In an extract from her new book, Pimp State, activist Kat Banyard argues that prostitution is sexual exploitation. Decriminalising this industry only legitimises the abuse of women
Recommended reading for all. Here are some choice excerpts:
The term “sex work” didn’t just pop up and go viral. The Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP), an organisation that openly campaigns for brothel-keeping and pimping to be recognised as legitimate jobs, credits itself as largely responsible for “sex work” replacing “prostitution” as the go-to terminology […]
[…] engaging with [prostitution] first and foremost as a labour issue, using the term “sex work” […] shrinks the field of analysis to the seller [and] hides what should be front and centre of our response to the transaction: the inherent sexual abuse.
The whole point of the sex industry is that it offers men the chance to buy sexual access to women who do not want to have sex with them – otherwise they wouldn’t have to pay. Masking its fundamental purpose thus becomes the primary PR challenge for the prostitution, pornography and strip club trades if they are to survive – maybe even thrive – in a society that has decided, at least in principle, that women are not subordinate sex objects and rape is a bad thing.
[…] bluntly asserting that poverty is the singular cause of the prostitution trade fails to acknowledge that men’s poverty has not begot a global demand from women to pay them for sex acts, that without men’s demand there would be no trade at all
[Free market theory-based support for legalisation] builds on the claim that prostitution is sex work by attempting to frame that work simply as a series of individual, private exchanges set apart from the rest of society. But the sex industry, like any market, doesn’t operate in a vacuum, leaving the rest of society miraculously untouched by its presence. Markets [are] social institutions: “All markets depend for their operation on background property rules and a complex of social, cultural, and legal institutions.”
Commercial exchanges that people may agree to participate in without a gun being held to their head – such as sales of human organs, voting rights, bonded labour contracts – are nonetheless deemed legally off limits. It’s the line in the sand that societies draw to say that the harm to those directly involved, to third parties, or to the bedrock principles necessary for equal citizenship, is simply too great. Some trades are too toxic to tolerate. A basic principle that is utterly indispensable to ending violence against women, not to mention to our fundamental concept of humanity, is that sexual abuse is never acceptable. Not even when the perpetrator has some spare cash and the person he’s abusing needs money.
[Emphasis added]
For all the men whining about me being a “swerf” because I call out men who watch porn and buy sex. Your rhetoric is transparent, and we know what it is you really care about. It’s not the children and women and their rights.
No, guys. I will always defend and protect women in the sex industry. My priority is exploited and abused women and children, and it always will be. It’s you I despise. The exploiters and abuser. And I always will.
