Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (18 page)

replete with the thirty national flags ofall the countries that had qualified for the World Cup-an international invite to all men expected to visit the city. Cut-price rates for OAPs and the unemployed are offered at Pascha. In 2003, a Thai prostitute was stabbed to death there. In 2006, another woman was stabbed by a client. She survived because security was alerted by a woman working in the adjoining room. In 2005, police raided the brothel and it was reported that firearms and cocaine were found. Four of the twenty-three prostitutes arrested were between fourteen and fifteen years old. The brothel faced no legal penalties for pimping underage girls. Is this the type of building you'd like to see in your city? When prostitution is legally sanctioned in a country its female citizens can sometimes find themselves indirectly involved in prostitution, regardless of their personal feelings or their consent: 'Speciality brothels advertise services that cater to men with disabilities, and caretakers (mostly women) are now required to take disabled men to brothels and assist them engaging in sex acts.' (Sullivan and Jeffreys, 2001) JANICE G RAYMOND PROSTITUTION ON DEMAND The normalising effect that legalisation has on prostitution is very dearly expressed by the attitude of Berlin brothel keeper Tatiana Ulyanova, who said of her 'right' to present prostitution as a job option to women: 'Why shouldn't I look for employees through the job centre when I pay my taxes just like anybody else?' After prostitution was legalised in Germany, Hamburg lawyer Merchthild Garweg said of the legal structures in her country: 'There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry . . . The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits.' The powers that be in Germany must have recognised the legal limbo, as the issue ended up in the Bundessozialgericht (Federal Social Court of Germany) in 2009. The judges ruled that employment agencies would not be forced to source women for brothels, and stated: 'The law was made to protect the workers, not to promote the business'. This was a welcome outcome, and as far as I am aware no woman refusing work in a brothel did actually lose her social welfare benefits, but it is important to remember two things here: that unemployed German women should not have been subjected to the threat in the first place, and that they never would have been had it not been for the legalisation of prostitution. These types of situations and potential situations should not be surprising when we understand that legally sanctioning prostitution obscures boundaries in a manner that would have been previously considered unthinkable. As Garweg also said: 'They are already prepar~d to push women into jobs related to sexual services, but which don't count as prostitution.' She was referring to sexually exploitative jobs, such as those of phone sex operators, which is prostitution in all but the physical sense. There is a shift created here by governmental policy towards a certain sort of world. We need to ask ourselves whether it is one we want our daughters growing up in, and whether it communicates a view of females we'd want to see promoted to our sons. We need to look at the proven consequences ofthe legalisation ofprostitution and ask ourselves, in short, are we happy with the sort of world it creates? And is it one we want to live in? Whenever the criminalisation ofmale demand is raisedwe are told by pro.prostitution campaigners that society ought to consult with prostituted women before it introduces any such legislation. There is a problem with that. As we can see from the quote below, taken from the 2010 independent Swedish inquiry, 22 women's perspectives ofthe criminalisation ofdemand are markedly different depending upon whether they are still involved in or have freed themselves from prostitution: 22 The inquiry stated its 'remit has been to evaluate the application of the ban on the I ,. I I .I """ .I I II 1.1 I 'It is clear, and it seems logical, that those who have extricated themselves from prostitution take a positive view of the criminal.isation, while those who are still exploited in prostitution are critical of the ban. This pattern is reflected in many different reports and is also confirmed by the contacts that the inquiry has had with women with experience of prostitution: Had the criminalisation of demand been enacted in Ireland during my time in prostitution I would have been very satisfied that the men who bought my body were criminalised, but I also would have worried and have wondered about how it was going to affect my life. So I am in no way surprised that many prostituted women oppose the criminal.isation of their punters, mainly because of the way criminalisation lays bare the actuality of the prostitution experience. The criminalisation of a prostitute,s client strips away the smoke and mirrors game of pretence that often exists between them; it forces him to accept the reality of his role as an abuser-a reality many men who use prostitutes reject, dismiss, and concentratedly ignore. The criminalisation of their actions forces them to see that their behaviour is not considered acceptable. Men will resent this and any prostitute with more than a few weeks, experience will know that and be justifiably fearful of it, because the resentments of men who prostitute women are always vented on the women they prostitute. So yes, I would have worried about that. I would have worried also about my livelihood. I would have asked myself a lot of questions, like how would I be able to earn a living in an environment where the punters were criminalised? But my understanding of the basic decency inherent to legislation like this would have prevailed over my worries and fears. When I was 'on the game, I would have known it was the right thing for the government to do. I believe that, deep down, the vast majority of prostitutes know it too. The report of the Swedish inquiry into the effects of the ban has made very interesting reading, and has absolutely rubbished claims by pro-prostitution lobbyists that the ban was unwise and unworkable. Of course there are those who, predictably, have tried to strip the Swedish inquiry of its credibility. Its findings do not suit their agenda. The Swedish inquiry reveals that prostitution in Sweden has plummeted in the years since the implementation of the 1999 ban, and states that: 'Since the introduction of the ban on the purchase of sexual services, street prostitution in Sweden has been halved. This reduction may be considered to be a direct result of the criminalisation of sex purchases: It also reveals that the rises in online advertising for prostitution services since 1999 are in line with other countries and are attributable to the same technological advances seen everywhere else. If this legislation had simply moved prostitution indoors I would be suggesting alterations to it, but that has not been the case. Ireland's 1993 Sexual Offences Act, on the other hand, made it an offence to 'loiter' with the intent of engaging in prostitution. That legislation had the, I believe, intended effect of driving prostitution indoors. It was never about eradicating prostitution; it was about obscuring it. It was about removing this ugliness from the sight of those who were not involved and did not wish to see it, and, in large part, it worked. Many women, including myself, were forced indoors with, as I've said, disastrous personal consequences. There is hypocrisy and culpability in any legislation that makes prostitution available to men but invisible to the rest of society. Sweden's legislation, conversely, targets prostitution in whatever form it is found. As a result, pimps and traffickers now regard Sweden as an unwise location to set up shop and are taking their trade elsewhere. The same situation has replicated itself in Norway. The immediate consequence of their legislation was a reported similar reduction in Norwegian prostitution. The situation didn't run so smoothly in Iceland. After the legislation was introduced Icelandic police announced that they hadn't the means or the manpower to enforce it, and prostitution was reported to have increased rather than decreased. The women of Iceland have refused , to accept that and have instead chosen to take matters into their own hands. A new underground movement called 'Stora systir' ('Big Sister') has sprung up and has been active in collating the contact details of would-be prostitutors and then handing them over to the police; in essence, doing the work of the police for them. I am both pleased and amused by this, and I also find it very revealing because it illustrates with great clarity that as soon as women have been promised the removal of these shackles they are not disposed to the feeling of having them snapped back on. Another tactic of prostitution promoters, in their effort to secure legalisation of prostitution, is to frame the prostitution experience itself as a human or civil right, and because the denial of human and civil rights is duly universally abhorred it is a tactic that the proponents of prostitution will continue to claim and to cling on to, despite it being embarrassingly inappropriate. Being abused is not a right, human, civil, or otherwise; and any group that claims to frame abuse as a right for certain persons clearly has no concern for those persons whose 'rights' to be abused they would uphold; nor do they have any concern for the dignity of civil and human rights as a concept, clearly, since they are active in so polluting and distorting the terms that describe it. To stand accused of stripping any group of their civil rights is considered an indictment, and a serious one. In today's world, with its shared collective history of refusing and denying civil and hu~anrights to ethnic and religious groups, even the utterance 'civil rights' can create the illusion of elevating the speaker to a position of moral high ground. Where this has been employed as a trick it has actually worked to the extent that it seems to make sense to some people, despite the fact that prostitution itself is a violation. Invoking that illusion is just another aspect of the shamefully misogynistic position of the pro-prostitution alliance, which attempts to hijack human rights and use it as a normalising tactic. This is just further evidence of a position which is toxic by its nature. Remember, there is nothing immutable about prostitution. It is not a human characteristic. It simply cannot be compared with the tone of a person's skin or other such unalterable attributes, and in fact it is an insult to humanity to attempt to compare it so. The policy which seeks to promote prostitution based on a 'human/ civil right' to be prostituted is nothing more than an attempt to remove all legal barriers to conducting the business of prostitution. It is not in. any way based on the human rights of prostituted women. It presumes only one right: the right of prostitution to exist. I have learned through the experiences of my prostitution and post.prostitution life that those who invent a case for prostitution are very often prostitution enthusiasts with a definite agenda and a correspondingly fixed perspective. They will row in and merge their arguments with those well-intentioned but misguided people who propose legalisation and regulation as a form of social control, and they will hide behind the reasoning of those non-invested parties who assume these controls to be beneficial to prostituted women. It is frustrating and saddening for me to know that there are many people who, out ofgenuine care for prostituted women, argue for legalisation in the mistaken assumption that it would take what is wrong about prostitution and somehow make it right. Those who advocate legalisation for the benefit ofmen are sometimes pimps but more commonlyprostitutors-men who buy women's bodies themselves. People who argue for the benefit of men usually benefit either sexually or financially from the bodies of prostituted women. They also often have no real understanding of the consequences of prostitution in the lives of prostituted women, nor do they care to, as they realise this knowledge would directly confront their agenda. They bang the legalisation drum and talk about the supposed benefits to prostituted women despite having no basis to do so. The only benefits they are interested in are their own, and those benefits involve either filling their wallets or emptying their scrotums. There will, of course, be people who espouse legalisation who do not fit either category. In the absence of a referendum on the matter, the percentage of Irish people who would support legalisation is something I do not know. What I do know is that if they pursue and advocate for legalisation in a genuine attempt to make prostitution a safer and more J 'j 'l .~ : 1, j '

tolerable place for prostituted women, they are not only wasting their time but striving for a legal structure which will deliver the opposite of their well-meaning intentions. The sphere of life such laws attempt to regulate is so far outside the nature of what it is to relate as humans that it is actually incongruent with the laws of most Western nations. For example, sexual harassment laws, which are enacted to protect women in all other areas of work, simply cannot be made to apply to prostituted women. I have already discussed at length the way in which a majority of a prostitute's clients gleefully transgress any physical boundaries she may attempt to set. Outright sexual abuse is a matter of routine. Legislation here is futile. You cannot legislate away the nature of the prostitution exchange, but you can legislate to get rid of the market. There are Irish voices who argue against Swedish-style legislation on the grounds that we ought not import a foreign solution to what is, as they see it, an Irish problem. What this argument fails to recognise is that this is not a specifically Irish problem. This is a global problem, and it is a global problem because it is a problem of gender inequality. What we need is a global response to a global problem. I witnessed a radical shift in the thinking of one of my own sisters after the conversation I related earlier in this book (when she'd asked me had I ever been sexually assaulted or raped in prostitution). She had gone away and thought about the legalisation issue from the perspective of paid abuse. She later said to me: 'I would always have thought that legalising prostitution was the only real answer, until you explained how it was basically paid sexual abuse. I couldn't support that. I couldn't support sexual abuse in any form. If a woman doesn't want hands on her, in her own heart, then that is sexual abuse regardless of whether there's payment or not: She was right. I was so relieved to hear her say that and I told her so. There was the sense of being heard, of being seen, of being suddenly listened to in that moment. There was the sense of being acknowledged, contrasting with the feeling I've had every time I've had to listen to pro-legalisation arguments, which is the feeling of being disappeared. In country after countrywhere prostitution has been legalised something has occurred which is an embarrassment to the pro-prostitution lobby: it is the refusal of prostituted women to engage in legalised prostitution and it is expressed as a sharp rise in illegal prostitution. Women in these countries routinely refuse to register and work in secret to avoid being on record as prostitutes. The pro-prostitution lobby attempts to explain this by attributing women's reluctance to be officially documented as prostitutes to 'whore stigma', in an attempt to project the source . of women's behaviour as coming from outside of themselves. Their rejection does not stem from some outer-imposed 'whore stigma'. The reason for women's refusal to collude in legalised prostitution is simple: the fact is that we women simply do not want to be labelled prostitutes. Most women want to get in and out of prostitution without any trace of their ever having been there. Many insist on working outside of the legal frameworks in these countries in order to preserve that precious .~ anonymity. This is a classic of practical dissociation tactics, and people .~] are actually mobilising politically to avoid having to be documented as '' prostitutes, as these words from a Dutch press release show: Petition-Stop Forced Registration ofSexWorkers in the Netherlands Monday, 2 July 2012 ICRSE Coordinator 'Several organisations and individuals, sex workers and allies, who work together to support the interests of sex workers in the 'i I Netherlands, have started a petition in protest of the proposed " registration requirement for sex workers. A large number ofwomen, transgender persons andmenworking in the Netherlands sex industry have already indicated that they DO NOT want to register, because they experience this as degrading and stigmatizing. Mandatory~ registration seriously violates their right to privacy. Moreoyer, there is no evidence that mandatory registration of sex workers helps to combat abuses such as trafficking.' I can certainly relate to the position of anyone who refuses to be �ocumented as a prostitute. Far from removing stigma,legalisation forces them to be compliant in accepting the tag 'prostitute' on an official level. I understand exactly why many reject that and work illegally to avoid it, because if I had been forced to choose between working in secret or being officially tagged a prostitute I would have done exactly the same -thing. The pro-prostitution lobby would say I was suffering from the ill-effects of'whore stigma'. No. The only ill-effects I was suffering from were the ill-effects of prostitution, and I wouldn't have wanted that to become any more fixed, set or established in my life than it alr(;!ady was. Those who would support legalisation on compassionate grounds need to consider this: 'prostitute' is not a label most prostituted women want to have follow them around forever, and it should not be forced on them. There is no compassion in that. There is also this to consider: under State-sponsored prostitution, men are absolved from responsibility because it is legally, and we are to assume morally, perfectly acceptable to pay to use the body of another for sexual gratification. To be prostituted is humiliating enough; to legalise prostitution is to condone that humiliation, and to absolve those who inflict it. It is an agonising insult. Chapter 21 '"""'