The Sex Work Shibboleth

For feminists, arguments about sex work have become an ugly, obstructive shibboleth. The debate about whether feminism can ever tolerate the sale of sex has raged for over five decades, and in recent years the question has opened old wounds in the fabric of feminist unity, leading to such embarrassing flashpoints as the verbal abuse and police intimidation of sex workers and their allies at the Reclaim the Night march in 2009.

Many feminists, like Finn MacKay of the Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution, feel that the purchase of sex from women is always and only misogyny: “Equality for women is a farce in a society where it is considered normal for men to buy our bodies.

“We can't be free while so many of us are literally for sale. As long as I believe prostitution is a form of violence against women, then how can I work alongside anyone who promotes it as a job like any other?”

A Moral Quarrel

Furious debate about sex work and pornography dominated the discussion at the recent Women’s Question Time event in London, organised by the charity Eaves, where feminists were invited to put questions to prospective Women's ministers in the run-up to the General Election.

Pandora Blake, a feminist sex worker, attended the event. “I hadn't realised quite how aggressively hostile most of my sisters are to my ideals,” she said. “It’s worrying that so many of the best female politicians seem unable to see nuance when it comes to the sex industry".

At this event, like so many others, issues such as abortion rights and the pay gap were elbowed out in favour of monolithic tub-thumping about sex work that played out a worrying tendency on the part of contemporary feminists to moralise rather than strategise.

On the other side of the debate, many pro-sex work feminists believe that the protection of sex workers should be the only consideration.

“Criminalisation of kerb-crawling, to take one example, is harmful to sex workers because ultimately they are the ones who suffer,” said Nine, a former support worker for Edinburgh prostitutes. “Sex workers who still need to make their money are faced with doing business with clients they would ordinarily have rejected. It concerns me greatly that the mainstream feminist movement refuses to look at the harmful effect of laws like these, which they support simply in the name of sending a message to men.”

Giving space to abusers

Unfortunately, tolerant attitudes such as Nine’s are too often manipulated by patriarchal apologists concerned with maintaining a status quo that constrains and commodifies female sexuality. Easy examples of such apologism can be found on the popular networking site for johns, Punternet, which rates and reviews prostitutes as ‘pieces of meat’. Worryingly, the International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW) recently recruited on the site, encouraging punters to write to their MPs to safeguard their favourite hobby.

If the exclusionary tactics of abolitionist feminists are unsound, the unscrupulous attitudes of organisations like the IUSW are hardly more laudable. The attitude that abusive punters are an inevitability, and the related reasoning that one cannot fight the misogynist meat market, hardly offers an answer to people like Rebecca Mott, a former prostitute and abolitionist activist:

“The torment of being prostituted has never left me. On the first night, when I was fourteen, I was gang-raped for many hours. That was the test to see if I was suitable material for prostitution. You learn that your body is there to be damaged. That you have no right to say no. That your purpose is to service men in any and every way they can think of. It is so much easier to speak only of women who appear in charge of their own working environment, rather than the reality.”

Too often, the pro-prostitution lobby is guilty of silencing the voices of women like Mott – just as the abolitionist lobby refuses to acknowledge sex workers whose experiences differ. The sex work debate is a sea of unheard voices, private tragedy and misinformation in which moral squabbling obscures the real-life concerns of many vulnerable women.

A legal no man’s land

The net result of all this wrangling is that the legal status of sex work remains an unworkable, precarious Jenga tower of muddled laws and moral equivocation. Recent changes to the law in Britain have altered that situation very little. Welcome efforts to focus police attention on those who buy the sexual services of abused women, such as Clause 14, which makes it a criminal offence to buy sex from ‘a woman controlled for gain’, has been balanced by more regressive and punitive sanctions against soliciting.

In Britain, as in many other developed countries, women who work as prostitutes are stranded in a socio-economic no man’s land, their work just about legal enough to offer a seedy but acceptable outlet for restrained bourgeois sexual mores and an economic option for women in desperate financial circumstances, and just about illegal enough that the market for commercial sex remains illicit and underground, depriving sex workers of public dignity and of the full protection of the justice system, and satisfying the prudish public drive to punish those who sell sex.

Amongst all of this moralising, misogynist apologism and equivocation, it is stupendously difficult to have a productive conversation about sex work. “There are very few spaces in which feminists with different perspectives on this issue get together and talk about it and find points to agree on,” said Nine. “There frequently isn't even room for debate at all, just point-scoring and shouting over people.”

The stagnation of the sex work debate around a brutal moral binary can be seen as the greatest extant danger to the future of feminism, particularly if one believes, as I do, that if we all stopped shouting at each other for a while we could hold the revolution tomorrow.

Belle De Jour: a misleading cipher

The keenest example of this unimaginative binary thinking is the Belle de Jour problem. Dr Brooke Magnanti of Bristol was recently forced to out herself as the former PhD student and prostitute behind the blog which turned into the book which turned into the lucrative, trashily unchallenging ITV adaptation, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, in which Billie Piper wears a variety of rump-revealing latex dresses and does a lot of heavy breathing.

The show, now in its third series, has become the dominant vehicle for the Belle De Jour meme, stripping out everything that was realistic and challenging about Dr Magnanti's blog and leaving a deodorised husk of middle-class male fantasy in which a massively undercast Piper perkily advises the audience to “'work out what the client wants, and give it to him as quickly as possible”.'

Feminists have justly denounced the show as duplicitous, portraying sex work as entirely safe, glamorous and lucrative for all those prepared to devote themselves entirely to the sexual service of rich men. However, commentators from Kira Cochrane to India Knight have failed to notice that Secret Diary of a Call Girl is ITV's convenient fiction, and not Dr Magnanti's reality.

Dr Magnanti herself was working in the elite eschelons of the sex trade, with no pimp or drug habit to worry about, but even so, critics have failed to notice that the show bears about as much resemblance to the blog as Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves might bear to the life of a medieval peasant.

Poor Dr Magnanti. All she wanted was to develop her writing and discuss her experiences. Instead, she has been distorted, idolised, victimised and vilified by anyone and everyone with a barrel to beat about prostitution. From glamorous courtesan to tragic victim, it’s not just Belle's body that can be bent into any position you fancy.

The one thing that almost no-one has asked is why a PhD student might find herself selling sexual intercourse to fund her studies in the first place. Commentators are slow to connect Belle with a bankrupt higher education system in which indebted students routinely live well below the poverty line to afford the degrees their future employers increasingly demand. Just last week, a report by Kingston University suggested that since the abolition of the student grant, the number of students funding their degrees by working as prostitutes and strippers has increased fivefold. Basic socio-economic analysis of this kind is what is missing from both sides of the contemporary conversation about prostitution.

There is a trench of faff and fighting at the core of the sex work debate where a rigorous analysis of work and capital should be. Sex work is an economic question, not a moral one: in a world where shame and sexual violence are still hard currency, the normalisation of the sex industry is a symptom not of social degeneration, but of the economic exploitation of women on an unprecedented scale, in a feminised labour market where all working women are expected to commodify their sexuality to some extent.

Nothing obscures this crucial approach so much as the dogmatic insistence, on both sides of the debate, on the primacy of a faux-feminist notion of ‘choice’.

With sex work, as with many other feminist flashpoints, the notion of ‘a woman’s free choice’ is fetishised and taken out of context in order to obscure useful analysis. The word ‘choice’ has been manipulated by the neoliberal consensus in order to erase the influence of brutal capitalist paradigms on the deeds and decisions of poor people, and of poor women in particular.

Liberated sex workers insist that their work is ‘a free choice’, whilst abolitionists and many exited sex workers claim that prostitutes suffer such abuses that the very notion of ‘choice’ is anathema. The term has already been devalued by wider society to the extent that any sexual choice made by a woman is assumed to be an empowering act of autonomous agency – especially when the net result of that choice is financial exchange.

Abolitionist feminists unwittingly play into this misleading rhetoric of ‘choice’ with their insistence that women in the sex industry have none, that, as Finn Mackay puts it, ‘prostitution is non-consensual sex’ - as if choice and consent are ever enough to justify industrial abuse. As if choice were something made in a vacuum, unconstrained by socio-economic conditions.

The underlying assumption of this analytical cul-de-sac - that any woman’s sexual choice, however restricted, is positive and empowering - could only have currency in a world where female sexual agency is still seen as abnormal.

Decriminalisation: a way forward?

The supreme irony of this sociological stalemate is that, on many counts, the ultimate goals of pro-protection and abolitionist feminists are one and the same. Both camps, for example, believe that women and men who sell sex should not face legal sanctions, and both factions understand that the persecution of prostitutes by law enforcement officers is a form of state violence against women that needs to be eradicated as a matter of urgency.

But achievable aims like these are sidelined by partisan squabbling. So intense was the debate around Clause 14 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill that practically no opposition was brooked against other, more directly damaging clauses of the Bill, such as those that gave police greater powers to raid brothels and confiscate any earnings found on the premises. “Women are being turfed out onto the street in their scanties,” observed feminist academic Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon. “Does anyone have an answer to this?”

Even in this bitter debate, however, occasions for hope do occur. A recent collaboration on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog between Thierry Schaffauser of the IUSW and Cath Elliott concluded that feminists should work together on decriminalisation:

“While we've all been busy arguing over other things, those most in need of our help continue to suffer violence. We believe the criminalisation of sex workers/prostitutes helps to legitimise those who attack them. Criminalisation of soliciting is a sexist law.”

Ultimately, all feminists believe that vulnerable women need to be protected from abuse, violence and stigma, and all true liberals oppose cultures that brutally shame and commodify female sexuality. If our goals are to be realised, the sex work shibboleth must be broken. Feminists need to put aside ideological differences and work towards a radical restructuring of neoliberal attitudes to sex, to work and to sex work.

It is not enough to seek to criminalise prostitution at the expense of vulnerable women, and neither is it enough to cede responsibility to misogynist market forces and offer protection within an imperfect, abusive sex industry as the only realistic alternative.

If we want a world where women’s bodies are more than just commodities, feminists need to get radical, we need to get smart, and we need to be prepared to lay down our weapons and take the fight to the real enemies. If we stop fighting each other and turn our energies on the pimps, the abusers and the superstructure of misogynist free-market capitalism, there are exhilarating victories to be won.

This article was published at The Samosa on the 25th of March, 2010.

Angry feminist Tuesday

I get angry when debates are skewed by lies and weasel words on both sides, as is happening right now with the debate around prostitution, trafficking and the Policing and Crime Bill currently going through the House of Lords. I get angry when the people whose side I'm nominally on, the people out to protect women first and foremost, the good guys goddamnit, make up, distort and exaggerate statistics. And I get angry when media outlets use that exaggeration to dismiss the whole debate - in this case, to claim that there are almost no trafficked sex-slaves working in Britain today , a claim which has led other commentators to alledge that trafficked women are not worth public funds and anyone suggesting otherwise is -and I quote - 'hysterical'.

I get angry when punters, bystanders and sex worker organisations claim that it's not okay to criminalise men who rape sex slaves, because that might make it a little harder for non-coerced prostitutes to earn their money, or even - shock, horror! - make it harder for yr average punter to get his no-strings fuck.

I get angry when groups that pretend to be supporting women try to push through illiberal clutches of contradictory laws based on bad statistics. And I get angry when I see clusters of people tearing each other apart over laws that, even if they are put into place, will leave us with exactly the same situation: namely that prostitution, an industry in which the overwhelming majority of sellers are women and nearly all buyers are men, will not actually be legal or illegal - it'll be just about illegal enough and just about stigmatised enough that those who sell sex get almost no protection or support from the law or their local communities, whilst still just about legal enough that 10-15% of men are free to pay for sex without having to consider the humanity of their partner whenever they so choose.

I get angry, too, when I make the mistake of reading my words twisted by idiots online, my feminism rubbished, my ideals mocked. I get angry when I hear, time and time again as my profile as a feminist writer grows, that I'm a prude, a frigid bitch, that I hate sex, that I believe in a sterile female supremacist state, that my sisters and I believe all heterosexual sex is rape. I get angry when I am lied about. No other kind of political writer gets their very selfhood, the deepest most intimate parts of themselves, trampled in the most malicious of ways by total strangers - only the few bloggers, journalists and authors who are brave enough to tackle feminist issues in the public sphere.

I get angry when I'm told that I am not allowed to take offence when women are objectified and served up as pieces of meat by the media, when I'm called a prude for hating the prevalence of lap-dancing clubs and wanting those clubs to be properly designated and licensed, when I'm called a crazy, bitter bitch for hating the fact that I can't leave my fucking house or even open a goddamn webpage without seeing pictures of unreal female bodies served up as the ultimate ideal that I should aspire to, when I hate being told to buy more things so that I can look perpetually young, odourless, hairless, shaved, de-sexed and dehumanised. I get angry when I'm ridiculed for wanting to own my sexuality, and wanting others to be allowed to own theirs.

I am a feminist. I am pro sex-worker, morally indifferent to the notion of a sex trade, fantastically opposed to the sex trade as it operates in Britain today - full of rape, abuse, sexual slavery, grooming, coercion and objectification. The voices of prostituted women who aren't having a good time are the only ones we don't hear - plenty of rape apologists, plenty of feminists getting it wrong, and plenty of people responding by telling us that those feminists are hysterical bitches who hate all men and all sex. A few brave people are trying to redress this balance: Rebecca is one of them. Go and read her blog before you read anything else.

All this anger makes me horny.

And when I'm horny and angry I need to get off if I'm to be any use to myself or anyone, not that masturbation is ever that much of a chore. So I go hunting online for a quick pornographic fix. But yknow what? All the porn I can find online involves raping, hurting, punishing and shaming women, endless thumping shots of cocks going into holes that just leave me cold and upset. I click on one that looks like it might be alright, only to watch thirty seconds of a young woman actually crying and screaming 'ow, ow, ow' whilst a disembodied cock fucks her in the anus. I hate it. It makes me want to throw up. Does that mean I'm a frigid bitch who hates sex? Apparently, yes.

The truth is that we have not even begun to tackle the sexual objectification of women in our culture. Slapping a ban on lapdancing clubs or fiddling around with the laws on prostitution will achieve sweet nothing unless it's backed up by cultural change - although it's always our right, as feminists and advocates of free speech, to object to the treatment of women in the sex industry or anywhere else, if we so choose. We are trying to hold back the sea, when instead we need to be building armoured submarines and diving into the water all guns blazing.

I am personally, right here and now, sick of being objectified by this culture, sick of denying my selfhood and performing for others and apologising for my wants and needs and desires. I'm only 23, and already I have starved my body into nothingness, I've nearly died from hunger and come out the other side, I've stripped on stage and felt no joy, I've experienced date rape and had sexual partners tell me I'm dirty and women tell me I'm a slut to my face, and every day I am forced to see thousands of pictures of how my body should look - plucked, shaved, starved, limp, white, pre-pubescent, drained, dead - and encouraged to beat myself into that mold - and yet people tell me that my experience is invalid, that my feminism is anathema, that I am 'bitter'. As a woman in my 20s I am told that I should constantly aspire to look sexy - but I shouldn't sleep with too many people, I shouldn't sleep with anyone on the first date, I shouldn't appear too keen, I shouldn't be 'slutty'. I am an object; I should aspire to be the best possible object I can be.

THAT is what objectification means. It's a denial of selfhood and sexuality and identity so absolute and all-encompassing that most of us don't even notice anymore that we've been duped.

Well, I'm sick of being an object. I'm sick of apologising for my 'frigidity', for my feminism, for my rage at not being allowed to express myself sexually and yet being expected to perform and bullied if I object to men, strangers or otherwise, treating me like chattel. There's something thundering inside me about to be unleashed, hemmed in by anger and the bawling of stupid, ignorant misogynists. I feel like my anger could howl away inside me and consume me if I don't let it out. I want to scream. I want to hit things. I want to climb on some high roof and yell that I'm a person, that all women are real people who deserve to be treated like human beings, until they come and drag me off for being 'hysterical'.

But don't mind me, I'm just your crazy neighborhood feminazi. Take me away before I upset somebody.

Little Lolitas?

[This entry comes with a trigger warning for mention of rape and abuse involving young girls. It's also possibly the angriest post I've ever written.]

Thanks to a new book, 'The Lolita Effect', and a kiddy-sized pole-dancing kit marketed to six year olds that got attention on both sides of the pond and, of course, Miley Cyrus, the 'sexualisation of young girls' is in the press again. Cue a great deal of handwringing and think-of-the-children-isms in the same international press that, this same week, gave a good deal of coverage to child-rape apologists.

All of these stories are just begging, just laying back like the wanton little semiotic nymphets they are and begging to be illustrated with faux-naive photos of young girls in suggestive states of undress - or, more frequently and legally, parts of young girls. Merely, of course, to demonstrate how awful it all is.

Western society has a curious doublethink going on over young girls and sex. Whilst young boys are acknowledged as having and acting upon sexual desire from a young age, the notion of young girls being sexual is still shocking - but it's also exciting. From the pages of playboy to music videos to porn, girlhood is sexualised and undeveloped female bodies fetishised as the ultimate in naughty fantasy. This trend has been going on for decades, and yet when real little girls do what they're told to do and play sexy, the hollow hypocrisy of the commentariat is deafening.

M.G Durham, author of 'The Lolita Effect', has a novel solution: why not actually tell little girls that it's okay to enjoy sex? In Carol Midgley's review of 'The Lolita Effect', she notes that 'some believe that shielding girls from sex for as long as possible — preaching the abstinence message and the pregnancy/STD/victimhood perils of sex — is the only way [to counteract The Lolita Effect]. Durham disagrees. Girls do not need “rescuing” from sex, she says. Merely the media’s one-dimensional, profit-driven version of it, which is based purely on male fantasies without a nod to female needs or desires.

'Rather, girls should be encouraged that it is their right to enjoy it, thus reclaiming their sexuality from a culture that increasingly positions them as passive, objectified sex kittens who are not encouraged to actually want sex or get any pleasure from it yet are mandated to be desirable to males — to look up for it but not, of course, act on it, for that would be sluttish.'

This fantastically sensible suggestion has not stopped the book being promoted in the press with straplines such as Lost Youth!. Nobody, moreover, has yet thought of asking young women and girls themselves what they want. What a silly idea: everyone knows that young girls are merely ciphers for the steamy fantasies of artists, advertisers and pop psions: they have no personalities of their own, and no agency to speak of. They are told what to want, and they'll damn well like it; they are the embodiment of patriarchal desire, and as such their own desires are irrelevant.

Curiously, I don't remember myself and my schoolmates morphing into vain, vacant sex-dollies between the ages of twelve and seventeen. As far as I recall, we were all people then, no matter how many parts of our growing selves were stamped down, stretched out, primped, polished, squeezed into shape or mercilessly stifled, and with any luck we're all still people now*. I do, however, remember being judged relentlessly on the way I looked, and being miserable because of it. I remember how my body and desires and the bodies and desires of every young woman I knew were ruthlessly policed, and how that process informed my feminism.

Now, this is the point where you might want to go and get yourself a strong drink or roll a fag**, because I'm about to talk about my childhood.

Like many people, I was emphatically not a Little Lolita. I was a pug ugly kid. No, really. I had braces, a scowl, an awful haircut and enough acne that I wouldn't have been surprised to be approached to be the new face of Pizza Hut. I often went out in unwashed clothes and forgot to brush my hair, which grew long and straggly. I used to look with envy at the same girls the papers are currently lambasting, the girls with boyfriends and the beginnings of breasts to fit in their push-up bras, the girls with highlights and lipgloss who strutted through the schoolyard in the shortest skirts they could get away with. Those were the girls who got attention and respect - from our peers and from the adults. Every magazine and advertisment I saw, every programme I watched, every message I got from parents and my peer group and the few friends I had told me that my selfhood was irrelevant because I was not beautiful, that my life would be immeasurably better if I looked more like those girls. I am reliably informed by my teenage sisters that the message has not changed in the past six years: if you're a girl and you're not sexy, you may as well go and lie down in a skip right now, because you're worthless and nobody will ever love you.

Note that I said sexy, not sexual. We were expected to look sexually available at all times - but if we actually were sexually available, we quickly developed reputations as slags. None of the effort we put into our appearance and behaviour was actually meant to result in any actual sex for us, because that was dirty and dangerous. We were supposed to look good, not feel good.

When sex started to be something that my classmates did together, the language at breaktime was all about what so-and-so had let Chris F. Studly do to her. Had she let him see her tits? Had she let him finger her? Had she let him put his penis in her mouth? All of it was - and still is - about what boys are allowed to do to you.

Which was doubly confusing, because at the time I was not only too shy and ugly to get a shag, I was crashingly horny nearly all the damn time. Nobody ever told me that would happen. The girls we were meant to look up to dressed for sex but didn't seem to be very enthusiastic about it - whereas I would have given my train-tracked eye-teeth for five solitary minutes of fucking. Sexualisation was never my problem. The problem - for all of us, whether we were pretty and popular or library-dwelling trolls - was that looking sexy was a game you had to win, whereas sex itself was forbidden. More than that: sex was dangerous.

You see, we were surrounded by rape. Not just rape as an airy warning, something that meant that you shouldn't walk down Eastern Road in the dark or catch night-buses on your own, but rape as a real, tangible thing, that had happened to people we knew. In year 9, after a school disco, one of my classmates claimed to have been raped by the class stud in the nearby park. Both she and the boy were immediately expelled. I still remember vividly how, in that same term, a girl broke down in a Maths lesson because she had been raped as a child by her stepfather. Eventually, after being caught sexually engaging with her boyfriend on school premises, she was suspended too. Not only did rape happen to some of us, if you were unlucky enough to be one of the ones it happened to, you faced punishment and moral judgement. God forbid you actually engaged in consensual sex - that was even worse.

This wasn't the case for the boys, of course, who could shag around to their hearts' content, and frequently did, without having any moral judgements attached to them. Their bodies and developing desires weren't policed by their peers and their parents as ours were, their sexuality was not taboo. Biologically, of course, this is more than illogical: whilst many men do not experience sexual feelings until puberty, women and girls are in theory capable of sexual pleasure and orgasm from early infancy, not that they are old enough to understand what that means. Whilst boys' first experience of heterosexual sexuality tends, these days, to be visual - catching a peek of a dirty magazine or simply being assaulted by a naked female body on a billboard - many girls' first experience of sexuality is of a parent telling them not to fiddle in their knickers without ever explaining why it's dirty, bad and wrong.

It's a trend that has held true for decades: the 'sexualisation' of young boys does not raise many eyebrows these days. Who cares if young lads watch porn from the age of thirteen, internalise the messages of pornography and violent rap music? Whilst young girls' sexuality is forbidden in any form apart from sartorial pantomime, young boys' sexuality is encouraged in almost any form (as long as it's a heterosexual form), with violence and the dehumanisation of women part of the language of schoolboy culture from an early age.

This is not entirely young boys' fault. The men I know today are largely mature, understanding and decent. But when I think of the fear I felt of young men as a child, when I think of the way they sexually terrorised me, my female classmates and each other, I cannot help but get angry that this is so roundly ignored. When I read statistics that tell me that one in three teenage girls has been sexually abused by a partner, they seem ludicrous at first - and then memory kicks in.

Sitting in a physics lesson, aged fourteen, I suddenly feel something hard, cold and sharp poking up under my skirt, prodding into the seat of my knickers. I jump, and turn around. The boy sitting behind me, Aidan his name is, is shoving a half-metre metal ruler into the fabric covering my anus. My expression as I turn makes him laugh. He withdraws the ruler, and the boys sitting either side of him echo him when he starts to yell at me, 'do you love it? Do you love it? Do you love it?'

Not knowing what he means, and not wanting to make an even worse mistake, I shrug. Aidan is triumphant. 'Penny loves it up the bum!' he squeals. 'Penny loves it u-up the bum!'. Everyone laughs. The teacher swoops in, and shushes them, and glares at me. What have I done to encourage them?

The author of the Lolita effect is absolutely right to point out that what I needed back then, what young women desperately need, is more, not less, honest sexuality. Little girls are already sexual - but instead of teaching them about sex, we teach them to fear it, just as the rest of society fears female sexuality. We teach them to become objects for others' enjoyment, rather than acknowledging that they themselves are capable of positive sexual agency. These days, young girls learn that sexuality is simultaneously shameful, dangerous, and the only sure way of gaining attention and popularity. We culturally castrate young girls before they're into training bras, and then the Polanski defenders, the critics of Little Lolitas, our parents, our teachers, our peers, tell us that little girls are all immoral because we're so clearly begging for it.

It makes me want to smash things. It makes me want to smash things like my sexuality has been smashed - into a thousand painful little pieces. These days, I'm a feminist. I understand that I have sexual agency, I understand that my body is not shameful, I know it's okay to like sex, I know that that doesn't mean I'm a slut or a slag or that I deserve punishment or to be treated like an object. I know that logically, but the damage has already been done, to me and to millions of others. I want us to stop talking about young girls as if they were not people. I want us to acknowledge a range of female experience. I want young girls to be allowed to be sexual without being taught victimhood, and taught that victimhood is all we deserve.

Above all, I want people to stop being so bloody frightened of young girls' sexuality, and the promise of positive, equal sexual experience that it entails. The sexuality of young girls is not there for the enjoyment or artistic appreciation of men, it's not an excuse to rape us and hurt us and shame us and punish us, it does not make us wicked, or manipulative, or slags. Young girls are people - not Little Lolitas, not tiny shameless sluts or else hopeless sad cases, we are all people, and we all have a right to healthy sexuality. Instead, we are offered a selection of ways to be victims, a smorgasbord of sexual shame and self-denial. I call time on this hypocrisy - right now.



*Although I just bet Sarah Williams is still a pen-stealing bastard, knowwhatI'msaying.

**people reading across the pond: I'm not advocating the gentle rotation of queer people as a relaxation aid, this is a piece of British smoking terminology. Don't you just love this weird fucking language?

Tom Harris and popular misogyny: LabourList guest post.

I've put a post up on LabourList, which my friend Rowenna Davis is editing for International Women's Day. It's about Tom Harris (you didn't think I'd forget him, did you?), sex education and women's bodies as public property, and it's a response to a directive to make a lot of old Labour dadalikes cross in under 700 words.

If you get a moment, please do go and join the debate - the comments are already getting pretty fruity. Christ, I thought I had it bad with you lot. TBR, Dandelion, Neuroskeptic: all is forgiven, or at least it will be once I've made myself tea and a smoke and had a nice little calm down somewhere quiet. Oh my yes.

Whipping boys: a post for International Fetish Day

Before I start, I'd like to say that this seems like such a small thing to write about compared with what's happening in Gaza right now. With blood and butchery and human grief being unleashed by the most hypocritical nation on the planet, whether or not a few Brit spank-fetishists get to enjoy their pornography of choice seems worse than trivial. Spoilt, even. But I'm going to write about it anyway, because right now the big things to care about are so big and heartbreaking that even considering that I might have anything to say makes me feel like a small and ignorant child. Until I'm good enough and strong enough to be reporting on the ground, I'm going to put my head down and keep on caring about the small losses, the small outrages, because hell knows somebody's got to, and because it's about responsibility, and choices, and how we deal with the violence of our own hearts. If you want to hear about the other thing, go and read Ewa's columns at Red Pepper, because they are wise and fantastic.

***

On the 25th of January, a bill to outlaw certain types of violent pornography will finally come into force, and a batallion of British fetish-fanatics are going to demonstrate in parliament square. I will be there, but not for the reasons you might think, and no, not because I fancy my chances of being handcuffed to a fence by Ben Westwood.

I met Jane Longhurst, once. I grew up in Brighton, and Jane was a music teacher with my youth orchestra. I remember the sense of shock that infected everyone in the weeks after her body was discovered; I remember standing on Waterloo road with my friends who lived in the area, watching the police search Coutts' house; I remember the tribute concert, I remember her former pupils crying and clutching each other in the string section. Good kids, who couldn't understand why this lovely, bright young woman had been so foully murdered, just like I couldn't, just like I still can't.

But I can tell you one thing: a collection of dirty pictures can't explain the deep brutalities of the human psyche. I'm grown now, and I know the difference between desire and action, and I've read and watched and researched a great deal of feminist and criminologist thought on violent pornography and I'm still convinced that we're looking for the root of evil in the wrong place.

Just to make my own position clear here: I do not indulge in kinky photography and films, although some of my best friends are spankers I have a dear clutch of friends and adopted family who variously watch, make and model for the stuff. And they enjoy it. I know they enjoy it, because I share a bedroom wall with one of them. I've been to fetish clubs, and had an averagely agreeable time; I've done voluntary shifts at the (now sadly disbanded) Coffee, Cake and Kink establishment in central London. Some of this particular pornography turns me on; some of it I can appreciate on an artistic level; some of it makes me giggle, and some of it leaves me baffled. But I can understand why some people like it - why some people need it - and, in fact, I have much more respect for those people who explore their weird fetishes gently, who bring them out into the light where they are harmless, than I do for people who torture themselves and nurse their violent desires in darkness and in shame. For that reason if for no other, I'm going to be at the demo on the 25th.

The point is that, as human beings, we all have dark and violent fantasies - whether we admit them to ourselves or not. Have you ever woken from a wet dream, sticky and muggy and consumed with bewilderment at the violence of your own subconscious? Have you ever received a parking ticket at a particularly awkward moment and imagined - however briefly - beating the attendant's face to a bloody pulp? Maybe? Yes? But did you actually do it? No, because if you did you'd be rightly condemned as a violent thug,like this chap, and you'd probably go to prison. Have you ever become incredibly angry, or violently turned on, and wanted to do damage to somebody, or wanted someone to do damage to you? Then you should be able to understand that what makes us decent human beings, what makes us able to live in society, isn't the desires that we have but the way we respond to them.

And it's that aspect of the new law that worries me most. Are we really naive enough to think that Graham Coutts murdered Jane Longhurst and defiled her body because some pictures made him do it? Are we naive enough to think that it was violent pornography by itself that allowed him to realise his fantasies? If so, then we'd have an epidemic of murderers stalking the streets of this country. What makes the difference between someone who enjoys pain-play and someone who enjoys abusing and killing people is the capacity to distinguish between fantasy and reality, desire and action, that is one of the basic categories of adult humanity. We need to be adult about our own dark desires, if we are ever to overcome them. That's why I'm disgusted by the very idea of a law which tries to outlaw normal outlets for normal, horrible desires. I'm disgusted by the idea of a government which wants it to be illegal to have naughty thoughts. There's a word for that.

Of course, this is about sex, and we are weird about sex, particularly in the UK, so it's not ever ever ever going to be clear cut. And we need to pay very close attention to Andrea Dworkin's porn philosophy: specifically, to her reminder that filmed and photographed pornography happens in real time, to real people. It's not just fantasy: those whippings and beatings happened. What this moves us onto is the issue of consent, which is another thing that we haven't even approached being adult about as a society.

The fantastic Pandora Blake is one professional porn model with a very incisive outlook on the issue.

'The actual wording of the legislation is dangerously vague. Spanking and CP material isn't necessarily illegal, but given an unsympathetic judge armed with waffly, imprecise language, it could be... If I'm arrested, I'll defend my sexuality in court.'

In fact, the spanking and fetish porn industry has, in general, much better safeguards against industry abuse than any other branch of the porn world, partly because it needs to. Thomas Cameron, another fetish porn actor, told me that 'yes, there have been a couple of cases where producers have been abusive. And you wouldn't believe how quickly they've been run out of town. There are measures in place to protect our own.'

I have written before on the fact that the nastiest, most misogynistic pornography out there isn't even addressed by the act. I will repeat: the really nasty scenes, the sick low-level fetishisation of male dominance isn't going to be banned, not now, not soon, probably not ever. Not only is banning ordinary misogynistic porn not the answer, it isn't even the question yet. As I said one year ago:

The question of whether pornography directly causes or does not cause sexual violence somewhat evades the real issue. The reason that pornography is such a sticky problem, the reason that many feminists hate and fear pornography, is the same reason that many in the pro-patriarchal sphere are willing to go to the wire to defend it: mainstream, heterosexual pornography as it is mass-produced by western society holds up an accurate mirror to the violently misogynist world in which we are living.

Let me repeat that for the confused or post-orgasmic: the fact of pornography itself, however ‘extreme’, is not socially harmful, but the messages inherent in most western pornography, never mind the ‘extreme’ end, re-enforce social paradigms of sexual inequality, male sexual subjectivity and violence against women. When I say that ‘the quality of most porn is dreadful’, this is what I’m talking about.

By contrast, I have never encountered an erotic culture with as much respect for women, with as much respect for humanity in general, as the fetish industry and scene. Because the true nature of the perversion is accepted for what it is, the necessity of drawing a distinction between fantasy and reality, the importance of empowering and looking after the models and actors, is very much insisted upon. That's what gets me about this bill. I'm against censorship, but if I had to pick one type of pornography to ban, I would come to the fetish and BDSM scene last of all. Because we are what we jerk off to: fetishists are merely honest about it.

The BDSM scene is the only erotic scene I have ever encountered where I have ever felt that if I said the word 'no', it would be respected. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the BDSM scene is the only forum in the country where people are actually adult about sex and aware of what does and doesn't imply consent. And this is why I find the upcoming bill baffling - particularly as amendments which would have put in place a defence if the consent of the performers is provable (say, if they are willing to provide personal or written statements) was rejected out of hand. This proves that the point of the bill isn't to protect the women involved, but to police the sexual habits of the nation.

Liz Longhurst is a perfect public face for the anti-kink campaign, as her legitimate grief for her daughter makes it incredibly hard to put forward counter-arguments without seeming callous. The fact remains, however, that the linking of violent pornography to violent sex crime is a logical fallacy - and legislation against the former is an extremely fucking worrying move indeed.

The Poppy Project: the showdown...

On a grizzly, awful day in Brixton, I went to visit the organisers of The Poppy Project to see if we couldn’t resolve our differences. I’d love to be able to tell you that I stormed in there and showed them the error of their ways with copious intellectual shouting before setting the desk on fire, singing the red flag and lighting a cigarette off the debris, but I felt that it would be more helpful to listen and, at any rate, our common ground turned out to be more considerable than either of us believed. So much so, in fact, that most of the discussion time was taken up with sisterly bitching about the state of the world. Here's what was resolved, and here's what wasn't:

Conditional help
‘Every time someone tells me that I don’t really care about prostituted women, I see red. They have no idea.’ Denise Marshall, Poppy's chief executive, was keen to set the record straight, not least on the fact that she and her organisation support both the decriminalisation of 'the women' (by which I here assume she was inferring all prostitutes) and the offer of non-conditional support to all trafficked women. One thing that I hadn't realised when I wrote the original piece is that the conditions that the Poppy Project imposes on the women who receive its care, whilst very much a reality, are a government intervention in the scheme. Indeed, the original conditions of the funding included such gems as a mandate that women who received the Project's help would not then be allowed to apply for asylum, and a condition that they had to have sold sex on the day that they came to the Project. Poppy organisers fought these conditions and managed to get some of them reduced or even removed altogether - but some conditions do remain. Women are not obliged to appear in court, thanks to pressure from the organisers, but they are still obliged to give evidence to the police as a condition of Poppy's assistance. The situation remains unideal, and the marriage between even this most on-message of women's groups and the government which funds it is not an easy one.

Why did the government impose these conditions? 'That's a very interesting question,' said Denise. 'Partly, I think, it's an immigration issue.' The government, not fully understanding what the Project was trying to achieve with trafficked women, was keen that the Poppy Project did not become a vehicle for hundreds of terrible asylum seekers, simply desperate to work in the oh-so-fluffy British sex industry, to scamper into the country. Because protecting women is important, but so is securing the votes of Daily Mail readers.


Conceptual disagreements
Although the reasons behind the Poppy Project’s conditional help and their real attitude towards decriminalisation were quickly established, the research conducted by the Project - research recommending ‘The Swedish Model’ of prostitution reform along with other sanctions adopted by the government for its own ends - remained a bone of contention. The organisers did not persuade me that the research done for the Big Brothel report was in any way systematic or their conclusions sound, and the fact that they did not really attempt to convince a vocal critic otherwise is telling. Anna, Poppy's press officer, told me that part of the reason they push for the criminalisation of the purchase of sex is 'conceptual': 'we don't believe that men should feel that they can just buy women's bodies'. It is true, then, that a significant part of what the Project's research is trying to achieve is a shift in social morality through targeted legal change. The problem is that this rarely ever works, even if it were the job of the law to police people’s sexual morality. Legal prohibition often creates more problems than it solves, and certainly in Sweden, where criminalisation of the purchase of sex has been implemented, life has become riskier for the women who choose to stay in the sex trade.

We live in an amoral, free-market capitalist society where, like it or not, most bodies are up for sale for a given fee. Even were the buying of sex to become illegal, as the buying of some chemicals is now, there would still be outlets where sex could be bought, if in a much more underground fashion which poses greater risks for sex workers in the industry. Interestingly, even the Poppy representatives seemed to disagree on this one: whilst Denise was adamant that prostitution is not 'a fact of life', Hannah*, a former sex worker from the USA and a Poppy volunteer, claimed that she could not imagine a time when it would not exist. I cannot reconcile myself to the Poppy mantra that 'prostitution is not a valid career choice', because the fact stands that men and women who choose to go into sex work do have agency - agency predicated on poverty, desperation and, often, a misconception of what the job involves, but agency nonetheless. Prostitution may be a sad and disempowering choice, but it is a choice, and it has to be recognised as a valid one free from arbitrary moral stigma. The problem isn't prostitution itself, but the fact that in a society underpinned by class and gender inequalities people go into prostitution for all the wrong reasons, and are likely to face abuse within the industry – abuse which is all but sanctioned by the British justice system.

We also live in a society where prostitution, particularly female prostitution, has a negative moral loading which makes it far more difficult for sex workers to pursue justice when they are victims of crime such as rape and assault. And this is a fact that no legal move is going to alter until protections are in place to ensure that all women can bring their sexual abusers to justice. Without that sort of systemic change, without real commitment on the part of the police, of parliament and of society in general to valuing the personhood of all women, particularly the young, the poor and immigrants who are most likely to go into sex work, no legal change is going to make a significant difference to the experience of women who work as prostitutes.

The Poppy organisers and I are in agreement that prostitution is a dangerous and unpleasant industry to work in, and that the attitude of this society towards sex work is repulsively hypocritical. But I remain convinced that all that criminalising the purchase of sex would achieve would be to make some women feel a bit better for a short time and drive prostitution further underground in the long run, especially when combined (unlike in Sweden) with moves that further outlaw the selling of sex, which is what the Home Office is moving towards. The point isn’t that buying sex is wrong. The point is that it’s not okay to treat all women like whores, and all prostitutes like pieces of meat that you can punch with impunity. The ‘Swedish Model’ confuses the issue, compromising personal freedoms instead of addressing the real issue. The real issue is not the moral value or otherwise of a woman’s choice to work in the sex industry. It’s the state of the sex industry within a society that fundamentally does not value women, and that’s a complex distinction to make, but a vital one if we are to make progress for women without alienating our allies.

Prostitution is not a crime committed by men against women. The state of the sex industry is a crime committed by society against its poorest and most vulnerable. It is a crime committed by patriarchal capitalism against the poor women and young men that it values least. I believe that in looking to ‘criminalise men’ (their words), the Poppy Project are lashing out at the wrong enemy.

The fact stands, though, that if I spend much more time picking perfectly valid holes in the work of the Project on this blog, then so am I.

We have different ideological conceptions of what feminism means. But there is much that radically abolitionist, women-only groups such as Poppy and socialist feminists like myself can do together. Whether we believe the problem to be men in general or the entire structure of capitalist patriarchy, we all believe that desperate women working in prostitution need support, protection and rights. The practical work done by the Poppy Project is almost identical in motive to the work of socialist-feminist aligned Xtalk, a project established to help immigrant prostitutes improve their circumstances.

Even former employees agree that the academic rigour of the Poppy Project’s research leaves much to be desired, and the actions of government based on their recommendations more still. Our ideological differences are considerable, and we will come to those differences if and when there is a real chance of the most misplaced aspects of that research becoming law. Right now, though, we are more alike than we are unalike. And we have work to do.

The Fritzl case and media hypocrisy

This weekend has not been a good one for the dangerous freaks and dissenters among us. I spent it mostly in the garden under a scrap of boiling London sky, contemplating all the things I'm suddenly not allowed to do anymore. That, and reading the papers, most of which have spent the post-Boris comedown wanking grotesquely over the Fritzl case.

In case you've spent the past month hiding in a box, this is the big Austrian incest story that made headlines across the world when it emerged that a grandfather in his seventies had imprisoned his daughter in a custom-built dungeon under his house and fathered seven children by her whilst the rest of the family lived upstairs in complete ignorance. Horrific, utterly, stunningly horrific. And not something you'd ever see on these civilised islands, of course.

When was the last time you read a home-grown incest story in the British press? You can't remember, can you? There's a reason for that. No, it's not that they don't happen. It's that both the law of the land and the journalists' code of practice (PCC, ed.2006) expressly forbid the reporting of child sex cases and especially of incest cases. Here's the PCC:

Article 7. Children in sex cases

1. The press must not, even if legally free to do so, identify children under 16 who are victims or witnesses in cases involving sex offences.

2. In any press report of a case involving a sexual offence against a child, i) the child must not be identified; ii) the adult may be identified iii) the word 'incest' must not be used where a child victim might be identified; iv) care must be taken that nothing in the report implies the relationship between the accused and the child.


All jolly sensible stuff; thank you, the PCC. This law is specifically in place to prevent, just for example, the terrible feeding frenzy with which the British tabloids and dailies and even the broadsheets have descended on the hapless, vulnerable Fritzl children, ensuring that wherever they go in later life, they will be 'those kids from the cellar'. In the UK, a story like this simply would not have broken, or not in any matter which would have retained the human interest of this staggering piece of news. If Fritzl was identified, any sexual activity or abuse would have been omitted from the reports; if 'incest' was retained, reporters would have had to leave out everything else: a non-story. But because it happened in middle Europe, it's open season for the press, and no doubt the bones of this tragic story will be picked clean before the summer is out. That, after all, is what the British press are here for.

But that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen here, too. Incest happens in this country, every day. The sexual abuse of young girls and boys happens in this country, all the time, which is why gloating over something that happened in 'Hitler's homeland' makes for such teeth-itching cultural hypocrisy. Everywhere, sad men are getting their grizzled rocks off on sexual power-trips over the young and fragile. It happens.

This, of course is also why internet paedophila is such a news fascination over here: as long as the story's not about actual sex with an actual child, we can break it gloriously, splashing snaps of picture-hoarding perverts across the tabloids, whilst actual pederasty - physical sexual interference with children rather than just sick appreciation thereof - remains practically unreported. But it happens. Violence against women and children happens. And whilst the law of this country protects young people from media scrutiny up to a point, we'd do well to remember the number of things we still don't adequately protect them from. Perhaps we're not quite as civilised as we think.


And that, frankly, is all I have to say on the matter. If anyone wants me, I'll be in the garden smoking a fat reefer the size of a baby's arm and watching zombie-porn. Come and join me, bring drinks.