[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
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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.
