review of Paid For part 2

In my previous post I began my review of Paid For by Rachel Moran, which is her account of her life in prostitution in Ireland. I commented mainly on the people whose quotations were used at the beginning of each chapter. It's interesting that so many of them were either nuns or the type of Radical Feminists who don't have sex with men as a policy.

You have to question their motives in trying to stop prostitution. Do they really want to help prostitutes or are they trying to stop men and women from having sex and especially promiscuous sex? Are they motivated by a disgust and fear of lust? Do they suppress their own sexual feelings and feel anger towards those who don't? Why are they not concerned about all forms of modern slavery? Why do they use false statistics to promote their cause?

I have now started reading part two of Moran's book and have come across something fascinating. She begins part two still working on the streets. She wrote that she had more control over who she would have sex with than when she worked in brothels/massage parlours or as an escort. She wrote that the 1993 Sexual Offences Act changed everything: she was forced to work indoors and for the first time have vaginal sex. Up till then she had been able to do only hand relief or oral sex.

The change is described as "traumatic" and caused "an inordinate level of suffering" for many women, not just her. "If you are working for yourself, you cannot adequately assess a man down the phone-line, and if you are working for someone else, you do not even have the chance to try." A woman working on her own is vulnerable, and a woman working in a brothel, massage parlour or for an agency is too.

However, what she doesn't mention is where two or more women work together for safety. That's illegal in Britain, Ireland and Sweden. It's not illegal in New Zealand though. The system they have in Soho where a young woman is looked after by an older more experienced woman also solves that problem. Even if you have already agreed over the phone for a man to come to the flat, you can look at him through the peephole and talk to him after you have opened the door before letting him in. If you don't like him tell him to go and if anything goes wrong there are two women there.

There is another good page about Ruhama, the organization connected to nuns who ran the Magdalene Laundries. Someone posted a comment on the page about the impact of the 1993 Sexual Offences Act in Ireland.

"The 1993 sexual offences criminalised soliciting (later reinforced by some aspects of the 1994 public order act) forcing independent sex workers STRAIGHT INTO THE ARMS of brothels and organised crime which had restructured itself to receive them for at least a year prior to the law being changed. This left sex workers who had formerly kept all their earning, or handed over 20% AT MOST with no choice but hand over 50% – 60% of their earning just to be able to go on earning a living at all and paying bills (at the time the law came into operation September, like most mothers, many of them were frantic to find the cash for school uniforms, books and quite often fees)."

This confirms what Moran has written about it. So obviously she is aware that new laws that try to control prostitution can have a different effect from what was intended. An effect that harms women. It is curious then that she supported the introduction of the Nordic model in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland.

Ex prostitutes are called 'survivors' by Radical Feminists (and now by the nuns of Ruhama). They are told that prostitution has been abolished in Sweden which is why no prostitutes have been killed since. The truth though is that we have no reason to believe there is less prostitution in Sweden today than before. No prostitute was killed in Sweden for many years before the new law was introduced, so it can't be said that it stopped women from being killed.

In Chapter 20 Moran writes "The Swedish inquiry reveals that prostitution in Sweden has plummeted in the years since the implementation of the 1999 ban and states that: 'Since the introduction of the ban on the purchase of sexual services, street prostitution in Sweden has been halved. This reduction may be considered to be a direct result of the criminalisation of sex purchases'."

The inquiry she refers to is the 2010 Skarhed report Prohibition of the purchase of sexual services and it says nothing about prostitution plummeting. Instead it says 'The overall picture we have obtained is that, while there has been an increase in prostitution in our neighbouring Nordic countries in the last decade, as far as we can see, prostitution has at least not increased in Sweden. There may be several explanations for this but, given the major similarities in all other respects between the Nordic countries, it is reasonable to assume that prostitution would also have increased in Sweden if we had not had a ban on the purchase of sexual services. Criminalisation has therefore helped to combat prostitution'.

That's a lot of assumptions. The report is not claiming that there has been a reduction in prostitution in Sweden, just that it hasn't increased as much as some other countries. There are other reports which people like Moran ignore because their findings 'do not suit their agenda'. The National Board of Health and Welfare in Sweden did three reports. This is from their third (2007) report 'It is also difficult to discern any clear trend of development: has the extent of prostitution increased or decreased? We cannot give any unambiguous answer to that question. At most, we can discern that street prostitution is slowly returning, after swiftly disappearing in the wake of the law against purchasing sexual services. But as said, that refers to street prostitution, which is the most obvious manifestation. With regard to increases and decreases in other areas of prostitution – the “hidden prostitution” – we are even less able to make any statements.'

 It also states 'For instance, representatives of the Stockholm Prostitution Centre say that prostitution initially vanished from the streets when the law was passed, only to later return at about half the former extent. Now about two thirds of street prostitution is back, compared to the situation before the law against purchasing sexual services went into effect.'

So the only 'plummeting' going on was when women vanished from the streets for a time. Like women been thrown off a cliff. In 2007 in the capital two thirds of them were back.

Moran insists that these missing women couldn't have started working as prostitutes indoors. If that was the case then it would be as bad as the 1993 Irish law that created such 'disastrous personal consequences' for her and other women in her opinion. The 1999 Swedish law is different she wrote because its intended effect is 'eradicating prostitution'. As we have seen, we have no reason to believe that it has eradicated prostitution or even reduced it overall, or that it has had any effect except on street prostitutes.

The 2010 Skarhed report doesn't think that former street prostitutes have moved indoors and on the internet for sex work. They don't know though. There is no research that says this has not happened. The Skarhed report does say this though "For example, some people with experience of offering sexual services in the street environment now say that they only go out on the street "when the phone stops ringing". Some contacts that are made in street prostitution now only involve exchanging phone numbers for later use. The use of mobile phones has facilitated contacts between people in prostitution, but there are no data showing that this in itself has led to an increase in prostitution."

The figures for the number of street sex workers is given in detail in the Skarhed report but they are very patchy. There are no figures earlier than 1998 or later than 2008. There is a drop to begin with, then the numbers rise and fall. We cannot say what the situation is today, ten years after the report. Estimates of the relative numbers of street sex workers and indoor workers are varied. There does seem to have been an increase in internet contacts.

Moran said on radio that 127 prostitutes were murdered in the Netherlands since legalization there. This is false. Most were killed before legalization not after. Who told her this false statistic? I don't know, but it could have been religious bigot Jim Wells. I've detailed his 'sins' elsewhere so I won't repeat myself.

It seems that a lot of her problems were to do with being a prostitute in a sexually repressed society. She said she felt contaminated and socially excluded. She said that others must feel like her: bank robbers is one example she gives (I think sex workers would be offended to be compared to bank robbers, just as she seemed to be offended by sex workers being compared to factory workers). An intelligent bank robber will start his own legitimate business or something else. It's not just 'money laundering', it's what any intelligent person would do if they have cash. I hope in the future we will live in a society where sex workers don't feel unworthy but I don't think the nuns of Ruhama are helping.

Before she left the streets she smoked cannabis. Later she snorted cocaine with a client. I haven't got to the bit where she starts taking crack cocaine and heroin, if she does. Catherine A MacKinnon was wrong, this isn't the best book about prostitution ever. Read My Name is Angel by Rhea Coombs, written by a south London prostitute. That will tell you the depths that people can sink to - without all the bullshit propaganda.

review of Paid For

Review of Paid For by Rachel Moran part 1

This book is an odd mixture of the author's personal experiences of being a prostitute with Radical Feminist ideology. The oddest thing about it is the numerous quotations from women who are so extreme in their attitudes to sex that they don't have sex with men, under any circumstances. Each chapter of the book begins with a quotation. Five chapters begin with quotations from Ruhama.

Ruhama is an Irish organization that works with prostitutes. It is run partly by nuns from two orders, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity and the Good Shepherd Sisters. Both of them ran Magdalene Laundries for decades. These were institutions where women and girls were imprisoned, because they were unmarried mothers or because they had sex outside of marriage.

A 2014 UN report stated: “Girls placed in the institutions were forced to work in slavery-like conditions and were often subject to inhuman, cruel and degrading treatment as well as to physical and sexual abuse. They were deprived of their identity, of education and often of food … imposed with an obligation of silence and prohibited from having any contact with the outside world … unmarried girls who gave birth before entering or while incarcerated in the laundries had their babies forcibly removed from them.”

According to this site, on their website, the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity boasted of “a long history of involvement with marginalised women, including those involved with prostitution”. They are quick to ignore that this 'long history' is a deeply troubled one – one that women all around Ireland try their best to forget and during which women and children were buried in unmarked graves.

Ruhama uses the language of Radical Feminists to campaign for the Swedish model, where men are criminalized for paying for sex. In 2015 the Criminal Law Bill did just that in Ireland.

We know that nuns don't have sex with men, but what about the other women whose quotations were used? Chapter 11 begins with a quotation from Sheila Jeffreys. According to an article by Julie Bindel in The Guardian, Jeffreys was the main author of Love Your Enemy which states "all feminists can and should be lesbians. Our definition of a political lesbian is a woman-identified woman who does not fuck men. It does not mean compulsory sexual activity with women."

I thought that a 'woman who does not fuck men' is called a nun. Sheila Jeffreys doesn't have sex with men and neither does Julie Bindel. They might not have sex with women either: their definition of lesbianism is a bit different from most people's.

Two of the chapters (10 and 19) begin with quotations from Andrea Dworkin. At the front of the book is an endorsement by Catharine A MacKinnon who states "THE BEST WORK BY ANYONE ON PROSTITUTION EVER". Dworkin and MacKinnon worked together on the theory of objectification. They took the philosopher Immanuel Kant's theory of objectification, changed it, and brought it into feminism.

Kant's theory was an attempt to find a secular reason why sex outside of marriage is unacceptable. Dworkin and MacKinnon however said that any sex between men and women objectifies women. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says "For MacKinnon and Dworkin, all women's consent to be sexually used by men cannot be true consent under the existing conditions of gender inequality." and "For Dworkin and MacKinnon, however, Kant's suggested solution is inappropriate. Objectification, according to these feminists, is present within all heterosexual relationships in our society and harms women's humanity. Marriage, or any other heterosexual relationship for that matter, is clearly not regarded as an exception by them."

The nuns of Ruhama, Sheila Jeffreys, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon don't have sex with men for religious or ideological reasons. Are they really the best people to ask about issues such as prostitution? Is it not probable that they are motivated not by concern for the welfare of prostitutes but by a desire to stop men from having sex with women? Or stop promiscuity between men and women? They can't stop ordinary men and women from having sex with each other on a Friday or Saturday night or on holiday, but they can stop men paying for sex. Or they think they can.

Dworkin's quotations in the book include “... we are talking about the use of the mouth, the vagina, and the rectum" (chapter 10) and "It is the use of a woman's body for sex by a man, he pays money, he does what he wants" (chapter 19). From this you will get the impression that a man can do anything he wants to a prostitute, including anal sex. Dworkin goes on "It is the mouth, the vagina, the rectum, penetrated usually by a penis, sometimes hands, sometimes objects ...".

My experience is that a man can't do anything he wants. Anal sex is rarely available. Even rarer is penetration by hands: it is weird that she should write that. What's more, in Moran's book she states quite clearly that prostitutes decide what they will and won't do.

"Some men will cite examples to back up their certainties. Usually these will refer to the fact that most prostitutes try to impose physical boundaries on the sexual act. It is true that they do. I avoided vaginal intercourse for the first two years of my prostitution life and anal intercourse for all of it. That is very unusual. I met many women who would never perform anal sex; that was not at all unusual. One particular young woman I met in my first months on the streets would not perform oral sex, ever. She just could not stand to do it and she could not understand how I was of the opposite mindset. I clearly remember her wrinkling her nose up in disgust and shuddering when I told her that all of my jobs were either hand-relief or oral."

Moran's personal experience contradicts what Dworkin wants us to believe. It also contradicts what Moran said herself on television: "You don't go into a factory and have the boss put his penis in your mouth, and the janitor put his penis up your anus". Moran writes that prostitutes will do what is least sickening to them, but that it is still sickening, so they don't have a choice. Choice is a myth.

What is sickening about hand-relief? I can't see how it is any more sickening that working as a bikini waxer or a dentist. As for oral sex, there's a big difference between oral sex with a condom, oral sex without a condom, and a man ejaculating into a woman's mouth. Some women do it for fun. She's missed the point though, the point is that what Dworkin and others have stated or implied is false. Men can't do anything they want to prostitutes. It's a myth.

Chapters 12 and 17 begin with quotes from Melissa Farley, who is the nearest thing that the Radical Feminist have to an academic. Farley thinks that men see prostitutes because they like control. We've addressed the issue of what men can and can't do. If you see someone and you have to pay cash up front, you know you can't get your money back, and they are getting an hourly rate higher than anything you have ever earned, how does that give you a sense of control?

I realise this post is getting very long, so I will come back to it with part 2 in another post.