[UPDATE: This post has been format-correct and mildly revised and added to, on 2 August 2010]
What follows are comments posted to The Guardian, re: Thierry Schaffauser's obnoxiously liberal and selfish perspective on "Sex Work". Here's what a few people have said. Note, especially, what Richard Burns thinks what activity constitutes THE GREATEST RAPE OF A HUMAN BEING. Following his "important statements of fact" are others, which further explicate his view of humanity, which is to say, his inhumanity. I only wish these WHMs would get down off their privileged thrones and do that work, on men's dicks and all, for a few years, and get back to us on how consensual and egalitarian it all is. Yeah... about that.
RichardBurns
15 Apr 2010, 1:53AM
julianr, how many of the millions women in Asia are working in sweat shops or as virtual slave labour in other industries supplying cheap goods, many of which you will have bought?
Will you be seeking to have the the training shoe made illegal because many are made by child workers?
Will you be stopping people shopping in Primark because many of the good there are made by people working for slave labour wages?
The huge mistake you make in your post is that prostitution in Asia is different from many other industries in Asia where people are exploited.
Prostitution for those women may have been a much more attractive proposition than many of the other 'careers' available to them.
You argument hence is fundamentally flawed as their condition is not unique to prostitutes.
RichardBurns
15 Apr 2010, 2:09AM
The greatest rape of a human being is to force your morality on them when they are 'harming' nobody but themselves.
The ultimate pimp is one who seeks to control another persons freewill, in effect to buy their minds rather than their body simply because you have the money and influence to persuade a police force to enforce your own morality on others, you are buying their souls.
By the way I have never used the services of a prostitute but I will defend the rights of anyone who chooses to do so, provided both parties are consensual.
After all many marriages are little more than glorified prostitution arrangements.
What consenting adults get up to is nobodies business but their own provided they are not harming anyone else.
RichardBurns
15 Apr 2010, 2:16AM
There are are there not, many women within marriage who use sex as a bargaining chip?
RichardBurns
15 Apr 2010, 2:33AM
[@]Postsocratic
Whilst it is true that essentialist conceptions of sex-work fail to consider the conditions in which it is exercised, it is just as tendentious to glaze over these conditions for the sake of expediency in dismissing positions that are against the sex industry or aspects of it.
Although there is much to be said about victimising discourses that fail to acknowledge individual agency, a critique of these type of discourse does not (in itself) close the debate on consent or what 'consent' may constitute in terms of the sex-industry. Similarly a dismissal of 'middle-class feminists' does not really answer questions concerning the objectification of either women, or the body itself.
Even if one is no more objectified when literally fucked in sex-work than when symbolically fucked in minimum-wage labour, this suggests there are deeper structural issues to be conerned with but does not legitimise the sex-industry (in its entirety) de facto, though it may not be intended that this position is advocated here.
Firstly don't choke on that dictionary you swallowed!!
You cannot criminalise prostitution without criminalising minimum-wage lalbour if you agree they are the same.
It would be just as valid to allow prositution but criminalise low wage labour.
You have no logical arguement there at all, it's just nonsense.
RichardBurns
15 Apr 2010, 2:50AM
My ex-girlfriend was a sex-worker on a famous web-camera website.
When she told me about it, I warned her to be mindful of the psychological effects of that kind of work.
In the end, sexual relations with her slowly became devoid of any tenderness, and so we parted.
A year later, I heard that she had got married...to a man who paid to masturbate himself whilst watching her on the internet.
Funny thing is, is that she never told me of her work when she met. She knew I wouldn't go out with her if I knew.
Deceit from the very beginning.
[@]Bliad
That's a touching story Bliad, she found love and happiness doing something you and many other people here apparently disapprove of, there is a lesson there I think.
It may have been deceit Blaid but I had there been no deceit there would have been no beginning. You also deceived her in a way because you carried on a relationship with someone you would never have gone with in the first place if you knew the truth.
The psychological effects of the work don't appear to have done her any harm rather perhaps you disapproval of her work may have harmed you perhaps?
Obviously I am perhaps making some assumptions there, but a point worth making is that for some women prostitution may lead to a better life.
This woman did not sell her body rather she found the love of her life.
Don't some middle class folks use a form of sanitized prostitution called speed dating?
RichardBurns
15 Apr 2010, 3:15AM
This comment has been removed by a moderator. Replies may also be deleted.
RichardBurns
15 Apr 2010, 3:24AM
This comment has been removed by a moderator. Replies may also be deleted.
Door
15 Apr 2010, 11:50AM
In what way is the new law anti sex workers?
If it considered paying for sex as inherently violent, as you claim, then it would have made it illegal to pay for sex. period. Even that would be prosecuting the client not the sex worker.
But that is not the case. Instead the law says that if you are paying for sex you have a responsibility to ensure that the transaction is a willing one, as should be that case for any sexual act or any transaction at all for that matter ( Like receiving stolen goods, for instance if you bought the goods from a shop you are unlikely to be prosecuted, but if you got it from the dodgy geezer in the local pub then...).
This is reasonable: if you are having sex with anyone paid or not you have a responsibility to ensure that that your partner is willing, otherwise you are not in the kind of connection that leads to wonderful life enhancing sex. Instead you are by default in a disconnected and abusive state, that this is so often the case doesn't make it any less true, it just shows how far from a free healthy society we are.
potentially, the new law could protect you from an abusive client. It certainly moves towards that possibility rather than away from it.
Bookseeker
15 Apr 2010, 2:19PM
@Thierry Schaffauser
No.
Prostitution, legal or illegal, makes a female underclass. No sane person wants that.
Better we should actually study, understand, and if necessary confront male sexuality. As a society we have simply caved into it so far.
lheurtebise
15 Apr 2010, 8:28PM
To be against the therm "sex work" does not equal disregarding prostitutes.
Associating "sex work" to "sexual open mindedness" and each critic to puritanism is manipulative rhetoric.
lheurtebise
15 Apr 2010, 9:22PM
I find it fascinating how it is possible through repetitive political correct patronising concepts, to obtain from many to neglect sexual psychology, neurology, sociology amongst other science for the presumably "good cause". Prostitution is for sure not "sexual liberation" or "feminism". A society reduced to the functionality of the humo economicus is dehumanised.
Richard Burns is a pro-prostitution apologist. Why oh why is the issue of male demand conveniently ignored by men such as Richard Burns. Women did not create prostitution - but men certainly did and it continues to be men who are the ones demanding women and girls be reduced to men's sexual service stations.
ReplyDeleteClaiming prostitution is 'acceptable' provided both parties 'consent' is similar to arguments once promoted wherein slavery was claimed to be 'acceptable' because the enslaved women's and men's lives were supposedly far worse when free than when they were enslaved by white male Europeans.
Burns conveniently ignores the fact prostitution causes immense physical, mental and emotional harm to the women and girls involved in prostitution. No instead the issue is reduced to one of 'choice and/or 'consent.' But there can be no 'free informed consent' when women and girls have no other option but to engage in prostitution in order to survive financially. Nor for that matter can prostitution be simnplistically reduced to forced prostitution or 'choice prostitution.' Fact is majority of women and girls in prostitution want to exit and they do not want their daughters/female friends to experience what they have suffered at the hands/fists and penises of Johns.
Oh and once again that tired old justification has been used because another pro-prostitution apologist supposedly knows one woman who freely entered prostitution and guess what? She found happiness with a John. One example does not cancel out the massive male sexual exploitation of women and girls, just because male heterosexuality is always in supposedly in constant need of 'female sexual service stations.'
I've yet to read or hear of one male who has died through lack of sexual access to a woman's/girl's body. Men do not need sex in order to survive - but all women and men need food, water, shelter and safety from predators. Women however are in most danger from sexually predatory men who justify their pseduo right of unlimited 24/7 sexual access to any woman/girl because they will supposedly die a horrible death if their penises are not satisfied.
Hi Jennifer,
ReplyDeleteYes, their penises, which het men use to think, or so they say. Or are their brains in their testicles? It varies depending on the het guy, I guess.
And a white woman and white man I knew, both relatively young, prepared to travel cross-country by bicycle. They each brought what they'd need for provisions.
She brought pepper spray. He brought "bear repellent". That says it all about who is dangerous to whom.
"I've yet to read or hear of one male who has died through lack of sexual access to a woman's/girl's body. Men do not need sex in order to survive - but all women and men need food, water, shelter and safety from predators. Women however are in most danger from sexually predatory men who justify their pseduo right of unlimited 24/7 sexual access to any woman/girl because they will supposedly die a horrible death if their penises are not satisfied."
ReplyDeleteWell, maybe each individual WHM won't die a horrible death if their penis is not satisifed by not having 24/7 access to any/all women/girls, but apparently our entire species will be doomed, according to this member of the WHMS site called The Spearhead:
Communize the Cunt
by Zebert » Sat Jul 31, 2010 2:59 pm
In our economic system women exchange their sexuality for access to power because they are born with two products that men want - sexuality and beauty. Men must design a political or economics system that removes the ability of women to decide who accesses their sexuality. Men must communize the cunt.
Solution
All women must be herded into sex farms where all men will have free and equal access. We must communize the cunt. If we don't, our species is doomed
Thank you, Patti.
ReplyDeleteForget their ridiculous moniker "feminazi". What you posted, and what people like Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Bill O'Reilly, and Glenn Sacks, along with the likes of the capitalist pimps and "communist" patriarchs like Zebert demonstrate is what we have to highlight and what society ought to be organising against are these misogynazis who spit out and spew their domineering and bullying CRAP wherever they go.
"misogynazis" -- I like it!!
ReplyDeleteYes, t'would have been more realistic (and would've rhymed better, too!) had William Congreve written
"Heav'n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn'd,
Nor Hell a Fury, like a WHM spurn'd."
I also got a kick out of this one from Richard Burns:
"By the way I have never used the services of a prostitute [and you're probably one of the millions of WHMs that has NEVER made of use of pornography either, right?] but I will defend the rights of anyone who chooses to do so, provided both parties are consensual." (bold and italics were added by me)
Agreed, we should be targeting only those prostitutes who force their lips around the protesting male's dick and then demand to be paid for the unwelcome act.
And as for this, "After all many marriages are little more than glorified prostitution arrangements.", I recall hearing a white male guest on some talk show many years ago spouting this same drivel, calling housewives/homemakers little more than overpaid prostitutes. Yet blame for the devaluation of the stay-at-home-mom or homemaker is placed squarely in the lap of feminists/feminism by both WHMs and many WHFs.