I cam across this tweet from the comedian Jim Norton, which sets up an interesting point/counterpoint:
My article for http://t.co/h8xVC3TuVS http://t.co/7gfhdoNiEs and a rebuttal by @CharlotteAlter http://t.co/G2u8e8UaXa
— Jim Norton (@JimNorton) August 8, 2014
Norton’s piece has the eye-catching click-baity title “In Defense of Johns,” while Alter’s rebuttal is entitled “Dear Johns: Actually, You Should Be Ashamed to Buy Sex.”
I’m pretty much on record as supporting the decriminalization of sex work, for a variety of reasons*.
Part of Norton’s piece is a rather squicky pontification on men who frequent sex workers**, followed by an argument for decriminalization that I tend to find convincing:
I’m a firm believer that prostitution should be legalized and pimps should be thrown down an elevator shaft.
Law-enforcement stings designed to shame men who pay for sex are nothing more than the state blowing its own morality horn. Being a comedian who is single allows me a luxury most johns don’t have, which is the freedom to discuss the topic openly. And not from a case-study point of view but from the honest point of view of someone who has spent the equivalent of a Harvard Law School education on purchasing sex.
By keeping prostitution illegal because we find it morally objectionable, we allow (or, more accurately, you allow) sex workers to constantly be put into dangerous situations. Studies have shown that rapes and STDs dropped drastically from 2003 to 2009 in Rhode Island after the state accidentally legalized it. The American Journal of Epidemiology showed that the homicide rate for prostitutes is 50 times that for those in the next most dangerous job for a woman, working in a liquor store. You don’t need a master’s in sociology to understand it would be much safer for sex workers if they were permitted to work in places that provided adequate security. Legalizing prostitution would also alleviate the fear a sex worker may have about reporting a john’s abusive behavior because of the risk of arrest.
***
The decision people make to have sex for a living would undoubtedly confuse and repulse a large part of the population. But in a free society, people must be allowed to make choices for themselves that are incomprehensible to others. By keeping prostitution illegal and demonizing all of its parties, we (you) are empowering pimps and human traffickers and anyone else who wants to victimize sex workers because they feel helpless under the law. [Emphasis added.]
Norton’s piece is, in a sense, a personal narrative used to make a point about a particular public policy. To be fair, I don’t know if he seeks out sex workers who do sex work entirely voluntarily, or if he is less picky. Alter’s rebuttal takes Norton’s account and tries to make a broader point about sex work in general, and that’s where I diverge, opinion-wise. It ought to go without saying that human trafficking is a very serious problem that needs attention, but in my opinion, it is being wrongfully conflated with all sex work. Alter writes:
Actually, Jim, you should be ashamed to pay for sex. And so should all the other men who purchase women and girls, many of whom have been trafficked, enslaved and repeatedly raped. No amount of rationalization can get around the basic principle of market economics: if people like you didn’t buy girls, they wouldn’t be sold, and if they couldn’t be sold, they wouldn’t be trafficked and abused.
(Of course, there are also women who buy sex, and plenty of men and boys who are trafficking victims, but let’s focus on the male-client/female-sex-worker argument that Norton is going with.)
That sort of brushes past the tendency to overlook the individuals involved in sex work who are not cisgender women, but note that it also makes the classic error of any sort of prohibitionism: if people would just stop buying, there would be no problem. That didn’t work with Prohibition, it’s not working in the War on Drugs, and it’s not going to work in what some people call the “world’s oldest profession.” Alter throws a tiny mention to the people who engage in sex work voluntarily, and I do mean tiny:
Sure, some woman do choose this line of work, and sex-workers unions argue that prostitution can be a freely made choice, but that’s not the case for the vast majority: U.S. State Department estimates that 80% of the 600,000 to 800,000 people trafficked across international borders every year are trafficked for sex.
The link to the “80% of trafficked people” claim doesn’t actually cite a source, and I’ve had a hard time determining where those numbers come from. You can take a look at the most recent State Department report yourself.
Alter points out problems in places that have made sex work legal:
The Netherlands has also been held up as an example of what happens when prostitution is legalized, but the results are mixed. The mayor of Amsterdam said in 2003 that legalizing prostitution had failed to keep sex workers safe, since “it appeared impossible to create a safe and controllable zone for women that was not open to abuse by organized crime.”
That, in and of itself, is not a very convincing argument against decriminalization, because many different areas of work are open to abuse by organized crime. Organized crime works, in part, by always looking for areas to exploit, and no other activity seems to require perfect resistance to organized crime in order to be legal. If anything, that sounds like an argument for stepping up enforcement against organized crime, not continuing to criminalize the entire thing.
Alter goes on to make a straw-man argument:
Most arguments for legalization presume that tons of women would choose sex work if it were safe and legal, but that’s convenient wishful thinking for johns who want to let themselves off the hook. “In the real world, Julia Roberts’ character from Pretty Woman does not exist,” said Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who organizes the National Day of Johns Arrests and advocates for harsher punishment for sex buyers. “Every time a john purchases sex, he is catalyzing a violent and oppressive industry.”
I’m not sure anyone seriously makes this argument. The actual argument, to my understanding, is that some people do choose sex work voluntarily, and even if it is not their ideal—or even their preferred—line of work, they have the right to do with themselves as they want. As Melissa Gira Grant says, they need “rights, not rescue.”
I don’t know how many, if any, people are claiming that women (and men, and trans women, and trans men, and so on) would be jumping in to the sex trade if it were just legalized, but that’s not really the point (at least, I don’t think it is.) The point is that making everyone involved in trafficking a criminal obscures the underlying criminal act that gives the offense its name: the actual trafficking. Much like how expending massive amounts of law enforcement resources on low-level drug dealers and users doesn’t do much to expose the top-level people, this doesn’t seem to be working.
As for Pretty Woman, sex workers have both supported and criticized the film’s portrayal of sex work.
Support (albeit lukewarm support):
The movie acknowledges a prostitute’s right to say no. It’s important that non-sex workers be reminded that sex workers can be disrespected, sexually assaulted, and raped. The scene where Stuckey (Jason Alexander) attacks Vivian is chilling, all the more so because he’s calling her “whore” and talking about his right to buy her as it goes down.
The character in Pretty Woman is a street sex worker. Street workers make up only about 10% of sex workers in the UK, so the film is not relevant to the UK sex industry (and it was made in the USA, not UK). I’d heard all about how the movie unrealistically glamourises sex work, so when I watched it on TV I got a shock. It seemed as if the film had been written and performed to stigmatise sex workers and the sex industry.
And far from glamourising prostitution, the film actually stigmatises and stereotypes sex workers. Vivian dresses in a revealing outfit, has never seen an elevator or been inside a nice hotel, is awed by the size of a small room, is emotional, is unable to even shop for a dress without the help of others, and charges $300 per hour yet is stupid enough to stay an entire week for $3,000 which really would only be the price for 10 hours. I mean, yeah, I get it that if you use more of a service or buy in bulk you get discounts – but that discount seems a bit much.
Vivian also feels upset that her client told his friend she is a sex worker, and decides to leave without taking the payment for the services she has sold. This is stereotyping sex workers as ashamed of their careers, as if all sex workers are slut-shamers and furthermore have internalised that slut-shaming and turned it on themselves.
Turning back to Norton and Alter’s pieces for a moment, Alter makes an association between being a consumer of sex workers’ services and “sex addiction.” While the scientific community is of mixed opinion, I don’t doubt that sex addiction is a real problem for many people (I know some of them). I also don’t think it’s fair to make the assumption Alter does here.
My biggest concern, though, is that Alter recommends adopting the “Swedish model,” (or “Nordic model”) which decriminalizes the selling of sex, but not the buying of it. She writes:
Some argue that making prostitution legal could make sex workers safer, because they could call the police if a client was getting violent. But criminalizing the johns would do the same thing: prostitutes would know they won’t face jail time for calling for help, and the violent jerk would be cuffed.
That is a possible outcome, but here is where I am worried: If only the demand side is criminalized (and setting aside questions of whether law enforcement could overcome decades or centuries of entrenched prejudices re: sex workers), the “johns” might tend to be the people who know that what they are doing is illegal, who know that they are the only ones who legally face punishment for it, and who do it anyway. In other words (and perhaps this is just a thought experiment on my part), it might make the work more dangerous for sex workers, because the johns would be criminals by definition. Besides that, it’s still just a way of making sex work impossible, by allowing someone to offer a service that is legally prohibited.
* It’s one of the issues where I make common cause with libertarians. Maggie McNeill, a retired sex worker who, I assume, leans libertarian, does some great work explaining the case for decriminalization at her blog.
** Please note that I am using the term “sex worker” in a very specific sense in this post to mean a person who engages in activities that are generally prohibited by prostitution laws. “Sex worker” can have a much broader definition that includes porn performers, exotic dancers, and so forth.
