I have found two authors new to me who oppose the Nordic Model. One of them is Hilary Kinnell and the other is Ine Vanwesenbeeck. I am reading Hilary's book at the moment, Violence and Sex Work in Britain. She understands the Radical Feminist viewpoint better than anyone else. I am quoting below from the beginning of Chapter 2.
"The core of the current radical feminist position is the assertion that sex work is 'in and of itself violence against women', that no woman ever freely consents to sex and that all clients are motivated by the desire to dominate, humiliate and hurt. This is the contemporary orthodoxy; it is shockingly heretical to suggest any other typology for women who sell sex or for men who buy; to do so leaves one open to very serious insinuations, not merely that one is terminally naive, culpably ignorant or colluding with abuse, but quite probably part of an international conspiracy to promote prostitution and in the pay of international traffickers. Despite such unnerving accusations, because my subject is violence in the sex industry, I cannot wholly ignore the 'sex-work-is-violence' line, so I will explain why it is a meaningless shibboleth which diverts attention from violence as sex workers themselves define it and from the structural conditions that allow it."
She goes on to write about the Radical Feminist idea of "commodification" of women's bodies. The main problem I have with the idea that men like me commodify women's bodies is that I pay different women for different services. I go to one place and pay for a professional massage, no kind of sexual service available anywhere on these premises. I go to another place and pay for an unprofessional massage but this woman doesn't offer any sexual services. At the same place a different masseur offers 'hand relief' as well as massage. Or instead of these Thai women I could chose somewhere I know where there is a Chinese woman who offers full sex.
Obviously I am "commodifying" the Chinese women, but am I also commodifying the Thai women? Maybe the one who offers hand relief, but where the line is drawn and why it is drawn there? What's the difference between providing a service and "commodification". I treat them all the same and I treat them with respect. I don't believe that I have ever bought a woman or bought a woman's body, the idea seems silly. And yet it is the basis of the Radical Feminist view of prostitution. Not only the Radical Feminist, but also the Christian Evangelical and the Roman Catholic (Anglicans tend to have more practical and more compassionate approach).
A commodity is something that you can take home with you. You can store it and/or sell it on. You can dispose of it if you are unable to sell it. You can change it. None of this applies to any of the women that I pay, so in what sense am I treating them like commodities? Men can't do anything they want to a prostitute, it's a question of negotiation. There are some men who think they can, perhaps they have been listening to the Radical Feminists, Evangelicals and Catholics when they talk on this subject. That's another thing that's not very helpful to sex workers.
It's a bit like when they used to say that teenage girls feel compelled to shave off their pubic hair because none of the women in pornography have pubic hair (so they think, it's not as if they've looked at it). Teenage boys have never seen pubic hair and are horrified when they finally get to see their girlfriends in the nude. The fact though is that teenage boys see pubic hair all the time in porn, as well as older and fatter women. If there are any teenage girls who felt the need to shave off their pubic hair it was because of silly journalists who propagated the Radical Feminist/Christian nonsense about porn.
"It is not difficult to see why policy-makers have embraced the radical feminist ideology. Three decades after the young hotheads of women's activism threw stink bombs into strip clubs, smashed the windows of sex shops and bravely fly-posted the streets of Chapeltown, radical feminism has lost its cautious support for decriminalisation and any hesitation about targeting clients. It has also become muted on the subject of patriarchy, and is now entirely compatible with the views of conservative moralists loyal to patriarchal religions and ancient concepts of the role of women, while the main instrument for imposing their solutions is the police - everywhere in the world still a heavily male-dominated institution and never slow to welcome extensions of its powers. The rhetoric of saving abused women and children is a very handy smokescreen to throw around other objectives which have nothing to do with challenging women's subjection to male dominance under conditions of patriarchy, but have everything to do with managing property values, social values and votes."
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