dolor y gloria

A number of politicians and law enforcers are now accepting that legalised prostitution has been an unmitigated disaster. There is currently a proposed law being considered by the Dutch Senate which, if passed, would result in punters being criminalised if they pay for sex with a trafficked, pimped or otherwise coerced woman.

These changes are the result of a vibrant sex trade abolitionist movement emerging in Holland.

The Dutch legalised their brothel industry in the year 2000. The government promised that this would result in safety for the women, and an end to trafficking. It claimed that everything would be above board, safe and clean. The opposite happened. Sex tourism is now a major industry, with British men being one group of Europeans visiting the city to pay for sex. A number of punters I have interviewed told me that they wouldn’t have dreamt of using prostituted women back home, but that being in Holland gave them permission to do it.

The illegal and unlicensed sex trade has boomed under legalisation, trafficking of women has risen dramatically, demand is on the rise and the women are certainly no safer than they were when pimping was illegal.

I have been visiting Holland over the course of 15 years, researching the consequences of legalisation.I have interviewed sex buyers (including one who told me he first paid for sex when he was 12 years old), women in brothels, pimps and pro-legalisation lobbyists that make a profit off the backs of prostituted women.

Xaviera Hollander is a big part of the propaganda machine that promotes the notion that prostituted women under legalisation are having a great time. Hollander is known for her memoir, The Happy Hooker: My Own Story, which sold by the millions. I visited her at her home in Amsterdam, to ask if she thinks the women are happy under legalisation. She admits to me that trafficking is on the rise, and that legalisation is far from effective in removing criminality from the sex trade. Coming from a former pimp, this is quite something.

There are large numbers of tour guides offering tours around Amsterdam’s red light areas. I took one of these tours last year, and was told that legalisation is a perfect model, that the women are safe and happy and the public accept the window brothels as part of the architecture. I asked the guide where he got his information from, and he told me that the Prostitution Information Centre (PIC) provide, for a fee, information for all of the tour companies. The PIC is run as a business by women who claim to be “sex workers”. In fact they appear to be nothing of the kind, being a company charging for this advice and therefore profiting from prostitution.

What once looked like a revolutionary approach to prostitution is now clearly seen as a disaster, by all except those who seek to make a profit from prostitution.

Jolanda Boer is a senior public prosecutor specialising in human trafficking. Over the past decade Boer has dealt with more than 100 such cases in Amsterdam. “There have been cases where the girl has been raped by their pimps and threatened into working behind the windows. The women are not in a position to freely tell people when something is going wrong. But of course they’re smiling because if you don’t you’re not going to get a client,” says Boer.

On Saturday I spoke to a packed room about my book on the global sex trade. The event was held in the red light district, in a building that had previously been a Chinese massage parlour offering “happy endings”. I had expected some kind of protest, or infiltration by the pro-prostitution lobby. But every person in the room was there because they recognised that prostitution is a human rights abuse, harmful to the women involved, and that legalisation has been disastrous.

The following day I was in Den Haag, home of the Dutch parliament, launching my book in front of dozens of concerned citizens, all of whom have had enough of Holland being held up as a perfect model in dealing with prostitution. After the launch, dozens of us marched along the local red light district, holding up banners and placards with slogans such as “Shut down the sex trade” and “Enough is enough”. It was the first ever public demonstration against legal brothels.

They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”

So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?

It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.

This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.

These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”

Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”

The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.

The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.

In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”

i’m looking for a source of infinite sweetness