review of The Wisdom of Whores

review of The Wisdom of Whores by Elizabeth Pisani

Elizabeth Pisani is an expert in AIDS and has advised governments. She has a lot of knowledge about prostitution in many countries.

The most interesting chapter for me was chapter 6. She was working in East Timor for the health ministry. She was on a flight to the capital Dili and she decided to talk to two Chinese women who she suspected were sex workers.

"I found out that a local businessman was offering girls three-month stints selling sex to the Chinese community in Dili. 'We were really lucky to get in,' said one girl. They got the nod from a friend who had done the run six months earlier. 'She bought a car when she got home.'"

She goes on to write that most women sell sex for the same reason they do other jobs, to make money. Sex work though can earn them sixteen times more. It varies from country to country. Slavery is 'relatively rare'.

"For many women, selling sex is a job with a fair degree of freedom and for some there's job satisfaction, too. Many clients want far more than just a quick orgasm. They want companionship, advice on how to cope with girl trouble, pampering to help them forget a lover's death or a business deal gone wrong. They want their confidence boosted or their scars healed, they want to learn new tricks in bed or they just want a massage or a cuddle. A skilful sex worker will read and fulfil her client's needs, and many will be well rewarded for doing so."

When she was talking to sex workers in China, even though she was talking to women from the Bai ethnic minority who are 'on the bottom rung of the prostitution ladder', she found that they turned away many clients because they didn't offer them enough money.

"The 'all sex workers are trafficked' ideologues may damn me for saying so, but these ethnic minority women, working at the bottom end of the sex trade in one of the poorer areas in China, did not seem to be driven by desperation.''

Conservative Christians in the United States find this impossible to accept. Brenda Zurita for example stated 'Prostitution and sexual trafficking are inextricably linked and abolition is the only answer to end the horrors of both.'

Brazil did well in its fight against AIDS, but they were refused funding by the US because they wouldn't sign the loyalty oath against prostitution.

"The loyalty oath is based on the belief, no, the absolute conviction, that anything that improves work conditions for prostitutes serves only to bind them to slavery. The High Priestess of this view is a US academic named Donna Hughes, who pontificates on the evil of commercial sex from every available pulpit. In an op-ed titled 'Aiding and Abetting the Slave Trade', she railed at a programme that taught Cambodian sex workers to negotiate condom use with their clients."

This programme helped reduce new HIV infections in Cambodia from 42,000 a year to 6,000 a year.

"'The Bush administration needs to ... shut down unethical "interventions" with women and girls in brothels. Those who lack the moral capacity to know that slaves need freedom should never get funding again,' preached Hughes."

Pisani goes on to write about the International Justice Mission. They are an Evangelical Christian NGO that raids brothels to free slaves (as they see it). The women who are 'rescued' end up deported or detained. They often try to escape. They don't want to make T-shirts for small change, which is the sort of alternative offered to them.

This book was published in 2008, and it seems that IJM has changed its methods since then.

In chapter 4 Pisani writes that some sex workers have 5 or 6 clients a night, but most have fewer than that. In Thailand, Cambodia and some Indian states they averaged 20 clients per week - although it is lower than that now. This is more than in East Timor (3 per week), the Philippines (2 per week) or China and Indonesia (5 or 6 in a good week).

There are people who will tell you that sex workers are raped 20 or 30 times a day. Some of these people are Christian Evangelicals, some of them are Radical Feminists. There are others who should know better but who have been told lies by the Christians and the Radical Feminists. I don't believe them, I believe the experts such as Elizabeth Pisani.