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Edited on Mon Oct-19-09 11:21 AM by FarrenH
of a punk/alternative clothing store offered free gear in return for sex with teenage customers who couldn't afford his stuff. Some of the the punk girls I knew did it. These were mostly well-adjusted middle-class kids who just wanted a new top or pair of Doc Martins. One of them, who told me she did it when she was 15, was utterly glib about it. I found out about it after hearing one girl tell another about it as if it was just another shopping option.
Zoom forward a few years and I was living in a commune in a short-lived bohemian oasis on the edge of post-Apartheid Johannesburg, the kind of neighbourhood where artists, lefties, punks, drug users and so on flocked too for the drugs, or the alternative lifestyles, the entertainment, to be around other artists or whatever. Lots of people I met were sexually adventurous. I recall the acute embarrasment I experienced one night because, after talking a big game, I was too uncomfortable to engage in a menage-a-troi with an artist friend and her for-the-holidays American musician lover (he in turn had a girlfriend, a dancer, back in Seattle - a situation all three were aware of). It was in this environment that I met a number of very confident, sex-positive sex workers, phone sex line operators and so on. And I got to know one or two of them well enough to know that their casual attitude to sex and lack of shame about what they did was not a put-on.
Then a few years after that I got to know two more sex-workers online, one a former porn movie actor and the other a prostitute. These online friendships continued for a decade and we have shared many intimate secrets, enough that I have to watch what I say on their facebook pages for fear that prudish family members might read. The former prostitute was, and is, a serious advocate for legalisation and adequate protection.
On a tangential note, I also lived with someone in a polyamorous relationship for 5 years. I have a very low sex drive and used to spend lots of my spare time programming, so I told my then lover (and friend to this day) that, if the sex got boring, I wouldn't mind if she got a little on the side. A year after that, she took me up on it. The chap who became her "toy-boy" on and off for years (and is also still a friend) had an almost pathalogical fear of relationships and was always looking for casual sex with no strings attached. In retrospect, we acted irresponsibly in terms of protecting ourselves from disease, but from a moral perspective the situation suited all of us just fine.
So I've spent a good deal of my life around people who have a very libertine attitude to sex, including "happy hookers" who are, in fact, happy.
And that experience has left me with the compelling belief that the miserable statistics (childhood abuse et al) that attend prostitution in countries like the USA and South Africa are not a consequence of sex work, per se, but are rather the result of the culture in which it takes place. Inadequate legal protection and workers rights, shitty enforcement where there is some protection, approbrium from the courts and finally a marked lack of respect from all parts of the political spectrum. Even the purportedly concerned would-be saviours of those consigned to the streets treat them as damaged goods, by default.
Its perfectly obvious that many who are involved in a profession that is universally stigmatised will express shame whether that was a prior condition or not. I can't help thinking of a particularly licentious friend, who in the interests of privacy I will avoid describing too much, who broke down in tears once and testified to being molested at the age of ten. He later admitted it was a lie, an attempt to solicit sympathy from someone he was regaling with tales of his sexual adventures with both men and women before realising that they were morally horrified. IOW the shortest route from condemnation to pity was to lie about childhood abuse. And that makes me wonder how accurate the cited statistics are. Its easy to imagine even a high-class call-girl who works for select Johns, charges a mint and has personal protection on call, being mortified when respectable friends and family find out and acting on that shame. What is not as obvious is whether all feel it before being exposed.
I see people here describing and linking to social conditions where prostitution takes place in isolated, prison-like conditions, or on the streets, where criminal gangsters and violent pimps serve as bosses. Societies where it is pushed so far to the fringes its practically outside of legal review, or entirely illegal and in the province of criminals by default. Broader social contexts where people view it as either sinful or dysfunctional, depending on which part of the social spectrum they're from. Of course such a profession, in such a context, is going to be a magnet for castaways, homeless people, drug addicts. But you can't disentangle their stories from the society that shaped them, the puritanical attitudes it has to fidelity and casual sex (excluding for the moment the threat of STDs, which is not the root cause of that approbrium), the long history of legal suppression and non-existent workplace protections.
Where trafficking is concerned its well known that people are still trafficked for cheap labour and made to work as slaves, too, but one doesn't see a link being drawn between all manual labour and slavery, too, as if the latter is a natural and inevitable consequence of the former.
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