Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (17 page)

BOOK: Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture

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No, no, no. The study was most explicitly
not
designed to “test attitudes of men who buy sex.” It was designed to prove that they have objectionable attitudes toward women. Period. Farley has been trying to do this in every way she can imagine for her entire career. Her nonprofit Prostitution Research and Education
¹⁰does not do research or promulgate education; it seeks to eliminate all sex work through any means necessary. And this survey, conducted in Boston, was funded by the Hunt Alternatives Fund, a group that started in the 80s with the goal of nuclear disarmament through Hunt’s pet project, Demand Abolition. According to the landing page at Hunt, “Demand Abolition supports the movement to end modern-day slavery by combating the demand for illegal commercial sex in the US. By conducting and disseminating research, educating policymakers, providing technical assistance to criminal justice professionals, and convening key stakeholders, Demand Abolition is catalyzing systemic social change that reflects the dignity of all people.”
¹¹

The page redirects you to the new Demand Abolition page, which states: “Until we eliminate demand, the sexual enslavement of our society’s most vulnerable children, women, and even men will continue unabated.”
¹²

At the landing page for its FAQs, Demand Abolition states: “In simple question and answer format, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women has issued a clarion call to end prostitution and sex trafficking by criminalizing and penalizing buyers of sex.”
¹³

Wait—Demand Abolition wants to “demand abolition”? It wants to “criminalize” the buying of sex? Are they joking? Buying sex is already illegal in most places—and it also exists almost everywhere. But this group is actually claiming that it must be “criminalized”? How far out of the world we live in do you have to be where you can believe that prostitution hasn’t been criminalized?

The answer? You just have to be a radical antisex feminist, apparently. In which case male-dominated society looks like just one big blur. Equating a law enforcement structure that can’t manage to stamp out street prostitution with men who frequent call girls and politicians who don’t pass stronger laws is only possible if men aren’t people.

What’s more, the places where sex work is most illegal (Saudi Arabia and other Sharia-governed states) are without exception the places where it’s most dysfunctional (e.g., trafficked women). The nations with the harshest antiprostitution laws are the one with the greatest social strictures against consensual sexual encounters between men and women. Those countries are also—and this isn’t an accident—the nations where there’s the greatest difference between rich and poor, and the places where women have the lowest status. Oppressive laws disproportionately affect the poor, women, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, no matter what those laws are passed to accomplish.

But it gets worse. The “hooker-free Utopia” Farley wants to see in the United States is even more extreme than she’d let you know. Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt have a documented constancy of homosexual rape in both social and penal circumstances, as well as antigay murder of anyone who isn’t “discreet” about same-sex contacts.

My favorite example of this is related in Robert Lacey’s
Inside the Kingdom
:
¹⁴a Saudi man is sent to prison for marrying his Filipino houseboy—this in a country where same-sex contact is common because the sexes are so thoroughly segregated. In a different case related in the same book, a Shi’ite woman living in a Shi’ite majority community in the Gulf was abducted and gang-raped by Sunni youths, then sent to prison because she had “asked for it” by meeting a man at the mall to demand the return of a (nonnude, fully clothed) photograph of her that a friend had given him. She wanted it back for fear that she would be considered “loose” if the photo got out.

In Cairo, according to British journalist John R. Bradley’s excellent book
Inside Egypt,
¹⁵male–male rape by police officers, often of male children who have at best committed minor offenses, has resulted in a terrorized young male populace. I have no idea if it’s changed since the revolution, but I doubt it. These are the kinds of societies that vigorously prosecute prostitution.

But let’s not blame the Muslims; in Thailand, India, Brazil, the Philippines, and many other nations, rampant sex trafficking occurs, including sex tourism from Western countries—despite prostitution being entirely illegal (Thailand, the Philippines, Russia, Ukraine, etc.) or brothels and pimping being illegal (Brazil, India, Kazakhstan, etc). The governments of India and Thailand—and more recently Brazil
¹⁶—are constantly trumpeting new legal measures to prevent sex trafficking, in order to court US investment—despite the fact that trafficking is rampant. Trafficking continues because of corruption and poverty, not because there are no laws against it.

The worst-case scenario for sex trafficking and child exploitation is a corrupt society where laws are enforced not based on criminal activity, but on the divide between rich and poor—and manipulation of the media plays a strong role. Yet for trafficking and child exploitation, nothing seems to change in the long run, except that it gets worse. The countries with the greatest poverty, corruption, and restrictions on personal behavior are the places where trafficking runs rampant, because the law is enforced with not just a double standard, but a predictably privilege-based standard. It’s based on the social position of the client and the amount of money that changes hands—not from john to sex worker, but from john to authorities, from pimp to authorities, from sex worker to authorities. The idea that in poor and corrupt countries such a situation will be solved if we “abolish” prostitution by putting the names of johns in the paper (as Farley claims) is utterly laughable. Corrupt nations mostly already have strong antiprostitution laws. It’s poverty and corruption that need to be “abolished.”

But that’s not Demand Abolition’s view. Want to know where they locate the worst-case scenario for prostitution laws? Not Burma, not India, not Sudan—but Australia. “…a wave of sex trafficking and other ills always follows the legalization of prostitution. For instance, parts of Australia have experimented with decriminalization and witnessed skyrocketing illegal prostitution because the buyers still want to purchase children, ‘exotic’ women from abroad, and sex acts that may be off-limits in the legal venues.”
¹⁷

Farley and her cronies actually believe the circumstances for prostitutes are the very worst in
Australia
? Because Australia, they claim, “witnessed skyrocketing illegal prostitution,” that means we should “abolish” prostitution everywhere? Like, say, all the places where it’s already illegal? Because that hasn’t resulted in skyrocketing prostitution, unless you believe the
Newsweek
article about Farley’s study. (In case you forgot, it was headlined “The Growing Demand for Prostitution” until
Newsweek
chickened out and changed it, because neither they nor Farley could convincingly make a data-based case that there
is
a growing demand for prostitution. Better to call it “The John Next Door,” creating the impression that sex work patrons live right next to you, lurking, waiting for you to look the other way so you won’t see them drive off to visit a hooker.)

But does that mean
Newsweek
is talking only about countries where it’s legal (plus those eight counties in Nevada)? I mean,
Newsweek
is an American magazine, and prostitution is mostly illegal here. Because if there’s a “growing demand for prostitution” in places where prostitution is illegal—gasp, could that mean…?

Or do
Newsweek
and Demand Abolition not have the faintest idea whether there’s a growing demand for prostitution, because they wouldn’t know actual data if it bit ’em on the ass and then charged ’em $5? Does Demand Abolition not know what they believe—other than that they object to the very fact of prostitution, and will make up social trends, statistics, and facts at will?

Incidentally, if Australia is Demand Abolition’s worst-case scenario, what’s their best case? Sweden. “The primer also takes note of promising results coming out of Sweden, where a 1999 law decriminalized the sale of sex but rigorously enforced a ban on purchasing it. Since passage, the number of women forced into street prostitution has fallen by 50 percent.”
¹⁸

So it’s legal to sell, but illegal to buy? How does that work, exactly, in terms of teaching your kids what’s legal to do and not to do? Or is it already assumed that nobody of value would ever let their son or daughter buy or sell sex?

As I suggested above, the exceptions are poor women and rich men. Rich men enlisting the services of poor women usually gets a blind eye, no matter what country and what aeon they’re in. That equation is sacrosanct and will remain so until we eliminate economics entirely. That’s why any enforcement activity against sex work always disproportionately impacts poor sex workers, and any enforcement activity against clients always disproportionately affects those who frequent poorer sex workers—especially, but not exclusively, lower-middle-class, working-class, and poor men who can’t afford to pay $200 or $300 for sex.

Rich men are never going to lose their options for hiring sex workers. In the Victorian era, just as in Saudi Arabia, just as in Washington, DC, all you have to do is this: Be male, have plenty of money, and exercise a culturally appropriate degree of discretion, and you can always find a woman who’ll fuck you. That is not going to change, no matter what country you’re in, what era you’re in or what law enforcement actions are taken. But what
can
change is how many poor sex workers face arrest, rape, and prison time because of hysterical prohibitionist panic based on bad science.

Farley’s campaign is aimed at wealthy Western nations, and therein lies the rub. She seems willing to haul the trafficked Cambodian children out of their rail container and parade them around in the White People’s Tragedy Tourism Dance whenever it helps her argue for stronger antiprostitution laws in Nevada. Farley is happy to equate third-world human trafficking with heroin-addicted women in Los Angeles with high-class hookers and strippers who occasionally give a blow job in the back room for $300. But she has yet to establish that any parallel can be drawn between these scenarios using any weapon other than the anti-male, antisex, and ultimately antifemale brand of helpless-woman feminism that was rejected by the vast majority of American women 20 years ago. In doing so, Farley is snug in bed with the most right-wing, reactionary elements in America who, if they could have their way, would have her and her fellow feminists in the kitchen baking casseroles.

Let us reject Farley’s bankrupt and transparently sexist claim that sex is a thing women own and that men take away—by purchasing it or by stealing it or by pressuring them into giving it up or by marrying them.

Sex is not a thing.

It’s not women’s job to “keep” sex so that people like Melissa Farley will approve of them. And it’s not the habit of men with hard dicks to follow anybody’s idea of morality except their own. For the record, plenty of us
do
manage to make it through life without violating our own codes of morality, which are apparently far more complex than Farley’s since they allow for female personal agency. This is what makes so reprehensible Farley’s attempt to enforce a single, extraordinarily restrictive moral behavior for men—despite the clear evidence that poverty is what creates despair, that drugs, abuse, and lack of opportunity go where poverty goes, and that these elements together create the most dysfunctional sex work environments. Those dysfunctions will not be eliminated by decriminalization of prostitution—certainly not street prostitution—but they sure as fuck aren’t going to be eliminated by Farley’s unsupportable ivory-tower sex-hating hysteria.

Why should I care? A few hysterical articles in the press, some dumb ideas in action, the slow erosion and discrediting of the social sciences—nothing we haven’t seen before, right? But Farley’s unsupported claims and the ease with which the press picked them up are evidence of the building feedback loop of antisex hysteria. More important, it’s just this kind of histrionic, crazy doublethink that alienated women of my generation from the idea of Feminism, capital F, or feminism, small f, as something they could see in themselves. I’m tired of seeing women my age afraid to call themselves feminists.

Every time I hear a woman my age or younger say, “I’m not a feminist, but…” I thank Melissa Farley.