I think it’s one of the advantages of the feminist blogosphere that we actually can get these arguments out there, and challenge some of the bullshit that’s going around in feminist communities about sex work. Though I wish I could stand to actually read the average thread about it at a place like Feministe…those threads generally wind up with me wanting to throw things.

I think you’ve hit it on the head regarding the lack of empathy. I would go one step farther and say that the feminists who want to protect women from the sex industry typically see women who are in the industry as being already lost, fallen, and broken (possibly beyond repair ) . So these feminists aren’t as concerned with helping women move into another line of work (or even less with helping those who want to stay in the sex industry to be healthy, safe, treated decently, etc. ) as much as they are concerned with protecting any more women from ever having this tragedy befall them. This is the only possible interpretation I can find for the “Prostitution Facts” graphic (which perhaps you’ve seen — made to look like “Nutrition Facts” and run as an ad in magazines where prostitutes run their ads ) .

In order to take a more reasonable look at the sex industry, one useful metaphor is to compare it to work performed by illegal immigrants. Here we have a lot of the same elements such as lack of police protection for workers creating a situation where employers can abuse them, and people ending up in certain types of jobs (which they may or may not want to be in) due to lack of other options. At the same time this example allows us to step back from the deep-rooted prejudice that becoming a “whore” turns a woman immediately from a person into worthless trash (a prejudice which has — mystifyingly — been absorbed wholesale into feminist theory… ) .

I’ve discussed this in the comments of this post. I think there are a lot of middle class women who have bought into the anti-sex-industry rhetoric just because that’s what’s been sold to them as the feminist party line and they haven’t really thought about it. So I think it’s useful to be discussing this on the internet in hopes of getting people to think a bit about what strategies actually benefit real women.

See - while you’re very much right - I get the impression that it hasn’t even been thought through on that level. None of these people seem to conceive of how they, themselves, given a less privileged background, might be faced with the reality of ending up in sex work. Thus, they are able to see it in the theoretical, the abstract - they can’t conceive of how making the working conditions worse (or eliminating business altogether) for someone who’s in it because they have to to survive is not making that person’s life any easier - and that a more humane means of actually helping people who want out of sex work to get out might be to actually focus on that at an individual level, rather than political “war on prostitution” efforts.

This seems to be the same attitude that Westerners take when colonizing other countries. It’s like saving the “poor savages” from their “infidel religion”, by killing them if necessary.

I was a bit wary of making that analogy, being a white lady and all, but I do feel that it’s pretty apt - it’s that absolute insistence on riding in to the rescue, “saving” people - whether or not they want to be saved, or whether or not that actually improves the “saved” people’s lives.

Isn’t that always the bottom line? -sigh-

Considering the demographics of most of those forced to be in sex work to survive, the position taken by anti-sex-work people is pretty blatantly racist and transphobic, imho. IIRC, all of the better-known anti-sex-work people are white.

it’s far easier to feel better about oneself if one is getting to play the big feminist hero saving the poor wimmins

This seems to be the same attitude that Westerners take when colonizing other countries. It’s like saving the “poor savages” from their “infidel religion”, by killing them if necessary.

For gods sake, I’m about the most unlikely “sex-pozzie” around, seeing as I’m about the biggest prude around. The thing, it’s not about me.

Word, from this asexual person.

Berg, et al: “Feminists”, all.