Re: Final Comment

["R. Anders Schneiderman" <aschneid@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 03:21 PM 1/9/98 PST8PDT, Jim wrote:
>> Surely nobody disagrees with the idea that sex-slavery or underage
>> prostitution is wrong. The sex-workers comments were not aimed at
>> coerced or non-consensual prostitution, but at prostitutes who bject to
>> being criminalised in the name of saving their honour.
>> James Heartfield
> [ Jim replies with examples of stupid statements by Milton Friedman ]
>...
>Capitalism produces a whole host of slick facades to "show" that
>choices are indeed free choices or if they are even "constrained
>choices", we are all constrained and they are choices nontheless.
>But the reality is that what appears to be "consensual" is the
>"consent" given when the alternative is not simply less money but
>rather no money; the "consent" given when the alternative is not
>simply less comfortable shelter but rather no shelter; the "consent"
>given when the alternative is a slow and horrible death.

Jim, in case you've forgotten what list you're on, this is the Progressive
Economists list, not the NeoClassical Economists list.  Nobody on this
list--including the two prostitutes who chimed in--is saying or even
implying that prostitution is "consensual" when the choice is turning
tricks vs. starvation, or letting one's family starve.  Nobody.  Honest.

>Surely criminalization of prostitution will not solve anything and
>surely criminalization leads to more underground activity and makes
>it more difficult to control the disease trends. But the sanitized
>brothels of Nevada and Canberra are light years away from the
>brothels of Patpong, the conditions of young Indian prostitutes in
>Great Falls or the conditions of a highway prostitute servicing long-
>distance truck dirvers in India. And those, especially on the left
>and even call themselves leftists, and then talk about "free choice",
>or "free consent" or "consenual prostitution" under capitalism
>and based on the isolated and perhaps self-serving or perhaps even
>self-rationalizing rantings of a few white middle-class "high-class"
>hookers in Canberra, well there is a party available for your
>political action--the RIGHT-WING libertarian party.

Again, who do you think you're arguing with?  It's hard to imagine that in
a country like, for ex, Thailand you could meaningfully talk about
"consensual prostitution" when the alternatives to prostitution are awful,
scarce, or nonexistant.  But what does that have to do with prostitution in
other regions of capitalism?

I met a few Coyote activists when I was working at the Berkeley Free
Clinic, and they really changed the way I think about prostitution.  In my
heart, I don't how someone can actually want to sell sex for a living if
they've got any alternatives, but the women I met from Coyote said they
genuinely preferred being a hooker to being a waitress, a secretary, or
most of the other working class jobs that were available to them.  At one
point, I did ask, "would you want your daughter to become a hooker?"  One
said yes, the other said, "no, but I wouldn't want her to have to be a
secretary or a waitress either, and I definitely wouldn't want her to be a
housewife in a fucked-up marriage like I was; I want her to get an
education and move up."  Their goal wasn't just to legalize prostitution
and improve working conditions for hookers but to improve the situation for
all women, so that no women would end up becoming a prostitute because they
felt they didn't have an alternative.

If you want, you can treat the Coyote activists I met as suffering from
false consciousness, or you can class-bait them as just speaking for 'a few
white middle-class "high-class" hookers.'  That seems to me like a pretty
simple-minded way of dealing with a complicated issue.  Like I said, I have
trouble imagining turning tricks as feeling anything other than degrading,
but what the hell do I know?  There are lots of people who have sex lives
that seem degrading to me, but they don't seem to be any less happy or more
messed up than the rest of us.  Would any of this still exist under
Socialism?  Who knows?

Nobody on this side of the table is arguing in favor of putting people in
situations where they choose to do things that feel completely and utterly
degrading in the way that forcing someone to perform sex for money
can--that amounts to contractual rape.  Nobody here is saying that having
the IMF include legalizing prostitution as part of their economic agenda
for destabilized East Asian countries is something we should push for
(although I'm sure someone will suggest it in the WSJ op-ed pages).  All
we're saying is, it doesn't make sense to argue that prostitution is
inherently degrading when there are more than a few prostitutes who say
that they don't experience it that way.  Putting women in economic
situations which they perceive as degrading, whether it's prostitution or
marriage, is evil.  But arguing that all true lefties have to see sex the
same way is little more than political correctness dressed up in radical
rhetoric.

Anders Schneiderman

P.S.  Thanks to Susan Fleck for raising the issues of gender and of
marriage vs. prostitution.   Incidentally, having recently moved to DC, I'm
beginning to think that for the power elite, there literally isn't any
difference between marriage and prostitution.