more student sex workers

There's something very odd about the Melissa Farley study that I wrote about in my previous post. It stated that men who pay for sex are 8 times more likely to report that they would rape a woman if they could get away with it and if no one knew about it. Also they are 3 times more likely to report that they have engaged in 'sexually aggressive behavior'.

You wonder why they didn't just ask outright in the survey 'Have you ever raped a woman?'. Well, the answer to that question is it looks as if they were asked that. So why aren't we told what these men reported? It can only be because they did not report that they had raped a women more than the non sex buyer group of men.

In the Melissa Farley study (Comparing Sex Buyers With Men Who Do Not Buy Sex: New Data on Prostitution and Trafficking) men were asked a number of sets of questions. One set of questions was the Sexual Experiences Survey (Perpetration Version). In this survey they were asked ten questions. The last three I have shown below.

8. Have you engaged in sexual intercourse when she didn’t want to because you gave her alcohol or drugs?
9. Have you engaged in sexual intercourse when she didn’t want to because you threatened or used some degree of physical force (twisting her arm‚ holding her down‚ etc.) to make her?
10. Did you answer “Yes” to any of the questions 1-10?

It goes on to say that 'Men are classified as perpetrators of rape if they answered “yes” to items 8‚ 9‚ or 10.' This is a bit strange because questions 1 to 7 are not rape. Question 1 is 'Have you engaged in sex play (fondling‚ kissing‚ or petting‚ but not intercourse) when she didn’t want to because you overwhelmed her with continual arguments and pressure?'

Anyway, men were asked if they had used alcohol, drugs or physical force to get sex in questions 8 and 9. So it would be a simple matter to work out how many men in each group have raped a woman. Yet we are not told this, instead we are told about what men say they would do under specific circumstances, and a calculation of sexual aggressive behaviour in general. The sex buyer group had 'a mean of 1.59 types of sexually aggressive behavior'. Never mind about the mean, what answers did they give to questions 8 and 9?

The Nordic Model Now! site use the Farley study to show that 'buying sex makes men more prone to violence against women'. Punters are 'nearly 8 times more likely to rape than other men'. Then people like Libby Purves try to say that the existence of sex work affects society in general and women in particular in negative ways.

Telling young people to just say no doesn't work. Whether it is about drugs or sex work. You can invite them to consider the advantages and disadvantages of each, to themselves and society, but don't try to feed them false statistics because they are too intelligent to be taken in by that. Some will want to continue after consideration and some won't. Then if they proceed you should do what you can to help them avoid the dangers.

I don't want young people to die of drug overdose and I don't want young people to die because they were forced to work alone. Let them have drugs of consistent strength and purity, and let them work together for safety. I would send my daughter to a university that helps them to stay alive. Except that she would make up her own mind which university she wants to go to and how she wants to fund herself.