book review: Revolting Prostitutes

I have been reading a new book about prostitution called "Revolting Prostitutes: The fight for sex worker's rights" by Juno Mac and Molly Smith, who are both sex workers. They come to roughly the same conclusion as I do: decriminalisation is the best way forward. The Nordic model is shown to be no improvement for sex workers, they still get arrested and there have been no extra funds from the state to help them. Legalisation is shown not to be a good model either.

I have quoted two paragraphs below, chapter 4 page 114, about arrests of sex workers.

In the aftermath of the arrests in Swindon, sex workers organised to stop the deportations of the Romanian women. Most anti-prostitution feminists made no comment, but one speculated that maybe the Romanian women were pimps after all. The idea that a workplace might have three managers and no workers, and moreover that the 'managers' would all be migrant women in their twenties advertising their own sexual services online is patently absurd. Its absurdity speaks, as gender studies academic Alison Phipps has noted, to just 'how far people will go to avoid extending solidarity to those they disapprove of'. 

Almost everybody with any flavour of feminist politics proclaims not to want those who sell sex to be arrested. However, that sex workers patently are arrested as a result of brothel-keeping laws is, for most anti-prostitution feminists, unmentionable - because the legal model they are pushing for retains and even strengthens these exact same laws (see chapter 6). The fundamental awkwardness of this truth - one that ultimately reveals dedication to something other than sex working women's welfare - creates a frustrating culture of unseeing and unknowing among the feminist left. They stick their fingers into their ears while sex workers try, with increasing frustration, to make the impact of criminalisation clear to them.

Sex workers often like to work together for safety, but that doesn't mean that sex work is inherently violent. As the authors write "After the presumed murder of estate agent Suzy Lamplugh in 1986, estate agents were advised to work in pairs where possible or have a 'buddy' keep track of their whereabouts". The same with nurses and social workers. Sex workers are prevented from keeping themselves safe, unlike estate agents, nurses and social workers. The Nordic model doesn't change that, it makes it worse.

Some people believe that when a man pays for sex he can 'do what he likes with her body in the time he has purchased it'. I've never purchased a woman or a woman's body but I have paid for sex many times and I know that sex workers will tell you what they will do and will not do. In my experience anal sex is rarely available. Oral sex usually is but with a condom. Sometimes a sex worker might be willing to do oral sex without a condom but it costs more money. Even then it's probably not going to be 'cum in mouth'.

The authors explain this, and it's quite important because it is relevant to issues of consent, boundaries, and whether sex work can be considered to be work.

Some people believe that sex should be reserved for relationships, and dislike prostitution for that reason. People who feel this way are entitled to their opinion and can live their lives how they choose. The authors explain "Yet for many people, sex can indeed be recreational, casual, or in some way 'meaningless'. The meaning and purpose of sex varies wildly for different people in different contexts or at different times in their lives".

The authors state repeatedly that prostitution is a survival strategy. However, they give examples of women who have used domestic servitude, laundry work and cleaning jobs for survival then used prostitution when they wanted something more than survival. Prostitution may be survival for drug addicts and undocumented migrants but in countries like Britain they are a minority.

It's curious that this book is available in ordinary bookshops, whereas Julie Bindel's recent book on the same subject isn't. Yet if you go into the left-wing bookshop in Bold Street in Liverpool, Bindel's book is there but Mac and Smith's book isn't, despite the fact that Mac and Smith are very left-wing. They wan't to see an end to capitalism and borders - and an end to prostitution. So you would think that Revolting Prostitutes would be on their shelves. Could it be that the people who run the bookshop don't want people to know that not all left-wing feminists believe in the Nordic model?

Doing Money

On the 5th of November there was a drama shown on BBC Two which told the story of a woman involved in prostitution. It was called 'Doing Money'. The drama is based on a book that claims to be a true story, called 'Slave' by Anna (not her real name).

This is what is printed on the back of the book:-

"This is the heart-breaking true story of one of the UK's most shocking modern-day slavery cases.
Anna was an innocent student living in London when she was kidnapped, beaten and forced into the sex slave industry. Threatened and tormented by her pimps, she was made to have sex with thousands of men."

This book has nothing to say about the sex industry in Britain. She was taken from London to Ireland, and put to work in Dublin, Galway and Belfast. Some women were also taken to Sweden.

This is curious, because there are many brothels in London. Why were women taken to Ireland and Sweden? Could it be that gangsters like Ionut and Schwarz thrive in areas where prostitution is underground?

Swedish authorities say that Sweden is less of an attraction to traffickers now because of the law they have had since 1999 which criminalises men who pay for sex. That can only be guesswork though, and this book seems to be saying that Sweden is more of an attraction than than London or Manchester.

If this is true then having the same law in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland will be counter-productive. Anna helped to bring this law about in Northern Ireland.

If you want to learn about one aspect of prostitution in Ireland and Sweden then you can watch Doing Money. If you want to learn about prostitution in Britain then A Very British Brothel and First Time Call Girl. They are both documentaries and they are consistent with my experience of prostitution.

Since I have read Rachel Moran's book Paid For I am struck by the differences between the two books. They can't both be 'the reality' of prostitution. Perhaps prostitution in Ireland in the 1990s was different to what happens now. Moran's book, together with three studies of Dublin sex workers, paint a picture of Ireland where things got more violent after the 1993 law. It seems that after the 2017 law things are getting even more violent. Yet this book helped to bring in the 2017 law.

These are the three studies of Dublin sex workers

• The Health Needs of Women working in prostitution in the Republic of Ireland 1994 O'Connor 
• Women Working in Prostitution: towards a healthier future 1996 O'Connor O'Neill Foran 
• Drug using women working in prostitution 1999 O'Connor O'Neill

Neither Moran's book nor these three studies say anything about women being kidnapped from the streets by violent pimps and raped. What one of the studies says is this

 "Three (17%) of the women felt very strongly that the new law is leading to the emergence of pimps (male protectors) and therefore, an increase in violence and intimidation on the streets. One said "anyone with enough money to rent an apartment and a mobile phone can go into business as a pimp. These men are offering protection and a "safe house" to women who are working. "They leech (latch) onto the women providing protection and paying bail, that's when the violence comes in"." O'Connor, A.M. (1994)

 It was the 1993 law which created the world that Anna experienced. Well-meaning but counter-productive laws create the problem and don't solve it. The 2017 law in Ireland as far as we can tell is like the 1993 law in that it will and has created more problems than it solved.

 Now we have an up to date study of prostitution in Northern Ireland. It is A Review of the Criminalisation of Paying for Sexual Services in Northern Ireland 2019 by Ellison, Ní Dhónaill and Early. It doesn't confirm what Anna, Rachel Moran and Lord Maurice Morrow have said about prostitution in Northern Ireland. If you want to know the reality of prostitution in Northern Ireland I suggest you read this report.

I have been following the case of Karl Ring and Ivett Szuda. Ring was sentenced to four years imprisonment with Szuda sent down for six and a half years. They were found guilty of human trafficking, controlling prostitution for gain, and 'money laundering'. They were not violent, and the most coercive thing they did was to take away some women's passports. This is not acceptable, but happens with migrant workers in different industries.

They rented flats in Chelsea Cloisters in London to women who wanted to work as prostitutes. They organized air travel between Eastern Europe and London. This is probably the reality of traffickers, at least in London. What happens in Ireland and Sweden could be different.

Below is one woman's experience, you couldn't get further from Anna's:-

"She showed me around the flat and she offered me two rooms. The smaller room was £60 per day and the bigger one for £80 per day." She explained that Szuda gave her a key to the flat at Chelsea Cloisters, which operated like a hotel. "The hotel had a reception and it worked like a hotel system but the rooms had kitchens and bathrooms,' she said. "They were basically hotel apartments. There was another girl when I arrived and she was doing sex work and there was another one who was just doing massage only. Everyone had their own rooms." But she said business was so bad for her that she went back to Hungary after six days. Another woman working for the couple went on holidays with Szuda and other prostitutes to the Bahamas and Miami as "team building exercises".

One woman said "On a good day I would see three to four clients a day, I earned £60 from each." So she earned £240 per day for what sounds like four hours work. She could stop anytime she wanted - like the woman who went back to Hungary after 6 days. She didn't have to do anything she didn't want - like the woman who was just doing massage only. Does this sound anything like the situation that Anna was in?

I think that the prohibitionists should think very carefully about what they want. Britain might become like Ireland and Sweden where the criminals reign. Just like in prohibition America where the do-gooders thought they were getting rid of a problem - alcohol - and they were just making it worse. Much, much, worse. Be careful what you wish for.

Novelist Liz Jensen said that men who use prostitutes should watch the drama and end up "squirming and feeling deeply regretful". I haven't watched the drama but I have read the book, and Rachel Moran's book. I have read the three reports on prostitution in Ireland in the 1990s. I have also kept up to date about trafficking through recent research and news reports. My conclusion is that it is abolitionists who have created this problem not people like me. Caring about people means looking at all the evidence and thinking about it deeply. It doesn't mean getting caught up in a drama. Don't think you can watch a drama and then you're an expert.

two documents on the subject of prostitution

Recently I came across two different documents on the web about prostitution. The first is the transcript of a debate in the House of Commons on 'commercial sexual exploitation' held in July this year. It wasn't much of a debate because although 15 MPs spoke they all supported the Nordic model where men are prosecuted for paying for sex. Lots of false statistics were used and I have made a web page to counter them.

The second document is the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report on Prostitution. It says many of the things that I have been saying for years. It debunks the false statistic that 50% of prostitutes start before the age of 18. It says that information about street prostitutes is wrongly used to apply to all prostitutes.

The report says that in Northern Ireland women can still be arrested for soliciting despite the idea that Northern Ireland has adopted the Nordic model. This model is supposed to be 'shifting the burden' of criminality from prostitutes to their clients, but in Northern Ireland nothing has changed for prostitutes. It says 'the current practice of treating soliciting as an offence is having an adverse impact'.

The report says that 'the model of decriminalisation implemented in New Zealand has worked successfully'. We should recognize that there is a difference between 'prostitution which occurs between two consenting adults, and that which involves exploitation'. It also says sex workers are often denied 'the opportunity to speak for themselves and to make their own choices'.

The most important conclusions and recommendations of the report are to do with changes in British law which should occur without delay to help protect women. I have quoted them below.

"The current law on brothel-keeping also means that some sex workers are often too afraid of prosecution to work together at the same premises and as a result often compromise their safety and put themselves at considerable risk by working alone.

We therefore recommend that, at the earliest opportunity, the Home Office change existing legislation so that soliciting is no longer an offence and so that brothelkeeping provisions allow sex workers to share premises, without losing the ability to prosecute those who use brothels to control or exploit sex workers."

"In the meantime, we have made clear our strong view that the first step of changing the existing legislation on soliciting, and on brothel-keeping as it relates to sex workers sharing premises, should be taken by the Government as a matter of urgency."

This is something I agree with and I have been saying for some time. I hope that the Government will do this without delay.

what I did during the world cup

The last time I paid for sex was in July when England were playing Sweden in the World Cup. I was in Liverpool and I had the idea that the brothels in Manchester would be less busy when the match was on. I would be able to take my pick from the women available. Often there may be four women at a brothel but most of them are busy. It's nice to have a choice of four. I'm not in the slightest bit interested in football.

I went to the big Boots in the centre of Liverpool and bought four viagra. At Lime Street station I bought a coffee and got onto the train. I took two viagra. I don't think you're supposed to take two. That's not the only risky thing I did that day. It takes one and a half hours with me for the viagra to start working, so I knew I would be ready when I got to the brothel.

I got off the train at Manchester Victoria and headed to a nearby brothel. I won't tell you which one or the name of the woman I saw for reasons which will become apparent. It's one I've been to a few times. The match had started, but to my surprise only one woman was available. She was a big black woman. I thought I might have seen her before, the name was familiar but her face looked different.

After I had paid my £40 she took me up to a small room that I hadn't been to before. She wanted me to hug her and kiss her. She didn't seem to mind big kisses on the mouth which is rare for sex workers. When I got on top of her it was very pleasant as it always is with big women. As usual I was finding it difficult to come. She gave me some oral sex without a condom and she let me finger her.

She told me to get on top of her and fuck her. I thought surely she knows that I haven't got a condom on. Anyway, I got on top of her and fucked her. It didn't take long before I came inside her. As I was getting dressed she said I could give her a tip. I said I would like to do that, and asked how much I should give her. She said anything I wanted and I gave her £10.

I had heard that there are women who will allow sex without a condom for extra money. I thought that it would always be a lot more money. So it was surprising what she did. I should have given her more money. It crossed my mind that if she has HIV then she wouldn't be bothered about unprotected sex because it wouldn't harm her. She is an African woman, and HIV is more common in Africa.

That's a possibility, but it may have been that she knew I had difficulty in getting to orgasm and was willing to try everything to achieve that. Sex with a condom and oral sex without a condom didn't work, so she was willing to try sex without a condom. It worked. I have been surprised how important it is for sex workers that their clients have an orgasm, it's as if they feel they have failed if it doesn't happen.

What usually happens with me is that I can usually get an erection but I can't come through shagging. I can often wank myself to orgasm while looking at the woman's pussy. Even when that doesn't happen I still feel that it is worth the money because it has been enjoyable. I can't help feeling though that if I can come through shagging then I have had a success. A bit like scoring a goal in a football match I expect. So as I was walking along the streets of Manchester I was feeling happy.

Men and women were standing outside pubs watching the match on big screens. The maid in the brothel had told me the score as I was leaving but I wasn't interested.

I could have gone home then but I thought as I am in Manchester why don't I go to see another woman. There isn't as much opportunity in Merseyside. It's only £35 at the Piccadilly Club so why not. There were three women available there. Two Spanish women who I had seen before, and another dark-haired young woman who I hadn't. Sonya was the most beautiful. Leila is beautiful too. I had seen Leila a few times recently when Sonya hadn't been available and enjoyed being with her.

Sonya has big dark eyes and she knows how to apply makeup to show them off. I said that I think I will have to have an HIV test. She asked why and I explained. She looked shocked. She asked me where I had done this and which country did she come from. I told her it wasn't a good idea for me to have done that. She seemed to forget about that though and we had a nice half hour. The viagra hadn't worn off and I shagged her a bit, with a condom. I gave her an extra £10 and she let me put a finger in her pussy. I washed my hands in the sink in the room first.

I hadn't come with Sonya but I hadn't thought I would. It was still very enjoyable though. I was going to walk to either Oxford Road or Piccadilly train stations to return to Liverpool but then I remembered that there had been disruption and the trains from there probably wouldn't be going to Lime Street. So I made my way back to Victoria station and on the way I went into the Mackie Mayor market.

The Mackie Mayor market is an old meat market that has been done up and offers food and drink. The central square has tables and benches and there is a beautiful old glass roof. There are different vendors providing a range of street food, coffee and alcohol. It is in Eagle Street off Swan Street in the Northern Quarter. When the people who go there have enjoyed their food and drink there are many opportunities for a sexual experience.

Smile Thai Massage is round the corner opposite the cat café (good if you want a little pussy). I have been to Smile once where I had hand relief from a lovely older woman called Saiphon. I asked her if she would have sex with me and she said she would only ever have sex with a man that she was in love with.

Orange Spa in Swan Street has Taiwanese women. Some of them are willing to have full sex. The Piccadilly Club in Great Ancoats Street is not far away. There is a brothel much nearer. Angels is at 56 Swan Street. I had been there a long time ago, and I had tried to go back. They're supposed to open at 7pm but they weren't open then so I went to Orange Spa a few doors along.

So I was surprised to see that Angels was open, even though it was only about 6.30pm. I couldn't resist going up the stairs. My curiosity was too great. A woman at the top of the stairs said they are open and invited me in. I asked her how many women were available. There were four, even though the match had been long over. I sat down and the women came in.

There was a young pretty tall slender Russian woman. There was an older shorter blonde woman. There was an older shorter Brazilian woman. There was a woman who had just come up the stairs and was in her normal clothes. It took me a minute or two to choose. The obvious choice would have been the pretty Russian. She must have wondered why I chose the podgy Brazilian.

Melissa took me up stairs and along corridors to a room. As I was undressing I looked through the open window to see the street below. She wanted to give me some oral sex with a condom to get me erect. That doesn't usually work for me though. I said I would like to look at her pussy. She said that would cost more: I think she thought was saying I wanted to lick her pussy. It took a while but I got an erection.

I got on top of her then after a while to my surprise I felt it was working and that if I continued I would come. Melissa was making a lot of loud sexy noises, although I don't think she was genuinely turned on. So I had my second orgasm of the day. The only time I have had two orgasms in one day through shagging was in 2014 when I came back from Whitstable in Kent and spent some time in Soho.

So I was well pleased. In the street I tried to identify the window of the room I had been in with Melissa. I took a photo on my mobile. If you are ever standing in Swan Street, perhaps spending the evening enjoying the delights of Mackie Mayor market, and you hear loud sexy noises, look up and it's probably coming from this window.

I've had an HIV check. I'm tempted to see the African woman again. She could be my regular. I could take a trip to Manchester once a month. I don't think I will though. I'll play it safe from now on.

watching loose women

I went to Manchester again and I did so many things I can't possibly tell you about them all. I started in Chinatown where I tried to find a girl in a massage establishment. I had read about her on a site, he said the place is a dump but she's so damned attractive he keeps going back. He'd got the name wrong - it was Lina not Lisa - and she wasn't there anyway so I moved on.

I'll skip ahead and tell you about Cosmopolitan in Portland Street. I went up the stairs and into the brothel. The receptionist was on the phone, I waited and then said "I'll sit down, shall I?". There was a big TV but I was watching the women. There was a blonde woman with tattoos who was looking through a carrier bag with some takeaway food in it. A skinny dark-haired girl came out of a room in a dressing gown and looked in the bag. She went back into the room. A tall blonde woman in a sexy dress came in.

Usually there are four women to choose from but I needed to choose between these three. I like dark-haired women but the skinny girl was too thin for me. She was from Portugal. The tattooed woman was nice, but I chose the Dutch woman. When I'd been there before I thought there were girls who looked like students. Manchester has a big student population and I liked the idea of a student girl.

Zoe was a disappointment though. She seemed very withdrawn, the opposite of Ling the Chinese woman who I'd seen at Cosmo before. Ling had been very enthusiastic, sucking on my cock without a condom and laughing and giggling when I was on top of her. Zoe only got interested near the end when I said "That Portuguese girl is too thin". I also told her that the receptionist is the most attractive of them and she agreed that she's very attractive.

I have been getting viagra from Boots in Manchester. I could have gotten a prescription from my doctor but instead I chose to get them 'over the counter' at the Market Street branch in the centre of Manchester. They do a check up first. So now I no longer have a problem with losing my erection when having sex.

I'd been shagging away at Zoe but hadn't come, so I thought I would go to the nearby Tropical Palms. There was one girl available and the receptionist said if I waited there will be another one coming out soon. I sat on one side of the room and the East European girl sat on the other side. She was reasonably pretty. I thought it's a bit like the school disco where the boys sat on one side and the girls on the other. If a boy liked a girl he could go over and invite her to dance.

I was thinking she was looking more and attractive and I might make an invitation but then a black man came up the stairs, dropped two twenty pound notes on the counter and she traipsed off with him. I thought 'What am I supposed to do now?'. I thought I'll wait for the other girl to come out. She was small and skinny though, another Eastern European, so I declined. She gave me a funny look.

Cherrys is not far away so I went there. There was the receptionist, a man sitting on a sofa, and a tall woman standing nearby. I knew straight away that I wanted her. She had a dark skin and a pretty face. I think the receptionist said something to the man, I paid my £40 and went into a bedroom with Amira. I asked her where she comes from and she said Algeria.

Amira was everything I'd been looking for. She's probably in her 20s or 30s and not skinny, a real woman. She lay down on the bed and opened her legs wide, holding open her pussy for me to see. Her natural skin colour is like a perfect all-over tan. When I got on top of her I enjoyed looking at her face and her big dark eyes. I had asked her to turn the light on so that I could see her properly.

I enjoyed myself so much with Amira that I could see her on a regular basis. In a recent post I said that I'd met Maisie and another Thai woman who were so nice I could see them again and again. Now there's Amira too.

Later I thought about the man at reception in Cherrys. I think what happened to him is what happened to me at Tropical Palms. He was waiting for all four women to become available so he could make his choice, but before that could happen I came in to spoil it for him. Maybe he waited long enough and he finally got his choice. I don't think he would have got better than Amira though.

Sex, Lies, and Paperbacks

I heard the feminist Julie Bindel recently on the radio talking about prostitution. I thought it would be interesting to read her new book and was delighted to find that no one seems to have a copy. I could get one off Amazon of course but I'm not going to pay for it. I've asked in libraries and been told I can request it, which I don't want to do. It's not in bookshops. There is a feminist/socialist bookshop in Bold Street in Liverpool and they had a copy but it wasn't on the shelf and they had to look for it.

So even though she's had free publicity for her book from Woman's Hour and free publicity from The Guardian it doesn't look as if many people are going to read it. I could get the gist of what she's saying from the radio programme and the newspaper article. I was pleased to see that she's no longer claiming that when she went to Nevada they found learning disabled women who were being double pimped.

She had claimed that on an earlier appearance on Woman's Hour, although that hadn't been in her report. The report said that one learning disabled woman had been found, which is one too many obviously, but hardly any indication of what will happen here if we legalize brothels.

In her Guardian article she makes no claim that there is less prostitution in Sweden now because of the law criminalizing men for paying for sex. She writes that prostitution is 'a consequence of women’s inequality' and that 'it should be possible to eradicate it'. Yet Sweden is held up as the best example of an equal society, and after 18 years of the law they haven't eradicated it.

While looking for her book I came across a similar book by Kat Banyard called Pimp Nation. I read Chapter 5 in the bookshop and was annoyed that she is repeating a false statistic that I've seen before. Around the year 2000 prostitution was legalized in the Netherlands, but in Sweden they began to prosecute men for paying for sex. Banyard writes that 127 prostitutes were killed in the Netherlands during that time but only one in Sweden.

I heard Rachel Moran state this on Woman's Hour, and it's false. The 127 prostitutes were killed over a 30 year period, not 15 years, and most of them were killed before prostitution was legalized not after. So it looks as if fewer women are being killed in the Netherlands now than before legalization. Not more, which is what they are trying to pretend.

What's more, no prostitutes were killed in Sweden in the 9 years before the new law prosecuting punters. Banyard tries to dismiss the one killing since 2000 as 'domestic'. It wasn't domestic, the authorities handed over Petite Jasmine's kids to a violent ex-partner because she was a prostitute, who then killed her. This is what the authorities in Sweden do. They take away their children. They also deport them or get them evicted.

Banyard doesn't mention this in her book of course. She's happy to point out that in New Zealand prostitution might not be called fully decriminalized because prostitutes aren't allowed to solicit near schools, but she doesn't mention the extra-judicial punishments of prostitutes in Sweden. She doesn't mention that two women who choose to work together for safety can be arrested in Sweden, as also happens in Britain.

Prostitutes can be treated like pimps, as can their landlords if they don't cooperate with the police to evict them. I would like to know if it is men or women who are prosecuted, and if it is women whether they are younger or older. My guess is that it is women in their 20s and 30s who get prosecuted, not so much men or older women.

There are police in Sweden (and Norway) whose job it is to identify prostitutes, find out who their landlords are, contact them, and get the women evicted. Or deport them, or take their children away. Then they tell the world that they treat prostitutes as victims. Victims, yes, but of the police. 'Violence against women', yes, but it is this Nordic model which is violence against women, not prostitution.

Woman's Hour has got a lot to answer for. They let Julie Bindel pretend that she'd found learning disabled women (in the plural) being double pimped in Nevada. They let Rachel Moran state the false 127 statistic. Then Bindel again plugging her new book.

I used to like Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour until she started having a go at the transsexual woman guest whose only crime was to contradict Murray by saying she didn't think it was too much of an imposition for a top hotel to require their female employees to shave their legs when in skirts with bare legs. Jenni later came out with a statement stating that trans women aren't really women, that they can't understand what it's like to be a woman. I think that it's Jenny who is the one who is out of touch with how most women feel.

Kat Banyard got the false statistic from Jim Wells, who was a politician in Northern Ireland (before he started making homophobic comments). He's a Protestant Christian so he together with Catholics in the south of Ireland have campaigned to ban sex work. Radical feminists like Kat Banyard ally themselves with social conservatives like Jim Wells, she quotes him in her book.

She thinks that if a man pays for sex with a woman then he can do anything he wants with her during that time, and that men like nothing better than asphyxiating prostitutes by forcing their erect penises down their throats. That's why she thinks sex work can't be a real job, because you can't be taught that. The reality is a sex worker will tell her clients what she will and will not accept: most that I've encountered don't allow kissing, fingering, oral sex without a condom or anal sex (or asphyxiation). She can even tell her client she doesn't want him to get on top of her if he's too big (that has happened to me twice, I'm tall and slightly overweight: I respected what they wanted).

This blog allies itself with sex workers, transexuals and gay men. Not that I think these three groups have anything in common except that they are under threat by people like Jim Wells. It allies itself with sex-positive feminists, as opposed to radical feminists like Bindel and Banyard.

I ally myself with sex workers like Laura Lee who after she was presented with the false 127 statistic at the Northern Ireland Assembly found out the truth about it. I ally myself with all the sex workers who are arrested just for trying to make themselves safe by working together, and the ones targeted by the punishment squads in Sweden and Norway. I ally myself with transsexuals and support their right to be who they really are. I ally myself with gay men and women and believe they can make parents who are just as good as heterosexual couples. Jim Wells - who doesn't believe that - can keep his opinions to himself. So can all the liars with their false statistics and their hidden agendas. I know what side I'm on.

I realize that many will doubt that sex workers are arrested and evicted in Sweden and Norway. The whole idea of the Nordic Model is that prostitutes aren't punished. Bindel said in her recent Woman's Hour appearance "They shouldn't be arrested - ever". I have collected all the evidence on my blog page The truth about the Swedish Model. Even more on my new page don't erase or edit out Petite Jasmine. You can also read my An Open Letter to Rachel Moran for more information about the 127 statistic. You may want to read my review of feminist Natasha Walter's book Living Dolls where I expose her false statistics.

UPDATE: After reading more about Petite Jasmine I can see that there are people who are trying to say that she didn't have her children taken away because she was a sex worker. There is no evidence that she was drinking and taking drugs, although she was accused of these things.

Jasmine wrote in a letter to a Swedish MP after her house had been stormed by social workers and her children forcibly taken into custody "I was subjected to an investigation which in a desperate way tried to find all those signs that they already from the start were convinced would be there, because I had been selling sex. Drug abuse, sexual abuse, emotional disturbance. They had a difficult time finding any of this, but it should certainly be known that they tried." So before she died, she herself had said that it was because she was a sex worker, and I believe her.

Someone asked why we don't mention the four women who have been killed in New Zealand since their change of law in 2002. We have no reason to believe that these four women (Mellory, Suzie, Anna, and Sky) would have not died if New Zealand had different laws. It isn't the policies of the New Zealand government that have resulted in the deaths of these four women, but it is the policies of the Swedish government that have resulted in the death of Petite Jasmine. That is why we protest at the policies of the Swedish government.

Sweden has not reduced prostitution. Neither can they claim that their policies have resulted in an end to the murder of sex workers. There were no murders in the nine years before the introduction of the new law. They want us to believe that the Swedish law has stopped women from being killed because prostitution is no longer tolerated there. They want us to believe that prostitutes are treated nicely there. All three of these are false: there has been no reduction in deaths, prostitution is just a common as before, and women are persecuted.

It wasn't just Petite Jasmine who was the victim. Her children witnessed their father stab and murder her, and stab and seriously injure a social worker. I want to leave you with more of what Petite Jasmine has written. I do this not to use emotion to promote my point of view, but to show what she was like and as a tribute to this brave woman. It is a translation from the Swedish so it might not be always grammatical.

"After one year and three months finally see her standing in front of me. The feeling when she runs into my arms and hug me, to get sniff her hair immediately becomes soaking wet of my tears, drag your finger along her small nose and chin, stroking her little hand and hold on her tiny body hard in my embrace and kiss her eleven thousand times in the forehead. To finally get to see her in the eye and say seventeen thousand times how missed and loved she is. And never want to let go again, but must. Created by my body when we two have been and we are part of each other forever. The love for my children is indescribable. (And justice system as said joint custody and half the time, where were you when everything was going on?)"

the prostitution debate on Woman's Hour

On the BBC Radio 4 programme Woman's Hour recently (03/03/14) Gavin Shuker MP talked about the results of the cross party committee report he chaired on reforming prostitution laws. He is a former Evangelical Christian (Pentecostal) pastor and he talks the language of radical feminists. It's a clear example of how religious groups and radical feminists are 'singing from the same hymn sheet'.

Here's what he had to say "There's always going to be a small group of people for whom it's a choice that they've made actively, but for the vast majority of women involved in prostitution it's a choice that's been made for them or a choice they're trapped in."

To which presenter Jane Garvey replied "And surely - you would imagine - that the vast majority of men who choose to pay for sex will know that the women who are doing it don't want to be there or there are a string of reasons why they find themselves in that position." No pun intended I'm sure.

The point is that the vast majority of men who choose to pay for sex are well aware of what all the research shows - that in Britain coercion is very rare. Neither is there any credible research to show that women are trapped in prostitution.

He goes on to say "The challenge is to men's attitudes of buying sex and in countries where they've successfully changed the law and made a difference to the prevalence of selling sex that's what they've done. They've tackled it head on and said it's unacceptable to purchase sex and our law's going to back that up rather than the other way around."

He's obviously referring to Sweden and some other Nordic countries. It's generally agreed that the law criminalizing the purchasers of sex in Sweden has had no effect at all on the majority of sex workers apart from making their lives more difficult. It has had some effect in reducing on-street sex work but that has always been a small part of the sex work industry and in Britain we have done much better through the use of ASBOs.

He also says "Prostitution is a form of violence against women and girls." This is just radical feminist propaganda and there is no evidence for it whatsoever.

He's obviously swallowed the radical feminist creed hook, line and sinker. He's just propagating radical feminist lies that have no foundation in reality. He continued "What you're confronted by though when you go into this with a genuinely open mind and you take more than 400 different submissions is you're confronted by alarmingly similar and consistent reports of the nature in which women have come into that trade. Many of which have come in under the age of 18 before they are able to even legally consent, with alarming numbers of care leavers, people that have been sexually exploited as a child, people that have been sexually exploited for money under the age of 18. Now if we're not going to take a serious look at our law in light of that ... then I think we need our heads looking at."

I have been trying to find out where is the research that shows that many prostitutes started before the age of 18. On the AVA site they state 'According to evidence submitted to the UK Government between 50-75% of women entered prostitution before they were 18, with 15 years being the average age of entry. [Home Office (2004). Paying the Price.]' However, when you look on the Home Office document Paying the Price: a consultation paper on prostitution July 2004 you can't find where it says that. On page 97 under Annex C (Age of first involvement in prostitution) the only place it mentions 15 years of age is where it mentions 3 studies, the largest of which was of 48 women and the most recent was 1998. Nowhere does it say that 15 years is the average age of entry. Just the opposite. The Home Office document does not make it clear what type of prostitutes these are; it seems that they are talking about street prostitutes who have always been a small minority among prostitutes and who hardly exist in Britain today because of ASBOs.

So when Gavin Shuker says on national radio "Now if we're not going to take a serious look at our law in light of that ... then I think we need our heads looking at" he is seriously misrepresenting the facts. Let him state where he gets his information from, because I can't find it. You can still listen to the programme here.

Rachel Moran

The next week on Woman's Hour (10/03/14) Jane Garvey talked to Rachel Moran and Ana. Rachel Moran said that she used to be a street girl and Ana said she was trafficked. However, blogger Maggie McNeill has good reasons to believe that Rachel Moran is not telling the truth. Another blogger, Laura Lee, believes the same thing. It seems that religion has reared it's ugly head again, only this time it's not Evangelicals like Gavin Shuker but Roman Catholics.

Ruhama is a Catholic organization connected with two orders of nuns. These nuns, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity and the Good Shepherd Sisters, used to run the Magdalene laundries in Ireland where large numbers of young women were imprisoned without trial. A wide range of innocent women and girls were sent to Magdalene asylums because someone in authority felt they were sexually active or might become so.

Presenter Jane Garvey asked Rachel Moran "If the punters are criminalized, won’t this drive them and the prostitutes to even more risky circumstances?" To which Rachel replied "Well you only have to look at the difference between Sweden and Holland to get your answer to that. There’s been 127 women murdered in Dutch prostitution in the last 15 years. Now in Sweden there’s only been one prostituted woman murdered."

I have been unable to find this statistic anywhere on the web, although I did find on this page that 127 have been killed in the last 30 years. Prostitution in the Netherlands was not fully decriminalized until about 15 years ago so it's important to get the facts right. Were these women killed before or after decriminalization? Whatever the facts it seems that religious extremists, whether Evangelical or Catholic, are quite happy to say things that aren't true to further their cause.

As for Ana, the woman who said that she was kidnapped and taken to Ireland, I'm wondering why they had to go to Ireland to find a case of trafficking. I believe that trafficking does exist but that it is at a low level in countries like Britain. Could this perhaps be Ruhama again saying things that aren't true? You can still listen to the programme here.

Valerie Lempereur

It would not be the first time that someone pretending to have been a prostitute wrote a book and had an effect on the debate about changing the law. Dutch journalist Valerie Lempereur wrote the book Behind a Window in the Wallen (Achter het raam op de Wallen) under the name Patricia Perquin. People believed what she said and it had the effect of changing the law for the worse.

Maggie McNeill has written about this in a post on her blog, and in the same post she gives information about the situation in the Netherlands. In September of 2007 Amsterdam commissioned a study which was published in 2010; it’s 232 pages long and available only in Dutch. Maggie has put the conclusion and summary in English on her site. I've had a quick look at it and done a couple of searches using keywords but as far as I can see there is nothing about prostitutes getting murdered.

So I can only conclude that the authors of the study did not see murder as a problem for sex workers in Amsterdam because it doesn't happen. It looks as if Rachel Moran's statistic about 127 of them being killed in the last 15 years is totally wrong. This study also shows that underage prostitution is essentially nonexistent in Amsterdam. It looks as if Gavin Shuker's statistic about there being lots of underage prostitutes is also totally wrong.

One thing that I disliked in the Woman's Hour discussion of prostitution is when presenter Jane Garvey said that you can use statistics to prove anything. People can try to use statistics to prove anything but bad statistics can be challenged. I don't think the BBC should just allow false statistics to be broadcast if they can't be backed up. The BBC Radio 4 programme More or Less is very good at debunking incorrect statistics.

Dr Brooke Magnanti's book The Sex Myth debunks many of the statistics used by people who want to ban pornography, erotic dancing and prostitution. I especially like the chapter in her book about the belief that the presence of lap dancing clubs in Camden has increased the incidence of rape. Dr Magnanti - who is a trained statistician and a former sex worker - shows that this belief is false.

So statistics are important because they support the cause of decriminalizing sex work and not criminalizing the clients of sex workers. I can't accept the idea that statistics can prove anything and we just have to go with our gut feelings. Are most sex workers in Britain coerced or aren't they? It's not that difficult to get to the truth. The debate is hotting up, and the consequences could be that the lives of sex workers are made more difficult and dangerous if the law is changed on the basis of the falsehood of religious extremists and radical feminists.

UPDATE: I've just found out that Croydon Community Against Trafficking are screening a film about trafficking at the New Life Christian Centre in Croydon. "Our fellowship is in the evangelical and Pentecostal/charismatic traditions that lay emphasis on Bible based faith and an ongoing experience of the Holy Spirit." The same type of Christian are causing trouble for gays in Africa.

As it says in this Independent article 'Roger Ross Williams, the director of God Loves Uganda, a documentary about the influence of conservative US Christians in the East African nation, said, “The anti-homosexuality bill would never have come about without the involvement of American fundamentalist evangelicals.”' I'm sure that they would like to cause trouble for gay men and lesbian women in this country but public opinion won't allow it, but they can make trouble for sex workers by confusing people about the true nature of sex work.

I have been looking at the document produced by Evangelical/Pentecostal Gavin Shuker and his all party parliamentary group. There is very little in the way of facts and figures, it doesn't seem to refer to research, but there is a lot of opinion and some anecdotal evidence. They don't have any information to back up their assertions.

I've found out more about the 127 statistic. Laura Lee on this page states:-
"Given his obsession with this 127 statistic, I'd like to clarify: the statistic relates to 118 murders that occurred between 1985 and 2012 being investigated by a police cold case team in the Netherlands. In 25 of the cases, the victims were not sex workers, or it is not known if they were sex workers or not. Most of the sex worker victims were working illegally and outdoors, not indoors. Eighty-six of the murders took place before October 1, 2000 (i.e. before prostitution was legalised in the Netherlands)."

I don't know if Rachel Moran was ever really a sex worker and I don't know what her association with Ruhama is, but we can be sure her '127 women murdered in Dutch prostitution in the last 15 years' statistic is false. If she was really concerned about the deaths of prostitutes then she would try to get her facts straight.

lucky west end girls

I have just finished reading a new book by Violet Ivy about the sex industry called Lucky Girl. It is an account of her life and in particular her involvment in different areas of the sex industry on three continents. I was especially interested in her time at the Soho walk ups, which is the area that I know most about, but her life story starts in a small town in Australia.

As a young adult she moves to the city. Finding work is difficult so she tries serving beers in a sleazy bar wearing next to no clothing. Not being happy with this she progresses to stripping. Eventually she decides to try prostitution. Her account of what she has to go though, especially the first time she has sex for money, is quite harrowing. So too is her account of her first anal sex where she is injured and robbed.

She goes to work for a year in a brothel in Kalgoorlie (I don't know where that is either). It is only when she comes to Melbourne and a high-class brothel there that things begin to look up for her. Although happy at this place, she wants to travel, so she moves to Las Vegas and works as a stripper and a sex worker. She paints a fascinating picture of a world of orgies attended by her - group bookings - against a background of the desperate gambling addicts she sees on the streets and in the casinos of Las Vegas.

Again on the move, she comes to London. Although working in the Soho walk ups is not her first option, she endures it until she is headhunted by an elite fetish brothel in Mayfair. Returning to Australia despite loving her work in Mayfair, the pinnacle of her career is accompanying a leading actor to an award ceremony. He is a gay man who needs to pretend to the world to have a girlfriend, and Violet provides that service for him.

While in Soho she is threatened by an Albanian pimp. She sends him packing. The girl in the flat above her is attacked. The police try to help, but this is in the days when CCTV was uncommon in the walk ups and maids could not always be afforded. Maids get a £2 tip from every customer but the sex worker has to pay her £60 per day. She also has to pay £240 to £280 per day in rent for the flat. Some days some of the sex workers were unable to make that amount of money and could get into debt.

Some of the readers of this blog might remember her. She called herself Sydney then and she worked in Peter Street in Soho and perhaps other places too. This would have been more than 10 years ago. There were a couple of other Australian girls working in Soho then too.

One thing I liked was her account of how she tried her best to help a 32 year old virgin enjoy his first experience of sex. She showed great sensitivity to his needs and was aware that her actions could affect his future relations with women.

Violet writes about her experience of what is perhaps the biggest problem in the life of sex workers, and that is the problem of boyfriends. A sex worker might meet a lovely man and want to have a relationship with him. Only an unsatisfactory man would accept his girlfriend working as a prostitute. So she might keep her work a secret and always fear he might find out, remain single, or accept as a boyfriend a man who might try to exploit her.

A while ago I read the book West End Girls by Barbara Tate. Barbara was a maid in Soho walk ups soon after the end of World War 2. Although the information is a bit out of date now, there is one area especially where she is relevant to today, the problem of boyfriends.

Barbara wrote that there weren't any pimps in Soho but some of the women had ponces. A ponce isn't the same as a pimp. A ponce is a man who tries to form an emotional relationship with a sex worker, not because he cares for her but because he intends to exploit her. He emotionally manipulates her and gets her to hand over her money to him. He tells her that he will invest it for their future together.

In Tate's Soho a ponce was often a Maltese man who would try to hook an established prostitute - who was nearly always a British woman. I think that many of the women in Soho today have men like this. The women are from Eastern Europe and the men are from their own country, maybe their own town. They could be 'boyfriends' who persuade them they can have a good life together in London.

Taking the two books together, it seems to confirm that the clever women are the ones who use sex work to make as much money as possible, bank it or make sensible investments, then leave. They can use the money to set themselves up, do what they really want to do in life, and they don't have to lie to their boyfriends about what they do.

Lucky Girl is a very informative and enjoyable read. We need to hear more about women's experience of the world of sex work and its unusual and occasionally frightening characters. You can buy the book at many places: Amazon, BookLocker and Book Depository. Violet has her own website.


Violet Ivy



no names no photographs

I got an email a few days ago from an angry sex worker. She found out that I had put a photograph of her on my blog. She wanted it removed. I did what she told me to do.

About three years ago I found out about a woman who lived a short bus ride from me. She does erotic massage. She comes from a Mediterranean country and is young and beautiful. I sent her an email and asked her if there are any photographs of her on the internet. She replied with a photo of her face. She hadn't modified it in such a way that she couldn't be identified. I went to see her and it was a pleasant experience, different from what I was used to. I wrote about her on this blog. I didn't give her name or her AdultWork page, but I did use the photo.

I wanted people to see how beautiful some of the women are who are available. She is as beautiful as the photo in my previous post, the photo that I thought was of a Liverpool prostitute but turned out to be of a leading model. She has the same dark Mediterranean beauty. I think she must be even more beautiful when she's angry. It's a pity she doesn't go in for domination. I deserve to be punished.

I don't think that putting her photo on my blog was much of a risk to her but I can understand that she doesn't want people pointing her out in Sainsbury's and saying something like "You see that woman there - she likes to hold men's erections in her hand and watch the semen squirting out the end of it".

In October last year I was walking to my local supermarket when I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I saw a thin scruffy woman. My immediate thought was that she is a street girl. After years of trying to locate street girls on Tooting Bec Common it is a look that I have come to recognise instantly. I looked at her face. She gave me a big broad smile, the sort of sweet smile that women can do when they really want to. She seemed kind of familiar.

I didn't know if she was an ordinary woman who was flattered by a man staring at her. Or a street girl who is always open to meeting new men. Or one of the women who I had known on the Common. She was really beautiful. I thought she might be the particular one that I had been most involved with, but I couldn't be sure. This particular woman is someone I have written about a lot when I started this blog years ago.

(This is not the street girl who has been in contact with me via email recently and who wrote two posts for this blog about her life. These two posts have been removed. She asked me to remove them because she was worried people might be able to work out that it was her who had written them.)

She had a man with her. I always said that if I saw one of the women who I had known on the Common in the street with a man then I wouldn't approach her and try to talk to her. I wouldn't want to cause a problem for them. If the man didn't know about her past he might say "Who the hell was that you were talking to?". Also, the man she was with looked quite tough and he might have taken offence with me for trying to talk to his partner.

this is not her but it reminds me of her

About two weeks ago I saw her again, alone. I went up to her and said "Are you (her name, but I'm not going to reveal it)?" We had a short conversation and then her boyfriend came along. She said "This is my boyfriend" and introduced me to him. She said goodbye and walked away.

She wasn't as beautiful as she was when I saw her a few months ago outside the supermarket. Women can seem more or less beautiful depending on their mood that day or maybe phases of the menstrual cycle. I thought that her face didn't look as thin as I remembered from years ago. Addicts do put on weight when they give up drugs.

She looked healthy. She looks as if she has given up drugs. Over the years I have asked people if they know what has happened to her. I was told by one person that she injects heroin in odd places. Later I was told by someone else that she was in prison. More recently someone told me that she'd been sectioned. She had been one of the two women on the Common who had seemed the most addicted, to crack cocaine and heroin.

When I started writing about her on this blog years ago I used her initial and not her name, as I did with all the women I met on the Common and in my neighbourhood. When I started thinking that she might be dead I thought it wouldn't do any harm to use her name and the only photograph that I have of her. Now that I know that she is not only not dead but seems to have overcome her multiple addictions I have gone though the posts on this blog removing her name and the photo.

I wouldn't want any information on this blog about her to become a problem for her. I wish her all the best for the future. If I see her again I would like to tell her that she should be proud of herself for having overcome such difficult addictions and other problems, and that if she can do that then she can accomplish anything.

I am glad that she not only remembered me but doesn't consider me to be an abuser. When I knew her on the Common I tried to be good to her. I think she thought that I was trying to save her. However, I believed that few people overcome heavy addiction to crack cocaine and heroin and that she would end up dead. I was wrong.

the southeastern corner of Tooting Bec Common
near to where the street girls used to congregate

Living Dolls and The Sex Myth

I am reading two books on the same subjects; prostitution, erotic dancing and pornography. Natasha Walter has written Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. Dr Brooke Magnanti  has written The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong. Natasha Walter is a feminist and has a negative view of prostitution etc. Dr Magnanti has been a sex worker (known as Belle de Jour) and is an expert in statistical analysis.

Natasha Walter writes that the number of sexual assaults increased in Camden Town in London after lap-dancing clubs opened. Dr Magnanti has shown in that this research (done by the Lilith Project) is false. She devotes the whole of Chapter 4 of her book to showing how poor the Lilith Project research is.

Other 'facts' in Living Dolls are:-

• two-thirds of prostitutes have been assaulted by clients
• 85% of prostitutes reported physical abuse in the family
• 45% reported familial sexual abuse
• a majority of prostitutes involved before age of 16 or 17
• all have a problem with alcohol misuse
• majority used hard drugs

These 'facts' seem to be about prostitutes in general. She then goes on to mention street prostitutes specifically. She writes that 96% of street prostitutes in Merseyside are using heroin and 81% using crack, 84% of these gave their reason for entering prostitution as getting money for drugs. I can well believe that this is true for street prostitutes - my experience is that when the police crack down on street prostitution it's only the drug addicts who keep on doing it. Before a crack down half of them are not addicts and eventually even the addicts give up - there is next to no street prostitution in London today.

All these figures are to set us up for her conclusion that prostitution isn't a real choice and therefore it is acceptable to take that choice away from women.

"Despite the fact that they have not necessarily been forced into this work, these women are not exempt from levels of abuse that make a mockery of the normalisation of prostitution."

She then goes on to write that 6 prostitutes are murdered every year. She doesn't write that no prostitutes are killed in New Zealand or the Netherlands*. She doesn't write that the reason prostitutes get killed in Britain in because people like her stand in the way of simple changes in the law that would make women a lot safer and probably remove the threat of death altogether.

The figures of 85% of prostitutes reporting physical abuse in the family and 45% reporting familial sexual abuse are dealt with by Dr Magnanti in Chapter 8. The research was the result of a handful of interviews, no control group, and is statistically pointless.

Walter writes in Living Dolls that she met and talked to a prostitute she calls Angela. Angela used words like 'dissociate' and 'psyche'. This reminded me of an article I read in the Guardian a few years ago by Emine Saner: 'You're consenting to being raped for money'. Saner wrote that she met and talked to a prostitute she called Karen. Karen also used these words. "You have to learn to dissociate your body from your mind which is dangerous for your psyche."

Could Angela and Karen be the same person? Angela in Living Dolls said "Basically you've consented to being raped sometimes for money". Karen in the Saner article said "Basically you've consented to being raped for money". Other things tie up in the two accounts. So who is Angela/Karen?

I did consider the possibility that she is a fantasist or someone like Valerie Lempereur who under the name Patricia Perquin wrote a book claiming to show the life of a Dutch prostitute in Amsterdam. Only it was a fabrication. Right-wing politicians used this book to push through changes in legislation restricting prostitution (just as feminist groups have been using the false statistic about Camden lap-dancing clubs to change the law to try and stop more clubs opening). Or perhaps Angela/Karen is a radical feminist (or a religious fundamentalist) who makes up stuff because she thinks she is helping the anti-prostitution cause. She is certainly a mouthpiece for feminist concepts such as dissociation.

When I re-read the Saner article carefully I realised that there was a lot of information that Karen has given about her career as a prostitute that Walter hasn't mentioned at all. Karen said that she's not a drug addict, she uses her earnings to save for her pension as well as pay her bills, she only needs to see five men per week to get enough money and the most men she has seen in one day is three. She gets paid £130 per hour (it used to be £170 till Eastern Europeans pushed prices down), has earned £1,500 in one sex session, and never has unprotected sex. When asked if she has experienced violence she answered 'Nearly' and refuses to see a man for a second time if she finds him physically unattractive.

It seems that Angela/Karen is more like Belle de Jour than Natasha Walter would like us to know. So I'm inclined to believe that Angela/Karen isn't a fabrication, if she'd wanted to make it all up to further the anti-prostitution cause then she could have made a better job of it.

Angela said that men sometimes asked if they could tie her up or gag her. Some also asked to have a threesome. It appears Angela didn't comply with these requests, yet she uses these as evidence that prostitution is becoming more violent.

Walter mentions the genre of books that include The Intimate Confessions of a London Call Girl by Belle de Jour and Confessions of a Working Girl by Miss S. She dismisses the former but regards the latter as gospel truth. Miss S wrote that she continued to work in a brothel despite having a damaged, swollen and bleeding vagina.

She writes about PunterNet reviews and picks out some of the worst of them, using them as examples of what punters really think about sex workers. The reviews that she uses however are not representative of PunterNet reviews generally.

So what does the chapter in her book about prostitution add up to? Some statistics that might have been true of drug-addicted street prostitutes at one time, used to suggest that this is the reality of prostitution. The musings of Angela/Karen about her injured psyche (but nothing about her career as a prostitute because that would contradict the dodgy statistics). An unreliable paperback memoir. And some unrepresentative PunterNet reports. Not much really, is it?

It seems that what Natasha Walter is really bothered about is what she calls 'unemotional sex' or 'sex without much emotional engagement'. Lust is an emotion, but the emotion that she's thinking about is intimacy. She seems to think that sex without intimacy is degrading. As Angela said in Living Dolls: "All this push to get women to buy into porn and it's values - it's turning all women into paid or unpaid sex workers." As Karen said in the Saner article: "I believe there is a conspiracy to turn women into readily accessible semen receptacles." Natasha Walter is worried about 'The Return of Sexism'. I'm more worried about the return of Puritanism.

A woman can't consent to being raped. That's a contradiction in terms. It seems that the phrase 'Basically you've consented to being raped sometimes for money' was used by Angela only in the context of men asking to tie her up and gag her, perhaps because they wanted to enact a rape fantasy. She didn't think that all sex work is rape, although that makes a good headline for an article. Similarly, if you're a sex worker then you are paid for sex. There is no such thing as an unpaid sex worker.

What you get from reading Living Dolls is the idea that if a woman has sex without emotions/intimacy/commitment then she might just as well be a prostitute. The idea is that women don't really want promiscuous sex as fun, that it's only pressure from men or porn culture that makes women want to do it. That seems to me not only wrong but old fashioned and regressive. I don't have a problem with people wanting commitment, but it's not right for them to try and force it on the rest of us.

*since writing this I realize that four sex workers have been killed in New Zealand