First let me say I don’t believe prostitution should be illegal at all. If women choose to sell sex and men to buy or vice versa in whatever combination then they should be free to do so. It has nothing at all to do with the government.
But OK, if you’re going to criminalize the women then the johns should be penalized too. Fair is fair. But classing it as sexual coercion by the male? That is dangerous BS. Sexual coercion is the very definition of rape. So all men who frequent prostitutes now in France are rapists? This is absurd. Certainly some girls and women are forced into prostitution but the law already covers that.
A woman who makes an informed decision to sell her own body is not being subjected to rape by her clients and to pretend otherwise belittles genuine rape.
I’d like to see protection against being forced by circumstances to engaging in prostitution. If there were guaranteed protections that women who don’t really want to do this don’t feel they must, simply to pay rent and groceries.
Playboy magazine, famously, applied a “means test,” and only accepted nude models for their photos who could show that they didn’t need the money so badly that this was needful for them. No one could claim, “I had to pose nude for Playboy because I was desperate for money.”
There are women (and, I guess, probably some men) who are prostitutes but don’t actually want to be. Without protection, then some of the claims about coercion are, at least in part, the truth.
I do not believe it is coercion. But I will not argue. These laws are bound to be passed everywhere – as 90% of women would be for these laws for obvious reasons.
Paying for sex is illegal in
USA – mostly since '75s – '85
Sweden – since '99
South Korea – since '04
Ireland and Norway – since '09
Canada and North Ireland – since '14
France – since '16
I find this a very strange position. Virtually all jobs are done precisely because without doing them people would be unable to pay the rent and buy food.
Those jobs, however, do not involve giving up sovereignty over your own body. No one should be forced to become a sexual object to survive.
That said, this ruling is dumb (going by what is said here). It’s frankly misogynistic. For one, it presumes that prostitution is just men paying women. But, more importantly, it presumes that said female prostitutes are not capable of consent. That’s treating them like less than a person.
These aren’t contradictory–some women are forced to become prostitutes. This should not be. There should be a good enough welfare state that this is not their only option. This does not mean they lack the ability to choose who to have sex with. And that’s only “some” prostitutes, not all.
The only situation in which the ruling could apply is sex slavery. But not all prostitution is sex slavery.
A careful reading of the linked article shows that what the French National Assembly has decided is that it will be an offence to pay for sexual intercourse.
The suggested rationale for that decision, however, has not been articulated by Assembly; it is attributed to the Assembly by the author of the article.
Is the attribution fair? I don’t know; I haven’t read the parliamentary debates in which this law was discussed. But at the moment it seems like a bit of a stretch to say that the Assembly has decided that sex for money is, by its nature, and act of coercion. They have decided it should be criminalised, which is not the same thing at all.
Yaël Mellul and ise Bouvet claim that the Assembly did this because it was convinced of the coercive nature of the transaction, but the piece they have written is singularly lacking in any quotes from members of the Assembly confirming that this was their motivation.
Why? I’m a woman, and I think prostitution should be legal. Even if people are forced by circumstances to take up prostitution, it’s a job and they are getting money instead of starving to death. I’m forced by circumstances to work, just like most people. If you have no job skills, you still need to eat.
I’m only opposed to underage prostitution, sex slaves, and abusive pimps, and if we legalized prostitution it would be a lot easier to stop these practices.
Does it? The article talks about female prostitutes pretty much exclusively, but none of the arguments it makes are necessarily exclusive to female prostitutes or male johns.
They certainly can allow you to use your body in armed conflict, or do any number of exceedingly dangerous jobs, or dress it a certain way, have it in places you’d rather not be, so on and so forth.
“Sovereignty” isn’t something you have over your body. You possess it. If you want the money, you does the job, and if you don’t want to do the job, so be it.
First off, all those things are horrible, too. (The draft was just more slavery, for example. Forcing people into dangerous jobs is inhumane.) Second, they don’t involve bodily sovereignty. No one is doing something to your body. You are doing something. You still have sovereignty.
And it very well fucking is something you have. It’s why assault and rape and all that shit are wrong. That is what it violates.
The article says that, not the ruling. And while there is such a thing as male prostitutes, the vast, vast majority of sex workers are women, and johns are almost exclusively men. That the writer used insufficiently inclusive language when describing a problem that overwhelmingly impacts women more than men is not, I think, particularly strong evidence of gender bias.
I agree. The majority of people think that prostitution is immoral. It travels with crime and violence wherever it goes, whether it’s legal or not. Hence why France and several other countries that tried legalizing it have reversed that decision or are in the process of doing so. Of course describing prostitution as coercion helps give a feminist- and progressive-sounding veneer to it.
In actual practice, of course, prostitution very often is coercive. Not always, but too often. Think of the typical relationship between a prostitute and pimp.
UDS has a point, we do not have in our hands the report or the “whereas” clause in the legislation that sets forth a justification for it, or a transcript of the debate to show that was what was argued. But nonetheless one can see how an observer could make that inference. And yes, this IS a rising trend, aiming for the deterrent effect of punishing the person who pays for the activity, and for the countries adopting this, as** ITR Champion** states, it is a way to be able to plausibly argue they are not going after the sex workers (majority women) but after the “exploiters”. In many places the organizatons of sex workers themselves have argued against this as not helping because it still does not address the root problems. That in recent years human trafficking has come into the limelight helps drive these sorts of action (never mind that some acts we now call trafficking, which are more simply predatory pimping, were illegal all along and it just so happens the authorities were lousy at enforcing that because hey who cares about what happens to some whore).
And sex work is not “you doing something”? I do not see how, absent coercion, the prostitute loses bodily sovereignty, s/he still makes the call as to what “services” are offered or not. Of course, how do we ensure “absent coercion” is the big question – most of our societies are not exactly doing a sterling job of that in either the immediate or root-causes sense.
If the argument is that the notion of an act of sexual intimacy becoming an economic commodity is inherently violatory, ISTM that tends to skate uncomfortably close to viewing sexuality as something “sacred”, that must not be treated in the same manner as, say, a field laborer’s physical strength.
Then there are those who believe that in a situation of true freedom and agency and a truly level playing field, no one in their right mind would choose sex work and no one in their right mind would pay for it. That is a bit trickier to prove/falsify because where we stand, we have no experiment or test case to look at; even our most developed Welfare States are far from utopian.
That’s exactly what anti-prostitution laws are about. The religious notion that sex is sacred, and sexual activity is different than all other activities that one might be paid for.
For those who try to draw the line because the prostitute allows their body to be touched/used by the john… so does a fashion model. Naked, even, to be dressed and undressed and posed and pinched and altered and used as a living clothing rack. The hands of the stylist are all over them. Same as bodypaint models, whose every inch, including breasts, buttocks, and often vulva, are touched by the artist applying paint.
It’s only when the touch is done for sexual gratification that we want to outlaw it.
This doesn’t have to be a religious notion, and it doesn’t have to be confined to sex.
On entirely humanistic grounds, you could arrive at the conclusion that sexuality is such an intimate and dignified aspect of human personhood that the law should not allow it to be commodified, and that we should not legalise prostitution for much the same reason, or complex of reasons, that we don’t legalise trade in human organs, and that we don’t, or shouldn’t, recognise property rights in human DNA.
You might agree or disagree with any or all of those positions, but you certainly don’t have to be religious to hold them.
One of the key (and convincing) arguments against the pro-life brigade is that control of one’s own body is a key moral right, a woman has the right to decide what she can and cannot do with her body. It seems to me that it’s also a convincing argument against the criminalization of prostitution and in this case the argument applies just as much to men. If you are in favor of abortion rights then you should equally be in favor of legalizing prostitution.