If you liked it, I urge you to buy a copy online. (No, I am NOT Stephen Leather.) I haven’t read the online version, but I know the finished product has more added, especially the wonderful little Epilogue telling what becomes of all of the characters in later life.
Zombie Bar in the book is obviously Voodoo Bar in real life. Can’t quite get a handle on which bar Spicey is supposed to be. The author has already stated Fatso’s Bar is the fictional version of the real-life Brit hangout Jool’s. All other bar and hotel names in the book are real. And the character of Big Ron is based on the real-life Big Dave, owner of Jool’s.
They may start by choice, but most give a good chunk of their earnings to their booker and agency (hey, like models!) and, if they weren’t taking drugs before, they’re more than likely going to start to help them deal with the long hours or to help them zone out. I’m acquainted with someone who genuinely enjoyed being a prostitute and made hundreds of thousands doing it. But she was also a drug addict, and estimated about 90% of her coworkers were, too.
Except that they’re being pimped out to people from societies where 12-year-old brides are not acceptable (though, of course, those norms may just be for their country or race’s 12-year-old girls).
Drug abuse is endemic in a number of professions, including law, academia and I’m sure you don’t need me to dig up links to the entertainment industry.
I’ve seen several articles that suggest that many (most? a lot of?) sex trade workers are suffering from low self esteem. This, rather than desperation, is the main reason they end up in sex work. A huge number were abused as younger girls. Usually this relates to sex trade workers practicing illegally in North America. No surprise there; given the general societal view of sex trade workers, it would take a very healthy self-image and some massive self-confidence to not start hating yourself.
Plus, many of the stories these prostitutes tell are very similar; they get befriended (especially young runaways) and given a small taste of the party life. When they are heavily dependant financially socially and emotionally, and also possibly hooked on drugs, the “time to pay it back” speech follows. They are expected to earn to pay back all that the pimp has spent on them so far. Once they have gotten into that hole it’s hard to stand up for themselves and get out.
So even in our “enlightened” North American society, exploitation is a significant player in the trade. As I said earlier, the fact that the trade finds in necessary to import girls for a place like Amsterdam and they tell similar stories of exploitation, suggests that even in that setting exploitation is needed.
As for cultural relativism - “morality” is the framework of rules by which a society operates that keep it functioning normally. The fact that murder, for example, appears to be an absolute is because there are no societies I am aware of where arbitrarily killing another member of the society is a practical means of running a society; therefore it should not be allowed and is not allowed by any of them.
There may be specially crafted exceptions:
some societies seem to thing it is OK to kill someone who has shamed you
many make an exception for self defence or euthanasia
many societies allowed tacit approval of murdering a cheating spouse (some only the wife)
some allowed murder of his/her correspondent too.
So murder appears to be an absolute because uncontrolled murder is almost impossible to permit in a functional society.
Similarly, there were societies where other exceptions were allowed - was it one of the middle east or mediterranean societies where you could escape a rape charge by offering to marry the victim. (Huh? Worked for them… The biggest problem was that a “used” woman was “unclean goods” and someone had to take care of her. At least we’re not talking about some middle east and asian societies where the solution is to kill the victim. Isn’t society grand?)
Moral relativism says something about the value put on the various players by their society. We have to step back one step further, and judge a society overall by the quality of its valuation of its members. Perhaps that is the more absolute judgment - “do their rules do justice for all members?” Any “morality” which simply protects the status quo and the socially dominant group at the expense of the unprivileged has flaws.
Sure, but I’d really rather my lawyer not be on heroin while I’m paying him. And I’m not planning on putting my penis in him, either.
Right, and by some people’s definition this is not exploitation. They want to make sure that the prostitute who is giving them a hard on is something like the Happy Hooker rather than a woman or girl who spends most of her time in shackles. Being dependent on drugs, unable to find a job to feed her children, starting the work herself as a runaway or anything else is a grey area, for some.
The thread title is about “sex workers,” not just prostitutes. I can tell you that a a lot of dominatrixes usually have other options available to them. Though they do not have sex (or shouldn’t) they are usually lumped in with other sex workers with little protest.
And every dominatrix I have ever met is very empowered by their jobs. I know that’s a small sample size but given what the position entails, it’s not too surprising.
In Super Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner present a case study of just such a sex worker. She made about $170,000/year. They estimate that there are fewer than 1,000 folks like her in the US, though.
I concur. The woman L&D profile was very well-adjusted before becoming a sex worker, and was certainly not pressured into the profession–she was pimp-free, and left to pursue a degree in Economics. Her youth was pretty bad, however; IIRC, she was molested as a child (though the blog I just looked at on the NYT Freakonomics blog contradicts this). She wasn’t exploited in any conventional use of the word, but the case could be made that hers wasn’t exactly a rational career choice in the sense that applying at IBM would be.
Absolutely! The majority of call girls, escorts, and other non-street-level prostitutes are educated and have other options, and a significant percentage of them are actually paying their way through college with the work.
The “trafficking” thing is awfully reminiscent of the salacious, borderline perverse, obsession that dirty old congressmen indulged in during the “white slave” panic. The high-end numbers all seem to rule out any possibility of free agency, which doesn’t seem realistic, or to rely upon a very expansive definition of exploitation based on some quasi-Marxist theory of economic compulsion. I also have some difficulty imagining (again, to take a literal or close-to-literal definition of the word) “imprisoning” or “trapping” large numbers of young women in major modern American cities. I mean, you hear about this stuff going down in strip mall massage facilities, not dungeons where they’re forced to live under lock and key.
By the way, I’ve suspected some of the more lurid trafficking stories of having been planted by pro-illegal immigrant activists or immigration lawyers, as a suspiciously prevalent theme is the urgent need for a “victim of trafficking” asylum provision. That’d be a holy grail for at least half the illegal immigrants going, as all you’d have to do is recite some rote story of being forced into prostitution in a secret (and hence un-verifiable) brothel and hey presto the economic migrant is home free.
