This is your periodic reminder that nine out of ten of prostitutes do not want to be in prostitution. If you care about listening to sex worker voices and trusting them to know what’s best for themselves, the best thing you can do to support prostituted women and men is to push for more comprehensive exit services.
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/pdf/Prostitutionin9Countries.pdf
but yes let’s condone prostitution because “choice” even though these women obviously don’t have many options if they need to leave prostitution but can’t for a buffet of reasons
When looking at the debates against people who want to excuse prostitution because of “consentual” sex work, some times I want to ask them “what is the right amount of exploitation in prostitution”?
If a factory killed 1 person a year, and another ten were traumatized annually, we’d shut that place down. Even a single death is too much, and to do it regularly is cause for all operations to stop, even if all the other workers like their jobs and want to be there.
If half of all waitresses said that the threat of starvation was the only thing that was keeping them at their job, that they desperately hate their lives and entire organizations are needed to pry them out of the clutches of olive garden and chili’s, we’d long have finished the discussion if society really needs casual dining to begin with.
If video game programming was so horrendous that even the threat of starvation and violence wasn’t enough to get most people to do it, if the entertainment industry had to kidnap and enslave a huge number of people to meet demand even (or especially) in areas where it was legal to make video games, we’d instantly understand that nobody “needs” video games even if a lot of people really really like them.
The argument that pro-prostitution people are making is that the ten people who ‘like’ being prostitutes is enough to condone the suffering of the other ninety people. And that’s assuming that the numbers are accurate to begin with! In almost any other situation, if even a fraction of the misery was present in the industry, we’d be clamoring for legislation to shut it down, and consider any discussion of “oh, but I love my job, I’m so happy with this” to be propaganda from people who don’t have the best of intentions. But in the face of this evidence we still get people saying that “oh, but there are people who like what they do, we should turn a blind eye to it, maybe have some Band-Aid law to show we care.”
So what’s the preferred rate of exploitation in sex work? are we really going to accept that 90% of them don’t want to be there, that so many of them have their health and safety put at risk? If we want prostitution to be legal and regulated, what numbers should we be aiming for? Is 80% misery ok in legal prostitution? 20%? Me, personally, If you told me that 99% of “sex workers” wanted to be there, loved their jobs, would continue working even if they had a second source of income - I’d still think that meant that 1% was rape, and that the whole thing should be shut down. But 90%? How can any reasonable person really argue for prostitution when it’s so obviously a pit of suffering and exploitation?
