Racism and Sex Work, Part 3
July 8, 2005 – 9:40 amI conclude this three part series with links to opposing opinions of what ails sex workers. Immigration rights and sex worker rights are now being co-organized.
One of me commenters, me, writes:
I think tho, that it would be good if the left could intead of polemisizeing against sex-work, try to make more links with these sections of the sex-worker groups. Help empower people instead of trying to save them (I know that’s a generalization and it’s a complex issue etc…).
DMSC in India has 65,000 members, including most of the street prostitutes in Calcutta…
http://www.newint.org/issue368/sexworkers.htm
There has also recently been formed a group in Nepal (I think with the support of DMSC)
http://www.ebloggy.com/blog.php?username=libertarias&id=1&entry=59
Recently the head of Empower Women in Thailand (porn star Pornpit Muckmai) won a human rights award for her organisations work with sex-workers. They raise some interesting issues re anti-trafficking groups and the need for them to work with sex-worker organisations:
http://www.nswp.org/mobility/mpower-0306.html
Sex-workers in Cambodia just won a big victory against drug trials.
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/620/620p18.htm
"As the US and UK governments defy the majority of people in the world and get ready to kill and displace millions in Iraq, mainly women and children, where are feminists on 8 March, International Women’s Day? According to every poll, we women are even more opposed to war than men. We are the backbone of every anti-war movement. Yet we have heard little against the war from those who identify as feminists.
Instead, on IWD Justice for Women, Women’s Aid, Eaves Housing for Women, POLLY and Lilith will be picketing Spearmint Rhino, a lap-dancing club. How obscene. When most women, children and men are desperately trying to prevent this war and save the lives of millions, some of those who claim to speak against violence against women prefer to attack a sex industry establishment. Machismo begins with the military, not with lap dancing."
http://www.allwomencount.net/EWC%20Sex%20Workers/lapdancing.htm
She continues in another comment:
The main example (of the left and sex workers organzing together) at the moment is related to immigration rights. There is a big campaign here to stop mandatory detention of refugees. There have been a lot of discussion about "people traffickers" etc. There are many sex-workers (mostly trafficked into the country with large debts to pay off) deported every year… Probably larger numbers than any other group of refugees.
http://www.scarletalliance.org.au/issues/migrant-workers
The loudest voices about this issue come from the government and church… Who want to solve the problem by having harsher penalties for traffickers and the church want to make prostitution illegal. A better solution would be to provide visas for anyone trafficked into the country and to allow normal work visas for sex-workers who are forced under-ground because of their immigration status.
There are also a lot of examples of collusion between the immigration department and traffickers. And in many countries there is collusion between "anti-trafficking" groups and traffickers. The department of immigration also uses sex-work as an excuse to target migrant women in particular.
Some people on the left are also pushing the Swedish model of criminalising clients and agents, but not sex-workers. In practice this has led to conditions for Swedish sex-workers becoming more dangerous, an increase in trafficking through Sweden (because clients are no longer willing to tip off police about people who have underage or workers who are forced to be there), many sex-workers having to travel to Norway to make a living and even women having their kids taken away by welfare agencies.
http://www.bayswan.org/swed/rosswed.html
http://www.petraostergren.com/english/studier.magister.asp
http://odin.dep.no/jd/engelsk/012101-990578/dok-bn.htmlThe figures and reports about the Swedish model are pretty bad.. But many feminists continue to push this approach even tho most sex-workers oppose it.
But when sex-workers try to raise these issues they are usually ignored.. if not shown open hostility. Sex-worker groups are often excluded from anti-trafficking projects or projects to help women who want to leave the industry - despite the fact that the most succesfull anti-trafficking projects usually involve help from other sex-workers.
In contrast, Thalia writes:
Actually, ‘me’ is wrong and the Swedish model is working very well, especially when compared to how badly legalization and decriminalization are doing in countried where they have been effect for some years.
This has to be one of the best (and shortest!) debates on prostitution/sex work I have ever seen and I highly recommend it. I’ve never seen a tighter, more well argued case against normalizing prostitution as sex work.
Having read all these links, including the last one, I observe:
Whether or not sex work is inherently exploitative because of its gendered nature or its racist nature is up for debate;
What makes prostitution problematic is more about the situation and circumstances surrounding the life of sex workers (lack of health care, being preyed upon by police, sex workers of color being subject to a double standard in the legal system, violence, lack of knowledge about what their rights are) than anything inherent in sex work itself;
The people who decry the exploitative nature of sex work appear to be white and middle class, who come off as infantilizing and racist towards all women involved in organizing sex workers;
If sex work organizers tell me that lobbying for x, y and z things will make their life better why do white women opposed to sex work seemingly dismiss these claims;
It is almost like white women organizing against sex work and the sex workers themselves live in different worlds;
The issue is very, very, very complex, with the intersecting worlds of commerce, world debt, travel imperialism/tourism, gender, race, immigration, the legal and medical communities. How about working to improve the lives of sex workers by calling out that a disproportianate number of sex workers in prison are women of color; pushing companies like Wal-mart, Nike, Ford, and the like, to pay living wages (and we’re talking like 45 cents an hour instead of 23 cents an hour….) while pointing out how the economic realities of women’s lives dictate what choices they have. And this is just for starters.
The answers lie in something beyond sex work is bad or sex work is great. We need thoughtful, compassionate dialogue with an eye to truly understanding other people’s positions on issues that directly effect their lives.
And we need to start holding men accountable since sex work isn’t just about prostitutes….it’s also about johns.
2 Responses to “Racism and Sex Work, Part 3”
Hi Jay,
This reminded me of an very good article by Liv Jessen who recently won an Amnesty International human rights award for her work with sex-workers. While it doesn’t specifically adress race it does raise some interesting questions about the Swedish model and the view of prostitution as sexual-violence generally. She makes the point that whatever your view of sex-work, it is important to remember that prostitutes are individuals with different experiences (often to do with other issues such as race) and that it is dissempowering to deny or ignore those who don’t fit our views.
“Women’s inferior position to men in society applies regardless of prostitution. We also know that being oppressed is not the same as being weak and passive. We always have to distinguish between understanding prostitution at a structural level and understanding it at an individual level. But prostitutes, like all other people, must be given the freedom to choose. That is what makes you human. It also means that you are allowed to take the responsibility for your actions.”
Prostitution seen as Violence Against Women
- a supportive or oppressive view?
http://www.bayswan.org/swed/livjessen.html
By me on Jul 9, 2005
I like Liv’s comment alot. The sometimes fever-pitch hysteria that surrounds the “prostitution is sexual violence” communities seems to me, anyway, to be undergirded by a world view where women are not authentic, as women are defined soley by being sexual objects.
My latest she-ro, Donna Haraway, says it much, much better:
“MacKinnon’s radical theory of experience is totalizing in the extreme; it does not so much marginalize as obliterate the authority of any other women’s political speech and action. It is a totalization producing what Western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing - feminists’ consciousness of the non-existence of women, except as products of men’s desire. I think MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version of identity can firmly ground women’s unity. But in solving the problem of the contradictions of any Western revolutionary subject for feminist purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian doctrine of experience. If my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice, MacKinnon’s intentional erasure of all difference through the device of the ‘essential’ non-existence of women is not reassuring.”
By Jay Sennett on Jul 11, 2005