When this blog began it was about my experience of prostitution in South London and Soho. Now it is mostly about my experiences in North West England.
Monday, July 25, 2022
Janice Turner in the Times
Friday, July 8, 2022
2 new films about sex work
There are two new films that are about sex work. Both are positive about it. The first is Good Luck to You, Leo Grande starring Emma Thompson. The second is How to Please a Woman starring Sally Phillips. Both are well-known comedians.
I found out about the second of these on Woman's Hour this morning. The presenter had no criticism of this film. Someone contacted the show and said how hypocritical they are in saying that men objectify women through prostitution and yet they accept the objectification of men. In both films the sex worker is male. I don't mean trans women, who the Radical Feminists regard as male.
I can see how the Radical Feminists are going to be critical of both of these films. Objectification means different things to different people. It meant one thing to Radical Feminist authors such as Catharine A MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. It means something different to the majority of Radical or Revolutionary Feminists. It means something different again to ordinary people.
To ordinary people it seems to mean having a sexual attraction to someone outside of the context of a relationship. The idea is that a man is incapable of appreciating a woman's personality if he is lusting after her. This is an idea that goes back thousands of years.
If I have casual sex with a woman, let's say on holiday, am I objectifying her more than if I play a game of tennis with her or a game of chess? Why would sex have that special attribute, different from other activities? If I pay for sex with a woman, am I objectifying her more than if I pay for a taxi driver or a waiter? You can say that sex is different from playing the usual sort of game or working the usual sort of job. That's not answering the question though.
We use people all the time. We meet people briefly, do something with them, and don't want to get to know them further. Casual sex or paid-for sex could be seen as harmful to women, but that is at the very least an overgeneralisation of women. Not all women are the same. Treating all people in a group as if they are all the same is one aspect of objectification, according to philosopher Martha Nussbaum.
The weird thing is that Emma Thompson has had a lot to say about prostitution over the years. She has signed up to Princess Eugenie's organisation to fight trafficking. We all want to fight trafficking, if by that we mean coercion. However, most prostitution does not involve coercion. Some other forms of work also sometimes involve coercion.
Other organisations that have associated with Princess Eugenie's crusade are the International Justice Mission, who say they want to release the captives. However, their hidden agenda is to try to stamp out prostitution anywhere in the world, no matter how many women they harm. They are an American Evangelical Christian organisation.
In the past they have called for and participated in brothel raids in countries such as Cambodia and Thailand. Women are arrested and kept against their will. Most of these women have not been coerced, and so their first experience of imprisonment is in a so-called rescue centre.
Sunday, July 3, 2022
my day trip to London
Friday, July 1, 2022
another day trip to Sheffield
I decided to go to City Sauna to begin with. Jenni off the telly was there. There were two sex workers. One was the tattooed lady who had been there on my previous visit. There was also Charlotte. I chose Charlotte. She is an older lady, quite tall and attractive. She smiles and talks a lot. She has black hair done up and wears stockings. I shagged her for a while but didn't manage to orgasm despite her best efforts.
She tried to wank me off. They know that wanking over tits works for most men. It doesn't work for me. I tried to wank myself but that didn't work either.
Honeypot has a good reputation so I went there. It wasn't so easy to find. The entrance is not in Attercliffe Road, it is in Worksop Road. It does have 774A in big letters on the front though. I went up the stairs and rang the bell. An old woman answered the door and explained that there was a man with the sex worker and another one waiting. She said I could come back later. I think she said the sex worker's name was Jessica. I thought Jessica seems to be very popular.
I thought I will have a look at the other brothels nearby. I could see Athena Massage and Diplomat clearly. There's supposed to be another one nearby called Escorts but I couldn't see it. Athena and Diplomat are a couple of doors away from each other and with both of them the entrance is at the back. I went into the alleyway at the back and thought about what to do next. Neither of these places has a good reputation.
is this the seediest alleyway in Britain? |
I decided to go into Diplomat. I don't know why. It seemed quite nice, there was a bar and at the other end of the room were sofas with four women. One was a big black woman who was in charge. There were a couple of bored looking young women looking at their smart phones. And there was Alec.
Alec is an attractive blonde. She has a natural beauty but has a couple of tattoos, what look like enhanced breasts, and lips that might have been enhanced too. I thought she looked as if she could be a student. Later in the room I could see she was probably older than that but it was a wonderful experience. She is very friendly. I shagged her for a while but wasn't getting any further than I had with Charlotte. She seemed to be enjoying it, at one point she was playing with her clit while I was shagging her.
I don't like to ask if I can use one of my ultra-thin condoms. Usually the answer is no. I felt I could ask Alec. She asked to see them and then said that would be fine. So we put one on, I got back on top of her, and after a couple of minutes I had a powerful orgasm.
Alec took me downstairs to the bar and gave me a bottle of water from the fridge to take out with me. She's such a thoughtful nice girl. It wasn't a hot and humid day that day, unlike my previous trip, which I think was part of the problem.
Another thing that has happened to me is that I have found out one of the places where some of my favourite sex workers go to. I like to go to Rock Ferry Thai Massage near Birkenhead. I have a few favourites such as Joy. She works there some of the time but most of the time at other places.
I am planning a day trip to London. I intend to head straight to Greens Court in Soho to see if Poppy is still working there. I doubt it but I'll try there first. Then maybe head to Greek Street to find if they are still open.
Saturday, June 18, 2022
my day trip to Sheffield
I watched a TV series about one of these brothels. The series was called A Very British Brothel. The brothel - City Sauna - is run by a mother and daughter. They had another series called A Very Yorkshire Brothel. I thought the episodes were good, showing sex work as it mostly really is. The people at the Nordic Model Now! site were up in arms about it and made a complaint to ITV. 'They are concerned that women might be encouraged into prostitution on the basis of the programme.'
I thought it might be nice to go there. However, my research showed me that their place is not the best place to go in Sheffield. The best place seems to be GFE. I thought that I can go to Sheffield by train and have a look around the town centre, including Sheffield Winter Gardens. Then after lunch I could get a tram to Meadowhall South/Tinsley and walk to GFE. I expected there to be some young slender women there. I could enjoy spending time with one of them then perhaps go on to somewhere else that has the older fatter women that I prefer.
The man said I had to give the other £30 to the lady in the room, he had already explained that prices begin at £50. Millie led me to the room, chatting to me while she did so. I gave her £30 and she asked me to have a quick shower. On the bed she didn't seem to want to take her top off but was happy for me to look at and feel her pussy. I got on top of her and enjoyed looking at her pretty face. She told me she has Italian and Maltese ancestry as well as English.
After I made my way back to the tram stop which didn't take long. I got off somewhere near Attercliffe Road. I found City Sauna and went in. The daughter who I had seen in the TV series - Jenni - was there. I asked her how many girls she has there today. She said only one. There was a woman sitting on a sofa with lots of tattoos and a shaved head. I'm sure she must be some type of woman but I'm not sure what type but not my type. I said I'll leave it.
The funny thing is there were men sitting on other sofas in the same room. My guess is that there were other women there and these men were waiting for them to become available - having declined the offer of the tattooed lady.
I found Caesars in Stanley Street easily enough. A woman spoke to me through a tiny hatch. She wanted me to give her £30 through the hatch. I asked how many girls she has and she said there is her and there is an Albanian girl. All I could see were her hands. She seemed to be African. I walked away. Finally I found Paradise Studio. The place seemed not only closed but abandoned. A large window had been smashed.
My conclusion is that the brothels of Sheffield are in decline. GFE was good and good value for money at £50. I think most men spend more there than £50. I would have liked to ask Millie what perversions she negotiates with her clients. She's not as innocent as she can look.
the Scottish government and the Nordic model
The theory that prostitution is a form of violence against women and girls comes from Radical Feminist ideology. They say that a woman can't truly consent to sex with a man in a patriarchal society. If you accept this ideology then prostitution is not only violence it is also rape but all forms of heterosexual sex are rape too. You can't just apply the theory to prostitution.
The Scottish government think that they are using an accepted intellectual theory but there is no intellectual justification for it. They don't explain where this theory comes from, people are just expected to accept it, even though it's not the genuine theory. That's quite disturbing. Also, I can't find out who in the government brought in this policy: I would like to know if they are Radical Feminists or Evangelical Christians.
The Scottish government are copying what socially conservative Americans have done. President Bush reinstated the Mexico City Policy, also known as the 2001 Global Gag Rule. It banned NGOs from receiving funding if they are pro choice about abortion. Then in 2003 USAID stopped funding any group perceived to be encouraging sex work, including HIV outreach groups. A literacy class for Thai sex workers was denied funding.
In 2003 the Bush administration passed a Global AIDS bill that prohibits international agencies from receiving funds unless they explicitly sign an oath that they do not support or condone prostitution and that no funds will be going toward harm prevention among sex workers. See Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusades Against Sex Trafficking and the Rhetoric of Abolition by Gretchen Soderlund.
It seems that the Scottish government is preparing itself to introduce the Nordic model into Scotland. That would be foolish because the official report into the effectiveness of the Nordic model in Northern Ireland shows that it has not reduced demand. There have been three reports into the effectiveness of the Nordic model in the Irish republic and none of them say there has been a reduction in demand.
I have been looking at books about women and violence. I looked at Enough: The Violence Against Women And How To End It by Harriet Johnson. As far as I can tell it has nothing to say about prostitution. It doesn't have an index but none of the chapter headings are about prostitution. It seems Harriet Johnson doesn't think prostitution is violence if it doesn't even get a mention.
I looked at Equal Power by Jo Swinson. She was the leader of the Liberal Democratic party. In Jo Swinson's book she writes about Sreypov Chan, who was 'sold into slavery in Cambodia as a seven-year-old girl'. "When she refused her first client, the pimp crushed up hot chilli peppers and pushed them into her vagina, then thrust a hot metal poker inside her." As an adult Srepoy Chan worked as an advocacy officer for the Somaly Mam Foundation.
Somaly Mam claimed to have been a sex slave and got others to make the same false claims. Long Pross and Meas Ratha were two of the girls who we know made false claims, and Sreypov Chan is another. Thomas Steinfatt has been looking into prostitution in Cambodia for a long time and has said that he has never encountered genuine instances of torture. Steinfatt has conducted research that shows coercion is not common.
So that's the fictional violence. What about the real violence against women in Cambodia? Sex workers are arrested by the police then held against their will in 'rescue' centres for months. Kept in poor conditions, there a near-total lack of psychological care for traumatized girls, an absence of meaningful job-training programs, and a blatant disregard for the young women’s privacy. One former worker said it was “like there was a revolving door for tourists and camera crews. It was like a zoo.”
American Evangelical organisations such as the International Justice Mission have conducted brothel raids in countries including Cambodia. The women they capture try to run away. IJM is funded by the American government. It would be good if the Biden administration stopped all funding to these organisations. It would help women more than the Scottish government refusing to fund good organisations such as Scot-Pep.
Jo Swinson learned about trafficking from Marie Claire magazine. Perhaps that is where Princess Eugenie learned about it too. She and one of her chums (Julia de Boinville) have teamed up to fight trafficking. It is clear that they support organisations such as the International Justice Mission and people like Nicholas Kristof. They are not doing good work helping women around the world, they are harming them. Instead of interviewing people like Kristof and the guy who made the Taken television series, they should interview people like Emily Kenway. At least they should read academics like Shelley Cavalieri and Gretchen Soderlund, who I have quoted below.
Below I have quoted from Between Victim and Agent: A Third-Way Feminist Account of Trafficking for Sex Work by Shelley Cavalieri.
In May 2003, law enforcement officers raided a brothel in Chiang Mai, the capital of the northern region of Thailand and the regional center for the many indigenous peoples or hill tribes that populate the surrounding mountains. They conducted this raid at the behest of a coalition of Thai non-governmental organizations and an American evangelical Christian organization [International Justice Mission]. The American organization, with funding from the U.S. government and in conjunction with the Thai non-governmental organizations, was dedicated to investigating and reporting brothels with children inside to the authorities, and tried to persuade the police to shut down such locales. The particular brothel raided in this story was a brothel like many others in the country, filled with ethnically Shan women from Burma. Most of the women were of the age of majority, but while accounts vary, some organizations asserted that there were teenagers working in the brothel as well. How these teenagers reached the brothel is unclear; the organizations claiming that teenage girls were there also asserted that the girls’ presence could not be voluntary due to their age and that the girls were victims of human trafficking.
The coalition of organizations effected what they termed a “rescue” of the women in the brothel because of the believed presence of children. What followed was a human rights debacle. Twenty-eight women and girls, most of whom were, by all accounts, adults, were involuntarily detained beyond the period of time that victims of trafficking may be confined under Thai law. They were not arrested or charged with crimes, but detained, according to the authorities, because they had been rescued from a situation of human trafficking. They were deprived of access to their belongings and saved earnings, which were locked inside the inaccessible brothel under police control; they never regained ownership of these possessions. After a lengthy period of time, the government deported many of these women to Burma. All of these actions, which the women experienced as both harmful and alienating, occurred under the guise of rescuing them from the brothel in which they worked.
According to social services workers who interviewed four women who escaped from the brothel as the police arrived, all of the women were ethnic Shan from Burma and were at least nineteen years of age at the time of the raid. Prior to immigrating to Thailand, their status as members of the Burmese Shan indigenous group rendered these women subject to summary detention and rape at any time at the hands of officers of the Burmese junta. Faced with the option of abuse by the authorities in a region of Burma overwhelmed by poverty, many Shan women chose, and continue to choose, to cross the mountains that demarcate the Thai-Burma border and move to a Thai city to work in a brothel. This choice has a certain logic, as forced labor, forced relocations, and food shortages remain an endemic problem in Burma. For many, work in a Thai brothel presented the opportunity to escape the repression of the Burmese junta and to send adequate money home in order to support families, educate children, and maintain households. From the perspective of these women, that they at times paid people to facilitate their passage to Thailand was merely incidental.
Further, the women who escaped the brothel prior to the raid claimed that they, like the women “rescued” in this particular scenario, and like many other Shan sex workers in Thailand, worked in the brothel of their own volition. According to these women, they were free to come and go as they liked; they were not subject to physical restraint in any way. They were not in debt bondage in the traditional sense of the phrase, although some did at times take pay advances from the brothel manager to travel home and back; they would repay such advances with a portion of their earnings over time, much like a loan against future paychecks that some workplaces offer in the United States. Yet from the perspective of the American evangelical organization doing this work, the women in the brothel, particularly the minors, needed to be rescued from the brothel. According to the IJM employee with whom I spoke during the summer following the raid, as all of the women had traveled across borders and left their communities to work in the sex industry, they qualified as exploited women in need of assistance, even when they personally denied that they experienced harm in the brothels. That they may have paid others to facilitate their migration was presented as further evidence of their exploitation.
Below I have quoted from Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusades Against Sex Trafficking and the Rhetoric of Abolition by Gretchen Soderlund.
Journalist Maggie Jones’s interviews with safe house managers indicate that shelter escapes are commonplace in areas where anti-trafficking groups are currently targeting their efforts (2003). The manager of the Phnom Penh home that took in the 37 prostitutes after the Dateline initiated raids reported to Jones that at least 40 percent of the women and girls taken to his shelter escape and return to work in Svay Pak’s brothels. Indeed, six of the teens taken by MSNBC/IJM had run away from the home within a week of the televised busts. When Phil Marshall of the United Nations Project on Human Trafficking in Southeast Asia’s Mekong Region was asked by Jones what he thought of current rehabilitation strategies, he said he had “never seen an issue where there is less interest in hearing from those who are most affected by it” (Jones 2003,1). In 2003, Empower, a sex workers’ advocacy program, issued a report documenting a brothel raid in Chiang Mai, Thailand conducted by International Justice Mission in which several of the 28 arrested (or “rescued,” in abolitionist parlance) Burmese women escaped from a local institution in the first 24 hours. According to Empower, the raid—conducted ostensibly for humanitarian purposes—took on many of the same features as a criminal arrest:
As soon as they had their mobile phones returned [the] women contacted Empower. They are only permitted to use their phones for a short time each evening and must hide in the bathroom to take calls outside that time. They report that they have been subjected to continual interrogation and coercion by Trafcord [an anti-trafficking NGO formed in 2002 with U.S. financial support]. Women understand that if they continue to maintain that they want to remain in Thailand and return to work that they will be held in the Public Welfare Boys Home or [a] similar institution until they recant. Similarly, they understand that refusing to be witnesses against their “traffickers” will further delay their release. (Empower 2003)
By the end of the month, more than half of the women had escaped from the shelter. What does it mean that so-called sex slaves often thwart rescue attempts? Is it intellectually and ethically responsible to call every instance of a practice “slavery” when many women involved demonstratively reject the process of protection and rehabilitation, and when they escape from supposed rescuers who aim to force them out of a life of prostitution (“captivity”) and into a life of factory work or employment in the low-paying service sector (“freedom”)?
Saturday, May 7, 2022
finding out about good places
It has worked out quite well for me so far. In January I had sex with Emma. She's older but I was attracted to her. In February I had sex with Maya. She's middle-aged but that's what I like best. I took a viagra one and a half hours before going. I used their condoms instead of my own thinner ones. Even so I didn't have any problems having an orgasm with either of them.
Things didn't work out so well in March. Sometimes I think I might be bipolar. When I am slightly manic it works out well but when I am slightly depressive I don't orgasm. I saw several women in March, at Rock Ferry Thai Massage and at other places.
April and May have been the best months yet. In April I saw Maya again. She was even more friendly than when I saw her in February. She was talking about her life. She said that after a week or two in Rock Ferry she goes to Manchester. There is somewhere Victoria station. I think she might have said it is a hotel. Then after a week or two she goes somewhere else and then she has a holiday.
One of the places I went to in March was a brothel in Liverpool called Christys. I have posted about it before. It is also called 69 and it is near to Aintree racecourse. I just turned up there and I was surprised because a new fence has been erected where the steps lead up to the top floor flat. When I rang the doorbell I could see that the flat was being redecorated. Becky answered the door and told me there weren't any 'girls' there that day. They would be open tomorrow. I said to Becky that I would leave it a couple of days then come back.
Christys was always a bit of a dump. My first review of it was negative. Then I got to like the place. However, she seemed to have big problems getting women to come and work for her. Often I would phone and there would be no 'girls' there. She told me she lost contact with Jodie, who was my favourite. So she can't have been making much of a profit. All the more surprising that she would be willing to spend the money to redecorate.
In April I was ready to go back. I wanted to see what she had made of the place. However, when I phoned Becky she told me there were no girls there. I said shall I phone back later in the week. She said I could if I wanted. I could have gone there and had sex with Becky but I decided to go to Rock Ferry instead.
Good thing I did because there was a delightful young woman there. She is tall with a very nice figure. I will call her 'Coke' which is not her real name. I saw her again the next week and we had a snog together. She probably doesn't do that with all her customers so I don't want men turning up to see her expecting a snog when that is at her discretion.
Both times with Coke I had an orgasm. The second time with all the snogging was even better. Afterwards I could see that she wasn't quite as young as I had thought. She looks in her 20s but if you look closer she could be 40. I make a note of the women I have sex with and give the experience a score out of 5. The first time with Coke was 5 and the second time I had to increase the scale and go up to 6.
I didn't ask Coke if I could snog her. It's just something that happened. At one point she put her tongue in my mouth. I did ask her if she wanted me to lick her pussy. Straight away she said yes, so I did. She doesn't like thin condoms though, which is fair enough. I'm going to phone up next week and if Coke or Joy are there I will go again. My money saving strategy has gone out the window. Coke told me Joy might be there, I saw Joy twice last year, she is very nice and told me I can use thin condoms.
On an internet forum I have been finding out about different things. I wanted to find out about Christys. I wanted to know if anyone had been there since the redecoration. I wanted to know what's going on there: has it turned into some kind of sex club where debauchery of many kinds occurs behind closed doors? Somebody said that it's probably just that Becky will be working there on her own now. Perhaps that makes it legal so no chance of being closed down so why not spend money on the place? Especially because she lives there and will want it to be nice.
I have also been finding out about a flat not far from Rock Ferry Thai Massage. I have told you about it before. Different Thai women use the flat for a week or two. Some offer full sex, some only offer massage and hand relief. There was a ladyboy there recently. I've found out that the way to find out who is there is to go onto the adultwork site and type in 'Birkenhead'. The Thai girl that comes up will probably be working from there. You have to book, you can't just turn up there like you can with Rock Ferry Thai Massage.
There is a new Thai massage place in New Ferry/Bebington. There used to be a seedy brothel round the corner from it called The Penthouse but that seems to have closed permanently. Most Thai massage places in the Wirral don't do anything sexual, but apparently this place does hand relief. It's called Tongdee. I won't be going there. There's only one place I want to go now.