Hello and welcome back to Bahana Bader Podcast with me, Paulson Victoria. We are carrying on reading Revolting Prostitutes. So this is page 25. Gay men have also been historically perceived through this mistrustful lens. Queer Fiorist Leo Bersani argues that gay men provoke the same sets of fears long embedded by the prostitute. A person who could either turn decent men immoral or destroy them. The HIV crisis brought new virulence to these homophobic fears. A man comes along and goes from anus to anus, and in a single night will act as a mosquito transferring infected cells on his penis. These fears about gay men as malevolent and reckless persist today. A Christian hate group that advocates against sodomist and homosexualist propaganda was invited to the UN in 2017. A feminist writer recently described a male HIV positive sex worker as spreading AIDS. To be associated with prostitution signifies moral loss. In 1910, US District Attorney Edwin Sim wrote that the characteristic which distinguishes the white slave from immorality is that the women who are victims to the traffic are forced unwillingly to live an immoral life. This belief that to be a sex worker is to live an immoral life has persisted. Mark Lagon, who led the US State Department's anti-prostitution work during the George W. Bush era and went on to run the biggest anti-trafficking organisation in the US, wrote in 2009 that women who sell sex lead nasty immoral lives, for which they should only be held cultible because they may not have a choice. In the 2000s, the blog, Diary of a London Call Girl, written by Escort an anonymous blogger, Belle de Jur, was a smash hit, leading to books and a TV show after its author was named in 2009, as the research scientist Brooke Magnanti journalists like Lombroso before them attempted to read her supposed moral loss in her physical body. Magnanti's face without quite knowing what I'm looking for dead eyes, maybe or something a bit grim and hard around the mouth. Sex work categorized as the wrong kind of sex is seen as taking something from you the life in your eyes. In her imagined loss, Meganti is transformed in the journalist's eyes into a fret, a hardened woman. The supposed sexual excess and the loss that accompanies it delineates the prostitute as quote other. The good woman, on the other hand, is defined by her whiteness, her class and her appropriate sexual modesty, whether maidenly or maternal. Campaigns for women's suffrage in the late 19th century and early twentieth centuries drew on the connection between women's bodies and honour, and the honour and the body politic of the nation. These campaigns were intimately linked with efforts to tackle prostitution, with British suffragists engaging in anti-prostitution work on behalf of women in colonized India to make the case that British women's enfranchisement would purify the imperial nation state. This sense that people, particularly women, are changed and degraded through sex crops up in contemporary feminist fruit thought in contemporary feminist thought about prostitution too. Dominique Rosepowitz, who runs a diversion program for arrested sex workers in Arizona, claims that once you've prostituted, you can never not have prostituted. Having that many body parts in your body parts, having that many body fluids near you and doing things that are freaky and weird really messes up your ideas of what a relationship looks like and intimacy. Even more punitive responses were common in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and even twentieth centuries. Orders of nuns across the world, workhouses and laundries for fallen women, prostitutes and unmarried mothers, and other women whose sexualities made their communities uneasy. Conditions in these magdalene laundries were primitive at best and often brutal. Even in the twentieth century women could be confined within them for their whole lives, imprisoned without trial for the moral crime of sex outside of marriage. Many women and their children died through neglect or overwork and were buried in unmarked graves. In Tuam, Ireland, seven hundred and ninety six dead children were secretly buried in a septic tank between nineteen twenty five and nineteen sixty one. The last Magdalene laundry in Ireland closed only in nineteen eighty six. The Irish nuns who ran the Magdalene laundries did not disappear. Instead they set up anti prostitution organisation Rahama, which has become a major force in campaigning to criminalise sex work in Ireland, and now coaches its work in feminist language. The Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity continued to make money from the real estate where the Magdalene laundry stood, while largely stonewalling survivors' efforts to document or account for the abuse that took place there, and refusing to contribute to the compensation scheme for survivors. There is a direct line between those religious orders and the unsupposedly feminist prostitution policy implemented in Ireland in 2016. Tropes about the prostitute body as a carrier of sexually transmitted destruction recur in ostensibly progressive spaces, as when a feminist as when a quote feminist, anti-prostitution organization refuses World War II era, public health posters, or when a prominent anti-prostitution activist tells sex workers' rights, advocates that they could quote rot in HIV infected pits, end quote. Sex workers observe such conversations to be laden with misogynistic contempt. A ritual of political humiliation where our bodies are laid bare for comment. When we defend ourselves, our resistance outrages non-prostitute feminists who seize on our obstinacy as proof that we love the sex industry and we love selling sex to men, that we're out to corrupt, and that we hate other women. Witness, for example, a commentator on Woman's Net, the UK's most popular parenting forum, addressing a fellow community member with quote, You whores panda to men. You undermine women, you steal our husbands, you spread disease, you are a constant threat to society and morals. How can women ever be judged on our intellect when sluts make money selling their bodies? What you do is disgusting, let a man come on your face, vile and evil. Norwegian academics Cecilia Hogard and Liv Finstad wrote that the sex worker's vagina is quote a garbage can for hoarders of anonymous men's ejaculations. We once witnessed a sex worker in an online feminist discussion being asked what is the condition of your rectum and the fibrous wall between your rectum and your vagina? Any issues of prolapse? Incontinence Lack of control? You may discover that things start falling out slash down when you're a little older. Are you able to achieve orgasm? Do you have nightmares? Such interrogation and commentary feels far from sisterly. It doesn't comfort or uplift sex workers to know that our being likened to toilets, loaves of bread, meat, dogs, or robots is all part of a project apparently more important than our dignity. Feminist women describe us as things, for which one can purchase a single use license to penetrate. They gleefully refer to the jizz we've presumably encountered and are orifices, and tell us to quote stick to sucking and fucking and leave feminist policy discussions to quote those of us who read the facts, end quote. Sex workers are associated with sex, and to be associated with sex is to be dismissible. As Njo Dusuma writes within anti prostitution feminism, quote, the echo of the pornographic is notable. The prostitute not only lacks, she is lack. What these feminists most want of sex workers is that they close their holes, shut their mouths, cross their legs, to prevent the taking in and spilling out of substances and words they find noxious. Sometimes feminist jibes are subtler than calling us holes, and these responses have much in common with the ways Victorians disciplined prostitutes into quote appropriate modes of femininity and sexual continence. Contemptuous articles link sex workers with quote trivial feminine coded practices such as fashion, shopping, and selfies. All mark sex workers' discussions of empowerment. In an article expressing her feminist objections to the sex work trade, one journalist writes that young women who quote dress like slags in quote tiny skirts deserve not to be taken seriously. Rejecting a woman because of her appearance is simple misogyny. Based on the idea that women who embody a particular kind of femininity are stupid, shallow, or somehow inferior. The focus on feminine frailities draws on pre-twenty first century depictions of the prostitute as deviant and degraded in her rampant femininity, obsessed with luxury goods and sex. Through this lens, it's easy to see. Through this lens, it's easy for non prostitute feminists to portray sex workers as having no political literacy at all. Indeed it is likely that a reviewer of this book report that we claimed the sex industry to be empowering and a conduit, presumably to shoe shop. Sex in these discussions is positioned as something intrinsically too special to be sold, something intimate, reserved for meaningful relationships. To implicate in this view is the same sense that sex is a volatile substance for women and must be controlled or legitimized by an emotional connection. One young feminist, for example, writes disapprovingly that sex work is increasingly acceptable to other young feminists because of quote hookup culture, adding It's old fashioned these days, almost prudish perhaps, to believe that sex is somehow inherently linked to your emotions or necessarily intimate. Yet for many people, sex can indeed be recreational, casual, or in some way meaningless. The meaning and purpose of sex varies wildly for different people in different contexts or at different times in their lives. The sense that sex is intrinsically always special rebounds on women who are disproportionately seen as losing something when they have sex that is quote too casual. It is no coincidence that men who sell sex are not the focus of the same kinds of anxieties. Men are seen as to have casual, meaningless or transactional sex with much less risk to their essential selves. In the UK, women rescued from brothels are still sent to live with nuns. The ultimate fallen women are sent to restore their dignity among the ultimate chaste women. Women diverted from the sex trade in the twenty first century are overwhelmingly taught traditionally feminine forms of employment, especially garment manufacturer, but also baking, candle making and jewellery making. Motifs of purity are common in jewellery produced by such projects. Is sex good? In this context, where sex represents lost, fray and bodily degradation, it is no surprise that some sex workers and those who advocate for us have responded by emphasizing the value of sex. Sex work, they agree, is sex, but sex is in fact good. In agreeing that sex work is sex, they place commercial sex in a category with other kinds of sex which have traditionally been considered wrong or degrading. For instance, queer sex or women having sex outside relationships. These advocates push back against narratives that associate bodily and or moral degradation with the wrong kinds of sex, instead asserting that sexual pleasure is a personal and social good. They position sex work as an adventurous, fulfilling and sexy experience for the worker. These politics are familiar in other contexts, for example, Jeannie Ludlow, an abortion rights advocate, notes that within pro-choice advocacy there is a hierarchy of abortion narratives, and a category of things we cannot say. This quote defensive stand leads to an emphasis on abortion stories deemed hyper deserving. For example, when the pregnancy results from rape, and in response to anti-choice narratives of grief and regret, we get feminist writing that describes an abortion as the happiest day of my life. Likewise, it is easy to find sex workers asserting I love sex, I fucking love it. Sex workers who stray too far from this line fear being told that their stories are quote what gives those opposed to sex work their ammunition. Advocacy gained increased momentum in early 2000s in part because blogging emerged during the George W. Bush administration. The US government he had led was propagating cartoonishly bad policies around contraception, sex education, LGBTQ ⁇ , young people, and sexual health. In response, liberal and feminist bloggers became particularly invested in producing non-judgmental information about sex and sexual health and offences of pleasure, masturbation, queer sex, and sex outside the marriage. The increased accessibility and attractiveness of blogging technology made it possible to talk more openly about sex and pleasure. As a result, many sex worker writers became embedded in a blogging culture that was, quote, perhaps rather to uncomplicatedly pro sex and pro-pleasure. This discourse of sex positivity helped produce the figure we term the erotic professional. Easily identifiable as the more vocal, visible figures of the sex work movement, the erotic professional positions herself as answering a vocational calling that seems to have barely anything to do with being paid. In downplaying economic coercion and instead emphasizing her pleasure and desire, the erotic professional attempts to make commercial sex more closely resemble the sex life that society is more ready to endorse. That for which women receive no payment. One escort, for example, is quoted in an interview saying a prostitute will do everything for money. Not me, I try to forget about the money. It's very affectionate. I don't even think about payment until the very end. I don't demand payment up front because the guys I go with are always good people. I also adore sex. I wouldn't be in this profession if I didn't like it. So I found a way to make money doing something that I like. Often the erotic professional is a dominatrix or quote companion types of sex work, in which the act of penetration is downplayed until it's particularly incidental. Bellowing the lines between paid sex and recreational sex is a narrative readily available to many sex workers, as it is already present in much of the marketing directed at clients. Little is more consistently tempting for clients than the fiction that they are the object of the worker's genuine, irrepresentable sex drive. The bored, libidinous housewife, the authentic quote girlfriend experience. It's very affectionate and I also adore sex. The powerful, formidable dominatrix are socially palatable, fantasy characters designed to entice and impress customers. These sex positive politics create the illusion that worker and client are united in their interests. Both, we are told, are there for an erotic experience for intimacy for hot sex, raising the subject of the worker's needs for safety, money or negotiating power would spoil the illusion that the worker and client are erotically in tune and that she's just as sexually invested in their encounter as he is. In this rhetoric, the focus can easily shift to the needs and enjoyment of the client. Carol Queen's influential 1997 essay on sex positivity and sex workers' rights describes sex work as a life of sexual generosity and has a subsection titled Why Johns Need Sex Positive Prostitutes. A subtitle it is hard for us to read without wondering who cares. This approach reaches its apex in 2011. Documentary Scarlet Road, which follows sex worker Rachel Watton in her relationships with two disabled clients. Rachel's advocacy makes little distinction between sex workers and sex buyers, and indeed focuses on sexual rights of her clients. In the trailer for the film, Rachel tells us, quote, I like the fact that my job always entails pleasure, end quote, and ends with quote, I think there's a right to sexual expression, end quote, eluding that what is being talked about is the sexual expression of the client, not the worker. This elision is harmful. The worker's interests are not identical to those of the client. Ultimately the worker is there because they are interested in getting paid. And this economic imperative is materially different from the client's interest in recreational sex. Losing sight of that leads to a politics that is inadequate in its approach to workers, material needs in the workplace. As sex workers we sympathize with the wish to overcome emphasis, pleasure, freedom or power. This narrative may feel much better than being stigmatized as damaged, an animal or a piece of meat. However, there is an obnoxious conflict of interest between fantasy persona who loves their job and an activist who demands policy intervention to remedy the abuse of their human rights in the workplace. Using just one persona to assure your clients that you love your working conditions, and also to highlight how inadequate they are is a difficult line to walk. When sex workers market themselves as quote upscale or exclusive, journalists often read this at face value and dismiss their voices as unrepresentative or privileged. Honorifics like mistress or dominia signal to the public that the politics of sex workers rights movement dovetail with the sexual roles we perform at work. It suggests that these politics can be consumed as sex. Sex worker Lori Adorable writes If we continue to play the same role outside the dungeon as we do within it, we will remain alienated from our basic labour rights as well as our labour. These politics produce a further category of things we cannot say, end quote. The prospectus of sex workers who hate sex work. For the erotic professional, the figure of the unhappy sex worker becomes the unacceptable other, who must be disavowed at all costs in their own fight for social acceptance. The idea of sex as a site of trauma prompts a knee-jerk dismissal, where anti-prostitution policies are discredited as mere prudishness. One activist writes in response to sex work as discussion trauma. I'm not a victim. My clients did not victimize me. If you're an independent provider, not being forced, perhaps you should consider another line of work. How can your sex work be healthy if you resent men so deeply? You shouldn't be doing sex work. Healthy sex work requires that you be empowered, end quote. Another sex worker activist responds callelessly to former sex worker's claims that high numbers of people are raped in sex work, writing Guess again, honey, I haven't. If you love yourself and believe that you deserve to be loved by others, when you choose to become a sex worker, then you'll probably be just fine. But if you don't, then you'll probably run into trouble. Like any victim blaming politics. This is both harmful and misdirected attempt to feel quote in control to fend off the possibility of sexual violence. Carol Queen, the same sex positivity essay quoted earlier, explicitly excludes those who are not having fun writing. Queen seems to position the workers' dissatisfaction at work as their own fault for being quote unenlightened, end quote. A sex worker who is living precariously or in poverty, who is at risk of criminalization or police violence, or who is being exploited by a manager or lacks negotiating power is not likely to be particularly sex positive at work. These factors are structural and not a function of the workers' state of enlightenment. Some activists become so invested in defending sexually empowered prostitutes that they downplay or even deny the sex industry can be a site of abuse. This can quickly devolve into personal attacks, as typified by one of North American sex worker and blogger who has written of the quote tragedy porn of so-called survivors with testimonies conventionally years or decades in the past long enough for evidentiary trial to have been washed away by their bucketfuls of crocodile tears end quote. Rape denialism is unconscionable and completely contrary to feminism. Those who are being exploited or harmed within commercial sex should be the central concern of the sex workers' rights movement. Yet such politics actively push them away. Exited survivor Rachel Moran has spoken about the hurt such attacks have caused her writing, My truths do not suit them, so my truths must be silenced, end quote. Sex positive sex work policies are useful for the erotic professionals who advocate them and forcebral feminists who push for criminalization. These groups share an interest in glossing over the material conditions of sex workers' workplaces. For erotic professionals to raise to raise such topics either spoils the advertising illusion or is detrimental to the self protective identity they've created. For carceral feminists, arguing about the quote meaning of sex usefully conceals practical, granular questions about sex workers, access to power and resources at work. Questions which, if examined, inevitably reveal that criminalization cannot improve sex workers' lives. Both sometimes represent the debate as a simplified, binary opposition. Happy hookers who enjoys sex work and thus supports criminalization versus exodus women who experienced harm in the sex industry and therefore support criminalization. For instance, anti-prostitution feminist and theatre maker Grace Diaz characterizes the debate frostly quote The exited perspective says you need to see the harm done to me and the harm done to women every day. The other side is like, you need to see I am enjoying it. So many women involved in sex work don't want to be there, but the others are saying, We're also here, we're enjoying it. Dais fails to acknowledge the prostitute experiencing harm or coercion who disagrees that criminalizing commercial sex will necessarily bring her justice. She neglects to consider any concrete reason for this disagreement, attributing it instead to enjoyment. Sincerely anti-prostitution campaigner Julie Bindell described the group Survivors for Decrim as the pro-prostitution lobby co-opting the language of abortionists to further your cause. The group's representative explained in reply, we're people who currently or formerly have sold slash traded sex, who are survivors of violence or trauma, and who have a different perspective from you on how to deliver safely for people selling sex. That's not pro-prostitution or co-opting. Bindelden claims your wording implies you describe yourselves as survivors of sex trade, which clearly is not true. And this is where we are going to stop reading. Thank you for listening. This has been Behind the Paddle Podcast with Paulson Victoria, reading Revolting Prostitutes. Make sure to check out our Dark Fans on MiniVids, Spotify, Apple, everything else. And do not forget to leave a review. Alright, I hope everybody else has a wonderful day. Bye!