10 ms·

I thought this was incredibly interesting. The author directly confronts the grey and ambiguous areas around consent when money is involved. It really drives ho

by rhcom2 7y ago

I thought this was incredibly interesting. The author directly confronts the grey and ambiguous areas around consent when money is involved. It really drives home the point that if you want to legislate ways to protect sex workers, you should actually talk to sex workers and not make up feel good bs that can harm people.

buboard 7y ago
The law should seek, more than just protect workers (the catchy part) to regulate their work.
- trehalose 7y ago
  Well, on the flipside, it should certainly seek, more than just regulate their work (the politically correct part) to protect them. How could the law succeed at either without input from the workers?
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Many years ago, I read the biography of a sex worker whose previous work had somehow been in politics, I think related to organizing and running political campaigns. After she voluntarily chose to become a sex worker in her late twenties, she turned her political background towards sex work. She was against regulation. She concluded that regulation never protected sex workers and it generally made their lives worse, not better. She was for decriminalizing it, a term that gets interpreted very differently by different people. If I recall correctly, she simply wanted no law or regulation that made selling sexual services illegal. Edit: The book is Working: My Life as a Prostitute by Dolores French
  - patmcc 7y ago
    There's an distinction made between legalization and decriminalization in terms of sex work (that I think is the reverse of how they're used in regards to drugs). Legalization, to sex workers, implies regulation, licensing, additional taxes charged, etc. Decriminalization means no laws against adults selling sex (except perhaps any standard employment laws, etc.) It's an interesting distinction, and talking to people about it really brings up the core complaint against sex work, which almost always ends up being a moral one (i.e. that it is not work that should be done, it's wrong).
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      I've repeatedly run into issues when I comment on this, so I spent some time at some point searching for stuff on the web. Dolores French makes the exact distinction you are making: that legalization means regulation and decriminalization means just leave them the hell alone and make no law forbidding it. But when I've searched, different sources use decriminalization to mean what you and she called legalization, iirc. So I have really been given a lot of nonsense over the years by people seemingly affronted by a woman and former homemaker who is for decriminalization as the term was used by Dolores French. If they understand the term differently from how I use it, they pounce on this as evidence that I'm an idiot rather than acknowledging that it gets used differently in different sources and it was simply a misunderstanding. Yes, I think this is about the gut reaction many people have that sex work is flat out immoral and should not be done. Period. "Identity politics" -- ie details about who I happen to be -- seems to just make it a real hot button for a lot of people that I am willing to go on public record as being for the decriminalization of sex work. As a former homemaker, devoted military wife and full-time mom of special needs kids, I'm supposed to be some symbol of conservative goodness or something, it seems. I've gotten more careful about how I talk about it. But my views remain the same.
    - gizmo686 7y ago
      I think "standard employment laws" may be an issue. Between sexual harrasment and bodily fluids, I cannot imagine most sex work being non criminal without some special carve out in the law. I can imagine a policy of non enforcement, but such policies have a tendency of getting reversed. Also, it was mentioned in the article, but the porn industry's STD situation should be harold by free market conservatives as a triumph of self regulation.
  - buboard 7y ago
    Regulation is about setting the terms about when it's legal (the US is kind of an outlier in legalization of prostitution anyway)
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      I think the problem is that in most places the world over, whether it is legal or not, both laws and regulations surrounding sex work tend to have very misogynistic outcomes. So they say sex work is illegal, but they mostly arrest prostitutes, not their clients nor the pimps. From what I have read, it's hard to prove a man is a pimp, so this is not entirely due to people simply hating on women. But the fact that they tend to arrest prostitutes, but not their clients, tends to reflect the fact that in this mostly heterosexual world, most sex workers are female and clients are typically male. There is a general widespread attitude that "men have needs" and it's okay for them to get laid, but women who put out without being married to the guy are an evil and immoral influence and they must be punished. So when a man and a woman have consenting sex outside the bonds of marriage, whether money is involved or not, a great many people view his actions as fine, but hers as morally reprehensible and in need of punishment. It's really no surprise then that the way these rules (whether laws or regulations) get written and/or enforced all too often reflects that bias. In an ideal world, we would have rules that protect both sex workers and their clients equally. But we have a very long ways to go to get to that point. In the interim, decriminalization seems to be the least worst answer, if only because when sex work is illegal, people who are being trafficked can't go to the police for fear of being arrested themselves -- even though they are being forced to engage in this kind of work against their will. It's a huge injustice and we shouldn't abide it.
      - angry_octet 7y ago
        Some of your arguments are used to justify the Nordic Model -- only clients should get arrested. However, it somehow always seems that it's the sex workers who suffer, even being arrested and gaoled for working/living together, etc. It's a rad fem authoritarian utopia that damages SWers routinely, and has had not noticeable impact on already-illegal trafficked SWer situation (generally from former USSR and the middle-East).
petermcneeley 7y ago
UBI mostly removes the need for laws to protect workers from exploitation. This includes sex workers.
- aidenn0 7y ago
  UBI, by itself, doesn't even eliminate poverty: consider the simple case of where the payments on your debts equal your UBI. You are now exactly as badly off as someone with no debts and no income. The same is true for people who have medical needs in excess of that covered by UBI, but no (or insufficient) health insurance.
  - petermcneeley 7y ago
    You are correct. I should have added "in Canada".
    - groby_b 7y ago
      You could've just said "in the civilized world".
      - drcross 7y ago
        "In first world countries" probably covers it, if slightly risqué.
        hombre_fatal 7y ago
        That was already the jab of the comment you replied to.
  - wahern 7y ago
    I suppose it depends on your country, but in the U.S. your income would never be garnished to the point that you couldn't afford basic living expenses. Most UBI schemes pay below the poverty level, which means it's unlikely your UBI payments would ever be taken to pay down debt. IOW, you're absolutely better off with UBI and massive debt than you are with no UBI and no debt.
barry-cotter 7y ago
Or if you hate sex workers you could criminalize the purchase of sex and use eviction, making people homeless, as part of your repertoire of tactics to try and destroy whores’ lives. https://www.amnestyusa.org/files/norway_report_-_sex_workers_rights_-_embargoed_-_final.pdf https://www.amnestyusa.org/files/norway_report_-_sex_workers... > Oslo police have over the last decade adopted a “preventative policing” approach to sex work which involves the enforcement of lower level offences as “stress methods” to disrupt, destabilize and increase the pressure on those operating in the sex sector. One academic researcher describes how police sources “in Oslo often use terms like they are going to ‘crush’ or ‘choke’ the [prostitution] market, and unsettle, pressure and stress the people in the market”. One example of this approach is “Operation Homeless”: an initiative that saw increased enforcement of the law on “promotion” of sex work – which makes it an offence to “let premises ... for prostitution”. “Operation Homeless” ran for four years between 2007 and 2011 and initiated the systematic and rapid eviction of many sex workers from their places of work and/or homes.
- basicplus2 7y ago
  That is a Shocking Disgrace.. I can only hope this action os ilegal in someway
- mehhh 7y ago
  So the police created homeless sex workers? How does this not worsen the blight in the city?
  - bravoetch 7y ago
    It's a power play. Police are law enforcement through use of power. They don't have 'make life better for people' in their workday.
    - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
      > They don't have Those police don't have The ones where I live aren't like that.
belorn 7y ago
The article describe in a very descriptive way how people who claim that they want to protect sex workers do not actually have that intent. My own theory is that people that genuine want to protect workers for exploitation usually end up working on general labor rights.
- gizmo686 7y ago
  If your geniune goal is to protect sex workers, you would not do so by working on general labor rights, because those rights do not apply to sex workers. If you want the government to protect sex workers you, almost by definition, need to make sex work legal. In reality, you might not need to go that far. The effectivness immigration policy of sancuary cities and safe harbor laws for reporting drug overdoses show that it is possibly to provide services (including law enforcement) to criminals; but building and maintaing the nessesary trust with the community is very difficult.
  - dx87 7y ago
    Legalising it can also have unintended side effects. When prostitution is legalised, the demand often outstrips the supply, leading to an increase in human trafficking. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986065 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986065
    - roenxi 7y ago
      Aha, I've seen that study on Hacker News before and I wrote a variant of the following observation: A charitable read of that paper, particularly p. 25, would suggest that trafficking dropped from 19,740 cases to 12,350 cases when prostitution was liberalised. I've done enough statistics to say that I don't think the paper conclusively shows evidence of a problem; particularly given how hard it must be to gather data on illegal things. Need more rigour to be used for this sort of discussion although it does show that there is a risk to be considered.
    - henrikschroder 7y ago
      I'm generally in the liberal camp on this, and that legalization/decriminalization is the way to go, and that you have to listen to actual sex workers and ask them what they want. But this argument is the strongest I've seen for the opposing view. It basically says that legalization/decriminalization does make things better for existing sex workers, but since it increases trafficking, the whole thing is net negative, since a lot of people are now made to suffer to supply this new market. The best defense I have against that is that then you haven't enforced the legal landscape properly. It should be possible for local police to protect legal sex workers and treat them with dignity and respect, and crack down hard on trafficking. But I also realize how naive that makes me sound.
elliekelly 7y ago
> It really drives home the point that if you want to legislate ways to protect sex workers, you should actually talk to sex workers and not make up feel good bs that can harm people. There's a tiny but really interesting museum in Amsterdam set up by a former sex worker that explains exactly this. The safety regulations they're looking for really aren't all that different from how cities regulate taxis. Like driving a taxi, sex work can be a dangerous job because they're alone with a client, often at night, and with a fair bit of cash on them. A lot of time the clients are drunk, which makes them more likely to be violent. And, because many of the workers are immigrants, there's a risk they're being exploited by someone taking a significant portion of their earnings. Allowing credit card transactions, issuing taxi medallions, requiring worker background checks, and, most importantly, having police who actually investigate crimes reported by workers, has gone a long way to make driving a cab a much safer occupation than it was two decades ago. I'm not sure about credit cards in de Wallen but they have a medallion-like system with the booth rentals.
- ummonk 7y ago
  Just don’t let Uber / Lyft for sex workers go in and disrupt it.
  - taneq 7y ago
    If Tinder allowed tipping it'd be basically that. Hmmmm...
    - cerberusss 7y ago
      I frequent Reddit and in r/Tinder, sometimes screenshots are discussed where a prospective date asks for money via Venmo.
  - qnr 7y ago
    It seems that this already exists: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/bjw8bv/smooci-app-escort-booking-platform https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/bjw8bv/smooci-app-escort-...
- 7y ago
novok 7y ago
Reminds me of stories I hear about rarely anyone who is in an NGO that manages or tries to help refugees has been in a camp or a refugee in their past, and when they actually get into those organizations, see how out of touch they are. Ex: " I went to endless meetings on refugee shelter and nobody ever invited a single refugee. I only ever saw one refugee at a meeting about refugee shelter, it was a doctor from Canada who had grown up in a refugee camp in Africa. She had become quite a senior doctor and when she came in it was like an axe murder. She was unbelievably angry, and she literally just called out every single thing the speaker said that wasn’t true." "the boss lady from UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) come around to inspect the shelters refuse to set foot inside of it. She was fucking furious that one had been built there. The fear that they had was the the Hexayurts were too cheap and they lasted too long. They were afraid that what was going to happen was that every place that they built them the locals were going to look at them and say That’s actually pretty good, and start building them themselves. And I’m just like, Does that not solve the fucking problem? Is that not what we want—local resilience? The more you find out about how these systems run the worse the expectation gets. It’s very messy. " https://www.yesplz.coffee/vinay_gupta_hexayurt_interview/ https://www.yesplz.coffee/vinay_gupta_hexayurt_interview/
- michaelt 7y ago
  About 20 years ago I worked on a project designing pop-up shelter buildings, and that's a misrepresentation of UNHCR policy. Their policy is both simple and logical once you know it: The main challenge with refugee camps is not an engineering issue; the challenge is getting nearby countries to agree to host camps. Countries will agree much more easily to host a temporary camp - which means it has to visibly be a temporary camp. It turns out, once you know about this constraint (and the obvious facts about cost, logistics, and that camps have large amounts of manual labour available) it's extremely difficult to improve on 10,000 year old canvas tent technology.

by rhcom2 7y ago

buboard 7y ago

The law should seek, more than just protect workers (the catchy part) to regulate their work.

trehalose 7y ago
Well, on the flipside, it should certainly seek, more than just regulate their work (the politically correct part) to protect them. How could the law succeed at either without input from the workers?
DoreenMichele 7y ago
Many years ago, I read the biography of a sex worker whose previous work had somehow been in politics, I think related to organizing and running political campaigns. After she voluntarily chose to become a sex worker in her late twenties, she turned her political background towards sex work. She was against regulation. She concluded that regulation never protected sex workers and it generally made their lives worse, not better. She was for decriminalizing it, a term that gets interpreted very differently by different people. If I recall correctly, she simply wanted no law or regulation that made selling sexual services illegal. Edit: The book is Working: My Life as a Prostitute by Dolores French
- patmcc 7y ago
  There's an distinction made between legalization and decriminalization in terms of sex work (that I think is the reverse of how they're used in regards to drugs). Legalization, to sex workers, implies regulation, licensing, additional taxes charged, etc. Decriminalization means no laws against adults selling sex (except perhaps any standard employment laws, etc.) It's an interesting distinction, and talking to people about it really brings up the core complaint against sex work, which almost always ends up being a moral one (i.e. that it is not work that should be done, it's wrong).
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    I've repeatedly run into issues when I comment on this, so I spent some time at some point searching for stuff on the web. Dolores French makes the exact distinction you are making: that legalization means regulation and decriminalization means just leave them the hell alone and make no law forbidding it. But when I've searched, different sources use decriminalization to mean what you and she called legalization, iirc. So I have really been given a lot of nonsense over the years by people seemingly affronted by a woman and former homemaker who is for decriminalization as the term was used by Dolores French. If they understand the term differently from how I use it, they pounce on this as evidence that I'm an idiot rather than acknowledging that it gets used differently in different sources and it was simply a misunderstanding. Yes, I think this is about the gut reaction many people have that sex work is flat out immoral and should not be done. Period. "Identity politics" -- ie details about who I happen to be -- seems to just make it a real hot button for a lot of people that I am willing to go on public record as being for the decriminalization of sex work. As a former homemaker, devoted military wife and full-time mom of special needs kids, I'm supposed to be some symbol of conservative goodness or something, it seems. I've gotten more careful about how I talk about it. But my views remain the same.
  - gizmo686 7y ago
    I think "standard employment laws" may be an issue. Between sexual harrasment and bodily fluids, I cannot imagine most sex work being non criminal without some special carve out in the law. I can imagine a policy of non enforcement, but such policies have a tendency of getting reversed. Also, it was mentioned in the article, but the porn industry's STD situation should be harold by free market conservatives as a triumph of self regulation.
- buboard 7y ago
  Regulation is about setting the terms about when it's legal (the US is kind of an outlier in legalization of prostitution anyway)
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    I think the problem is that in most places the world over, whether it is legal or not, both laws and regulations surrounding sex work tend to have very misogynistic outcomes. So they say sex work is illegal, but they mostly arrest prostitutes, not their clients nor the pimps. From what I have read, it's hard to prove a man is a pimp, so this is not entirely due to people simply hating on women. But the fact that they tend to arrest prostitutes, but not their clients, tends to reflect the fact that in this mostly heterosexual world, most sex workers are female and clients are typically male. There is a general widespread attitude that "men have needs" and it's okay for them to get laid, but women who put out without being married to the guy are an evil and immoral influence and they must be punished. So when a man and a woman have consenting sex outside the bonds of marriage, whether money is involved or not, a great many people view his actions as fine, but hers as morally reprehensible and in need of punishment. It's really no surprise then that the way these rules (whether laws or regulations) get written and/or enforced all too often reflects that bias. In an ideal world, we would have rules that protect both sex workers and their clients equally. But we have a very long ways to go to get to that point. In the interim, decriminalization seems to be the least worst answer, if only because when sex work is illegal, people who are being trafficked can't go to the police for fear of being arrested themselves -- even though they are being forced to engage in this kind of work against their will. It's a huge injustice and we shouldn't abide it.
    - angry_octet 7y ago
      Some of your arguments are used to justify the Nordic Model -- only clients should get arrested. However, it somehow always seems that it's the sex workers who suffer, even being arrested and gaoled for working/living together, etc. It's a rad fem authoritarian utopia that damages SWers routinely, and has had not noticeable impact on already-illegal trafficked SWer situation (generally from former USSR and the middle-East).

petermcneeley 7y ago

UBI mostly removes the need for laws to protect workers from exploitation. This includes sex workers.

aidenn0 7y ago
UBI, by itself, doesn't even eliminate poverty: consider the simple case of where the payments on your debts equal your UBI. You are now exactly as badly off as someone with no debts and no income. The same is true for people who have medical needs in excess of that covered by UBI, but no (or insufficient) health insurance.
- petermcneeley 7y ago
  You are correct. I should have added "in Canada".
  - groby_b 7y ago
    You could've just said "in the civilized world".
    - drcross 7y ago
      "In first world countries" probably covers it, if slightly risqué.
      - hombre_fatal 7y ago
        That was already the jab of the comment you replied to.
- wahern 7y ago
  I suppose it depends on your country, but in the U.S. your income would never be garnished to the point that you couldn't afford basic living expenses. Most UBI schemes pay below the poverty level, which means it's unlikely your UBI payments would ever be taken to pay down debt. IOW, you're absolutely better off with UBI and massive debt than you are with no UBI and no debt.

barry-cotter 7y ago

Or if you hate sex workers you could criminalize the purchase of sex and use eviction, making people homeless, as part of your repertoire of tactics to try and destroy whores’ lives. https://www.amnestyusa.org/files/norway_report_-_sex_workers_rights_-_embargoed_-_final.pdf https://www.amnestyusa.org/files/norway_report_-_sex_workers... > Oslo police have over the last decade adopted a “preventative policing” approach to sex work which involves the enforcement of lower level offences as “stress methods” to disrupt, destabilize and increase the pressure on those operating in the sex sector. One academic researcher describes how police sources “in Oslo often use terms like they are going to ‘crush’ or ‘choke’ the [prostitution] market, and unsettle, pressure and stress the people in the market”. One example of this approach is “Operation Homeless”: an initiative that saw increased enforcement of the law on “promotion” of sex work – which makes it an offence to “let premises ... for prostitution”. “Operation Homeless” ran for four years between 2007 and 2011 and initiated the systematic and rapid eviction of many sex workers from their places of work and/or homes.

basicplus2 7y ago
That is a Shocking Disgrace.. I can only hope this action os ilegal in someway
mehhh 7y ago
So the police created homeless sex workers? How does this not worsen the blight in the city?
- bravoetch 7y ago
  It's a power play. Police are law enforcement through use of power. They don't have 'make life better for people' in their workday.
  - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
    > They don't have Those police don't have The ones where I live aren't like that.

belorn 7y ago

The article describe in a very descriptive way how people who claim that they want to protect sex workers do not actually have that intent. My own theory is that people that genuine want to protect workers for exploitation usually end up working on general labor rights.

gizmo686 7y ago
If your geniune goal is to protect sex workers, you would not do so by working on general labor rights, because those rights do not apply to sex workers. If you want the government to protect sex workers you, almost by definition, need to make sex work legal. In reality, you might not need to go that far. The effectivness immigration policy of sancuary cities and safe harbor laws for reporting drug overdoses show that it is possibly to provide services (including law enforcement) to criminals; but building and maintaing the nessesary trust with the community is very difficult.
- dx87 7y ago
  Legalising it can also have unintended side effects. When prostitution is legalised, the demand often outstrips the supply, leading to an increase in human trafficking. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986065 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986065
  - roenxi 7y ago
    Aha, I've seen that study on Hacker News before and I wrote a variant of the following observation: A charitable read of that paper, particularly p. 25, would suggest that trafficking dropped from 19,740 cases to 12,350 cases when prostitution was liberalised. I've done enough statistics to say that I don't think the paper conclusively shows evidence of a problem; particularly given how hard it must be to gather data on illegal things. Need more rigour to be used for this sort of discussion although it does show that there is a risk to be considered.
  - henrikschroder 7y ago
    I'm generally in the liberal camp on this, and that legalization/decriminalization is the way to go, and that you have to listen to actual sex workers and ask them what they want. But this argument is the strongest I've seen for the opposing view. It basically says that legalization/decriminalization does make things better for existing sex workers, but since it increases trafficking, the whole thing is net negative, since a lot of people are now made to suffer to supply this new market. The best defense I have against that is that then you haven't enforced the legal landscape properly. It should be possible for local police to protect legal sex workers and treat them with dignity and respect, and crack down hard on trafficking. But I also realize how naive that makes me sound.

elliekelly 7y ago

> It really drives home the point that if you want to legislate ways to protect sex workers, you should actually talk to sex workers and not make up feel good bs that can harm people. There's a tiny but really interesting museum in Amsterdam set up by a former sex worker that explains exactly this. The safety regulations they're looking for really aren't all that different from how cities regulate taxis. Like driving a taxi, sex work can be a dangerous job because they're alone with a client, often at night, and with a fair bit of cash on them. A lot of time the clients are drunk, which makes them more likely to be violent. And, because many of the workers are immigrants, there's a risk they're being exploited by someone taking a significant portion of their earnings. Allowing credit card transactions, issuing taxi medallions, requiring worker background checks, and, most importantly, having police who actually investigate crimes reported by workers, has gone a long way to make driving a cab a much safer occupation than it was two decades ago. I'm not sure about credit cards in de Wallen but they have a medallion-like system with the booth rentals.

ummonk 7y ago
Just don’t let Uber / Lyft for sex workers go in and disrupt it.
- taneq 7y ago
  If Tinder allowed tipping it'd be basically that. Hmmmm...
  - cerberusss 7y ago
    I frequent Reddit and in r/Tinder, sometimes screenshots are discussed where a prospective date asks for money via Venmo.
- qnr 7y ago
  It seems that this already exists: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/bjw8bv/smooci-app-escort-booking-platform https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/bjw8bv/smooci-app-escort-...
7y ago

novok 7y ago

Reminds me of stories I hear about rarely anyone who is in an NGO that manages or tries to help refugees has been in a camp or a refugee in their past, and when they actually get into those organizations, see how out of touch they are. Ex: " I went to endless meetings on refugee shelter and nobody ever invited a single refugee. I only ever saw one refugee at a meeting about refugee shelter, it was a doctor from Canada who had grown up in a refugee camp in Africa. She had become quite a senior doctor and when she came in it was like an axe murder. She was unbelievably angry, and she literally just called out every single thing the speaker said that wasn’t true." "the boss lady from UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) come around to inspect the shelters refuse to set foot inside of it. She was fucking furious that one had been built there. The fear that they had was the the Hexayurts were too cheap and they lasted too long. They were afraid that what was going to happen was that every place that they built them the locals were going to look at them and say That’s actually pretty good, and start building them themselves. And I’m just like, Does that not solve the fucking problem? Is that not what we want—local resilience? The more you find out about how these systems run the worse the expectation gets. It’s very messy. " https://www.yesplz.coffee/vinay_gupta_hexayurt_interview/ https://www.yesplz.coffee/vinay_gupta_hexayurt_interview/

michaelt 7y ago
About 20 years ago I worked on a project designing pop-up shelter buildings, and that's a misrepresentation of UNHCR policy. Their policy is both simple and logical once you know it: The main challenge with refugee camps is not an engineering issue; the challenge is getting nearby countries to agree to host camps. Countries will agree much more easily to host a temporary camp - which means it has to visibly be a temporary camp. It turns out, once you know about this constraint (and the obvious facts about cost, logistics, and that camps have large amounts of manual labour available) it's extremely difficult to improve on 10,000 year old canvas tent technology.