The Empress Is Naked: From Female Privilege to Gender Equality and Social Liberation by Adam Leonas

Author:Adam Leonas [Leonas, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-06-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 26: Prostitutes

Not all prostitutes are the same.

There are luxury prostitutes who get paid thousands of dollars a night. Others just find it to be a profession which pays a decent wage. Many prostitutes enjoy it: in a study carried out in New York, one in four prostitutes reported “inclination” as a reason for selecting this profession280. Arianna, a prostitute from Calgary, Canada, who had been working as a prostitute for 5 years, said “It’s my body, what I choose to do with it is what I choose to do.... It is a very empowering industry. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”281

Others, who come from very poor backgrounds, see it as their only way out of poverty. And of course, there are those who are forced into prostitution (trafficking).

There is no doubt that forced prostitution is a heinous crime. However, violent coercion occurs in only a tiny minority of the cases282. Arriana says that she's “never, ever come across an underage person or somebody being forced to work.” What happens, then, with the overwhelming majority of cases where prostitution is the woman's choice?

The debate has been rekindled by recent attempts in France, Canada and elsewhere to criminalize clients. This hypocritical practice is supposedly in favor of prostitutes, as the penalty is imposed on the customers and not the sex provider. Sure enough, such proposed measures are strongly opposed by prostitutes' unions, as they argue the obvious, i.e. it will push sex workers to go further underground, ending up in illegal and dangerous situations.

In every totalitarian regime, as well as in the biggest economies of the planet, be it the USA, Japan, Russia or China, prostitution is illegal. The penalization aims to deprive men of that sexual outlet, so that they are forced to work and become “successful” within the system in order to have access to a woman. This aim is, of course, never spelled out; instead, various “moral” arguments are invoked. It is supposedly unethical for a woman to lease her vagina for 10 minutes for money, while it is ethical to give away all her time, all her being, her own life, what Marx called her “working power”; it is ethical to become alienated in a soul-crushing job in a super market with unpaid overtime, zero advancement or promotions, unhealthy working conditions leading to musculoskeletal problems, precariousness, and to suffer from the degrading behavior of a manager, for 8, 10 or 12 hours a day, in order to earn the same amount of money which those 10 minutes of sex would have obtained. This kind of petty-bourgeois morality has de facto been thrown in the bin in countries where survival is not taken for granted. In countries like Thailand, not only it is not a shame, but is an honor for a daughter to be a prostitute. That way she can support her old parents financially. Luxury prostitutes have also overcome the negative prejudices clouding their profession, and do not consider it as wholly shameful. It is time for society to overcome the social stigma and consider prostitution like another profession.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.