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Oslo report on violence against sex workers (effects of sex purchase ban)
July 9, 2012 - 9:10pm
A very interesting summary (in English!) of some key findings in an Oslo report that analyses some of the effects on sex workers of Norway's sex purchase ban.
When you criminalize one-half of the transaction, you criminalize the industry and imperil all of its participants. Always. This law is about unreconstructed second-wavers punishing those women who have sex with men for money, with the eager acquiescence of the right-wing, who want it to be illegal to get any benefit from sex outside of marriage, and the neo-liberals, who just don't like the idea of working-class people making money without any capital but unskilled human capital, and possibly lowering their property values. It's shocking that nobody's had anything to say here yet. This is important stuff, but apparently, the rights of women to be safe no longer count when they're sex workers.
Makes me ill. My fellow-leftists should be better than this.
The problem is that those of us who think prostitution is a form of violence against women are not allowed to have our say on this forum. Yes, I agree, it can potentially be a serious problem with the so-called Swedish model. I'm just out of a (closed) women's seminar on this very issue, and how to ensure that people in prostitution are not further harmed by measures to at least curtail the commodification of human beings and the ravages of the sex trade.
And a minority of the women in attendance are of the generation construed as the second-wave (there have actually been several waves before ours, and I'm really at the tail end of it.
By the way, the writer obviously has a parti pris...
All work is capable of being a form of violence against people, and frequently is. Howabout we criminalize the violence?
And you seem to be having your say just fine.
Also, I'm imagining your discussion session was a bit of a cisfest too, right? Or otherwise, odds are you had some token trans womon there willing to ignore or modify her own very rich personal narrative in exchange for the validation of 'real women'.
I don't care how old you are, I care what ideas you ascribe to, there are still first-wavers speaking these days, we just call them bigots now. I care about how willing you are to look at the pervasive influence of all forms of sexism, not just cismisogyny, on everyone. I care about how much evidence you pay attention to, not just the part that fits your argument, and I care about what you've done for womyn who aren't your kind of womyn.
Also, last time I checked, unidirectional feminism, especially at its most extreme, is a parti pris as well. It's what allows so many of you to ignore and minimize other oppressions, like, to get back to where this argument started, classism.
I think theres alot of truth to this, I immediately think of the rejection of a person's overqualifications for work is in fact a rapid assessment that that candidate would not accept any after-the-fact shenanigans from an employer who is used to treating subordinates in a certain way.
Why hire and train multiple people when you simply single out one applicant as the most vunerable; with fewest supports and work them to death without fear of reprisal. 'Offering' someone overtime when they can't say "no" seems like violence when people are literally wasting away from working 16hrs x 7 days week in week out
Not to mention unsafe conditions, employees who lose their jobs if they retaliate against abusive behavior, oh, and wages that have fallen so low in relation to productivity that the lack of disposable income that ensures that someone cannot simply work their way out of the need to continue to work the job, something you can't say about entry-level sexwork.
But once again, workplace related deaths have a huge gender bias, and thus the only unsafe and exploitive job unidirectionalists care about is the one where the vast majority of workers are cis women. No one is gonna talk about someone getting trafficked into a logging camp, or having a crappy boss at the convenience store who won't supply a panic button. Just sex. Because, quite simply, they want to control women's bodies and access to those bodies.
And human bodies will stop being commodified when cashiers, tellers, and casino dealers are universally allowed to work sitting down and wear their hair green.