Prostitution Research & Education Website

Unequal

Melissa Farley 2005

This article responds to Debbie Nathan’s ‘Oversexed’ (Nation, August 29, 2005). Nathan sympathizes with those on the Left who consider prostitution a form of labor rather than violence against women. Nathan criticizes abolitionist feminists who think that women in prostitution deserve more in life than a condom and a cup of coffee. We feminists think that women deserve the right NOT to prostitute. That’s what almost all women in prostitution tell us they want: to get out. We also think that HIV prevention funds should not be used to promote legalized prostitution.

In 1993 in The Nation, Lillian S. Robinson’s co-researcher Ryan Bishop says to her, “You have to [visit the Thai sex industry]. . .You have to go there the way you have to visit Dachau.”

In 1996, Robert I. Friedman’s India’s Shame: Sexual Slavery and Political Corruption are Creating an AIDS Catastrophe in The Nation described the business of sexual exploitation in India that is paradigmatic of the sex industry worldwide, including the United States. He documents criminal gangs’ control of prostitution in India and describes a “medical holocaust,” referring to the AIDS crisis among prostituted women, primarily caused by johns’ and pimps’ raping them and johns’ refusal to use condoms.

These two articles articulated prostitution and trafficking as slavery and as sexual annihilation. Prostitution was understood as a dominating transformation of a woman into a special commodity in which the man who buys her shapes her into his own physical and psychological masturbatory entity.

I understand prostitution this way as well, after a decade of research that includes the accounts of more than 850 prostituted women, men, transgendered people, and children in 9 countries. HIV infection is not the only physical consequence of prostitution. No other “employment” other than war combat has comparable rates of physical assault, rape, and homicide. One woman explained, “What rape is to others, is normal to us.” The symptoms of profound emotional distress that result from prostitution and trafficking are off the charts: depression, suicidality, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociation, substance abuse.

Today the sex industry is as global as any other industry. Sex trafficking is about marketing. It’s globalized prostitution. The industry advertises young, AIDS-free organs for rent. Whether a woman has been trafficked or not, and whether prostitution is legal or not, researchers have found that the poorer she is, and the longer she’s been in prostitution, the more likely she is to experience violence.

When a john buys a prostitute in the US, he usually can’t tell if she’s from across town, from across the country, or from another country. One Korean-American survivor of prostitution grew up in the US but was forced by pimps to fake poor English because johns liked that: the image of the exotic as well as the vulnerability of nowhere to run. Johns can’t tell where she’s from, they simply ask for “something different.”

Prostitution, described by Friedman in 1993 as sexual slavery, has been redefined by the Left, including the Greens, as sex work. In that one word – work – the sexism and the physical and psychological violence of prostitution are made invisible. A battle is being waged by those who promote prostitution as a good-enough job for poor women against those of us who consider prostitution an institution that is so intrinsically unjust, discriminatory, and abusive that it can’t be fixed, only abolished.

Survivors have described prostitution as ‘volunteer slavery’ and as ‘the choice that is not a choice,’ while sex industry apologists on the Left insist that prostitution is ’sex work,’ unpleasant labor but much like factory work. Do women consent to prostitution? Do they say to themselves, hmn, what job should I choose: computer technician, lawyer, restaurant manager - no, I really want to be a prostitute? Women who ‘choose’ prostitution were sexually abused as kids at much higher rates than other women. So they get defined as whores when they are little. That’s one way women end up ‘choosing’ prostitution: getting paid for the abuse they have grown up with and believing that’s all they are good for. Other forces that ‘choose’ them for prostitution include poor or no education and no job that pays a living wage. Prostitution exploits women’s lack of survival options. Sex discrimination, poverty, racism and abandonment are the forces that drive girls into prostitution. A Left analysis doesn’t often address those structural issues in tandem where prostitution and trafficking are concerned. All they see is HIV.

According to sex industry advocates: if you provide prostitutes with condoms and a union, their problems will be solved. Everyone should have unlimited access to condoms. That’s a harm reduction no-brainer. But women in 9 countries want more than condoms and unions. They want to get out of prostitution. In order to do that, they need housing, job training, jobs, and medical care, including substance abuse treatment.

Violence against women is established as a primary risk factor for HIV. In 2005 Osotimehin recognized that for Nigerian adolescent girls, AIDS is fueled by sexual violence, by children being married off to adult men, and by the social unacceptability of using condoms. This social climate, harmful to all women, makes the vastly unequal prostitution transaction even more dangerous. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control found in 1998 that most women enter prostitution as a result of rape, poverty, or abandonment. They urged public health programs to address human rights issues in conjunction with campaigns against HIV. Yet most have utterly failed to confront the poverty, racism, incest, rape, battering, sex discrimination in employment, and chronic sexual harassment that drive women into prostitution.

From 1982 when HIV was recognized as epidemic, HIV education programs focused on safer sex negotiation. They assumed that an assertive prostituted woman could persuade the john to use a condom. Health organizations can be lethally complicit with pimps and johns when they promote safer sex negotiation while failing to see that when she asks a john to use a condom she can get killed. A group of Nicaraguan women in prostitution urged that johns, not prostitutes, be compelled to use condoms. You don’t often hear that recommendation from pimps and johns and HIV educators.

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