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Apparently, Feminism is dead!!!

What's the non-ideological feminist position?

I'm not sure that there's such a thing as a "non-ideological" feminist, nor a "non-ideological" position. Which doesn't change that the language used in this debate is roughly as political charged as that used in debates about Northern Ireland (Ulster, Six Counties). You can very reliably predict what someone is going to say as soon as they mention one of those labels.

Sihhi's long post a few pages back was an interesting exception, in that the language of "sex work" was used without assuming the conclusions which normally flow from it.
 
You don't seem to know that much

You insult me, but you haven't factually denied what I've written, except where you've twisted it to state I'm scorning the decriminalisation of sex workers in New Zealand.
 
You insult me, but you haven't factually denied what I've written, except where you've twisted it to state I'm scorning the decriminalisation of sex workers in New Zealand.
That's not an insult lol :eek: :D You have hardly any knowledge of the UK sex industry, and no experience at all. That is obvious and not particulrly insulting. Your a man whose only first hand contact with a working girl is a mate of your Mums and an offer of a tenner suck.

Not your fault, of course. And you are entitled to your opinions :)

I'm out of this anyway.
 
Stigmatising punters is stigmatising sex work is stigmatising sex workers. And please stop calling them johns. It just sounds so weird :D

I guess we are going to disagree. "Stigmatising punters is stigmatising sex work is stigmatising sex workers."

Re:Johns/Punters.
Punters and working girls alike don't like trafficking. One of the most common (almost ubiquitous) FAQs on AW is 'Are you British: YES I AM'. Cos as a working girl you are CONSTANTLY asked it. Trafficked girls get bad field reports, punters don't like

This suggests you approve of the term. People who want the GFE hence use punternet desire someone British to play as a "girlfriend" with.
Doesn't the mindset of people asking 'Are you British?' suggest something extra pathological?
Should we Muslims go into a corner shop and ask 'Are you Muslim?' before we buy any fruit there.

Many people dislike the use of the term "working girl". That sounds far weirder to me from my history. Girls don't work, they study at school. Women work.
 
What would £23.71 get me and would it include cuddles afterwards. A cocoa, maybe a dvd and some popcorn?

*Scarpers
 
I'll let you fondle my bum for that. I'll chuck in a cuddle if you buy the drinks.
Ok I've just had my tea and im feeling well fat so the bum fun's probably not going to needed. Can we just have a long cuddle and some of my homebrew?
 
I guess we are going to disagree. "Stigmatising punters is stigmatising sex work is stigmatising sex workers."

It's like saying that stigmatising employers is stigmatising employment is stigmatising workers. Or that stigmatising muggers is stigmatising people who are mugged. Disapproving of one parties role in a social relationship, or of the social relationship itself, does not necessarily imply disapproval of the other party to the relationship. It depends on why you disapprove.

Personally, I don't see how anyone could spend even a few minutes on a "punters" website without coming away with a strongly felt, if not necessarily coherent or politically useful, desire to see the lot of them swinging from lamp posts.
 
I used to be a bit more definite on this issue, i.e. a) sex work should definitely be decriminalised or legalised as the safety of the workers is paramount, but as Thora said earlier, b) there are wider implications in regards to gender relations, and c) arguments that it is equivilent to shelf stacking are flawed.

Actually I probably still feel the same, but in a softer way and with less idea of what could/should be done.

a) I do think the safety and wellbeing of sex workers has to be upmost priority, and that will only be possible in a society that can't arrest you for selling sex. The idea of criminialising punters has always sounded a sensible way forward, but if cesare is right and there's a suggestion that it could increase violence to workers then that's obviously not acceptable. Likewise I do acknowledge Edie's comment about it still leading to the work being stigmitised, with negative impact on workers. I would also very much like there to be proper repercussions for the more dodgy punters she mentioned earlier. :(

b) Wider implications - I still can't get over the fact there's something that angers me and makes my skin crawl about most sex work being gender biased in a particular way, with the traditional oppressers buying off the traditionally oppressed. However, given the point above and not wanting to get into "us and them" battles with other women, I'm not sure at this stage what the bloody hell to do about it. I guess it partly depends on whether female sex work for men props up more general objectification. I'd suspect it does but I'm aware there's no real definite evidence on either side, and my gut is that page 3/lad mags/airbrushed adverts etc. are probably more important within the wider public consciousness.

Which brings me on to
c) the question of whether sex work is like any other form of work, and what insidious effect it has on the worker. Which is a bit like "how long is a piece of string", given that some workers blatently are fine and some blatently are not, and there's probably a lot of people who fall somewhere in between. I would suspect that many worker's own OKness with it will vary at different time points too. And I have to hold my hands up - I haven't worked with sex workers as a group. However, from working with various people where negative sexual experiences have been some sort of issue in their lives, I would hasten an educated guess that sex work has the potential to fuck someone up more so than, say, hairdressing or stacking shelves.
 
It's like saying that stigmatising employers is stigmatising employment is stigmatising workers. Or that stigmatising muggers is stigmatising people who are mugged. Disapproving of one parties role in a social relationship, or of the social relationship itself, does not necessarily imply disapproval of the other party to the relationship.
That's not the way I read what Eids was saying at all. I think you've made an amazingly stupendous massive leap there:hmm:
 
Re:Johns/Punters.


This suggests you approve of the term. People who want the GFE hence use punternet desire someone British to play as a "girlfriend" with.
Doesn't the mindset of people asking 'Are you British?' suggest something extra pathological?
Should we Muslims go into a corner shop and ask 'Are you Muslim?' before we buy any fruit there.
No, you don't understand. It's a way of filtering for trafficked wg's. It's not some ethnic filter, the punters can see what you look like afterall. LOTS of Asian women also put British up here in Yorkshire (cos they are, even if their working name is AsianPrincess or IndianWhore or whatever they have).

Look as an example, I know this lass. Note she puts "I am a British Indian"

edit: PM for link actually :)
 
I'm not sure that there's such a thing as a "non-ideological" feminist, nor a "non-ideological" position. Which doesn't change that the language used in this debate is roughly as political charged as that used in debates about Northern Ireland (Ulster, Six Counties). You can very reliably predict what someone is going to say as soon as they mention one of those labels.

Sihhi's long post a few pages back was an interesting exception, in that the language of "sex work" was used without assuming the conclusions which normally flow from it.

Sihhi's language does inform his position. Maybe you mean his use of terminology? :confused:
 
That's not the way I read what Eids was saying at all. I think you've made an amazingly stupendous massive leap there:hmm:

I'm not sure how else that sentence could be read other than as a statement that hostility to one participant in the prostitution exchange or to prostitution itself is necessarily hostility to the other participant. In reality, I think that most people who are neither fans of prostitution nor religiously motivated moralists distinguish to varying degrees between prostitutes and punters.
 
Sihhi's language does inform his position. Maybe you mean his use of terminology? :confused:

What distinction are you drawing between a "use of language" and a "use of terminology"? I don't see one in this context.

Of course Sihhi's language "informs his position". What's unusual is that he's using a terminology usually used by people with a very different position. ie, When someone starts talking about "sex workers", 99 times out of 100 they are going to be advocates for the efficacy of unionisation, of the opinion that prostitution is basically just another form of work other than in the problems created by criminalisation, etc.
 
That's not an insult lol :eek: :D You have hardly any knowledge of the UK sex industry, and no experience at all. That is obvious and not particulrly insulting. Your a man whose only first hand contact with a working girl is a mate of your Mums and an offer of a tenner suck.

Not your fault, of course. And you are entitled to your opinions :)

I'm out of this anyway.

I have some personal knowledge of a particular sub-section within the UK sex industry.
I didn't mention it because it's not about sex work directly, but I've been a witness to women being threatened by newspaper people. Why?
The protest was against London's Turkish language newspapers including escort and sauna adverts.
The testimony of some of those women, former sex workers, is not direct, they are not friends unlike my family neighbour's (mum's friend) so I didn't mention it, but not all feminist and non-sex worker- using/non-close-observers of sex-work males is stigmatist, factually inccurate, based on nonsense or deluded.
I didn't want to weigh this all down with heavy extensive reports so only linked to articles.
As I stated at start of thread I'm male so I'm not a sex worker and have no experience, nor are males much requested in job opportunities around sex work - that's to be expected since most sex workers are women and the people best able to relate to them.
 
What distinction are you drawing between a "use of language" and a "use of terminology"? I don't see one in this context.

Of course Sihhi's language "informs his position". What's unusual is that he's using a terminology usually used by people with a very different position. ie, When someone starts talking about "sex workers", 99 times out of 100 they are going to be advocates for the efficacy of unionisation, of the opinion that prostitution is basically just another form of work other than in the problems created by criminalisation, etc.

Ah, right. I thought (obviously mistakenly) that you were commenting on ends of scale ideology by use of terminology/language. I'm still not sure what else you'd call sex work if you don't feel strongly about either extreme.
 
No, you don't understand. It's a way of filtering for trafficked wg's. It's not some ethnic filter, the punters can see what you look like afterall. LOTS of Asian women also put British up here in Yorkshire (cos they are, even if their working name is AsianPrincess or IndianWhore or whatever they have).

Look as an example, I know this lass. Note she puts "I am a British Indian"

edit: PM for link actually :)

"Trafficked" or debt-bondaged sex workers don't normally use 'punternet'.
They are just one step deeper in the economic coercion compared to the other "non-trafficked" sex workers.
The idea that responsible john thinks on the lines of 'great I'm doing my bit for women, by asking if they are British'. It's just part of a situation where the sex industry just carries on as if it's a normal industry just ferreting out the illegal immigrants. That's really the problem here.
 
There was a debate on the issue at an SSP conference back in 2006, I think, nigel irritable, random, where to, cesare and butchers, may remember it prompted a thread over the road. It sorta came a few years an 'experiment' in Leith where there was a toleration zone and a study based on what came out of that evidence wise. One thing that was shown was A total of 111 incidents were recorded last year (2003) by support group Scotpep, compared with just 11 in 2001, the last year of the old "non-harassment" zone. That statistic alone was worth looking at and seeing if enhanced access to support/outreach workers, better approaches by law enforcement agencies and charities working with the women could reduce it even less?
Sadly the SSP position was 'eradication' of prostitution which according to many in the party, meant that we had to oppose 'tolerance zones' even if they were shown to have reduced violence against the women and enabled more women access to the services that may, if they wish, give them a road out.
One of the things that annoyed me about the SSP position was the opposition of 'unionisation' 'self organisation' of the women, as if that would be a tag of legitimacy. We would somehow be accepting their position. Imho it effectively meant we demanded poeple be too horrified and that these people were being too abused to help in that way. Some, I repeat some, of the most abused, vulnerable men & women in our society, were effectively labelled as too 'abused' to be helped in a manner that might well have given them the very choices they had hitherto been denied. One thing that irked me then and still does now was the claim that tolerance zones, do not contradict the goal of eradication. No one has offered any evidence to why that was the case. And frankly the debate at that conference descended into confusion at the end anyway. Afaic, there's no contradiction between the two. If anyone can show me how reducing the risk to women in a tolerance zone and allowing her to access the very measures needed alongside being fought for a generalised political campaign around the issues that affect our class make our aim of eradication invalid then i'd love to have heard it, even these years later it's not been proffered.
 
Prostitution.

Seeing as this is all getting close to the bone, I'll say that 'prostitute' - at least in its Turkish variation - does trouble former sex workers (I don't call them working girls). There's no way the family old neighbour would have tolerated fahise. My mum once described her to me as 'kaderine mahkumdu' 'She was a prisoner to her fate'.

I hope none of this debate has put anyone off the struggle for women's equality in the economic sphere. If women were equal, this issue wouldn't be an issue within feminism, but it's not, so it is and the language has to be sensitive.
 
One of the things that annoyed me about the SSP position was the opposition of 'unionisation' 'self organisation' of the women, as if that would be a tag of legitimacy. We would somehow be accepting their position. Imho it effectively meant we demanded poeple be too horrified and that these people were being too abused to help in that way. Some, I repeat some, of the most abused, vulnerable men & women in our society, were effectively labelled as too 'abused' to be helped in a manner that might well have given them the very choices they had hitherto been denied. One thing that irked me then and still does now was the claim that tolerance zones, do not contradict the goal of eradication. No one has offered any evidence to why that was the case.

Do you mean this or something else?

I support unionisation efforts and grouping together for support/defence/increasing prices/etc and have nothing against tolerance zones, and am certain that women shouldn't be arrested.
But in NZ, where as I understand it, crudely, the prostitution reform act means total decriminalisation and tolerance zones; men are involved in profiting from the new version of brothels that replaced the old set-up of front desk appointment payment and back room tip. It hasn't changed the fact that still sex work lodges women as something different to men. Nor has the reality of economic coercion changed with the onset of the crisis in 2009, 6 years after the act passed. Nor are the underage children subjected to ongoing abuse, necessarily being assisted.
 
The word not is a mistake, imho support for and agreement with tolerance zones are not a de facto contradiction of what was SSP policy. They were simply an aim at lessening the effects in the here and now whilst looking at how 'eradication' could be achieved.
 
One of the things that annoyed me about the SSP position was the opposition of 'unionisation' 'self organisation' of the women, as if that would be a tag of legitimacy. We would somehow be accepting their position.

Who was opposing what? Was it women in the SSP? Or women outside?
 
Who was opposing what? Was it women in the SSP? Or women outside?

SSP policy was in 2006, after a conference vote, for eradication and opposed tolerance zones and opposed an amendment supporting unionisation/self organisation of women/men in that sphere. Some of those who opposed this policy were men some were women.
 
SSP policy was in 2006, after a conference vote, for eradication and opposed tolerance zones and opposed an amendment supporting unionisation/self organisation of women/men in that sphere. Some of those who opposed this policy were men some were women.

OK, I see where you're coming from now.
What did the SSP practically do against tolerance zones?
Was there some kind of campaign?
 
Nothing much, it simply opposed a move, I think by Margo McDonald MSP, to re-introduce them.

Well yeah that's what I was thinking how would practically work against it?
The thing people outside could practically do would be to try and make contact with the women in those zones to offer something else instead.
 
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