How can we know the reality of prostitution? One way is to look at the research of academics. The most important academics are Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon, Dr Nic Mai, Dr Brooke Magnanti, Petra Boynton, Teela Sanders, Laura Agustin and Melissa Mira Grant. Radical Feminists like Julie Bindel don't like academics. The nearest they have got to an academic is Melissa Farley who has failed to study a representative sample of sex workers.
Another way is to look at the words of sex workers themselves. They have been interviewed by journalists and authors and from this a pattern emerges of women who could choose to stay in their home towns and be unemployed, move to a city and do menial work, or move to a city and do sex work. Often they experience all three and choose sex work. They choose sex work over the menial jobs that they either have or could get if they wanted.
The Duke of Westminster paid prostitutes, a journalist found out and interviewed some of the women.
"They told me that it was either being an escort girl or doing cleaning jobs, which paid almost nothing and were often degrading. One said, 'If I had stayed at home it was poverty - no job, no life, no fun. In London I could live like a princess but only working as an escort girl. I could have been a cleaner or worked in a coffee bar for the minimum wage so I had to choose. I thought it would be better to sleep with the super-rich - even if they were old and boring and sometimes ugly!'"
From The Reluctant Billionaire by Tom Quinn.
You might think that the reality for women from the poorest countries would be different. John R Bradley travelled widely in Islamic countries and wrote his book Behind the Veil of Vice. He interviewed sex workers. One typical example was a 26 year old Chinese woman, who came from a small city in China where she had been working in a garment factory since leaving school. She moved to Shanghai and did sex work then moved to Bahrain. She was with other Chinese women, living in a hotel where rent and food were cheap. She made $4,000 in a good month, planned to stay a year then return to China and open a small business.
"The reason why those working there by choice are doing so is obvious enough: They are earning at least ten times, and sometimes much more, than they ever could in their own countries working in a dead-end job (if they can find one)."
Heidi Hoefinger went to Cambodia and got to know many of the sex workers there. She wrote a book Sex, Love and Money in Cambodia: Professional Girlfriends and Transactional Relationships.
"Most of the women were born in the Cambodian countryside, and a combination of familial obligation, financial need, and personal aspirations for adventure, freedom or romance drove them to migrate to the cities. Many but not all have elementary educations but that's it, so when they get to the city, their options are limited. They can either do domestic work like cleaning, or street trading of fruits or other goods, or garment factory work, or entertainment or sex work. Many tried their hand at everything and ended up preferring to work in the bars because they were the most lucrative, there was more flexibility of movement, they got to meet people from outside of Cambodia, and learn and improve their English skills, and the bars were just generally more fun than the other jobs. Most women are very resourceful and entrepreneurial, and the ultimate goal of many of them was to open their own businesses like a clothing store, bar, restaurant or salon, so they could support themselves and their families. Of course meeting a nice person along the way, who treats them and their families with love and respect, was also one of the life goals for many."
From the article Everything You Think You Know About Cambodian Sex Workers Is Wrong
In Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant she writes about Cambodian women "many have also worked in garment factories, and left the factories due to low wages to move into sex work". She says women suffer greatly from police crackdowns which are promoted by American Evangelicals.
In Vietnam by Max Hastings he writes that during the Vietnam war prostitutes earned much more than other workers. In 1975 when South Vietnam was about to collapse hundreds of Vietnamese sex workers bribed their way onto evacuation flights out of the country. They were the ones who had the money and especially the dollars. It wasn't hundreds of pimps, it was hundreds of sex workers.
In China Communists took control in 1949. That year they arrested large numbers of prostitutes. The quotation below is from The Tragedy of Liberation by Frank Dikötter.
"But few conformed to the image of a contrite prostitute projected by propaganda. A fair number were restive and quarrelsome, while a few insulted or physically assaulted the cadres in charge of their re-education. They denounced the manual labour they were forced to perform as a new form of exploitation, apparently unhappy to spend their days locked away, sewing olive-green shirts for the soldiers of the People's Liberation Army. Cao Manzhi, one of the cadres in charge of the whole operation, later admitted that even those inmates who came from low-class brothels did not like being interned and missed their life as prostitutes."
This is not to say that there aren't women who are coerced into prostitution. There are women who are drug addicts. There are trafficked women, but 'trafficking' doesn't necessarily mean coercion or illegal migration. These women are in a minority in prostitution, both in affluent and poor countries. This is modern slavery and it exists in many different occupations. There are ways to combat modern slavery. There are people whose job it is to do that. We need to let them do that, and not listen to Evangelicals (like Franklin Graham, Jim Wells and Gavin Shuker) or Radical Feminists (like Julie Bindel and Sheila Jeffreys).
The problem is that there are some people who just can't believe that a woman who has a job in a coffee shop could want to give it up to become a sex worker. For example, I got this from Mumsnet "These are generally working class and financially impoverished young women but they don't just wake up one day thinking ohh I know selling my body will be much better than a boring job in Starbucks, they are groomed and controlled by abusive men". She ends this post by writing "None of this really addresses why men feel entitled to use women for sex though".
I don't feel entitled to demand sex from any woman. When there is a woman whose chosen way of making money is by providing sex and if I ask her nicely she may give it to me I can't see the problem. I am happy to help her achieve an increased standard of living and if she invests in starting a business or in some other way set herself up all the better. I'm not going to stand in her way, but there are many people who would.
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