my review of the year 2021

I have been going to the brothel in Liverpool called Angel Lodge. I saw Katy, Taylor, Alicia and Lucia once each, but I saw Megan 3 times. She is the sort of big blonde that I like and she lets me use my ultrathin condoms. I have only been to Christys once this year.

I went to Manchester once this year, but it's not as good as it was. Cosmopolitan is still good though.

In the summer I found myself near Queensferry in Wales. I remembered that there is a brothel there. I found the number through a Google search on my mobile. When I went there I was pleasantly surprised. It's a nice place (called Dollys) and the sex worker there was lovely. I thought I was onto a good thing.

Pippa is very talkative and seems to want to please. She is a big blonde like Megan and Jodie. She is prettier though, and I liked the way she has her hair up. The first time I saw her she said I can bring thin condoms next time. I saw her three Mondays in a row.

Although she seems to want to please, she didn't seem to want to do the one thing that I want. I like to get on top of a woman and shag her till I come. She let me shag her for a while but then wanted to do something else. So I didn't orgasm with Pippa.

The second two times I saw Pippa I went afterwards to another brothel in Wales. Temptations in Flint. These two brothels are not difficult to get to by bus from Chester. At Temptations I shagged Lola. She didn't talk much, didn't seem to want to please me, but was quite happy for me to get on top of her and shag her till I came. Even though I didn't ask to use my thin condoms with Lola, I came both times with her.

There is a strange brothel in Wallasey called Jays. If you go there on a Wednesday there are two women there. One of them is an old woman called Celia but also called Sharon. The other is Keira and I think she has a different name too. Keira looks middle aged but is probably elderly too: she looks as if she has had some cosmetic surgery. Celia and Keira work together. If you want both of them to suck your cock, at the same time, you can have that. Without a condom if you pay both of them an extra £10.

I saw them twice this year. The second time was very odd. Celia was her usual helpful self but Keira was preoccupied. She stood in the same room as us but looked out the window, commenting about a man who would be returning soon. I think there is a pimp here who is in the room above and watches through the mirrors on the ceiling. I asked them to turn a light on, they told me they were unable to comply, but later the light came on by itself. I'm not going to go there again.

Talking about old women, I saw Diane and Jackie in Chester. Diane has a flat near the racecourse and Jackie uses a friend's house in Bache near the hospital. I won't be going to see either of them again either. All of the women that I have mentioned so far in this post have been English, or possibly Welsh. I say this because some people believe that the majority of women in brothels are Romanian. "Leicestershire police reported that 86% of the women in brothels they visited were Romanian". Not near me.

I will be going to Rock Ferry Thai Massage again though. I saw a lovely woman called Jasmine in January. I saw a delightful young woman called Joy twice recently. I would have seen her a third time but I was told she'd gone. To Manchester. They are there for a couple of weeks then they go to work somewhere else. Then they come back again.

There is another Thai woman who works nearby. Her name is Yaya. She doesn't move to different places. She is pretty and speaks English very well and seems educated. She shares the flat with another Thai girl who only does massage with hand relief. Her name is Maeya.

Maeya only does hand relief. Yaya does full sex but doesn't move to different parts of the country. Joy and the other women at Rock Ferry Thai Massage do full sex and move around. That will be through their own choices, how much money they wish to make and what they are prepared to do for it.

Usually at Thai massage places you don't get full sex. At Rock Ferry Thai Massage you do though. Another place I have been to is Sakura in Liverpool. You don't get full sex there (not usually) but you do get more than just a massage with hand relief. With some of the women at Sakura. I've been there four times this year, but I don't think I will return. Another Chinese place is the newly opened Pink Peony.

So I won't be seeing any old women again. You may wonder why I ever did but some of them are attractive. I don't think I will be going to Wales again, why bother when I can get what I want closer to home? I don't even need to go into Liverpool. My favourite two women this year have been Jasmine and Joy from Rock Ferry Thai Massage. I hope to see both of them again.

sex work and the transgender issue

I've been reading a lot about trans issues recently. What got me started was I realized that there is a chapter in Shon Faye's book about prostitution. She is a trans woman and her book is The Transgender Issue. She is in favour of the decriminalization of prostitution, as am I.

This blog is about sex work so I'm not going to write much about the trans issue, except in how it relates to prostitution. I can see both sides of the debate. I have also read Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier and Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality by Helen Joyce. Both of these are authors oppose trans 'ideology'. The second of them is a Radical Feminist.

What annoys me about the Radical Feminists is how they want to reinvent themselves as the guardians of free speech. On the final page of her book Joyce writes "It will take a renewed commitment to two interests shared by everyone in a secular, liberal democracy: freedom of belief and freedom of speech".

They're only saying this now because they have been on the receiving end of treatment that they have been handing out for decades. Consider this, from Amia Srinivasan's book The Right to Sex.

"In 1993 a group of anti-porn feminists wrote a letter to the vice chancellor of the Australian National University demanding that an invitation to US pro-sex feminists, including Gayle Rubin and Carol Vance, be rescinded. One of the signatories was Sheila Jeffreys, a central figure on the 'revolutionary feminist' wing of the British women's liberation movement, which insisted - contrary to the then dominant socialist feminist position - that male sexual violence, rather than capitalism, was the foundation of women's oppression. In recent years Jeffreys has decried the 'vilification' and 'censoring' of feminists who, like her, are trans-exclusionary. Jeffreys apparently does not recognise the irony in objecting to the same tactics that she and other anti-porn feminists pioneered forty years ago." 

What goes around comes around. I suspect that in the future this will happen to them again. They might think that their scheming with the religious right has paid them dividends, but the mums who don't want a trans girl in their daughters' school toilets can just as easily say they don't want a lesbian girl there. Someone who says that a man can't become a woman, it's only politeness that has stopped us from saying it before, can just as easily say that homosexuality is a perversion and a mental illness.

Sheila Jeffreys is a lesbian, she thinks women should be lesbians. Do think that ordinary people can distinguish between a trans person and the sort of radical feminist lesbian who has short hair, no makeup and wears men's clothes? If the transgender movement is an ideology then Radical Feminism is one too: two rival ideologies fighting it out for the hearts and minds of people - and especially teenage girls.

In Chapter 7 of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, Joyce writes this:

"But from the 1990s or so, liberal or 'third wave' feminism de-emphasised such structural and communal issues, instead centering choice and agency - for example arguing that some women might want to work in pornography or prostitution, and that this could be empowering. Second-wave feminists, who mostly regarded these as harmful for all women and almost always coerced, were dismissed as 'sex-negative' - or simply prudes."

I think someone who chooses to believe that women who work in pornography or prostitution are 'almost always coerced' without any evidence for that are indeed prudes. They don't like it, so they think up a reason why they should oppose it, harming women in the process. They don't like it for the same reason their religious right allies don't like it - a fear and disgust of basic human sexuality. If you choose to believe something without evidence, that is not reality it is ideology.

If you believe that prostitutes are almost always coerced then you want them to be rescued. But 'rescue' means women abducted by police and kept against their will. That is harming women.

Third wave or pro-sex feminists are termed liberal, and it is said they have no interest in 'structural and communal issues'. It was Jeffreys though who was the first to take feminism in a direction away from its socialist and anti-capitalist roots. As Amia Srinivasan wrote in her book:

"At the ninth Women's Liberation Movement Conference, this time held in London, Sheila Jeffreys gave a paper titled 'The Need for Revolutionary Feminism', in which she took socialist feminists to task for not recognising that male violence rather than capitalist exploitation lay at the foundation of women's oppression, and for making 'reformist' demands like socialised childcare."

Amia is anti-capitalist. Sheila Jeffreys doesn't represent the original feminism, from which third wave feminism departed. Feminism didn't originally have the obsession with pornography and prostitution that people like Jeffreys, MacKinnon and Dworkin introduced.

Third wave feminists have not argued that 'some women might want to work in pornography or prostitution'. They argue that large numbers of women do. How can we help them? As far as I know they have never used the word 'empowering'. Money is empowering. Sex work is well paid. So from that point of view it is empowering, although maybe the Radical Feminists mean something different by that word. Being a politician or a CEO is empowering in a different way. Sex work doesn't give you that but then neither does most work.

Harmful for all women? Joyce doesn't say why she thinks that, but it brings us back to the false research that I wrote about a couple of posts ago. They think that there is more rape when there is more pornography and prostitution. Which brings us back to Sara Pascoe's book that I reviewed even more posts ago. Pascoe states that the evidence that she has looked at does not show that pornography increases rape (page 198) or sexism (page 200); or that most porn is violent (pages 204, 224 and 226). She also says it isn't true that women in porn don't have pubic hair (ignore what Jenni Murray says). Pascoe is very fair on the subject of pornography. Not so much on the subject of prostitution.

I've just listened to Jon Ronson's radio programme about trans issues, part of a series called Things Fell Apart about the culture wars. He talked about the Michfest music festival in America for women that started in the 1970s. What he said about it is completely different from what Helen Joyce has written about it in Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (chapter 8). Joyce makes no attempt to show both sides of the debate, for example not saying that transwomen were eventually welcomed into the festival by the other women: Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality seems to me a work of propaganda.

review of Harlots, Whores & Hackabouts by Kate Lister

This is a large book full of illustrations. It is a history of sex for sale. The first chapter is Sex in the Ancient World. There is much about ancient Babylon. I learned much from chapter four, The Honest Courtesans - Selling Sex in Renaissance Europe.

Both St Augustine of Hippo and St Thomas Aquinas taught that although prostitution is immoral, it is the lesser of two evils. Without it much worse things would happen - adultery and sodomy. It doesn't seem that they thought masturbation was much of a problem.

In Renaissance Italy sex workers were called 'meretrice' or 'cortigiane'.

"Cities, like Venice, forbade men from managing the brothels, instead installing older women known as matrons to do the job. A good matron not only looked after her girls, but knew how to keep the customers happy as well. In fact, the iconic Italian dish tiramisu is said to have been invented in the brothels to revive flagging energy levels. Whereas puttanesca, a flavourful sauce served with pasta, literally translates to 'cooked in the whorish fashion' and is said to have been eaten in the brothels when women were between clients. For all the moralizing around sex work, it did allow women to earn their own money, run their own business, and in a few cases, become internationally celebrated celebrities."

Kate goes on to write about Imperia Cognati, known as Queen of Courtesans. I was aware that the puttanesca pasta sauce is associated with Italian brothels, but I didn't know that the dessert tiramisu is too. Kate isn't saying that they were invented during the Renaissance though: they are of much more recent origin. I can imagine Italian sex workers having a hearty appetite, I can only speculate on which pasta shape they prefer. Perhaps farfalle, which means butterfly but is also a slang name in some parts of Italy for vulva: the labia minora resemble the wings of a butterfly.

The attitude of Christians is revealed in this chapter. The real problem came with the Protestants.

"Attitudes to sex work began to change dramatically across Europe following the rise of Protestantism. Protestants utterly rejected Augustinian notions that prostitution could curtail far worse sexual sins. Martin Luther called sex workers 'murderers' and suggested they be 'broken on the wheel'. Protestant preachers utterly condemned any toleration and called for state-run brothels to be closed and for prostitution to be abolished. Catholic attitudes to prostitution were soon viewed as evidence of wider moral corruption. The Vatican responded by ushering in a new era of sexual repression."

Pope Pius ordered them out of Rome and the Papal States, but the citizens of Rome petitioned him, and he repealed his edict.

So it seems that it is the Protestants and especially the Puritans, who came later, who despised sex work. Catholicism in Ireland seems to be heavily influenced by English (and Scottish) Puritanism. Southern European Catholics aren't quite so uptight about sexual matters.

In chapter 11 there are photographs named 'Interior of a brothel in Naples, c.1945'. One American surgeon reported that 'prostitutes from Naples descended upon our encampment by the hundreds, outflanking guards'. Let's hope they brought some tiramisu with them.

review of Paying For It by Scarlett O'Kelly

This book was written by an Irish woman who became an escort as a result of the recession. She is one of the women who some feminists dismiss as being unrepresentative of prostitutes. The same was said of Brooke Magnanti but this is some women's reality. What proportion of sex workers are like O'Kelly and Magnanti is difficult to know, especially as things will have changed over the decades.

In Chapter 11 and 25 she writes about 'wifey sex', where a man feels he should only make love to his wife slowly and gently, not go faster and harder as he would wish. Lots of men go to an escort for this reason. Her advice is for him to talk to his wife - she might want rampant sex sometimes. In Chapter 25 she also writes about premature ejaculation and how to solve it. The answer is the start/stop squeeze technique and pelvic floor exercises.

In Chapter 27 Scarlett tells us how she divided up the men who came to see her into different categories. They are Unhappily Married, Fearful Catholics, Students, Middle-class Liberals, Young Family Man, Mr Self Employed and Manual Labour Man.

In Chapter 28 Scarlett goes into great detail about anal sex. On page 203 there is one paragraph that explains how to do it without pain. Later she goes into great detail about prostate massage. She writes that all of her customers have asked for anal sex. That surprised me, because I thought that most sex workers don't do it.

In Chapter 32 Scarlett recounts how she realized that other sex workers charged less money than she did. This is one of the reasons that she eventually gave it up. I don't think she realized though that most of these women would be charging extra for anal sex, and many of them would not be providing that service at all. That's what I think anyway, I could be wrong. Also, they will be spending less time with their clients than she did.

Several times in the book she says that she had no alternative to what she did, it was an economic necessity. During the recession the only way she could maintain her standard of living was to do sex work. There must have been hundreds of thousands of women in exactly the same situation as her. One wonders what they all did. Presumably they lived much poorer and many of them lost their homes.

If you have a hundred people, all of them in exactly the same circumstances, and 99 of them choose to do one thing, does it make any sense to say that the one person who did differently was forced to do so? That she had no alternative? You could say she had no alternative if she wanted to avoid being poor, in the particular circumstances of a recession. You can't say though that all sex workers at all times don't have a meaningful choice.

She writes that she has no regrets about being a sex worker, and that she enjoyed the sex sometimes. So it's not true that although women in sex work can be positive about it, once they have left they cease to be so.

hatred of clients

One thing that surprised me when I read Sara Pascoe's book is her hatred of men like me. She thinks that we are psychopaths, antisocial and unsympathetic.

I have read a new book that sheds some light on this attitude. The book is The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, a professor at Oxford.

There are six chapters in the book, each on a different aspect of sex. The two chapters that were of interest to me were the last one (Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism - about prostitution) and the second one (Talking to My Students About Porn - about pornography).

In some ways this mirrors two of the three sections in Sara's book. The third section is about prostitution and the second is about pornography. Sara and Amia's approaches to these subjects are very different though.

This is what Amia writes (on page 151)

"At the level of the symbol, prostitution is seen as a distillation of women's condition under patriarchy. The prostitute is the perfected figure of women's subordinate status, just as the john is the perfected figure of male domination. Their sexual transaction, defined by inequality and often accompanied by violence, stands in for the state of sexual relations between women and men more generally. Seen in this way, the prostitute calls out to be saved, the john to be punished, and their transactional sex to be stopped - for the good of all women."

She is using the word 'john' to mean the clients of sex workers. It's a common term in America. Amia writes that the criminalisation of men doesn't help sex workers. So why do some feminists want it? They want to punish men. That is more important to them than helping women.

There are two points I can make about that. First, these feminists believe that prostitution can be reduced even if it can't be eliminated. They have a statistic which says that the proportion of Swedish men who bought sex decreased after the law was introduced that criminalises men. That is a false statistic, as I have explained in detail here. Second, the law doesn't harm men. In most Nordic model countries very few men are convicted: it seems easy to avoid prosecution for an intelligent sane sober man.

Amia quotes from the book Revolting Prostitutes by Molly Smith and Juno Mac. "The client thus becomes the symbol of all violent men: he is the avatar of unadulterated violence against women, the archetypal predator." This all seems very odd to me. I can understand antipathy towards drug dealers and pimps (if the person accused is really a pimp: lots of people are convicted of pimping offences who aren't pimps).

Amia, Molly and Juno aren't saying that they believe the clients of sex workers are predators, they are saying some feminists believe that. Some sex workers work alone and never have a violent client. There may be gangs who want to take her money. There may be vigilantes who want to harm her.

Some women would like to work with other women to avoid potential violence but that's not allowed. Some brothels were well run and never had any violence but the police have closed them down. If sex workers were allowed to keep themselves safe they would probably be just as safe as estate agents, nurses and social workers.

Perhaps they think that men like me exploit the supposed power imbalance. In the quotation from Revolting Prostitutes there is this: "prostitution as a deeply unequal transaction - one scarred by patriarchy as well as white supremacy, poverty and colonialism. It seems intuitively right to criminalise men who are, in many ways, the living embodiments of these huge power differentials".

Today both sex workers and their clients come from many different backgrounds. The idea that clients are affluent white men and sex workers are poor black women is rarely true. It is more often true of employers and their servants or even employers and their cleaners, but nobody seems to be bothered by that. I do not consider women or non-Europeans to be inferior to me or only there to serve me. I pay women and not men for sex because I am heterosexual. Mostly English women because that is my preference. They have probably got more money than me. Lots of sex workers today are highly educated. Lots of clients are working class.

A clue to one possible reason for the hatred of clients comes from Sara's book. She writes about a gig where a man called Stefan came over to talk to her. On the subject of early internet pornography, he said that the pictures took so long to download that he wished they would do so upside down. He was trying to make a joke, the idea being that he was impatient to see the woman's genitals (the 'good bits') and not so much her face.

Sara took great offense at this. Two pages later there's a note about Alexa, the cloud-based voice service. Sara writes "Stefan wouldn't like her, she's all brain and no good bits." This is very unfair on Stefan. She is assuming that any man who has a strong sexual attraction to a woman's body is incapable of appreciating her personality or her mind. That he thinks women are only good for one thing.

That's a common prejudice, and it's wrong. Where does it come from? Sara writes about millions of years of evolution that reinforce certain attitudes. I think it comes from cultural conditioning and in our culture that comes from thousands of years of Christianity with its disgust and fear of basic human sexuality. Lust reduces us to the level of beasts, so they say.

So some people hate men like me because we are supposedly violent, we've got more money than most and we are incapable of appreciating women's personalities or minds. There is no evidence for any of this. It seems to come from a lurid imagination or an outdated ideology. Or the female equivalent of misogyny. Perhaps I should feel guilty: after all, I am a Living Embodiment. Another word for that could be scapegoat.

You would think that the Radical Feminists would hate men like Jim Wells. Or Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers. But they like Jim Wells. Julie Bindel and Kat Banyard have quoted him (as 'Mr Wells') in recent books despite the fact that he is an Evangelical Christian who doesn't believe in abortion or gay rights. They like him because he wants to stamp out pornography and prostitution.

Amia Srinivasan in her book The Right to Sex comes out unequivocally in favour of decriminalisation. As do Molly Smith, Juno Mac and Emily Kenway in their books. I wish that Sara Pascoe had done the same in her book (see previous post). Even so there seems to be more and more support for decriminalisation and less for the Nordic model. I know which side I'm on, and it's not with Jim Wells.

In 1991, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), an abolitionist group that [Kathleen] Barry founded, took its case of 'prostitution as slavery' to the United Nations. 'To be a prostitute was to be unconditionally sexually available to any male who bought the right to use a woman's body in whatever manner he chose,' CATW told the working group on contemporary forms of slavery. This unconditional availability and the man's right to do whatever he wanted was tantamount to ownership and slavery.

The paragraph above is from Nine Degrees of Justice by Bishakha Datta.

They didn't get anywhere. Sex workers choose their clients. They can and do deny their services to any man they choose. They tell the man what they will accept and what they won't. If a man wants anal sex without a condom he won't get it. There are no 'survivors' who say that he will. In Rachel Moran's book, for example, she states that she didn't have anal sex once.

So the whole basis of Barry's argument is false. The whole basis of the Radical Feminist argument is false. They don't know what they are talking about. Their hatred of men like me is based more on victim porn than reality.

I have never bought a woman's body. Trying to link it to slavery doesn't make any sense. I don't believe that women are only good for sex - only worth 'what some man will pay for her'. This explains more about why punters are hated - people are being told that we buy women and that we think that women have no value apart from sex. This kind of hatred can only come from a repressed sexuality.

Taken liberties

I worked out why the documentary on trafficking that I talked about in my last post is called 'Taken'. There's a film about trafficking called Taken, 'about a retired CIA agent attempting to rescue his daughter from being sold into prostitution'. So they are trying to associate themselves with people who rescue women and girls, when we know that they end up getting deported.

That's not all. These women have their earnings taken away from them. I can't express it better than Molly Smith and Juno Mac have in their book 'Revolting Prostitutes'.

"As a result, the theft of sex workers' money in police raids on brothels is routine and goes beyond the mere confiscating the occasional eighty pounds. In October 2016, when the police raided massage parlours in Soho and Chinatown, London, and took seventeen women to deportation centres, they also removed thirty-five thousand pounds. They even took money from individual women's lockers. Sex worker Janice had thirteen thousand pounds taken from her in a brothel raid and it was never returned to her, even after she was found not guilty: 'They even tried to take my home. I was left with nothing after a lifetime of hard work. I'm not young anymore and don't know how I'll manage. My life has been turned upside down.' Anti-prostitution policing thus becomes legalised theft."

How dare these police officers pose as rescuers and do this? The public don't know about it and Channel 4 aren't interested in telling the truth. I will do everything I can to expose these thieves and liars. I think that someone should do some Freedom of Information requests to find out how much money was Taken from these women. I am happy to interview any of the women involved if they wish to contact me.

Taken: Shafting the Sex Workers

Taken: Hunting the Sex Traffickers

On Monday there was an interesting documentary about trafficking on Channel 4 called 'Taken: Hunting the Sex Traffickers'. I don't know why the first word of the title of the documentary is 'Taken' because it is quite clear that none of the sex workers had been coerced.

They didn't explain that the internationally accepted definition of trafficking as stated in the Palermo Protocol involves coercion. According to this definition none of these women were trafficked. I am aware that British law says something different. Documentaries like this don't intend to inform the public about trafficking, just make good TV.

Women from Brazil come to Britain on tourist visas. There are three set-ups (this was news to me). The first is that there is a 50-50 split between the sex worker and the management in the money handed over by the client.

The second is that the management get £10 for every client sent to the sex worker (or is it 10%, I can't quite remember). That's for answering a phone call and directing a client to the flat. The rest of the money she keeps for herself.

The third is that the sex worker pays rent then the rest of the money she keeps for herself. Even if the money from the first three clients goes in rent she will still be making lots of money. 10 clients a day is the figure mentioned.

None of these scenarios seem like exploitation to me. A police officer said that it may seem a good deal to a Brazilian street girl to come to Britain but it is still exploitation. She's in a bad situation and this is a bit better. However, very few will be street girls.

British street girls are usually drug addicts and are not accepted in brothels. It could be different in Brazil though. It could be that they are just poor. If that's true then working in Britain could be a permanent step up for them. Many of these women will be other types of sex workers and many of them will be ordinary women wanting to save money for a special reason, which could be paying for university.

Do you not think that for an 18 year old the prospect of coming to Britain on a tourist visa and making a lot of money having sex with men is an attractive one? Yet if the police find them they deport them, then pretend they are treating them as victims.

We heard the words of 'Sylvia' who was one of these women. I don't think it said in the documentary that she was deported back to Brazil. 'Sylvia, who now lives in Brazil after being deported, has given up sex work.' it says here.

Sylvia said “I was robbed by men with knives, which was very traumatic and left me with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder." Sex workers are not allowed to work together. So whose fault is it that sex workers are robbed by violent men? The clients? Men like me? Or people who stand in the way of any change in the law which allows sex workers to work together? I'm quite prepared to believe that Sylvia suffers from PTSD. They say that sex workers often do. If that is true then it's because of robbery, rape and other violence against them. All of it easily preventable. None of it a necessary part of sex work.

Sylvia was raped by a man without a condom who then told her he had HIV. She had to go to hospital and take drugs for 28 days. This could not happen in a well-managed brothel or a Soho walk up where there are always two women in the flat.

“We can’t let vulnerable people be put into dangerous situations. These are lives being ruined. We have to stop this and the way you do that is to take out people like Mark Viner.” says Detective Inspector Peter Brown (not his real name). No. It is the law that puts vulnerable people into dangerous situations. Stop prosecuting women who work together for safety.

He also said “We all know drug dealing is a crime but a lot of trafficking takes place much more in the public eye, not just in brothels but in nail bars, car washes or the exploitation of workers in food factories,”. Does he intend to 'take out' the owners of nail bars, car washes and food factories? Why not help the workers in nail bars to work for themselves - without deporting them.

more about brothel raids

In my previous post I reviewed Emily Kenway's new book The Truth About Modern Slavery. I compared what Emily wrote about the police raid on the brothel Cuddles to what Catherine Bennett has written about it in the Guardian.

According to Catherine, the police freed 19 women who had been trapped in the brothel. According to Emily the police detained six of these women so they could deport them. So, who is doing the trapping? Who is doing the imprisoning? The police, of course, but aided by gullible or malicious journalists. The journalists stood outside the brothel as the police brought each woman out and photographed them. As can be seen in this photo the women were desperate to hide their identities and keep their privacy. This is violence against women.

this is violence against women

And they, the police and the journalists, are pretending that they are treating these women as victims. Catherine doesn't say anything about the deportations and doesn't say anything about the perp-walk.

In this post I want to compare what Catherine Bennett has written in her article with what others have written in their articles. It can be seen that Catherine went over the top to justify the raid and went much further than other journalists.

It is quite clear that Catherine wishes her readers to believe that the 19 women worked in the brothel and slept there too, never being let out. She used the word "immured" which means never let out. She wrote "What kind of person lives in a house like this?"

Yet the Guardian (in a different article), the Independent, the Irish Times and BBC News all write that they lived somewhere else apart from the brothel. The journalists were told by the police that the police think that the women were locked in a house. I don't believe that. I'm sure that the brothel and the house had sufficient security and like every house had locks, but that most probably was to keep people out not to keep people in.

Catherine writes "an electric fence stopped anyone trying to escape from the back of the building". By 'building' she means the brothel, she doesn't mention the house. None of the other journalists write this. The nearest is what the Irish Times wrote: "Detectives think the women may have been held against their will behind locked doors and an electric fence".

The Guardian said 'It was reported that the back of premises, on Hagley Road, was protected by an electric fence'.  The Independent didn't mention the electric fence.

So this is pure speculation on the part of the police. Or lies. Did they really think that or are they just trying to distract people from the reality that they are the ones holding the 19 against their will? There was no electric fence at the house where they supposedly all lived, and the electric fence at the brothel was probably to keep people out not keep people in.

Emily Kenway writes that some of the women 'asked for their passports to be kept in the safe to secure them from robberies'. All of the journalists - apart from Catherine Bennett - suggest that this is evidence that they were kept captive.

None of the women came from Romania, Moldova, Albania or Kosovo. They all came from Latvia, Poland, Japan, Hong Kong, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. None of these countries are desperately poor.

from the Cuddles raid

I have made a list of the rubbish that these newspapers have stated in their articles about the police raid on Cuddles, writing about what the police have told them about trafficked women in general.

• they are "expected to have sex with between 20 and 30 men a day" (Independent)
• they are "made to have sex with up to 40 men a day" (Guardian)
• forced to offer anal and unprotected sex at cheap rates damaging their health
• tricked into brothels when they thought they would be waitresses, au pairs or dancers
• raped, beaten and forced to work as sex slaves
• all the money they earn is taken from them
• they have to work to pay off inflated or invented debts
• told their families would be murdered if they ran away

Let's take the first two statements. There were 19 women in the brothel when it was raided. That means that there would have between 380 and 760 men turning up on the doorstep of Cuddles each day. That's like one every minute of a 12 hour shift. You can prove for yourself that that is nonsense by just waiting for an hour outside a brothel. They really do not have that many customers.

I'm not saying that none of these things have never happened. Emily gives an example of sexual exploitation in her book - that of 'Eva'. I'm saying that it is rare in Britain. It is not the reality of prostitution in Britain.

review of The Truth About Modern Slavery by Emily Kenway

I have read 'The Truth About Modern Slavery' by Emily Kenway. Her belief is that exploitation exists and we need to combat it but current methods are counterproductive. Chapter 3 is about prostitution and trafficking. It has helped me to understand why there used to be many brothels in Liverpool but few now.

She writes that the police shut down many long established brothels in the mid-2010s. She spoke to Niki Adams from the English Collective of Prostitutes.

"So loads of brothels that were long term and had really good security systems, regular clientele, were expert at dealing with troublesome clients and so on, suddenly they were bust up, so they moved to new premises and didn't feel secure, and then the police would come and make them move on."

This explains what happened with most of the Liverpool brothels, and also Sandy's Superstars in Manchester, but not why most Manchester brothels survived. The crackdown seems to have started in 2005 though.

"The 2005 raid on Cuddles 'massage parlour' in the West Midlands is regarded by sex worker activists and academics as pivotal, marking the start of a distortion in media coverage regarding sex work and a shift from tolerant to interventionist policing, all legitimised under the banner of anti-trafficking. Women found inside the brothel were marched out in front of the media, their faces exposed in the press in what has been likened to an American 'perp-walk', despite the fact that they were supposedly victims."

6 of the 19 women taken away by the police 'were detained under immigration powers and scheduled for deportation'. Catherine Bennett writing in the Guardian in 2005 doesn't mention deportations though (It's all very well condemning the sex traffickers, but what about the punters who keep the trade going?). This is what Catherine Bennett wrote:-

"In the recent raid on Cuddles, the Birmingham massage parlour where 19 women were immured, police had to use battering rams to knock down locked internal doors, windows had been boarded up, and an electric fence stopped anyone trying to escape from the back of the building. What kind of person lives in a house like this?"

The answer is nobody. Prostitutes don't live in brothels, not unless they are held captive, and I'm pretty sure this was not the case. I don't believe that there was an electric fence to stop women from escaping. Someone, perhaps Ms Bennett, invented this to try to drum up support for brothel closures. Three of the women working at Cuddles were part of the ECP.

Emily writes about police raids on Soho walk ups (in 2013 and 2016), in Newquay in Cornwall and in Redbridge in London. The media stated 'police rescue 15 women from pop-up brothels during Redbridge raids'. Emily made Freedom of Information requests and found that none of these 15 women had been referred to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM). This means the women did not consider themselves victims of trafficking. What's more, no Duty to Notify submissions were made. This means that the police did not consider them possible victims of trafficking either. She gives more examples of this happening.

These women were not prisoners in brothels and did not require rescue. Instead of being rescued many will have been detained for deportation or prosecution for brothel keeping. Not rescued from imprisonment but imprisoned.

Part of chapter 3 is her assessment of the Nordic Model. This is the final paragraph of her assessment.

"In sum, this legislative model provides no concrete evidence of combating trafficking but does provide conclusive evidence of creating vulnerabilities which may lead, at best, to more poverty, more abuse, riskier working conditions and, at worst, to severe exploitation itself."

The final paragraph of chapter 3 says this

"The 'radical feminists' and religious interests that promote models which harm women want us to think we have to take a side; against sex work entirely and therefore exploitation, or for it entirely and therefore comfortable with exploitation. This in totally untrue. In fact, we can be against exploitation and support those in sex work, recognising sex work as work and recognising trafficking for sexual exploitation as abhorrent and wrong."

Emily Kenway is a writer and activist. As a former advisor to the UK's first Anti-Slavery Commissioner she was at the heart of modern slavery action. She has written for a variety of publications including the Guardian and TLS. This book will have a place on my bookshelf alongside 'Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights' by Molly Smith and Juno Mac and 'The Sex Myth' by Dr Brooke Magnanti as essential reference works on this subject.

In Catherine Bennett's article she suggests:-

"Perhaps the language barrier explains why so few of the men who are using - effectively raping - women who have been trafficked in this way never wonder if their young, obliging Moldavian, Lithuanian and Estonian companions might not prefer to be here as au pairs, or even to be back home, instead of submitting to sexual abuse from 30 strangers a day."

I have often wondered if Eastern European sex workers would have preferred to stay at home or to do menial work. Fortunately we have their words to answer that question. I will repeat my quote from the biography of the 6th Duke of Westminster who paid for the services of many of them. None of them have 30 clients a day. This is what a reporter who was watching the Duke told the author of the biography after questioning many sex workers emerging from his flat.

"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!'"

So, I am not a rapist. But you, Catherine Bennett, do not know what you are talking about. There are good journalists, investigative journalists like Nick Davies, but you are not one of them.

behind the veil of vice

I am reading Behind the Veil of Vice by John R Bradley which is filling in a lot of the detail about what Evangelical Americans are doing in developing countries.

"The opponents of sex traffickers are an unlikely alliance of evangelical Christian and salvationist feminist groups. Their cause was given a huge boost, both in terms of publicity and funding, by George W. Bush, at the expense of funding for groups fighting AIDS, combating poverty, and promoting women's autonomy. This was in 2003, the year that the Iraq invasion was launched. One of the biggest beneficiaries of these faith-based initiatives, receiving tens of millions of dollars, is the International Justice Mission, a militant evangelical outfit that employs hundreds of Christian lawyers and moral cops, and even advocates vigilante raids on brothels. This and other evangelical groups are drawn into a mutual embrace with the salvationist feminist organizations, despite their ideological differences, because they believe that it is primarily prostitution that creates human trafficking, so banning prostitution will largely put an end to it." page 31

If you look on the Wikipedia page for the International Justice Mission it is quite disturbing. They instigated raids on nightclubs and brothels in Thailand which resulted in Burmese women being deported. 'About half the group subsequently escaped; some apparently feared deportation to Burma.' It seems many were from the Shan ethnic minority who faced persecution from government forces in Burma.

When Thai organization Empower raised questions about a televised brothel raid, Empower staff say International Justice Mission accused them of supporting pimps.

In Cambodia they invited an American TV show to film a brothel raid. At least 12 of the detained women escaped from the 'safe house' they had been taken to. A number returned to the brothel.

In the Philippines a number of the women housed in a government-run facility following rescue missions escaped.

Google donated $9.8 million to them. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated $5 million. To combat trafficking, which they want people to understand means coercion of women and underage girls.

In 2016, Holly Burkhalter, IJM's senior advisor for Justice System Transformation, said that within 10 years of working with the government in Cambodia, less than 1 percent of victims of sex trafficking were minors.

Another thing that I learned from Bradley's book is that there is little evidence that trafficking exists on any scale. He mentions the Nick Davies 2009 Guardian article 'Inquiry Fails to Find Single Trafficker Who Forced Anybody Into Prostitution'. I knew about this and commented on it in this blog.

What I didn't know was that there was another important piece of investigative journalism, the Jerry Markon 2007 Washington Post article 'Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence'.

It says that in 2000 Congress passed a law, triggering a little-noticed worldwide war on human trafficking that began at the end of the Clinton administration and became a top Bush administration priority.

"He [Tony Fratto, deputy White House press secretary] said that the president's passion about fighting trafficking is motivated in part by his Christian faith and his outrage at the crime. 'It's a practice that he obviously finds disgusting, as most rational people would, and he wants America to be the leader in ending it,' Fratto said. 'He sees it as a moral obligation.'"

"Feminist groups and other organizations also seized on trafficking, and a 1999 meeting at the Capitol, organized by former Nixon White House aide Charles W. Colson, helped seal a coalition. The session in the office of then-House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) brought together the Southern Baptist Convention, conservative William Bennett and Rabbi David Saperstein, a prominent Reform Jewish activist."

"Bipartisan passion melted any uncertainty, and in October 2000, Congress enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, significantly broadening the federal definition of trafficking. Prosecutors would no longer have to rely on statutes that required them to prove a victim had been subjected to physical violence or restraints, such as chains. Now, a federal case could be made if a trafficker had psychologically abused a victim.

The measure toughened penalties against traffickers, provided extensive services for victims and committed the United States to a leading role internationally, requiring the State Department to rank countries and impose sanctions if their anti-trafficking efforts fell short."

'Anti-trafficking' means 'anti-prostitution'. If America wants to help developing countries they should give them money for development. America should not sanction countries that don't cooperate in their futile effort to stop sin. There are more important things, such as fighting AIDS. That's especially true of Cambodia, who America practiced terrorism against from 1970 to 1973 and wrecked their country.*

What is it with these Christians like George W Bush? They talk about weapons of mass destruction and trafficking as an excuse to harm people in other countries. They want everyone to believe that most sex workers are coerced and many are underage. Then they have their excuse to stop sin. They can't stop most promiscuity but they can try and stop men like me from fornicating. It doesn't even work, it just harms sex workers.

Bradley went to Damascus and tried to find underage prostitutes. He couldn't find any. Nobody else could either.

"A nun from the local Good Shepherd Convent claimed that girls under her care had "suddenly disappeared" - most likely "taken out of school, she believes, to earn for their families." There is a dark hint here, but again no clarification is subsequently offered in relation to what the nun was specifically referring to. Perhaps the girls just could not bear to stay another day in the Good Shepherd Nunnery, and had instead decided to sell ducks and chickens with their mothers in the local market? At least there they might get to flirt with the local boys without provoking a lecture on sin from the mother superior." page 35

Or, it could be that the parents of these girls did some research and found out that the Good Shepherd Sisters ran Magdalene laundries in Ireland. Perhaps they watched the film The Magdalene Sisters and it made them think (in the film three girls run away from a Magdalene laundry after being abused by nuns). The nuns see wickedness everywhere but they can't recognize their own wickedness.

Bradley talked to sex workers in different Moslem countries. 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.

They had not been trafficked against their will. '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).' page 175

Evangelicals, Catholic nuns, Radical Feminists and Communists should think about that when they advocate sanctions on poor countries or prohibition. These women don't want or need to be rescued. Not unless they have been captured and interned in a 'safe house'. Then they need rescuing from the prohibitionists.

another false statistic

"90 percent of Irish women in prostitution want to exit trade but lack resources."

"Report finds 90% of sex workers want to leave trade but resources are not there to help them."

I came across this statistic on the Feminist Current site. On this page is a link to an article in The Irish Examiner. The article is about a review done of the effects of the Nordic model in Ireland by Dr Geoffrey Shannon 'The Implementation of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2017, Part IV – An Interim Review'. In the report it states "According to Ruhama approximately 90% of women want to exit at some point but have a perception that there are not any viable alternatives for them". Dr Shannon just blindly believed Ruhama without bothering to check. This is the complete paragraph:-

"Civic society organisations are critical of the insufficient resources provided by the Irish State for comprehensive exit supports for women affected by prostitution and sex trafficking. According to Ruhama approximately 90% of women want to exit at some point but have a perception that there are not any viable alternatives for them."

The point of this paragraph is to say the Nordic model in Ireland isn't working, sex workers aren't getting help to exit. He thinks that 90% of women - he doesn't say Irish women - want to exit. That is not correct, but his point is that a lot of women are in dire straits. Why aren't the Radical Feminists reporting on this, instead of the false statistic, which they have made more false by saying that it applies to Irish women?

You can't try to take away the customers of sex workers while still arresting them for working together and not giving them help to exit. It has always been said by proponents of the Nordic model that help to exit is a vital aspect of it, it won't work without it.

This is what Ruhama have published on this page.

"The only ones who meaningfully benefit are those organizing, pimping, procuring, trafficking and buying prostitutes. There is always someone who wants to profit of the bodies of those in prostitution and it is a rare event to have anyone truly "independent" in the Irish sex trade. International studies consistently show that 90% of those prostituted want to exit. It is this 90% who should be attended to through recognition by society and the state that prostitution is not a harm free enterprise but one that is inherently dangerous and connected to organized crime. Trafficking for sexual exploitation is intrinsically linked to organized prostitution – they cannot be separated as one will not exist without the other."

The 90% statistic comes from the research done by Melissa Farley 'Prostitution and Trafficking in 9 Countries'. None of these 9 countries was Ireland. So the statistic that begins with '90 percent of Irish women' does not refer to Irish women at all. The report by Dr Shannon did not find that 90 percent of Irish sex workers want to exit. Dr Shannon copied a false statistic from Ruhama (not 'found' as in independent research). It doesn't apply to Ireland.

Melissa Farley is known for working with drug addicted street prostitutes and then pretending that it applies to all sex workers. When Ruhama say that 'international studies consistently show' this statistic, they are referring to this one study by Melissa Farley.

If you look at the Farley study, you can see a table which gives the results of questions put to sex workers.

699 as a proportion of 854 is not 89%. It is 82%. I don't know what's going on here. Later in the study she writes that 89% of 785 sex workers want to exit. I have no idea where the 785 figure comes from, the total number of women in the study is 854. The 785 figure isn't mentioned anywhere else in the study.

The countries chosen are an odd mixture of affluent and poor countries. In the three affluent countries (USA, Canada, Germany) between 70% and 95% of the sex workers used drugs: "Canada, USA, and Germany reported the highest rates of drug use (70% to 95%)". I don't believe that this can be true, that the proportion of sex workers who take drugs in North America and Europe is as high as this. Farley obviously has made no attempt to find a representative sample of sex workers. In the six poor countries less than half were drug takers.

"The German women were from a drop-in shelter for drug addicted women, from a program which offered vocational rehabilitation for those prostituted, and were also referred by peers, and by advertisement in a local newspaper." Not surprising they didn't get a representative sample.

Sex workers who take drugs lead very traumatic lives, as do sex workers in poor countries without social security where levels of criminality tend to be higher. This tells us nothing about the majority of sex workers in Britain and Ireland. When making laws in Britain we should consider the welfare of the majority of sex workers in Britain.

They are not drug addicts, aren't forced into it by pimps or traffickers, and don't want to exit. I'm sure the majority don't intend to do it for the whole of the rest of their lives, but that will be true of waitresses too. 

30% of the funding for one of her studies came from the US Department of State. Is this the same State Department that caused so many problems for Cambodian women that I wrote about in my previous post?

Some people blindly believe what Farley says. Farley says "we calculated the average length of time in prostitution to be 9 years across countries". That sounds about right to me. If you feed that figure into the statistics in the report ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ by Ulla Bjørndahl it is certain that violence against sex workers increased substantially in all categories in Norway since the Nordic model was introduced there.

prostitution in developing nations

I know about prostitution in Britain through experience and research. I know about it in Ireland too through research. I don't know much about prostitution in developing nations. I always assumed that there must be coercion of some sort going on there because you see that in other types of work such as factory work.

I have read two books recently, one about Vietnam and the other partly about Cambodia. The first says that during the Vietnam war sex workers 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.

The second book says that about 10 years ago the American State Department was 'pressuring the Cambodian government to take a stand against sex work or else lose aid from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)'.

"What happened once the sex workers rounded up in brothel raids were unloaded from the trucks and moved to the so-called rehabilitation centres? They were illegally detained for months at a time without charges, as were others who worked in public parks and had been chased, beaten, and dragged into vans by police. The Cambodian human rights organization LICADHO captured chilling photographs of sex workers caught in sweeps locked together in a cage - thirty or forty people in one cell. Sex workers who had been detained reported being beaten and sexually assaulted by guards in interviews with LICADHO, Women's Network for Unity, and Human Rights Watch. Some living with HIV, who had been illegally held in facilities described by the local NGOs that ran them as "shelters," were denied access to antiretroviral medication. In one facility sex workers were "only able to leave their rooms to bathe twice a day in dirty pond water," Human Rights Watch reported, "or, accompanied by a guard, to go to the toilet.""

The American State Department then upgraded Cambodia's compliance ranking. In Brazil it was a different story: "The groups had been strong-armed by the US into signing loyalty oaths declaring their opposition to prostitution in order to keep their AIDS funds. Rather than sell out sex workers, the entire country of Brazil refused to sign the pledge and gave up $40 million."

The book says about Cambodian women that 'many have also worked in garment factories, and left the factories due to low wages to move into sex work'. So, again, we see that sex workers earn more than other workers. And yet the people who want to 'rescue' sex workers say they want to teach them how to operate sewing machines. Women don't do sex work to avoid starving, they do factory work to avoid starving and when they are fed up scrimping they turn to sex work. As we saw with the biography of the Duke of Westminster, the choice is to stay in your home town and be unemployed, move to a city and work for little money, or become a sex worker and have a better lifestyle.

Who are these influential Americans who are harming women in developing countries? It can only be the Evangelicals and their Radical Feminist supporters. I'm sure they, and especially the Radical Feminists, would say that they never wanted women to be locked up. They would say they support the Nordic model where prostitutes are decriminalized. But in every Nordic model country women who work together are arrested and sex workers get evicted from their homes. When Amnesty International exposed this abuse and hypocrisy they were demonized. It was said that Amnesty International works in the interests of pimps and traffickers, whereas (as I wrote in my last post) they are expressing the views of many (non-Radical) feminists.

Sex workers know what they need to escape from and how to do it. They don't need Evangelicals and Radical Feminists trying to stop fornication/objectification. There is coercion but not so much from pimps and traffickers, more from the police, the State, and neocolonialist America. It's not as if the people of Cambodia haven't suffered enough from the Americans*. It's only going to increase pimping and trafficking.

The first book is Vietnam by Max Hastings. The second book is Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant. If there are any Vietnamese former sex workers who left in 1975 reading this I would like to hear from them. I'm sure they have an interesting story to tell.

This is an interesting article about Cambodia. There is a book called Sex, Love and Money in Cambodia by Heidi Hoefinger. Everything You Think You Know About Cambodian Sex Workers Is Wrong

https://www.hrw.org/report/2010/07/19/streets/arbitrary-detention-and-other-abuses-against-sex-workers-cambodia

According to this site: "Empower Foundation, the sex worker organisation in Thailand, was represented by Liz Hilton who reported that wages in other industries that commonly employ women, such as agriculture, fisheries and factories, were so low that even the lowest paid sex workers were earning twice the minimum wage."

There are two things that could change the face of prostitution in Britain. One of them is the anti-HIV drug called PrEP, and the other is Brexit.

Lots of gay men take PrEP. It can be bought over the internet but they can also get it for free if they join an impact trial. It's not really a trial, they just keep an eye on you at the Sexual Health clinic and test your kidney function etc. They do regular HIV and other STD checks. It's not just for gay men, anyone can go on it. For someone like me who has had unprotected sex with sex workers recently it's good and it would be good for sex workers too.

I found out about it just a couple of months ago and now I'm on it. It's not for people who have HIV, it's for people who want to avoid contracting it. It's effective if taken properly. I'm one of the few heterosexual people on the impact trial, and they're happy to have more straight men. The trials will end this year but the doctor said she'll still give it to me. People will still be able to go on it.

As I said I gave up seeing sex workers over the winter. Now it's spring I've been thinking who to see. Number one on my list is my African lady in Manchester. I have seen her several times and shagged her without a condom. I've had a couple of HIV tests since so I know I haven't got it.

However, it seems that she has chosen this springtime to go on holiday. I look at the twitter page of this brothel and it says who is there next day. There is nearly always a choice of three women. She's not been there for a couple of weeks now but this is what happens. So I expect she'll be back. I'll be ready for her. I don't want to make the trip to Manchester if it's not sunny and dry which is one reason why I tend not to go in winter. It's a nice day out.

I'm old enough to remember that in Soho before Aids they would say "£10 for sex with condom, £15 without". If PrEP becomes commonly used, is it possible that we might go back to that? I doubt it, there are other STDs apart from HIV and condoms make it so much nicer for sex workers.

I can imagine though that some enterprising young lady could be a bit imaginative and offer a wider range of services, for a price. She could offer sex with an ultra-thin condom. They're just as safe, but instead of the customer bringing his own, she would have a range of different brands available. That way she could be sure they aren't old or have been tampered with. She could offer to use a female condom which she would insert before sex.

She could take PrEP every day and offer unprotected sex, perhaps only with a regular customer she likes. There could be a PrEP club, where unprotected sex is available on the understanding that both the sex worker and her clients are taking it every day.

I stopped taking it every day when I realized that my African lady isn't there at the moment. But now I've started again because I've heard that anti-viral drugs like PrEP are being tested to see if they can stop people getting coronavirus. There are two ways to take it: either just take one tablet a day, or only take it befor and after you know you're going to have unprotected sex according to instructions.

Brothels are closing because of coronavirus (COVID-19). Overpool Angels is now shut.

Number two on my list of desirable ladies is the young oriental woman called Sara who I have mentioned in previous posts. She's not always working in Chester but she was recently. I texted her and asked her if I could use an ultra-thin condom and she replied yes. On her page on Vivastreet she said she would be there until Monday the ninth of March. However, when I texted her on Monday she said that she'd left Chester.

I was hoping to put a link to her Vivastreet page here for you but it seems to not function now. That's a pity because there were photos of her and a video of her doing a sexy little dance. I can put a screenshot of the page here though.

My third choice would be Eva the Spanish girl at Overpool Angels. I'm not sure she's there this year though, especially considering we've left the EU. They can't just get on a coach and turn up at Victoria coach station anymore. Having said that though, girls like Sara from Asia don't seem to have that much of a problem.

I was told by a Brazilian woman that often they say they are Italian to get to EU countries. Many Brazilians have Italian ancestry and that gives them permission to come here.

Since Eastern European countries joined the EU there have been large numbers of women coming to Britain to work as prostitutes. In some places they outnumber British women. It could be that British women are reluctant to compete against them on price. Could it be that in the future there will be fewer sex workers in Britain and the price for sexual services will be higher? That's a possibility.

local girls

I have said before that most men would want a sex worker who is young, tall, slender and pretty. I have found a couple of those locally in the last couple of months. Eva is Spanish and works at Overpool Angels in Overpool. Lily is English and works at The Office in Ellesmere Port. Both are a short walk from the Merseyrail stations, just one stop apart. I have seen Eva three times and Lily four times. Both have let me use my ultra thin condoms.

The combination of viagra and ultra thin condoms means that I can get and keep an erection easily and orgasm. I gave Eva £45 each time and Lily £50. I could have paid just £40 to see Lily but I gave her an extra £10 for oral sex without a condom. That's for half an hour. Much better value than Blackpool and about the same as Manchester.

I went to an older woman's house in Chester (Jackie) after I saw her ad in a local paper. She was nice and I was sure I would see her again but that was before I met Eva and Lily.

I saw Lily again on Tuesday this week. I had to wait to see her so I sat with the older woman, who I fancy. She had an American drama on the TV and she was also playing a game on her tablet. She asked me to help with the general knowledge. I tried flirting with her, reminding her of what we did together, but she made it clear that she didn't 'work the room' anymore. There were several phone calls and a man came to the door.

Lily is getting a bit picky now that she's becoming popular. She doesn't really like men coming inside her, she prefers it if they come on her tits. She let me use one of my condoms to begin with but then said could we change to a regular one. Then she said she wanted me to come on her tits. We tried, but it didn't work.

I left without having had an orgasm but I went one stop along to Overpool Angels. A woman opened the door. Eva wasn't there. I told her I wasn't going to hand over my money until I saw the sex worker, so that I could see if I fancied her. I sat on a corner of the bed and in walked another woman who I recognised as the 'maid' from previous visits. She's older, but I really fancied her.

It's funny that in February this year I went to Sheridans in Salford for the first time. I walked out because they tried to give me a much older woman. Most men who were expecting to see a young, tall, slender and pretty girl in her 20s like Eva would have walked out - if they hadn't paid already. I thought I would have a nice time with this older woman and I was right. I said I would have her if she let me use one of my ultra thin condoms like Eva does. She said fine, a condom's a condom.

She said her name's Amber. I think she's mixed race, she said she's naturally brown. She's quite small, with a small pretty face. I enjoyed shagging her, even more that Eva, and to judge from the look on her face she enjoyed it too. I orgasmed inside her. Afterwards she told me she had to fill in for Eva at short notice. Eva had remembered she had an appointment. I learned several interesting things from Amber talking to her afterwards.

She told me the reason why I had never been offered the bigger room with the four-poster bed when I'd come to see Eva. They keep it for other clients, but I won't go into the details. I asked her about young Italian Roberta, who I had shagged on the four-poster in June. Amber said that they had gone together on holiday to Mexico but Roberta didn't want to continue sex work.

Roberta told Amber that she was annoyed that none of the men came to see her again. She had been expecting that she would have regular clients, who would see her and no one else. That didn't happen, even though she gave them more than the minimum. I had hoped to see Roberta again but she wasn't there, so I saw Eva.

I guess my favourite age for a sex worker is about 40. I'm happy to go younger or older if I find them attractive. I can find a woman attractive even when she's not conventionally attractive. A smile or a laugh can be as important as a pretty face.

I'm giving up paying for sex for this winter. It's not as much fun in winter. I might start again in the spring. I'm trying to restrict my spending for a while. When my finances improve, I'm sure that I will continue: I can't think of any better way of spending £50 than having half an hour with an attractive woman.

You have to go round to the back of this row of shops. Look for the open gate with the number 30A. Go up the stairs to heaven with the angels. The two windows lit up above Bespoke Care Cheshire Ltd is where the room with the four poster bed is.

review of Paid For part 3

There are several different aspects to this book. One aspect, her own personal experiences, is very interesting. Another aspect, her comments on her experiences, is not interesting. For example, in Chapter 10 she says that she met 'advantaged middle-class women' who were prostitutes. That is interesting, because it contradicts what the 'abolitionists' say. When Moran comments that these women must all have something wrong with them, probably child abuse, that is not interesting, because that's just her opinion.

"They were privileged. They were educated, only to second level usually but even so, I am talking about well-to-do fee-paying private schools. They seemed to have had other viable choices open to them; they could have gone to university, they could have gone to work in daddy's business, but yet here they were in this awful place doing something they clearly hated and that obviously made them miserable." Chapter 10 page 96.

Moran wrote in the same chapter that she knew one woman who managed to save ten thousand pounds. This woman would have been even better off if she hadn't spent so much money on overheads - rent, advertising, mobile phone, taxis, clothes and shoes. Moran criticised her for this: "The whole idea was supposed to be about making a half-decent living, I'd say to her, for God's sake" page 92.

The ex-preacher Gavin Shuker (now an MP but not for much longer I hope) said this in a debate about prostitution in the House of Commons: "There is undoubtedly a huge supply of money, estimated by some to be £5 billion or £6 billion of our economy, but that money is not finding its way into the pockets of women who are exploited through this trade; it ends up in the pockets of pimps, exploiters and those who benefit from trafficking."

In the debate Moran's book was mentioned three times. It's almost as if they haven't read it. She wrote that the reason she and others became prostitutes was 'the opportunity to put roofs over our heads and food in our mouths' page 73. She didn't hand over her money to 'pimps, exploiters and those who benefit from trafficking'. So her experiences contradict what Shuker and other abolitionists say.

This leads us on to the question of is it a good idea to remove the opportunity for women to put roofs over their heads and food in their mouths. This is a question that has been answered by Molly Smith and Juno Mac in their excellent book 'Revolting Prostitutes'. On page 150 they write this:-

"One anti-prostitution organization, the Women's Support Project, write in support of the Nordic model: 'If men were not prepared to buy sex, then prostitution would not work as a survival behaviour.' When you enact a policy that makes a survival strategy 'not work' any more, some of the people using it to attempt to survive may no longer survive."

I don't believe that all women who become prostitutes do so because they would otherwise be homeless or starve. Many will survive by low-paid work and then they turn to prostitution when they want something better than survival. We can all agree that there should be social security so that nobody remains homeless or hungry.

If you really believed that prostitution exists because of destitution, then you would campaign to eliminate destitution. Prostitution would disappear, together with destitution, without the need to put men and women in prison or fine them. Without taking away anyone's rights. Without removing that safety net that should still be there while society works to achieve the goal of removing destitution, which is a worthwhile goal in itself. They don't campaign for that though.

Another important question that Molly Smith and Juno Mac answer in their book is about how some laws can make prostitution more dangerous for women. It is important for sex workers to be able to screen potential clients. Street sex workers could do this but the 1993 law in Ireland and the 1999 law in Sweden made this much more difficult. On page 144 they write this:-

"Everywhere in the world, regardless of the legal model, street-based sex workers use a familiar range of safety strategies. For example, they might work together with a couple of friends, they might take time to assess a client before getting into his car, and they might have a friend write down his car's number plate to signal to him that someone will know who she's with."

A woman who is was a street-based sex worker (as Moran was) either had to give up working on the street and work indoors (as Moran mostly did) or continue under more difficult circumstances. In either case she can no longer screen her clients in the way she used to. Moran said this was a big problem with the 1993 Irish law. Smith and Mac say this was a big problem with the 1999 Swedish law. Yet Moran and others successfully campaigned for the Swedish law to be enacted in Ireland. This happened in 2017, and according to newspaper reports it seems to have been a complete disaster.

A major theme of this book is trauma. She writes that she was traumatised by having to have sex for money. People don't usually do things that traumatise them a second time. You might think that she was forced to do it because she had no other way of making money. However, she seemed to have quite a few different ways of making money. I'm not talking about her early attempts at erotic dancing and erotic photography. I'm talking about her drug dealing and her pimping.

"I had progressed to snorting cocaine at that point and would procure it for certain punters, making a mark-up on it, so that I was profiting from the drug transaction as well as whatever bizarre fantasies I was helping these men indulge." Chapter 9 page 87.

"I rented an apartment in Terenure for a short time and opened an escort agency of my own. I was seventeen at the time and I'm quite sure I was the youngest person advertising an escort agency in Ireland. It was a very simple thing to do and only required an apartment, a mobile phone and an advertisement in the back of In Dublin magazine, but when I had to deal with the reality of the ridiculous overheads, I soon got rid of the apartment and advertised for call-outs only. I worked mainly in the brothels and escort agencies of others from then on and did my own call-outs to homes and hotels. If I'd get a request for a call-in on my agency line I'd use a bedroom in the brothel of one of the women I was associating with at that time. I'd pay them a fee for the use of the room, which was common practice. I'd made money that way when I had my own apartment." Chapter 10 page 93.

As someone who has spent years on Job Seeker’s Allowance I'm not very sympathetic to people who sell drugs or pimp and who justify it by saying they needed the money. I never did that, I lived within my means on benefits. Many people in Ireland travelled to England and worked night shifts in factories. So to say she had no other option is far from the truth.

She wrote that she never had the opportunity to do an ordinary job, such as working in a bank. She wrote that she didn't feel worthy of that type of work. Well I would never have been allowed to work in a bank. You don't have to feel worthy to live on the dole or work in a factory.

Many women and men become full-time drug dealers or pimps. If she hated 'paid intercourse' so much why did she not do one or both of these? She said she didn't want to deal with the reality of the ridiculous overheads. Is she saying that prostitutes keep more money than pimps? She was 17 and hadn't yet developed her cocaine addiction. I'm not saying that women should do anything apart from prostitution, but if you are really traumatised by it then it's odd you should continue because of something about overheads.

Not once in this book does she express regret about the harm she did when she sold drugs or pimped. She does express regret about having been a prostitute. I don't expect anyone to feel guilty about being a prostitute, but I do expect people to feel guilty about dealing or pimping. Especially when pimps (and men like me) are demonized by people like her.

I have said that there are several different aspects to this book. One of them is her own personal experience. Another is her comments about her experiences. A third aspect is the quotations from Ruhama and others which begin each chapter and which I commented on in the first part of my review of this book.

There is a fourth aspect, and this is where she writes about some of her experiences but in a very vague and ambiguous way. It is clear what she intends us to believe, but it is not clear if there is evidence to back that interpretation. Consider this:-

"What was going on was the very same thing that was going on when I was lifting my skirt in a backstreet alley. The nature of prostitution does not change with its surroundings. It does not morph into something else because your arse is rubbing up against white linen as opposed to roughened concrete." Chapter 10 page 100.

She said that she only did handjobs and oral sex up till 1993. Then, after a change in the law, she had to start working indoors. She went back onto the streets sometimes though. One can only assume this was because on the streets she didn't have to do the 'paid intercourse' that she disliked so much and only did 'sporadically'. So why is she writing about her arse rubbing up against roughened concrete? How would she know what street girls do?

My understanding is that street girls don't wear skirts. They wear jeans, and they pull them down a bit and bend forward so they can be taken from behind. So they don't experience their arses rubbing up against concrete, either that of paving or a wall. But then again, maybe they did it differently in Ireland in the 1990s. Why doesn't she make clear what the facts are?

Another thing that is odd is that for the first two years men accepted that she didn't want to do vaginal or anal sex. Later they accepted that she didn't want to do anal sex. Yet they didn't accept that she didn't want to be penetrated with fingers or objects both vaginally and anally. She says that men didn't accept the limits of the 'agreed contractual exchange'.

My own experience of prostitution is that few women allow digital penetration. It is not usual for a prostitute to say beforehand that she doesn't allow it. If I ask for it she will most likely say no, or sometimes she will say she charges extra for that. Occasionally she will let it happen without additional payment. I have never forced anything upon a woman.

If Moran had written "I told him to stop but he wouldn't listen" or "I told him he would have to pay extra for that but he went ahead anyway" then we would be clear about what happened. That would be sexual assault or rape. But she doesn't write that.

In Chapter 23 on page 252 Moran writes this:-

"A 2005 Ruhama research report on barriers affecting women in prostitution states: 'Studies in Ireland have found that 38% of women involved in prostitution have attempted suicide and 25% suffered from diagnosed depression and were in receipt of medical treatment'. It is my personal conviction that the twenty-five percent of prostitutes recorded as having depression in Ireland is a significant underestimate of the true figure and that many prostitutes have not been diagnosed simply because they have not presented their symptoms to a doctor."

If you look for this Ruhama report it does indeed say this:-

"There are also high levels of stress related illnesses. Studies in Ireland have found that 38% of women involved in prostitution have attempted suicide and 25% have suffered from diagnosed depression (O’Connor, 1994)."

The Ruhama report is Factors affecting prostitution – Damage and survival mechanisms. In the references section they give the full title of the work they say they derive these statistics from: O’Connor, A. M. (1994) Health Needs of Women Working in Prostitution in the Republic of Ireland, First Report for EUROPAP, Dublin: Eastern Health Board.

However, the O'Connor 1994 document says nothing about either suicide or depression. What's going on? There is another document, written by O'Connor and somebody else that does contain these statistics. It is O’ Neill, M. and O Connor, A.M. (1999) Drug Using Women Working in Prostitution, Report prepared by the Women’s Health Project, Dublin: Eastern Health Board.

Now that we know the correct title of the document we can tell immediately that it is not about prostitutes in general in Ireland, but about prostitutes who are drug addicts in Dublin. As the study itself says "Numerous studies have highlighted the fact that women working in prostitution who are drug users, particularly intravenous drug users (IDUs), appear to be a different population from those who are non-IDUs." The number of drug addicted prostitutes is a fraction of the total number of prostitutes.

The study was of 77 women. All were drug users. 95% were working on the streets. 45% were homeless. Between 11% and 28% had HIV. 52% had been charged with soliciting. This had resulted in 20% of those women being imprisoned and 12% fined. 29 of the 77 (38%) reported having attempted suicide. 19 of the 77 (25%) suffered from diagnosed depression and had received treatment.

"Living with drugs causes considerable strains. A woman drug user who is also a mother faces specific problems organising her drug-related needs around her commitments as a parent, especially where young children are involved. Another dimension to the drugs issue for women is dealing with the reality of prison sentences for themselves, their partners, their siblings or their adult children. Prison sentences for drug related offences severely cut across family networks and reduce still further levels of support for women." O’ Neill, M. and O Connor, A.M. (1999)

Their problems were numerous: addiction, homelessness, imprisonment, fines, and risk of HIV as well as street prostitution. We know that drugs can increase depression, and people with depression may be more vulnerable to addiction. So to say that a quarter of prostitutes are so unhappy in prostitution that they suffer from depression and that even more attempt suicide is simply wrong. It is a deliberate distortion of research. They have hidden the facts.

What they are doing is using research that applies only to drug addicted street prostitutes and pretending that it applies to all prostitutes. They have used this tactic time and time again. It is dishonest. Another tactic they use is to bury information. Instead of referring us directly to the research which is the source of the statistic, they refer instead to a document that refers to it. Or a document that refers to another document that refers to the research.

So if someone tells you that the number of active sex buyers in Sweden is the lowest in Europe, or that there is no evidence that criminalizing men increases the risk to women, you should remember that you have to trace the evidence back to the original study. They know that most people, no matter how much they say they care, can't be bothered to do that.

The O'Connor 1994 study is interesting, resulting from interviews with 18 street-based sex workers after the introduction of the 1993 law. It says twice that they are not a representative sample of sex workers in Ireland.

"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)

We know that at least one woman was leeching onto the women and that was Rachel Moran. It seems that sex workers don't hate people like me, they hate people like her. I think that O'Connor and O'Neill did good work interviewing street-based sex workers. Their data should have been used to improve the lives of the most vulnerable women. Instead it has been abused by Moran (former pimp) and Ruhama (The Church) to bring in legislation that harms the most vulnerable women. She exploited them then and she's exploiting them now.

The only time Moran mentions decriminalisation is when she writes about the Nordic model decriminalising the sale of sex. It doesn't. Prostitutes go to jail under the Nordic model. There is no mention of New Zealand where prostitutes are genuinely decriminalised: they do not go to jail. She is not presenting both sides of the argument. She does not mention the difference between legalisation and decriminalisation.

There is the issue of why do sex workers get paid so much. At the end of Chapter 19 page 204 she writes this: "Their higher pay does not reflect gender parity; it reflects the difficulty involved in earning it". In a way she's right.

Incidentally, on this page she uses her most florid language. Phrases such as 'the decision to sell the flesh on one's bones' and 'to bear the burden of its corruption on their bodies' may go down well with the abolitionist audience and especially the Christians but to me they are laughable.

If you go to Manchester the going rate for half an hour with a sex worker is £35 to £40. If you go to Liverpool it is £70. In Liverpool the going rate for a straight massage with nothing sexual is £25 to £30 for a half hour. The reason why Liverpool sex workers demand more than Manchester sex workers is not because they hate what they are doing more but because the police have a different attitude. In Liverpool women find it more difficult to work and keep themselves safe. It is the police who create the difficulty not the punters.

Note that she doesn't say that the money goes to pimps and traffickers and not to the women.

In the epilogue on page 293 Moran writes that "Prostitution first fell sharply in one place and one place only. That is in the nation which suppressed demand. A global implementation of Sweden's laws, which criminalise demand, is the one thing I'd most like to see before I die." This repeats her statement that "prostitution in Sweden has plummeted" in Chapter 20 page 215. Although there has been an effect on street prostitution, none of the reports from Sweden show an overall reduction in demand. I have devoted a page to this issue, and I have devoted a post to the disaster that is happening now that the Nordic model has come to Ireland, with women being jailed not decriminalised. This dishonest book helped to bring this situation about.

In Chapter 21 page 233 she writes about 'pro-prostitution groups' who march in Gay Pride Festivals around the world. She writes that the gay community is being used and 'the pro-prostitution lobby is trying to pull a fast one here'.

By pro-prostitution groups/advocates/lobby she means people who believe in genuine decriminalisation for sex workers, as happens in New Zealand. They are not 'pro-prostitution', they just don't want sex workers to be arrested for working together for safety. It is the 'abolitionists' who are trying to pull a fast one by pretending that they don't want 'prostituted' women to be arrested. Ruhama is now pretending that they never intended this to happen in Ireland even though this issue was discussed before 2017.

Abolitionists are a threat to gay men and lesbian women. They are a threat to transsexual people. Jim Wells, the Northern Ireland DUP politician, is a Christian. He is a Creationist who has got into trouble with his views on abortion and gay rights.

He was instrumental in getting the Nordic model adopted in Northern Ireland, where the first man to be arrested was arrested along with three women. He used a false statistic to do that. He said in the Northern Ireland Assembly that 127 prostitutes were murdered in the Netherlands after legalisation there.

Rachel Moran repeated this false statistic on radio. Julie Bindel and Kat Banyard quote 'Mr Wells' in their recent books. Banyard uses his false statistic.

So it's not surprising that sex workers and people who genuinely believe in their decriminalisation are welcome at Gay Pride Festivals. Obviously they aren't a sexual minority, but then neither are transsexuals who are also welcome and also threatened by people like 'Mr Wells'. Third-wave sex-positive feminists belong here too.

If the abolitionists don't like it then they can have their own parade. What would that look like? They could have Jim Wells to lead it, but then maybe they would keep him out of sight because you don't want to let the mask slip. But you could have another evangelical like Ian Paisley junior or Gavin Shuker. Ian Paisley junior has said "We don't like poofs" and was Chair in a debate where Gavin Shuker and Fiona Bruce spoke in favour of the Nordic model.

Or MP Fiona Bruce from the Evangelical Alliance. She is trying to get the Nordic model adopted in Britain. She voted against gay marriage and wants to restrict abortion. The nuns of Ruhama would be there, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity and the Good Shepherd Sisters could each have their own floats. It might seem odd that Evangelicals, Catholics and Radical Feminist lesbians can work together but one thing unites them: they don't like men and women having casual sex.

Radical Feminists like Julie Bindel and Kat Banyard would be there. There could be a guest speaker from America, a social conservative who could talk about incarceration of men and women: after all the American model is the same as the Nordic model just without the hypocrisy. Another guest could be an African preacher or politician, one of the ones who put gay men and lesbian women in prison. Maybe someone from the Taliban?

Pride of place would be the survivors. Women like Rachel Moran and Anna, who we are all supposed to be listening to, despite the fact that they tell different stories. Anna's book 'Slave' makes 'Paid For' look like 'Belle de Jour'. Dr Brooke Magnanti wouldn't be invited because she doesn't count as a survivor. Also she's an expert in statistics so she might upset the nuns.

The biggest problem with this book is that the main message is women go into prostitution to avoid poverty. This is different from the 'abolitionist' message and Anna's book which says it is all about violent pimps or traffickers. Also, Moran contradicts her own message when she writes about the 'advantaged middle-class women' that she knew.

A big problem for her message is that if you say that women do it to avoid poverty then you are open to the criticism that most people work to avoid poverty. If your answer to that is saying that you feel offended by someone saying that sex work might have some similarity to working in a factory (even though she compared sex workers to bank robbers) and something about someone putting his penis up your anus (even though no-one put his penis up her anus) it's not convincing.

I found these on a Radical Feminist site