The Pimping of Prostitution

Abolishing the Sex Work Myth

Julie Bindel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781349959471
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Teoria e pratica del diritto

This book examines one of the most contested issues facing feminists, human rights activists and governments around the globe – the international sex trade. For decades, the liberal left has been conflicted as to whether pro-prostitution activists or abolitionists hold the correct view, and debates are ongoing as to who holds the key to the solutions facing the women and girls involved. Over the course of two years, Bindel conducted 250 interviews in almost 40 countries, cities and states, traveling around Europe, Asia, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and East and South Africa. Visiting legal brothels all around the world, Bindel got to know pimps, pornographers, survivors of the sex trade, and the women being sold by men classed as 'business entrepreneurs'. Whilst meeting feminist abolitionists, pro-prostitution campaigners, police and government officials, and the men who drive the demand, Bindel uncovered the lies, mythology and criminalactivity that shroud this global trade, and suggests here a way forward for the women seeking to abolish the oldest oppression. Informed by the lived human experience of those interviewed, this book will be of great interest to feminists, students, criminal justice advocates, criminologists and human rights activists.

© The Author(s) 2019

Julie BindelThe Pimping of Prostitutionhttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95947-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Abolitionist Movement

Julie Bindel¹

(1)

London, UK

Julie Bindel

End Abstract

Andrea Dworkin once mused, ‘Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps’.¹ To many, prostituted women do not matter at all.

In this chapter I chart the growth of an exciting and vibrant abolitionist movement. It is a movement with many obstacles to overcome, and I outline the barriers and hostility its members face from the sex trade apologists. It will document the true face behind the international campaign to deregulate an abusive and dangerous industry. It asks why the liberal left is so supportive of the sex trade, when it is a trade built on inequality and the disenfranchisement of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable women and children.

Through the voices of survivors and other feminist abolitionists from numerous countries and states, you will hear about the ordinary, everyday common practices and experiences of prostitution, and the reasons why prostitution and the entire global sex trade must be abolished before women can live as equal citizens in this world.

The Beginnings

The abolitionist movement began in 1860 when Josephine Butler , a social reformer feminist activist, saw the plight of young, homeless girls and women being sold to men for sex. Butler was appalled. As a child she had learned about social injustice from her father, John Grey , who was a supporter of the abolition of slavery. Butler’s main achievement was her successful campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts : a brutal piece of legislation that permitted police to round up women in military towns whom they believed to be involved in prostitution in order to test them for venereal diseases.

Some women were locked up in hospitals for three months until they were cured. Butler said that these acts ‘removed every guarantee of personal security that the law has established’,² and questioned why it was women who were tested when in fact it was women who were the victims of venereal disease, and it was men who were ‘the cause of the vice and its dreadful consequences’.³

Butler was ahead of her time in that she firmly placed the blame for the abuse of the women in prostitution, and for the existence of the sex trade, on the shoulders of men: something that many feminists today are reluctant to do. Butler was clear that prostitution was male sexual slavery of women and she attacked the pimps and profiteers, as well as the State that allowed the sex trade to flourish yet also blamed the women for the spread of sexually transmitted infections.

Butler has been accused of anti-sex, Christian moralism, and written off as a ‘rescuer’ and patronising to working-class women. In reality, Butler is an important figure who advocated on behalf of prostituted women whom much of society considered to be worthless and ‘scum’. Not only did Butler take women into her home who were in the direst need, but she also challenged men’s right to sexual access to prostituted women and children. Butler was clear that prostitution hinders women’s human rights, and that men are to blame for the existence of prostitution.

During her life Butler achieved huge social and legal reforms at a time when women did not even have the right to vote. She travelled all over the USA and much of Europe, inspiring individuals, stimulating local organisations into action and addressing meetings, from small gatherings of women to public meetings attended by hundreds of working-class men.⁴

The abolitionists of today stand on Josephine Butler’s shoulders and are, in turn, accused by the ‘sex workers’ rights’ lobby and advocates of decriminalising pimping of being moralistic, anti-sex man-haters. The feminist abolitionist movement is made up of many survivors of prostitution and other forms of male violence, as well as women, and some men, who recognise the harm the sex trade causes to wider society.

What is clear is that the abolitionist movement is global and it is growing. Despite the lack of funding and support the movement receives compared to the ‘sex workers’ rights ’ lobby (which, as we will see in Chap. 7 is awash with AIDS/HIV prevention money), the abolitionist movement is gaining ground and finally being taken seriously by a number of policy and lawmakers around the world. As the evidence continues to mount on the disaster caused by legalisation and decriminalisation of the sex trade, so do the benefits and successes of the Nordic Model —legislation first introduced in Sweden in 1999 that criminalises paying for sex and decriminalises selling sex. Although, as I show in Chap. 9, academia is dominated by pro-prostitution scholars and doctoral students, a number of brave and robust academics across various countries and disciplines are daring to carry out and publish credible research on the negative consequences of prostitution and legalised prostitution systems.⁵

Links to the Movement to End Male Violence

The other side were claiming prostitution is not all about violence, and it can be very empowering for women and certainly a better job than working at McDonalds . So I said to them, ‘Well at least when you work at McDonalds you’re not the meat’. (Evelina Giobbe 2015)

Abolitionists argue that the only effective way to tackle any trade that is built on vulnerability, exploitation and desperation is to support those desperate enough to sell sexual access to themselves and ensure that those creating the demand pay the price . There is as little room for pimps to be reclassified as respectable businessmen—which they are under the New Zealand model where the sex trade is decriminalised—as there is for police officers to consider it a mere perk of the job to have sex while investigating activities in a brothel.

‘I started talking about the similarities between the Left and Right’, Evelina Giobbe , sex trade survivor and founder of Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt (WHISPER ),⁶ told me. ‘They both want control over and access to women’s bodies. The Right Wing does it through marriage and the Left Wing does it through prostitution and pornography. You can marry it, you can buy it—and we’re it.’

There is a cost to those survivors who name prostitution as male violence towards women. Prostitution is not some unusual but generally harmless activity, such as collecting rare insects or mountain climbing, as much of the Left would have it. Rather it is both a cause and a consequence of women’s oppression, situated firmly within the patriarchy . Women have long been punished for naming male violence and for insisting we examine and campaign against it as something institutionalised and normalised, instead of seeing it as the actions of individual, atypical men.

When women first named domestic violence as a tactic to shore up and maintain male supremacy over women and their children, they were duly punished. Those who do the same with child sexual abuse , rape, sexual assault and forced marriage are accused of lying, manipulation and man-hating. The upholders of male supremacy define sexual violence as pleasurable sex.

In 2005 I appeared on a popular daytime TV programme to debate the UK’s appallingly low conviction rates for rape. Immediately after the broadcast I went to my local bank to deposit a cheque. A man asked if I was the woman he had just seen on TV. When I told him yes, he screwed up his face and told me I was ‘too ugly to rape’. A young female bank clerk who overheard this sought to reassure me that the man was talking rubbish, as I was ‘very pretty’—which goes to show how much we internalise the need for male approval. The stigma that is imposed on women accused of denying men sexual pleasure is debilitating and humiliating. But despite this, the women who can best testify to the truth about prostitution continue to speak out.

Nowhere is the conflation of sexual desire and sexual abuse more prevalent than in the debates on prostitution. Abolitionists are routinely accused by the pro-prostitution lobby of hating men, sex, orgasms and the female body. Abolitionist criticism of the sex trade has been rationalised by the pro lobby as a reaction to a failure to acquire ‘a good fuck’. I have watched sex trade survivors give talks about prostitution to large audiences, and then receive intrusive questions about their sexual orientation, sexual history and sexual behaviour. The implications were obvious: were they frigid, sex-hating prudes? Because prostitution is rewritten as sex by the apologists, speaking out against the sex trade is cast as speaking out against sexual pleasure. Often they are accused of ‘hating sex’ due to their ‘bad experiences’ of prostitution, as though this is an unusual response to years of unwanted sex.

The History

‘We are speaking out because we are sick of the myth of the Pretty Woman version of prostitution’, Janette Westbrook , survivor activist and SPACE member told me in 2014. ‘For too long the happy hooker stereotype has dominated.’

The contemporary survivor movement began in earnest 30 years before Westbrook and I met in New York. WHISPER , founded in 1985 in the USA, was a direct challenge to the notion that prostitution is either a free choice or labour.

‘I am 65 years old. I was literally sold into prostitution—it’s called trafficking now’, says Giobbe . ‘I was sold to a pimp as a 14-year-old kid that ran away from home. I was gone for two days. Kids who run away from home are not thinking their whole lives; they’re just escaping a moment in time.

‘A man was very nice to me and listened to my sad story. He said I have to meet a friend of mine, he took me to the man’s house. I was really an innocent and the man who brought me there left. The other man said “You’re mine, I bought you, you’re going to be a prostitute”. I looked at him incredulously and I said “no” and turned around to leave and he beat me half to death and that was the beginning.’

Had Giobbe not gone to a Women Against Pornography meeting in 1985, the modern abolitionist movement may have taken rather longer to garner support. The ‘sex workers’ rights ’ movement, as we will see in Chap. 2, was already in full swing.

‘Oh my God, they were everywhere’, says Giobbe. ‘The big push was Margot St James and COYOTE (a pro-prostitution lobby group founded in the USA in 1973, standing for Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics⁷). They were the first and last word on prostitution, anywhere. Literally, their arguments, word for word—is exactly what you’re hearing from Amnesty [AI] today.’

Giobbe describes the panel session at the conference that was made up of pro-sadism and masochism (S&M) and prostitution activists and Women Against Pornography members. ‘The audience were like the bride’s side of the family and the groom’s side of the family’, she says. ‘There were the liberals, and there were all leathered out S&M girls and there were the feminists, like regular people. I was looking for a seat and I had a sharp haircut and th...