Julie Bindel's new book

Julie Bindel was on Woman's Hour today talking about her new book. Nice free publicity for her although I don't expect it will do her any more good than with her last book.

She stated that women need to reclaim feminism because of the influence of men. Men are taking leadership roles in feminist groups and that's why some women have started believing things that she doesn't agree with. The idea that prostitution shouldn't be banned, for example.

That's ridiculous though because the books that have influenced me the most are by women authors. Molly Smith, Juno Mac and Emily Kenway. Also the feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum. I can't think of one male author.

She said she wanted to see a world without rape, domestic violence and prostitution. No doubt that will resonate with suburban housewives although I'm not sure how many still listen to Woman's Hour.

Her idea is that feminist policies shouldn't please men. However there are some men who are very pleased with Julie Bindel's policies. Jim Wells for example. He is a religious bigot who, like her, wants to get rid of prostitution, pornography and erotic dancing. Gavin Shuker is very pleased with the policies of Jess Phillips who has worked with him and other Evangelicals in the APPG on Commercial Sexual Exploitation. Gary Haugen of the IJM was very pleased with Laura Lederer. William Hudnut was very pleased with Catharine MacKinnon.

The worst kind of patriarchal men hate prostitution, pornography and erotic dancing. Also gay rights and abortion. They are happy to work with Radical Feminists. The liberal men who Bindel doesn't like don't believe that the way to solve social problems is to give the police more powers and arrest more people.

There is a male influence in feminism that women should reclaim feminism from. In her previous book Julie Bindel quoted 'Mr Wells'. Mr Wells is the Northern Ireland politician Jim Wells, who is a religious bigot. He is an Evangelical Christian. Kat Banyard also quoted him extensively, in her book that came out about the same time. Banyard also used his false statistic.

When Julie Bindel and other Radical Feminists say that men who pay for sex - like me - are like rapists and wife beaters, where does that idea come from? You can understand why right wing religious bigots will say that. They hate promiscuity in all its forms. They associate sex with aggression, violence and death.

They are disgusted by prostitution and don't believe that there are some women who aren't. So they think that sex workers must have something wrong with them, be coerced, or desperately poor. They cannot believe that there are some women who choose prostitution for the same reason that other people choose their jobs; a combination of financial reward, number of hours worked and like or dislike.

They might say if I think it's valid job why don't I do it? I think being a waiter or a masseur is a valid job but I'm not doing those either. I wouldn't want to do those jobs because they like sex work involve meeting lots of new people, anticipating their needs then remembering them if they return. Some people like that. I don't.

On page 71 Julie Bindel states that 'abolitionist feminists' succeeded in 'effectively decriminalising large numbers of formerly prostituted women'. She uses this belief to counter the accusation that her kind of feminist is 'carceral'. Carceral means thinking that you can solve social problems by giving the police more powers to arrest people. It means wanting to arrest men who pay for sex. Radical Feminists have always said that they want to stop women from being arrested, so I don't see how women no longer having to disclose criminal records for soliciting defends them from the accusation of being carceral.

It wasn't the Radical Feminists by themselves who achieved this judicial review. It was academics (who Bindel hates) and 'feminist lawyers' too. She doesn't say if these feminist lawyers were Radical Feminists or other feminists. The judicial review doesn't decriminalise sex workers. Why isn't Bindel campaigning to allow women to work together for safety? Why isn't she campaigning to allow soliciting? Why isn't she campaigning to remove criminal records for brothel-keeping? Other feminists are campaigning for these things. This would be the real decriminalisation.

People who support the Nordic model say that they want to decriminalise prostitutes. They say they want to shift the 'burden of criminality' from prostitutes to their clients, from women onto men. Yet there is no Nordic model country that has done this. People like Bindel don't campaign for it. Occasionally they will say that you can't decriminalise women until you criminalise men. Former Irish justice minister Frances Fitzgerald doubled the penalties for brothel-keeping with the introduction of the Nordic model there. She gave some stupid excuse for that but it seems that genuine decriminalisation for sex workers would compromise the ability of the police and the state to wipe out prostitution. Which is weird because the evidence is that the Nordic model increases demand.

In this book Julie Bindel implies that anal sex is standard for sex workers. She wants to know if men would rather 'take it up the ass' than work in McDonald's. She mentions Rachel Moran and her book several times. Rachel Moran never had anal sex in all the years she worked as a prostitute. She didn't even have vaginal sex for the first two years. She only started vaginal sex after 1993 when a law was introduced which restricted prostitution. Even then she only did penetrative sex 'sporadically', preferring to do domination.

As for oral sex, there is a difference between oral sex with a condom, oral sex without a condom and cum-in-mouth. Lots of prostitutes don't do cum-in-mouth. In fact, lots of sex workers only do hand relief. There are a great many establishments where women do massage and hand relief. They don't do oral sex or penetrative sex. I'm not sure that the word 'prostitute' is even appropriate for these women which is one reason why the term 'sex worker' is better.

Women don't sell blowjobs on Hartlepool harbour for five pounds (page 131). I have never encountered anything like that even though I have been to red light districts where I met drug addicts.

On page 219 she briefly mentions 'women escaping prostitution in Cambodia'. Most prostitutes in Cambodia are not coerced into it. If they work in a brothel they are not kept there and do not need to escape. The only time they need to escape is when they are arrested by the police and taken somewhere, often somewhere run by American Evangelicals such as those in the International Justice Mission.

If you are talking about sex workers who would like to do something different (often after they have built up considerable savings) there is an organisation called Empower in Thailand that did literacy classes for them. Empower was refused funding by the American government because they refused to sign an oath that they do not support or condone prostitution in its many manifestations and that no funds will be going toward harm prevention among sex workers. Some feminists such as Laura Lederer worked with the Evangelicals, they justify it by saying they are fighting trafficking.

In 2003, as part of the Trafficking Victim’s Protection Act Reauthorization Act, the administration announced that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) would stop funding any group perceived as encouraging sex work. The new policy stated that groups “advocating prostitution as an employment choice or which advocate or support the legalization of prostitution are not appropriate partners for USAID antitrafficking grants or contracts” (Hill 2003). This rule meant that nonabolitionist groups doing AIDS/HIV outreach or offering other harm-reduction services to sex workers were no longer eligible for funds from USAID. Among the international programs partially funded by the United States was a sex workers’ literacy class run by Thailand’s Empower, a group that since 1985 has advocated for the rights of women in the entertainment industry in that country.

Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusades Against Sex Trafficking and the Rhetoric of Abolition by Gretchen Soderlund

PornHub, OnlyFans and Nick Kristof

I have been wondering why I am no longer able to download pornographic videos from PornHub and similar sites. It seems that I have found the answer. It's all to do with an American called Nick Kristof, who I came across a while ago in the context of trafficking and brothel raids in countries like Cambodia. Kristof's credibility took a big hit a while ago when Cambodian woman Somaly Mam was exposed as a liar. She fabricated a lot of lurid details about her and other women's involvement in prostitution.

There used to be a site called Backpage where sex workers could advertise. That was closed down by federal law enforcement. In 2012 Kristof wrote an article for the New York Times accusing Backpage of enabling trafficking.

SESTA/FOSTA is a law passed in 2018. It stands for Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. It was supported by Kristof. It makes life more difficult for sex workers to advertize. It could make blogs like mine illegal if it is seen to 'promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person'.

The Survivors of Human Trafficking Fight Back Act was passed in 2020. It, like SESTA/FOSTA, allows people to persue legal action against platforms including PornHub. Kristof called for this.

Kristof wrote another article in 2020 for the New York Times called 'The Children of PornHub'. Pornhub announced new policies to restrict users’ ability to upload videos without registering - and bar downloading videos altogether. Even with their restructuring, MasterCard, Visa, and Discover banned payments to PornHub’s parent company, MindGeek.

I don't feel sorry for PorhHub. Porn stars don't like it because their videos can be pirated on PornHub. It has become something of a monopoly where lower wages, less control and fear of speaking out become increasingly common for performers. Kristof doesn't care about that though. One of Kristof's primary sources for the anti-PornHub article was Laila Mickelwait, the Director of Abolition for a non-profit organisation called Exodus Cry who seek the complete abolition of the legal sex industry, including sex work, pornography, and strip clubs.

The founder of Exodus Cry is Benjamin Nolot. It is associated with IHOP aka IHOPKC (International House of Prayer Kansas City) which is led by pastor Mike Bickle. Both Nolot and Bickle are Evangelical Christians who oppose gay marriage and abortion. Bickle seems to be antisemitic too. The public don't realise that behind the 'anti-trafficking' campaigning are nasty religious bigots. We can all be against non-consensual sex, but this is a puritanical crusade against consensual sex work, pornography and erotic dancing.

As Kelsy Burke writes on slate.com
"When anti-porn groups use language about “trafficking,” they hope to attract broad support, since all of us can agree that no person should be forced into labor or servitude, sexual or otherwise. Yet groups like NCOSE and others led by conservative Christians use “trafficking” as an umbrella term for all sex work, including that which is legal and consensual. According to NCOSE’s guiding values, “the commodification of sex acts is inherently exploitative.”"

As Melissa Gira Grant writes in The New Republic
"As a result of their years spent building influence, “fighting trafficking” as defined by these groups has also led to policies to defund AIDS programs that worked with sex workers and instead support programs mandating abstinence over condoms. Catholic groups used fighting trafficking to block funding to anti-trafficking programs that offered referrals for birth control and abortion. Women’s rights groups teamed up with religious right groups to shut down Craigslist’s and Backpage’s ads for sex work. All this was accomplished by religious right groups marketing themselves as anti-trafficking groups who were invested in protecting women and children from abuse. Meanwhile, their approach led to police abuse of sex workers under the guise of anti-trafficking raids and “rescues,” while also dismantling sex workers’ efforts to work independently and protect themselves. This isn’t fighting human trafficking: In some senses, it has increased the likelihood of exploitation and violence."

The campaign against PornHub was co-sponsored by NCOSE (National Center on Sexual Exploitation). NCOSE was approved for a loan of between $150,000 and $300,000 under Trump’s coronavirus bailout program. There are associations with Trump and with Q-Anon. Now NCOSE is going after OnlyFans.

In December I published a post about webcams. I had found a number of images on my laptop. I thought they derived from OnlyFans but in fact they came from Chaturbate. I said that webcams can be a useful way of getting an income for students or young mothers. OnlyFans have been in the news recently. They banned sexually explicit content but then changed their minds. NCOSE have been putting pressure on MasterCard to ban payments to OnlyFans.

NCOSE lobbying led to Walmart withdrawing Cosmopolitan magazine from display. NCOSE has used the language of feminism to try to portray Cosmopolitan as part of our hypersexualised society where women are expected to satisfy men's urges. However, the magazine has helped women to find their own sexual satisfaction.

NCOSE has benefited from alliances with anti-porn feminists concerned about women’s exploitation, including Gail Dines and Julie Bindel. This is yet another example of where Radical Feminists have teamed up with religious bigots. Catharine A MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin worked against pornography with the mayor of Indianapolis William H Hudnut. He was a Christian pastor. Laura Lederer helped bring feminist groups such as Equality Now together with Christian groups such as the National Association of Evangelicals and The Salvation Army. This coalition helped bring about the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA).

The TVPA has caused problems around the world, it has enabled the American government and the State Department to put pressure on countries to allow or conduct brothel raids which have harmed sex workers. This happens in poor countries like Cambodia but in Japan tens of thousands of women from the Philippines were denied entry even though most of them were not sex workers. It could be the reason why brothels were closed down in large numbers in Britain from 2005 onwards.

I have put a lot more information about trafficking here.

my strange day out in Manchester

The last time I went to Manchester was 2019. I have had many nice days out in Manchester over the years, visiting the numerous brothels. Yesterday I thought the time was right to see how many of them remain.

I got off the train at Manchester Oxford Road and went to Cosmopolitan first. This is the nearest brothel to the station. The receptionist said that a woman would be available in ten minutes. She invited me to sit on one of the plush sofas to wait. When I got talking to her she said that this woman is petite and slender. I said petite and slender doesn't do it for me and I will come back later.

There used to be a brothel very near to the centre of Manchester called Cherrys. I tried to find it in the backstreets but it's not there any more, as far as I can tell. So a bit of a walk took me to the Piccadilly Club. Two young women were available, both young blondes. One of them smiled and the other didn't, so I thought I might as well have the one that smiled.

I paid £35 and went upstairs to the room. When I got an erection I said that I wanted to get on top of her. Instead of lying down on her back she positioned herself against the wall, half sitting and half lying, with her legs apart. She invited me to penetrate her, which I did. I had to prop myself up on my hands, with my head up against the wall, which wasn't comfortable for me.

I told her I wanted her to lie down so that I could get on top of her but she said she doesn't do that, none of the girls do that. Several times during the half hour I had with her she said that I don't understand, she's not stopping me from getting on top of her, but I am asking for something special that none of the men who go there get.

So I left the Piccadilly Club without having had an orgasm. I could have walked to Passions but I decided to go in the opposite direction. I could see that the door of Manchester Angels was closed, but then I think they used to start around 7pm and go through the night.

My favourite brothel was Salon 24. As far as I knew it was closed, but I thought to be sure I could go there. It was indeed closed, with weeds growing up around the entrance and car park. The last time I was here I paid £120 to have sex for an hour without a condom with a big black woman. After that I went to the Red Light District where I started talking to a scruffy woman in a doorway who then urinated in front of me. I didn't pay her to or ask her to, she just needed to piss.

I walked through the central shopping area of Manchester and then Chinatown. I went to Tropical Palms which is a brothel in a seedy alleyway. There was a receptionist who said they have just one woman there. The woman was about 50 years old, but she looked very sexy. She had long blonde hair in tight curls and a sexy dress. I paid £40 and went upstairs with her.

She asked me what I wanted to do. I said I want to get on top of her and shag her. She said no, I won't be doing that, she is going to get on top of me. I thought not another one. I lay on the bed, she put a condom on and did some oral sex, then took off all her clothes. She said I could touch her. I didn't know what she was going to do but I thought I'll just let her get on with it. I wasn't in the mood for another argument.

She got on top of me, inserted my penis into her, then moved up and down. This continued for a long time but I didn't have an orgasm. Then my time was up. Many people think that when you pay for half an hour with a sex worker she has to do everything that you tell her to do. That's not true at all. They tell you what they will let you do with them.

Cosmopolitan is nearby so I went back there. There were 3 women available, all blondes. I chose the one who was the least petite and slender. Her name is Heidi. The receptionist asked me if I wanted a small room (£40) or a large room (£45). I chose a large room. In the room Heidi asked me if I wanted to use the shower. She also asked me if I wanted her to put a porn film on. None of these options were available at the Piccadilly Club or Tropical Palms.

Heidi is everything you would want a sex worker to be. She gave me some oral sex and when I had an erection she had no problem at all with me getting on top of her. I did ask her if she would let me use one of my thin condoms. She said no, which is fair enough. Still a very enjoyable experience.

If I went back to Manchester I would go to Cosmo and I would be happy to see Heidi again. I won't be going back though, because there is an even better option nearer to home. Six times this year I have been to Angel Lodge in Liverpool. Twice I have seen Megan, who lets me use one of my thin condoms. She said she is happy to let me use a thin condom if I give her an unopened pack. To show that they haven't been tampered with.

I have also seen Katy, Taylor, Alicia and Lucia at Angel Lodge. I will see Megan again. She takes the place of the big blonde woman I saw several times last year at Christys. I saw Jodie three times and I also saw Luisa, Paige, Becky, Maria and Charlotte. I would see Jodie again but she no longer works at Christys.

episode 3 of Taken

I watched the third episode of Taken: Hunting the Sex Traffickers last night. The oddest thing about it is that the deported sex worker Sylvia decided she wanted to return to Britain to be a sex worker again. Towards the end of the episode they showed her at the airport.

She said she wanted money for university. In the first episode they implied that these migrants are street sex workers. In an earlier post I said that few of them will be street-based sex workers but some will want money to go to university.

"For example if they're doing sex work on a street in Brazil, then they are happy to come and do sex work in a relatively controlled environment in the UK, that doesn't mean they're not exploited and that doesn't mean bad things won't happen to them here."

The justification for what the police do is that women will want to come to Britain to do sex work but they can't allow this to happen because women are getting raped and robbed. However, the police are raiding brothels. They have closed down the well-run brothels where nobody gets raped or robbed.

Sandra Hankin ran two brothels in Manchester called Sandys Superstars. Nobody was raped or robbed there. The police closed her down. So they have created this situation.

They said women are treated as commodities. Let's say that I brought Thai women to Britain to work as masseurs. Nothing sexual. Would I not be just as much treating women as commodities? What's the difference?

Rosana Gomes got ten pounds every time one of the sex workers got a customer. Is that exploitation? It doesn't sound as if she controlled them in any meaningful sense. Instead she was the interface between men enquiring about Brazilian sex workers and the sex workers themselves. She answered the phone and got ten pounds for each punter.

There is a Daily Mail article about all this that is very inaccurate. Sylvia wasn't the victim of a violent human trafficking network. Viner and Gomes weren't violent to her. She didn't escape to Brazil. She was deported. Viner and Gomes were not her captors.

episode 2 of Taken

I watched the second episode of Taken: Hunting the Sex Traffikers last night and there wasn't anything in it that has changed my opinion. What they seem determined to do is to deny agency to sex workers.

They know these women are not coerced but they need to show that they are victims. Throughout they have said that the women are exploited. That is a matter of opinion.

In last night's show they had a man talking about Learned Helplessness Syndrome. While he was talking they showed footage of street sex workers in Madrid, although I don't know how that is relevant to the subject of the documentary which is Brazilian women in Britain.

Learned Helplessness is not a syndrome. It is a theory not a fact. You can't just diagnose Learned Helplessness when someone does something you don't want. He said that the women are not threatened with having their families attacked. The manipulation is more subtle than that.

Mark Viner had relationships with some younger Brazilian women. The idea is that he psychologically manipulated these women into thinking that he loved them. I don't believe that. They say he had a million pounds. Do you not think that was the attraction for them? They lived the high life for years and then moved on.

I'm not trying to denigrate the women. I admire them. I'm not trying to blame the victims because I don't believe they are victims. They are just trying to make money and sex work allows them to do that. For themselves and their families.

Some of the women were raped and robbed. This happens because they have closed down all the well-run brothels. Such as Sandys Superstars in Manchester. And arrested women who work together. They have created this situation just as they have created the situation in which heroin addicts die of overdoses.

Then they say "Look how terrible prostitution and the drugs trade is, we must crack down on them". Give us more power. It's not working. It will never work.

In Cambodia and other countries women who are detained by anti-traffickers often run away. The anti-traffickers cannot accept that the women didn't want to be 'rescued' and instead say they are incapable of deciding what is best for them. It's called 'false consciousness'. See running from the rescuers.

There is a word for denying the agency of women: it is called objectification. I don't believe in the theory of objectification but if you do - or at least Martha Nussbaum's version - you can see that women are being denied the ability to choose for themselves. Not just the ability to choose, the very idea that they are capable of choosing sensible actions for themselves.

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.