Dominant Culture, Feminism, Drowning out the voices of sex workers

and it is the same expals link you always post. on their front page is an attack against the coop.

try this link...it works

www.firstadvocates.org

feminists for decrim

you are talking to one.....i am a feminist and i am angry some feminist chose to ignore sex workers voices....

contact first, i am sure they will be able to discuss your position and discuss sex workers who are angry that some feminists chose to ignore us.... also, please stop saying the majority of sex workers are abused. no where is that proven and it is propoganda. until you have concrete data, please refrain from making broad sweeping statements that cast us all as victims, unable to look after or speak for oursleves, or damaged goods.

Infosaturated wrote:

The fight for women's rights is based on our position as a collective not as individuals.

That is partly true, but to me not broken down well enough according to deep principles and then the means we are forced to use to achieve their promise.

The fight for any group's human rights, equality rights, civil rights, is "based" in the belief that all human beings are fully human.

It's true that members of a marginalized group learn to fight most effectively when they recognize that they have been marginalized as members of that group, and therefore must fight back as a group, demand recognition, compensation, defence, as a group, for however long that may be necessary. That's when we learn how to free ourselves, and in my experience (now regrettably long), it's the only way that oppressed peoples ever are freed. (Lord save us from people who think they can free us in spite of ourselves -- I'm not an Iraqi or an Afghan, but I suspect that many of them would echo that sentiment)

That is talking about means, however. That's politics, and that's how we fight teh power and teh prejudice.

But anyone who has ever been marginalized knows a deeper kind of rage, the rage that drives you to say sometimes, "Goddammit, I was here; I am a person; I lived."

No collectivity or community or group can ever speak entirely well to that feeling, or should ever attempt to rule it or suppress it, imho.

Infosaturated, you said in an earlier reply to me that you try to stay away from the language of "values" (because I had warned about how sloppy and right-wing that rhetoric tends to be), but then you pile up above a whole series of examples of how "community" "values" would authorize wholesale crimes against individuals. You don't seem interested in attributing specific crimes to the criminals who commit them, in violation of what I believe should be the general recognition of the human dignity of every individual as an individual, not as a member of a marginalized group.

The implication of what you have written seems to be that you would prefer a different set of "community values." You seem confident that your notion of "community values" would not be oppressive to those who don't share them.

Infosaturated, "community values" are ALWAYS oppressive.

I gotta tell you: Given the bigotry that I've seen in my lifetime, I'm here to say "F**k community values"; we're not having a referendum on individual liberties; and long live section 2 of the Charter.

"It's true that members of a marginalized group learn to fight most effectively when they recognize that they have been marginalized as members of that group, and therefore must fight back as a group, demand recognition, compensation, defence, as a group, for however long that may be necessary. That's when we learn how to free ourselves, and in my experience (now regrettably long), it's the only way that oppressed peoples ever are freed. (Lord save us from people who think they can free us in spite of ourselves -- I'm not an Iraqi or an Afghan, but I suspect that many of them would echo that sentiment)"

I too find this argument compelling. Although of course we build things like the Charter to also protect some from the state no matter how small or insignificant the society may designate the group or group of one.  And I think you might agree that with and without the Charter, the larger the group that can self identify as the similarly oppressed the better the hope for recognition, defence and compensation. That is a key reason for me to argue that prostitution is a matter of violence against women and of women's equality.  In that circumstance I can bring the forces organized against other sexist violence to bear on this question and I can reapply the lessons learned about fighting to release women from abusive marriage, incest and so on.  It seems to me this is the best political tactic and movement building for those of us currently caught in prostitution as well as those of us who have escaped or managed to evade the institution of prostitution in spite of being women

But the Charter recognizes too that women's individual rights are not accessble unless the group rights of women as a disadvantaged group are recognized and taken into account.  It says that any discrimination against women built into the laws of the land and the public policy will adversely affect each individual woman trying to access her individual rights. 

Over and over, these discussions have documented that it is women who are disadvantaged by the ills of prostitution even if some women seem to or claim to or do benefit.  Almost noone disagress with that now.  And these days most progressive Rights activists agree on a notion of the obligation of the state to do more than nothing.  That is, that there is a resposniblity  a positive obligation on the part of the state to act toward establishing the equality for women that does not yet exist (as it has an obligation toward all the herstorically disadvantaged members of a discriminated group and this case the group is women)including by not only those women who are caght in prostitution.  Clearly some of us are arguing that women as a group are not served by decrimnalizng the behaviour of men who act in predatory ways toward our group (clearly we consider and can see that most of those badly affected by the institution of prostitution are members of our group).

In this case of buying sex the debate gets a bit reversed. We keep agreeing that we want those being prostituted to be decriminalized and we are only debating with each other about the wisdom and usefulness and the political value of criminalizing those who buy sex, buy women outright to sell as sex objects, set up businessess to sell or rent women or sell sex or sell sex with children as the case may be.  And we are saying with some evidence that allowing that sale will increase the demand for more such sale, So it seems a mishapen and misinforming discussion to talk of the rights of the individual women when on the whole, what we disagree about is the individual and group "rights" of men to have sex on demand for dollars or the "right" of anyone to buy or sell access to bodies of children and women.  These rights do not exist yet and are in fact the aspiration of the current cases in my opinion.

Well of course we are talking about how to think politically so everything can be debated, but I think there are many good arguements for approaching prostitution as a form of Violence Against Women.  I think most of us would accept that it is nearly always also a form of objectifying women and adds to the objectification of all women in that if one can buy women like an object and sometimes not only similar to but actually buy her body for use, that to approve of that encourages one to think of all women as objects.  It seems unlikely that you could have an equality seeking regime in which you sold some women and it had no impact or a positive impact on other women.  The exception of course is that governments can (and do) designate some women as saleable by calling them prostitutes or by saying informally by what they tolerate that it is ok to sell this kind of women: asian or black or women without papers or women who are addicted or poor women. 

But since feminism is trying to stick up for and gather all women on the premise that none of us is free until all women are free, it seems contrary for many feminists to accept the sale of any women and it seems obvious to us that to do so will diminish how all women are viewed and treated by society at large.  One of the anti-prostitution feminist slogans used to be "no disposable women"

In recent years many feminists have also had to shift our understanding of prostitution as globalization advanced and became more and more entrenched. In my organization we literally debated when is prostitution more usefully thought of as objetifcation and when more usefully thought of as Violence Against Women.  Under new conditions of imperialism/colonization/globalization it became obvious that numerically it is aboriginal women, women of the poorest parts of the world and the poorest of the first world who are being prostituted.  I think no one can refute that now.  In the Lower Mainland of Vancouver for instance about 80% of the illegal indoor trade is of asian women from the poorest parts of asia.  Even the police confirm that.  It was always so but perhaps not so obvious to us.

Women as a group and most women individually do not have econmic or social equality anywhere: pay rates, social nuturing responsibility, stigmatization etc and in addition, in those populations there is a huge force or set of forces further limiting their choices.  From birth, each woman with very few exceptions endures the prescribed life of a person oppressed by sexism: one with enforced limits on her options.  Enforced by men and social institutions. 

I would point to Richard Poulin's research at the University of Ottawa for documentation of the forces that pile up against women in the international sex trade. Of course his research goes further and documents how women are treated not like objects but actually as objects to be bought and sold on the inernational market.  He, being a socialist emphasizes that laissez faire politics is opposed by progressives against any other multinational industry and it should be in this case.  I have written about this too in Marjorie Cohen's latest book on Public Policy for Women

In rape law and rape theory for social change Canadian feminists say that choice is unavailable to us if it is not meaningful choice for instance if we are over powered by restraints, by physical force but also by breach of trust, by limited circumstances created by by social/political policy and so on.  We say the solution is to work for equality and to criminalize the use of rape and other forms of violence against women not only becuse it is harmful to the individual woman but also because it impedes her and other women's  progress and exercise of freedom.  We say that Violence Against Women as social control operates much the same way that lynching did at the end of slavery for blacks in north america.  When law less often constrained blacks, violence was used to terrorize them into prescribed behaviour and to defeat claims of entitlement to power.  Lynching went up for a while when slavery was no longer legal.

So why would we not apply that same feminist thinking to the institution of prostitution?

I don't think every single moment of each prostitution event is conducted with a fist or gun but I do think that most of those moments are not constructed or chosen freely by the ones being prostituted.  I do think that every incident of using a woman this way diminishes all of us.  We know now that most women in the trade were sexually assualted before adulthood and that that sexual assualt was commercialized by someone.  We know those events shape the self and sense of self and even our interior dialogues.  We know that most prostituted are women of colour and aboriginal, we know that of world wide forced migrations of women and chidlren most are for purposes of prostitution.  Those facts are well documented now. 

We know that many if not most express a sense of being trapped in poverty and do not wish their daughters to suffer a similar plight.  We know that large numbers are held by enforcers who threaten them, their families and their friends.  We know that women everywhere prostituted suffer greater injury and death at the hands of pimps and johns and traffickers.  The only higher incient is the deaths of women in the family.  (And yes we have argued for the end of the family economic and political unit as it was once known and to end the romanticization of it's realities and the compusory heterosexual  basis of it).  We know that diseases are rampant among the prostuted but that it is men who infect women more easily and quickly but women who are charged with keeping the industry safe for men just as it is women who are left pregnant or ill when men insist that their desire requires no condoms and their pocket books full of the unequal pay permit them to buy what they desire.  We know that women are advised by health agencies to be careful with mind numbing drugs and alcohol, vagina freezing agents and halucinogins used in self medicating with such things to endure their life.  It is only common sense that being double and triple penetrated by two or more men as is the much sought after mimicry of gonso pornography is health harmful to say nothing of the damage to the body of thirteen year olds vaginally and anally raped in prostitution.

But I would say one more thing in defense of naming and dealing with prostitution as violence agaisnt women. VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN is a political category.  As Dorothy Smith articulates well, categories have a purpose of revealing and helping us see or of closing down obscuring and separating information so that the overall power relations of a situation is more hidden.  Violence Against Women is a political category invented by the second wave of the Women's Liberation movement to express the interconnection between the incidents where individual women were hit, threatened, coerced or killed by men so that we could see for ourselves more of the nature of oppression of women as a group and by the group men.  Doing so allows us also to see more of the force at work on each incident each woman's life.  Calling each wife assault, rape or incident of incest part of Violence Against Women helped us to see that the characteristics of each woman and the minutia of her personal behaviour had little to do with the fact of the abuse or how to end it or how men were using it.  It collectivized the experience in a way that revelaed more about how each woman was defeated and about social control of women and it grouped us in common cause. Globally that analysis has been widely acccepted as helpful and progressive but it took everyday for  for three decades for us to get here

Of course some women and mostly men refuse that even today.  They say women are resopnsible for what was heppened in a partifular case, they say "but this man loved this woman" even if they are beating them to death, they say a particular event is not "rape rape".   That a particular man is not a rapist or batterer becuase somehow he is exceptional.  Just look at what happend with Polanski (although in the end popular opinion turned the tide there too as it is turning on prostitution entrenched men)

I think this last reason is an important one to keep in mind.  If we say prostitution is ok just a job, why would the government supply exit services or incomes?  Why would they not return to criminalizing those women they awant to hassle for other reasons like property development or border security?  If we say it is choice isn't it more likely that women will be blamed for choosing the wrong "job" or "customer" or company to "work" for?  Won't we move backward away from the consensus now established that women prostituted and trafficked are not the problem but may need protection and that it is men and profiteers who are needing to change not the women?

If we appraoch it as Violence Against Women, won't we be more likely to look more diligently for the controls exercised, for the services that support, for the blameworthineess of particualr oppressive behaviour, for the ethical and egalitarian solutions to loneliness and isolation that men seem to need and for the ways to protect the vulnerable women and children and to reduce the vulnerability imposed on women and children worldwide?

so, you would be for government control over women's bodies? legalized sexual constraint placed on women? it is not your body, it belongs to all women and therefore we decide what is best for us all, not you? sounds like the same old rhetoric that's got us the situation we see currently.

please post a link that shows ethically gathered data supporting your assertion that 80% if indoor sex work in canada is migrant/trafficked workers from south east asia.....

respectfully,it is not a real number and i challenge you to produce a link to support your claim....bejamin perrin does not qualify as his data also was never subjected to research ethics board review.

many industries receive "exiting" or retraining miney as well as incomes such as unemployment insurance. why would we as sex workers not qualify? you say they support exiting but its' proven they barely do at all.i can count on 2 hands the number of exiting programs in canada. if sex workers could have access to programs such as EI or victims compensation we would have more choices...but you would waste money and time trying to get the government to create new programs and we have all seen what a priority we are to the government....last in line and first to be cut....always.

why do we need to seperate sex workers from other workers? why 2 programs? oh right, because we are different, and do not deserve equal treatment....

especially sex workers who do not repent and try to exit or accept rescue. we are the worst and need to be completely excluded. after all we are the ones causing violence against women....and the ones who covort with the enemy....men.

i believe you are completely backwards and that decriminalizing sex work will begin to erase the stigma we must endure and will raise the safety of all women, not destabilize it....by raising our perceived value, we will raise the value of all women.

Frankly, I am quite willing to take Lee's words as statements of fact, she after all is posting from her own name, with professional credentials behind it to protect, so I doubt she would be slapping up false information.

It is not an either or, susan, and it is not something that I am going to jump into either way, I am listening and reading all sides,  and talking to people I know on both sides. But I have to say I do not appreciate you calling Lee a liar and your post feels like your attempting to muscle me into a position against Lee.

This is a very serious matter, that I am not taking the least bit lightly, throwing accusations of falsehoods around against Lee does it great disseervice. Personally, I am very  well aware of the good work Lee does in VAW, and for you to defame her so, speaks ill of you, not her.

So be careful about that, if you want to be taken seriously as a credible voice. She has in no way defamed you in such a manner.

prostitution is still not illegal in canada and you have still provided no links for research ethics board reviewed data to support your claims....

i never insulted anyone, but it seems you would call my arguments crappy.it is important people here understnad that it is not a huge group of people against us, it is a small group of workers from front linerape crisis lines and that these groups do not take part in any committees or groups working towards real change.

if you think the city of vancouver's action plan is a crappy arguement, where were you when it was created? if you are so concerned about exiting opportunities, why did you undermine the coop and all of our proposed activities? and no i'm not talking about the brothel, i am not working on the brothel, there never were any olympic brothels.

i am fighting for inclusion of active sex workers and for information and statistics that are proven, not conjecture or based on cambodian numbers.

please provide links that state that 80% of adult sex workers were abused as children so we may all be clear as to the context , author and politics surrounding your assertion.

it is not an insult for me to ask you to prove your statement.i have every right as a sex worker to challenge statements made about my community especially when they are so broad and sweeping. i have challenged info saturated, martin and will continue to challenge anyone making claims and statements i know to be questionable in origin. it is compounding the harms we are experiencing. do i need to repeat horror stories of raids, deportations, public humiliation and arrests? or how destabilization is forcing workers to choose areas of the sex industry outside of their comfort levels because of a lack of jobs?

it is my duty to my community to make sure people do have the facts and that any statements made are based in reality and research. lee lakeman is free to post a link to the source of her assertion but has not done so. please, post the link. i provide links for my assertions....i mean i have to, i have no credibility. i am a sex worker.

you have a job and a salary and will not be arrested for going to work. you have ei benefits, workmans compensation and a toilette to use at work. compared to the workers you say you represent you are a person of great privelege.

i am asking for a link.....is it too much for me to want a link? what are you afraid of....that there is no link? how is it well known? please enlighten me and provide a link.....

like this, an exptremely credible witness, a person i do not know...is she lying?

http://www.nswp.org/pdf/KINNELL-FEMINISTS.PDF

excuse me? i was demonstrating that it is possible to post a link....it is lee lakeman's business whether she chooses to back up her assertion with a link or not....

as i stated before, i have posted many links from many countires and different agencies.i am merely continueing to demonstrate we are not the minority. many people feel as we do. and if you read the link i provided you would hear many of my sentiments echoed. posting inaccurate or unproven data harms us.

i tried to find any such link myself, but could not....no where could i find a statistic statig 80% of adult consentual sex workers are child abuse survivors....

from the parliamentry sub committees report-

Some witnesses who appeared before the Subcommittee, including the Regroupement québécois des

Calacs, Lyne Kurtzman of the Alliance de recherche IREF-Relais femme, and Rose Dufour, an

independent researcher and author of a book on prostitution, argued that there is a close link between

incest, sexual assault and prostitution. The statistics used to support the connection have been heavily

criticized. Some researchers, including Frances Shaver of Concordia University, questioned the

connection: "If we really want to know whether an experience or a history of childhood sexual and

physical abuse has something to do with ending up in prostitution, then we need to do a study that

starts first with a sample of Canadians. Then we want to sort those according to who has been abused

and who hasn't, and then we want to look at the proportions of those who were abused - at what

proportion ends up in the sex trade and what proportion don't - and the proportions of those who were

not abused and what percentage end up in the sex trade and what percentage do not. This research

has not been conducted." Frances Shaver, testimony before the Subcommittee, 7 February 2005.

And so have infosaturated and martin, posted many links debunking your links, which you also ignore. So calling claims against people, is pretty difficult for you to do, and it does this topic a disservice, which is what I am stating, and nothing more.

Stick to facts and less attacks.

Capitalism and the body - the next step?

I don't know susan, I find the links provided to Sweden's and other socialist countries findings pretty compelling and now here you are denying the voice of a former sex worker, as illegitimate because she is a "former one", and are basically stating that only your voice is authentic, in fact sadly you just called her a liar, too.

There are lots of institutions and things that have a high rate of VAW. One of those is marriage. Should women's individual rights to choose who they marry be called into question for the good of the "collective of women" because of this? 

What about women who are raped when out alone and drunk at 3 am? They are asking for it, right? Just like the sex worker? How can they engage in such inherently risky behaviour? 

We better formulate a list of all the things women should not be allowed to do with their own bodies - for the good of all women of course.

And what is exotic dancing if not "a woman selling her body"? Do people think women should  be "protected" from doing that as well? 

susan: thank you for your continued patience in providing an alternate perspective. 

Quebec anthropologist Rose Dufour is one feminist that the pro-prostitution lobby will find itself hard-pressed to discredit. She will not allow prostitution apologists to drown out the voices of the street and escort agency-experienced women whose life stories she transcribed. Almost all of her respondents WERE sexually abused as youths, and they themselves point out the links that some are so intent to deny. After four years of intensive qualitative research with a number of women whose words she transcribed and ran past them in order to support their healing process and reflect their analysis accurately, she published the book Je vous salue... Marion, Carmen, Clémentine, Eddy, Jo-Annie: le point zéro de la prostitution (Éditions Multi-Mondes, Québec, 2004).

I now fully expect Davis to claim that Dufour's research probably hasn't been vetted by a front-line sex work organisation, as she does with that of Melissa Farley. She would be wrong if she did. Quebec's PIPQ (Projet d'intervention prostitution de Québec) has entrusted its advocacy work to Dufour, who represented them before the Subcommittee on Solicitation Laws of the Standing Committee on Justice, Human Rights, Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, on April 18, 2005:

Ms. Rose Dufour (Associate Researcher, Collectif de recherche sur l'itinérance, la pauvreté et l'exclusion sociale, Université du Québec à Montréal): Good evening, Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen.

My position is rooted in field research that I have been doing for the past four years. The research report that I have brought with me has 646 pages. I will be tabling it at the same time as my brief.

It is difficult to make a presentation on the findings of this research in 10 minutes. Moreover, I believe that my position will without a doubt require an explanation of some of these findings.

First of all, I would like to say that I have been working with female prostitutes for the past four years. I help them take stock of their lives. This has enabled me to collect data to update the process leading these women into prostitution. I have looked at 20 life stories. I have reached what is referred to as the saturation point with respect to street prostitution and I have concluded that sexual abuse is the key factor explaining how someone becomes a prostitute. After working with these women for a year and a half, I then decided to investigate the johns. I examined 64 johns and, in doing so, I was the first person to conduct research in America on this subject. As a result of this research, I was able to define client types and update the systems categorizing prostitutes and prostitution. I will try to touch on this issue as well. After documenting the two main players in the prostitution system, I did a life history on two pimps to try and understand how others get into this line of work.

So there were three basic questions. First of all, how do women wind up turning to prostitution? My research budget was limited and therefore I was not able to work with male prostitutes. Secondly, why do men seek out prostitutes? Thirdly, how do people become pimps?

The answers to these three questions enabled me to define the ground zero for prostitution, namely the departure point of the systems producing prostitution.

How do women wind up turning to prostitution? My research showed that 17 times out of 20, namely in 85 per cent of all cases, the girls were repeatedly abused in their own family or in their immediate neighbourhood. In addition, I brought to light the fact that the little girl is abused, and since she does not define the conditions of sexual abuse, she is not able to say no to her abuser, generally someone she loves, who has earned her trust and is someone she wants to please. She does not give herself in this relationship: she makes her body available. That is exactly the type of relationship that exists between the prostitute and the john. She does not give herself, because to do so requires a sharing of intimacy, something that the child does not do and that the female prostitute does not do. She simply makes her body available.

In the prostitution relationship, the female prostitute goes through this same motion, namely making her body available. She has learned to be at the sexual service of someone else rather than at the service of her own needs. To be a prostitute means to have a public body, to no longer have a private body. In this sort of representation, the prostitute becomes, to some extent, the most abused of the abused.

I was also able to reveal how poverty is a part of the backdrop to prostitution. In examining the conditions of sexual abuse, I was also able to show that, in some instances, prostitution was the only option available to the abused person. This was because the individual internalized her identity as a prostitute, resulting from the words spoken during repeated sexual abuse and as a result of the exchange of money derived from the activities she was asked to perform.

In another group, there were four women who had no other choice but to become prostitutes, seven others for whom sexual abuse was the main reason leading to the prostitution and six others for whom the sexual abuse was related to the prostitution without however being the primary factor.

This is a very complex issue, and I cannot explain it to you in a few words. I can, however, tell you that the degree of relationship, the intensity of the relationships, the type of rapport established between the abuser and the abused does create a particular type of relationship.

» +-(1745)

Since the female prostitute is an abused person, I would recommend that this committee no longer view her as a criminal, but instead help her because she has been abused sexually. Most of these women are showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Source

More here.

Back agains snert to fill us up on how men can do nothing other than support their right to male privilege?

If someone would not want their daughters to have sex without marriage, they can hardly support prostitution as a means to make money, it is hyprocritical in the extreme. It is an "othering" stance.

Let's turn it around then and look at it from the other end: "What limitations can a state put on how a person uses their body?

Quote:

If someone would not want their daughters to have sex without marriage, they can hardly support prostitution as a means to make money, it is hyprocritical in the extreme. It is an "othering" stance.

Nonsense. I don't have to want for my children everything that I support the legality of. My tattoo analogy is an example of that.

Quote:

Back agains snert to fill us up on how men can do nothing other than support their right to male privilege?

Back again to try to re-frame this as "male privelege", as opposed to the right of adults to do as they choose with their bodies?

Quote:

I find very telling all those libertarian analogies between prostitution and things people do to themselves.

It should be "telling" you that adults have an inherent right to do as they choose with their bodies. If you oppose that, now's your chance to speak up.

And they reflect the privilege of who defines the field of engagement, the divide between libertarian theorizing and anti-oppression politics.