my porn experiment

In my last post I wrote that Sara Pascoe is very fair on the subject of pornography but not so much on the subject of prostitution. The Oxford Professor Amia Srinivasan is the opposite though. She has written that internet porn sites control what people see, 'bringing their sexual tastes into conformity'.

"As Shira Tarrant, author of The Pornography Industry, observes: 'If you are interested in something like double oral, and you put that into a browser, you're going to get two women giving one guy a blowjob ... you're not likely to get two men or two people giving a woman oral sex' She adds: 'Online-porn users don't necessarily realize that their porn-use patterns are largely moulded by a corporation.'"

People who are anti porn will just believe this, as Amia seems to have done. I though decided to see for myself, and the results were quite interesting. I typed 'double oral' into Google and was presented with twenty images. I chose to look at images rather than videos because my wifi doesn't allow me to look at PornHub or the main video sites. I could have seen a tiny picture of each video in Google search but in my experience it's not so easy to assess the content of the videos from just a tiny pic or even from the title.

By the way, I have managed to circumvent this censorship. I have found a site which not only can I look at with my wifi but I can download videos from. It is called porntrex.com. You can't download from PornHub now, as I reported a few posts back. I have downloaded lots of videos featuring beautiful Japanese women. I don't have a thing for East Asian women, I have a thing for beautiful women: for some reason the most beautiful women appear in Japanese porn. I would love to interview Kotomi Asakura and ask her about her life.

Getting back to my porn experiment, eight out of the twenty pictures that I saw when I Googled 'double oral' were of two women and one man. Seven showed two men with one woman. Two of them were indistinct. One of them showed two gay men. One of them showed two men and a 'shemale'. One of them was two women giving oral sex to another woman.

And if you don't believe me, try it for yourself. You probably won't get exactly the same results but you can see that what porn critic Shira Tarrant wrote is nonsense. It isn't true that it's all the same. There is enormous diversity. Men's sexual desires aren't being 'moulded by a corporation'. What is presented has been moulded by people's desires. Heterosexual, homosexual, trans, cis.

They say that porn is ubiquitous in modern society. In one way it is, although I can't access PornHub. In another way it isn't, because it seems that so many people haven't looked at it. If they had, they wouldn't say the stupidest things about it. They are convinced that it is all violent. Society has become sexualized, so they say.

I wish I could show you all of the pictures but I don't want this blog to show pornographic images. I will show you the one where the two women give oral sex to another woman. You can't see anyone's genitals or breasts. You can see pubic hair though, some people believe that it's never seen in porn - people who have never seen it. Some people will be disgusted and horrified but I think it's quite sweet.

There's a film, Cinema Paradiso, where at the end a compilation of censored bits of films are shown. They are of people kissing and so on. It shows life, it shows joy, it shows passion.

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.

more student sex workers

There's something very odd about the Melissa Farley study that I wrote about in my previous post. It stated that men who pay for sex are 8 times more likely to report that they would rape a woman if they could get away with it and if no one knew about it. Also they are 3 times more likely to report that they have engaged in 'sexually aggressive behavior'.

You wonder why they didn't just ask outright in the survey 'Have you ever raped a woman?'. Well, the answer to that question is it looks as if they were asked that. So why aren't we told what these men reported? It can only be because they did not report that they had raped a women more than the non sex buyer group of men.

In the Melissa Farley study (Comparing Sex Buyers With Men Who Do Not Buy Sex: New Data on Prostitution and Trafficking) men were asked a number of sets of questions. One set of questions was the Sexual Experiences Survey (Perpetration Version). In this survey they were asked ten questions. The last three I have shown below.

8. Have you engaged in sexual intercourse when she didn’t want to because you gave her alcohol or drugs?
9. Have you engaged in sexual intercourse when she didn’t want to because you threatened or used some degree of physical force (twisting her arm‚ holding her down‚ etc.) to make her?
10. Did you answer “Yes” to any of the questions 1-10?

It goes on to say that 'Men are classified as perpetrators of rape if they answered “yes” to items 8‚ 9‚ or 10.' This is a bit strange because questions 1 to 7 are not rape. Question 1 is 'Have you engaged in sex play (fondling‚ kissing‚ or petting‚ but not intercourse) when she didn’t want to because you overwhelmed her with continual arguments and pressure?'

Anyway, men were asked if they had used alcohol, drugs or physical force to get sex in questions 8 and 9. So it would be a simple matter to work out how many men in each group have raped a woman. Yet we are not told this, instead we are told about what men say they would do under specific circumstances, and a calculation of sexual aggressive behaviour in general. The sex buyer group had 'a mean of 1.59 types of sexually aggressive behavior'. Never mind about the mean, what answers did they give to questions 8 and 9?

The Nordic Model Now! site use the Farley study to show that 'buying sex makes men more prone to violence against women'. Punters are 'nearly 8 times more likely to rape than other men'. Then people like Libby Purves try to say that the existence of sex work affects society in general and women in particular in negative ways.

Telling young people to just say no doesn't work. Whether it is about drugs or sex work. You can invite them to consider the advantages and disadvantages of each, to themselves and society, but don't try to feed them false statistics because they are too intelligent to be taken in by that. Some will want to continue after consideration and some won't. Then if they proceed you should do what you can to help them avoid the dangers.

I don't want young people to die of drug overdose and I don't want young people to die because they were forced to work alone. Let them have drugs of consistent strength and purity, and let them work together for safety. I would send my daughter to a university that helps them to stay alive. Except that she would make up her own mind which university she wants to go to and how she wants to fund herself.

student sex workers

Some of you may have read the article by Libby Purves in The Times on Monday (15/11/21) called 'Shame on universities that legitimise 'sex work''. Durham University's Student Union (DSU) is providing a course for students and staff to 'explore the challenges that student sex workers can face'.

This is what Libby Purves wrote in her article:-

"Men who buy it, whether online or physically are significantly more likely than other men to rape or commit other violence against women."

She does not give a reference for this statement. Looking around on the internet to try to find research that says that the presence of prostitution causes increased levels of rape I came to the Nordic Model Now! site. They have a page 'FACT: Buying sex makes men more prone to violence against women'.

"Studies of men who buy sex (punters) show that they are significantly more likely than other men to rape and engage in all forms of violence against women. A US study found that punters were nearly eight times more likely to rape than other men."

The US study is 'Comparing Sex Buyers With Men Who Do Not Buy Sex: New Data on Prostitution and Trafficking' by Melissa Farley and four other people that I have never heard of. Melissa Farley is known to be biased. See her Wikipedia page. Or go here.

It is illegal in America to buy sex. So the men that do are criminals. They cannot be compared to men in Britain. America is a violent society, with extremes of wealth and poverty. It has an enormous prison population where people are treated inhumanely. Mental illness is not given the attention it is in European countries. Religious fundamentalism and other reactionary attitudes are common.

Even so, the study did not show that American men who buy sex committed eight times as many rapes. Instead it says, under the heading 'Self-Reported Likelihood to Rape', that 15% of sex buyers reported 'that they would force a woman to have sex or rape a woman if they could get away with it and if no one knew about it' compared to 2% of non sex buyers.

To be a non sex buyer in this study a man had to have 'not been to a strip club more than once in the past year; had not exchanged something of value for a sex act; and had not used pornography more than once in the past week' as well as to have not bought sex. No phone sex or lap dancing either. Buying sex includes hand relief. I don't think this is most people's definition of a non sex buyer.

What the headline should have been is 'American men who don't use pornography regularly or pay for anything sexual - not even erotic dancing - are 7.5% times less likely to say that they would rape a woman under particular circumstances. Not 7.5% times less likely to rape, 7.5% less likely to say they would'.

Maybe they should have checked their testosterone levels while they were at it. Then the headline might have been 'Men with low testosterone levels less likely to use pornography, pay for sex or rape'. What they should have done is to have three groups: men who pay for sex, men who don't but like erotic dancing and pornography, and men who don't do any of these things. Otherwise how can you tell what corelates with rape? Pornography or prostitution?

None of this gives us any indication that eliminating prostitution would change men's attitudes and/or make them less likely to rape. It isn't possible to eliminate it or even reduce it anyway. You can try to eliminate it but that's not going to help.

It isn't the existence of prostitution that causes certain men's attitudes. There isn't a correlation between prostitution and rape. And even if there was a correlation, correlation is not the same as causation. Prostitution does not cause rape, not even some rape.

The second research study used on the Nordic Model Now! page is a UN study, 'Why Do Some Men Use Violence Against Women And How Can We Prevent It?' It was done in Asian and Pacific countries so isn't relevant to Britain. It says that the strongest association with rape is 'having more sexual partners'. That seems to mean more than 2 'lifetime sexual partners'. Whatever that means. Are you a man, and have you had more than 2 lifetime sexual partners? Then you are more likely to be a rapist than a man who has 'had transactional sex or sex with a sex worker'.

Consider these two statements. 1 Men who have more sexual partners are more likely to rape. 2 Men who have sex with sex workers are more likely to rape. The first invalidates the second. When a man visits a sex worker he increases the number of his lifetime sexual partners by one. It seems that it is the increasing of the number of partners that is the thing: the fact that the additional partner is a sex worker is of no importance. It could even be that the fact it's a sex worker and not a woman he met in the office or at a bar is a good thing.

The third research study used on the Nordic Model Now! page is 'Factors Influencing Attitudes to Violence Against Women'. It says nothing about prostitution. It does have something to say about pornography though: "Correlational studies of pornography use in everyday life find that men who use hardcore, violent, or rape pornography, and men who are high-frequency users of pornography, are significantly more likely than others to report that they would rape or sexually harass a woman if they knew they could get away with it." So the author has a different agenda than Nordic Model Now!. He wants to put the blame on pornography not prostitution.

Would it be surprising if a rapist is more likely to sometimes pay for sex? Or use pornography? I don't think so. That would be your correlation, but they have failed to establish a correlation, let alone causation. If you interviewed rapists I'm sure you could find lots of things that they do more frequently. Going to betting shops, for example. That doesn't mean that betting causes rapes.

Young women at university will make up their own minds about sex work. They will not be scared off by people like Libby Purves. They can see through their propaganda. I hope that on the course for students and staff, the one that Libby Purves wants to stop, they can examine the evidence. The existence of sex work does not cause problems for women. Also they can consider why sex workers get assaulted: top of my list of reasons is people in the older generation (like Libby Purves) stopping grants and not allowing them to work together for safety.

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.