Another view, from a former prostitute.................Prostitution is not sex and it’s not work. Its reality is far from complex – in fact, it’s simple. Trust me, I’ve done it I left home three weeks past my 14th birthday, a few months after my father’s suicide, to escape the abuse of a schizophrenic mother who was in the throes of an ever-escalating mental health crisis. I was homeless by the summer of that year, and street-walking by the year after that. I got out of prostitution at 22, returned to education at 24, and the following year took a place in Dublin City University studying for a BA in Journalism. I wrote a memoir about my seven years in prostitution, which has been published all over the English-speaking world and translated into other languages too. In the intervening years, I’ve received thousands of messages from strangers from across the world, most of them women, and a good sprinkling of men. They vary widely in their content, but there are recurring themes. So many of these women’s stories stay with me: the 19-year-old French girl who got into prostitution as a direct result of watching a TV series that depicted prostitution as glamorous and empowering; the mid-20s Australian woman who believed – because well-funded NGOs told her to believe – that ‘sex work’ was legitimate employment; or the early 20s German woman who told me that, because pimping had been decriminalised in her country, she’d got the message that what was legally sanctioned surely had to be OK. Just about every man in Germany seemed to have got the same message, and the result was social carnage. The ‘flat rate’ brothels of Germany offered the sex trades equivalent of an All You Can Eat buffet, with men, paying a one-off fee, invited to use the bodies of as many women as possible, for as long as possible, in one day. Many men arrived in groups, often as stag parties. That German woman’s body was used by between 400 and 500 men in her first month. There will never be an end for her from the psychological repercussions of this savagery we’re expected to call ‘work’.. Decent work means dignity, equality, a fair income and safe working conditions. Decent work puts people at the centre of development; gives women, men and youth a voice in what they do; the rights to protect them from exploitation; and a future that is inclusive and sustainable. The truth for the prostituted woman, though, is that she has not only been sexually abused, but sexually abused too many times to count. The reality of prostitution has been hiding in plain sight for millennia. We all know it, instinctively. That’s why we don’t want our sisters and daughters and mothers in brothels. It’s strange how something we know on a sensory level can elude us intellectually. The reality of prostitution is not complex, it is simple. Controlling what people do sexually is inherently abusive. Oh, and the oldest profession in the world is midwifery. Prostitution is not any sort of profession, never mind the oldest one...............https://psyche.co/ideas/the-reality-of-prostitution-is-not-complex-it-is-simple
Create an account or sign in to comment