Pontius Pilate as a woman

-> Does she control government entities around us that can legally enforce her ideology? Can she actually suppress opinions or reduce people's freedom of expression?

-> Does she control your social position? Can she alienate you from your existing group on a whim?

-> Do her views/actions actually mirror the popular, widely accepted one in the contexts you frequent? Or is she an outlier?

-> Are you a member of a majority that she cannot control or escape?

-> Does she control your internet access or what you can post? Can she force you to read and follow her ideology?

-> Can she physically remove or suppress the media you/your group enjoy? Can she stop the production of such media? Does she occupy a powerful position in group that affects the existence of such media?

-> Can she actually physically, legally force you to stop whatever you are doing?

-> Does her opinion or criticism carry enough weight to directly, materially affect your life and wellbeing?

The new Britney

The new Rihanna

The new Beyonce

The new Nicki Minaj

The new Lana Del Rey

The new Ariana

Women are attacked by these younger trade in comparisons so much more than men. Nobody is on some relentless lookout for the new Kanye or the new Bieber.

According to the DEA, one third of the illegal drugs trafficked from Mexico to the USA is weed so... Who tf is smoking that illegal pot?

Reblogging as a ref.

diechromatic

:

It’s disgusting enough that they try and excuse prostitution, stripping or any other “sex work” by saying it’s always a women’s choice. But defending pimps so much that they demand that you refer to them as words like husband, boyfriend and friend? That’s seriously fucked up. How can anyone look at a pimp - a violent, abusive man who literally hates women - and think it is appropriate to refer to him with terms that are supposed to be connected to love and caring?

In a way they are right about pimps but they are also wrong (they are especially wrong about them being the sexually commodified/ exploited woman’s ally. Legal and illegal pimps or “third parties” involved in prostitution are exploiters, not allies). What they are right about, even though they aim to separate the negatively stigmatized pimp-position and title from boyfriend and husband as if they are mutually exclusive, is that a lot of pimps are the pimped/prostituted woman’s boyfriend, husband, or male “friend“/acquaintance:

“Writing about the legal brothels in Nevada, psychologist Melissa Farley reports, “At least 50% of the women in the brothels are under the control of illegal pimps outside the brothels, and 57% are giving all or part of their earnings to someone other than the legal brothel’s pimp.” She also notes that, historically, legal pimps (now known as managers) required women to have pimps outside the brothels. Most women “working” in these brothels are controlled by outside agents who initially pimped them into the legal brothels and still control their behavior and take a percentage of their earnings. Women’s illegal pimps are often boyfriends, husbands, or other friends.”  — Raymond, G. Janice. “Not A Choice, Not A Job: Exposing the Myths About Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade.” Potomac Books, (p. 148 - 149)

“Husband” and “boyfriend and “friend” are stereotypically supposed to entail someone being supportive, romantically or emotionally connected, and ideally a relational figure of compassion. So the renaming of pimps in this way is smartly strategic for pro-sex trade/prostitution/pimp/industry advocates. Exploitation, oppression, and harm is far easier to culturally normalize when the language being used does not even connote any surface negativity. This intentional altering of language to convey the notion that pimping and being prostituted isn’t negative is an important part of sex work politics. 

“In order to normalize prostitution in everybody’s culture, postmodern theory helps to keep the real harms of prostitution, pornography, and trafficking invisible.” - (x)

In this way, prostituting, porn performing, and stripping are now liberally termed “sex work.” This term has been so successfully integrated into the everyday vernacular that even some sex trade abolitionists (anti-sex industries activists) use it despite exited abolitionist women coming forward to speak out against the use of “sex work” to refer to prostitution).

[ CATW co-sponsored with Equality Now a panel entitled “Prostitution or Sex Work? When Terminology and Legalization Collide with Human Rights” on March 13, 2014, at the 58th Session of the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women (CSW58). The survivor-led panel included Rachel Moran of SPACE International (Ireland), Natasha Falle and Bridget Perrier of SexTrade 101 (Canada), Autumn Burris of Survivors for Solutions (USA) and Beatriz Elena Rodríguez Rengifo of ASOMUPCAR (Columbia). Vednita Carter, Founder and Executive Director of Breaking Free (USA), moderated the discussion. ]

[ In March 2013, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) organized the first panel of solely survivors of sex trafficking and prostitution at the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) at the United Nations. Titled, Survivors Speak: Prostitution and Sex Trafficking, was moderated by CATW’s Executive Director Norma Ramos and featured panelists: Vednita Carter Founder Executive Director of Breaking Free, Stella Marr (US) Founding Member of Sex Trafficking Survivors United, Rachel Moran author of “Paid For” and founder of the organization SPACE International (Ireland), Natasha Falle Executive Director of Sex Trade 101 (Canada), and Theresa Der-Lan Yeh of Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation (Taiwan). ]

Cherry Smiley’s AWAN address to the 55th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) at the UN in 2011.

“Please be aware that the term ‘sex work’, which is found in your public policies and documents, came out of the US sex trade of the 1970’s. It was invented with the particular aim of normalising and sanitising prostitution for the public and for lawmakers in particular, and you have done a great service for those who profit from prostitution by your acceptance and adoption of it. Simultaneously you have also – inadvertently, we acknowledge – levelled a painful insult against us. We are, all of us, sex-trade survivors; the living witnesses of a dehumanising trade, and any acceptance of our abuse as ‘work’ further dehumanises us.“   — Open Letter from Survivors, Alliance of Women for the Abolition of Prostitution

“In January 2014, 61 South Asian victims and survivors of prostitution as well as women’s groups representing communities marginalized by caste, class and ethnicity and antitrafficking organizations helping girls and women “trapped in bonded labour and other forms of servitude” wrote to Mlambo-Ngcuka to protest the new UN Women policy of avoiding the word prostitution.

“We do not want to be called ‘sex workers’ but prostituted women and children, as we can never accept our exploitation as ‘work,’ ” the letter signers wrote. “We think that the attempts in UN documents to call us ‘sex workers’ legitimizes violence against women, especially women of discriminated caste, poor men and women and women and men from minority groups, who are the majority of the prostituted.”

They are still awaiting an answer from UN Women, Gupta said.

Censoring comment about violence against girls and women is not new in the Commission on the Status of Women or in the UN more broadly. Nafis Sadik, the outspoken executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, or UNFPA, from 1987 to 2000, said in an interview in 2013 that there had been numerous attempts to silence her, often from pressure by governments.”   — Prostitution: A Word That UN Women Does Not Want to Hear | March 31, 2015

The testimonies of abolitionist sex trade victim/survivors are routinely ignored (or outright denied by liberals/liberal feminists who accuse exited abolitionist women of lying about the negative experiences they have had in the sex trade, whether that be in pornography, prostitution, stripping, etc). Sex industries activists tend to prioritize the well-off few who are in a privileged enough position to describe themselves as sex workers who act entirely out of free will and free choice, who do not experience pimp-control or pimp-violence, or violence or coercion from buyers, and can leave the sex trade whenever they desire to do so without threats, intimidation, or violence. This does not constitute the majority of women and girls in the sex industries and it does not reflect their experiences.

"In industrial nations such as Canada, more than 90% of prostitutes are under the control of pimps. According to a 2002 report published in Québec by the Conseil du statut de la femme (Council on the status of women), 92% of the female prostitutes would like to leave the underworld of prostitution if they could. “To get out of it”, says the ex-prostitute Agnès Laury, “requires the unwavering will not to return to the street, to get help and to totally sever the ties to the underworld”.”  — Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres (CASAC) By Élaine Audet & Micheline Carrier

(Rebloggable quote here)

With all that said, “sex work” is such a popularized mainstreamed sort of liberal lingo to the point that even anti-pimping/prostitution/pornography/stripping activists are using the language of the pro-pimping/prostitution/pornography/stripping Liberal Left despite the fact that “sex work” is not a neutral or objective term but a liberal one (tied in with economics) that specifically comes out of the 1970s United States pro-prostitution movement :

Where did the idea that prostitution is work originate?

In 1973, the U.S. organization COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) declared that prostitution was legitimate service work. In the 1980s, COYOTE capitalized on the AIDS epidemic as a health crisis, keeping its organizational focus on increasing its customer base but shifting its strategy to educational outreach in addition to advocacy of decriminalization of prostitution (Jenness, 1993). These goals are reflected in the activities of the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective (NZPC), one of many COYOTE offshoots that provide union-style organizing for those in prostitution. When prostitution is understood as violence, however, unionizing prostituted women makes as little sense as unionizing battered women.

Political parties have also adopted platforms defining prostitution as work. For example, the Green Party has championed prostitution as labor and those in prostitution as sex workers. A NZ Green Party member described the decriminalization of prostitution as a way of protecting prostitutes’ rights as workers (Sue Bradford, Green Party public speech in Auckland, New Zealand, June 26, 2003). However, another sponsor of the NZ decriminalization bill admitted, “it’s going to be the owners or the operators [of brothels and other sex businesses] who are going to be the long-term beneficiaries [of decriminalization]” (Else, 2003, n.p.). In this statement, the politician seems to acknowledge that workers’ rights in prostitution are a political fantasy. While appearing to promote public health, the NZ law keeps the names of brothel owners secret, thus making public health inspections of brothels an impossibility. The outraged mayor of Auckland, New Zealand, wrote, “This so-called legitimate profession remains partly hidden behind a veil of secrecy [under the new law]” (Banks, 2003, n.p.). In fact, the law protects the privacy of pimps and generally represents the interests of johns.  — “Bad for the Body, Bad for the Heart”: Prostitution Harms Women Even if Legalized or Decriminalized, by MELISSA FARLEY; Prostitution Research & Education, 7 September 2004.

The use of “sex work” and “sex worker” is about normalizing an ideology that promotes the sex industries by using language to gloss over its harms. The use of these terms are not in the political interests of sex trade abolitionists. 

If you’re wondering about the origins of the word prostituted, here is an explanation.

Prostituted refers to how this is something being done to the sexually commodified person through circumstantial coercion, systematic entrapment, physical force, or other structural and societal factors. It is not their fault. They are not at fault for trying to survive in a system they did not create (even though politically some may side with the Liberal Left and advocate to reinforce it).

It is the system of capitalist patriarchy that needs to be dismantled (those oppressed should not be subjected to direct blame for their oppression, obviously), and in societies that are post-patriarchy and post-capitalism, the institution of prostitution won’t even exist. To be sexually exploited for pay won’t even be an option.

Trafficking, Prostitution and Inequality A Public Lecture by Catharine MacKinnon

at The University of Chicago Law School

Catharine MacKinnon, the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School specializes in sex equality issues under international and constitutional law. She pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment and, with Andrea Dworkin, created ordinances recognizing pornography as a civil rights violation and the Swedish model for addressing prostitution. Representing Bosnian women survivors of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities, she won Kadic v. Karadzic, which first recognized rape as an act of genocide. Her scholarly books include Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), Sex Equality (2001/2007), and Are Women Human? (2006).  

Trafficking, Prostitution, and Inequality, Catharine A. MacKinnon: Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review

This is what the writer for the article in which the above chart is featured (a liberal feminist pro-sex trade/work/industry activist -

“Joyce Arthur is a founding member of FIRST, a national feminist sex worker advocacy organization based in Vancouver that lobbies for the   decriminalization of prostitution in Canada. She works as a technical  writer and pro-choice activist” - ) -

says about the use of the terms “trafficking victim*” and “sex slave*”:

* The incidence of sex trafficking and sexual slavery is hugely inflated. Most “victims” are adults who have consented to do sex work and don’t want to be “rescued.” THIS IS FALSE.

“In a study submitted at trial with 854 women in 9 countries, including Canada, 89% of women interviewed said they wanted out of prostitution. In another study submitted at trial conducted in the downtown eastside of Vancouver, 95% of prostituted women interviewed said they wanted out of prostitution.” - Feminist Media Collective: The Myths of Bedford v. Canada: Why decriminalizing prostitution won’t help

“Only a tiny percentage of all women in prostitution are there because they freely choose it. For most, prostitution is not a real choice because physical safety, equal power with buyers, and real alternatives don’t exist. These are the conditions that would permit genuine consent. Most of the 1% who choose prostitution are privileged because of their ethnicity and class and they have escape options. Poor women and women of color don’t have these options.

“We want real jobs, not blowjobs,” said a First Nations survivor of prostitution in 2009. Prostitution exploits women’s lack of survival options. Research conducted in nine countries found that 89% of all those in prostitution said that they were in prostitution because they had no alternatives for economic survival and that they saw no means of escape. In Indonesia another study found that 96% of those interviewed wanted to escape prostitution. Sex discrimination, poverty, racism and abandonment drive girls into prostitution."  — Prostitution, Liberalism, and Slavery, by Melissa Farley

** Some third parties can be exploitive, but usually they aren’t. Generally, their role is to facilitate work for sex workers and help keep them safe. However, the current criminal laws increase the risk that sex workers will be exploited because they have no legal recourse. THIS IS FALSE.

Pimps use tactics of control, manipulation, fear-mongering, debt bondage, blackmail, battering, and rape to “break in” women into prostitution. Even without the overt physical and sexual violence, emotional abuse and psychological abuse, and manipulation, the fact most of the women in prostitution start off due to poverty, racial and/or ethnic or caste oppression, and female oppression, and as under-aged girls (at a very vulnerable stage in their lives) and continue on into adulthood (where there prostitution is re-framed as an act of “free choice” because “they’re adults now.”), is cause to question even if the prostitutional system should be normalized and “legitimized”.

“What are the forces that keep the majority of women in prostitution while they say they want out? It was clear from both the research on the trial record and the affidavits of the women that prostituted women have many things in common. Nearly all the women said poverty is the reason they entered prostitution. Terri-Jean Bedford said in cross-examination, “poverty nips at your heels”. Another woman who gave an affidavit for the applicants said that she was trying to support a child with a serious heart condition and welfare wasn’t enough. The average age of entry into prostitution was reported as 14 and 15 by the research on the record. Many of the women who gave affidavits entered as teenagers – in fact, two of the applicants entered underage and the other entered at 18. Aboriginal women and racialized women are overrepresented in the prostitution industry. Many prostituted women have been incested, or abused as children. Many were removed from their families as children and placed in state care. Generally, they have low levels of education – many of the women who gave affidavits had not finished high school. These are just a few of the factors that maintain women’s prostitution.” - Feminist Media Collective: The Myths of Bedford v. Canada: Why decriminalizing prostitution won’t help

There is also an unavoidable, inherent power differential between a pimp and a woman who is being prostituted and also an inherent power differential between a prostituted woman and her buyer, or trick, or punter, or john (true sexual consent cannot happen here).

Ongoing, affirmative consent that’s enabled due to having various viable options that guarantees the choosing individual the freedom to act as they please and leave as they please without the threat of being subjected to violence or abusive control is not happening for 89-96% of women in prostitution. Consent is something freely, enthusiastically given, not something coerced out of the person, and money acts as a coercive in the context of prostitution (if the only reason you are having “sex” is not because you want to but rather for survival purposes, what’s happening is commercial rape or “paid rape” (to quote prostitution victim-survivor Bridget Perrier and many others), or it’s also  commodified or paid “sexual abuse” (to quote prostitution victim-survivor Rachel Moran).

When a person is commodified, and prostitution involves sexual commodification of course, no free choice or “equality” can happen in such a context. There is nothing freeing or liberatory about being pimped/prostituted or in prostitution:

"Commodification is a cornerstone of sexism and of prostitution. Once a young woman is “made into a thing for others’ sexual use” as the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls has defined sexual objectification, then the stage is set for sexual violence. Men’s dominance over women is established and enforced by the dehumanizing process of sexual objectification that is the psychological foundation of men’s violence against women. In prostitution, sexual objectification is institutionalized and monetized. …” - Prostitution, Liberalism, and Slavery, by Melissa Farley

(Rebloggable quote here). 

Again, unlike any other “job” this one (prostitution) involves sexual acts and bodily intrusion that would be considered workplace sexual harassment in non-sexual occupations (what makes prostitution exceptional from this?) and if prostitution is like any other “job” then rape is an occupational hazard or paid rape or paid sexual abuse is actually the baseline of the job since money acts as a coercive (this isn’t a job then, it is a human rights violation and mostly violence against women and girls. When framed as “sex work” or a job like any other, the harm inherent to prostitution just becomes normalized, it’s made acceptable. Prostitution is not compatible with civil rights or OSHA or the laws on and surrounding sexual harassment).

Now, since this response commentary is bound to get assailed by liberal accusations of “whorephobia”, and burning Strawmans that further misrepresent the arguments I’ve presented, I’m going to be preemptive and post a point-by-point counter written by feminist Meagan Tyler. (She doesn’t necessarily apply the language I would use though. When I refer to prostitution/pornography/stripping, etc I refer to it by its descriptive name and only use sex work or sex worker when referring to its use by liberal proponents or in critique of it). 

10 myths about prostitution, trafficking and the Nordic model 

1. I’m a sex worker, I choose sex work and I love it

This is one of the most popular retorts de jour and is treated by many who use it as a sort of checkmate argument, as though any one person stating that they enjoy sex work makes all of the other evidence about violence, post-traumatic stress disorder and trafficking in prostitution, magically disappear.

Maud Olivier, the Socialist MP who recently introduced the Bill to prohibit the purchase of sexual services in France, slammed the “hypocrisy” of such criticisms: “So is it enough for one prostitute to say she is free for the enslavement of others to be respectable and acceptable?” she asked her fellow parliamentarians.

But the “I love sex work” refrain is put forward as a powerful argument because it is seen to counter a supposedly all-encompassing claim by radical feminists and others that systems of prostitution are harmful to women.

This relies on misunderstandings of radical politics, the concept of structural oppression and tired old debates about false consciousness. Just because you like something doesn’t mean that it can’t be harmful (just as liking something doesn’t automatically make it feminist). Radical feminists criticize beauty practices as harmful too, and saying you choose to wear high-heels doesn’t make that critique wrong. Nor does it mean these feminists hate you for wearing high heels (I’ve heard that one wheeled out in many an undergraduate tutorial) or being in prostitution.

Similarly, when anyone practicing radical politics points out that free choice is a fairytale, and that all our actions are constrained within certain material conditions, this does not equate to saying we’re all infantilized, little drones unable to make decisions for ourselves. It just means we’re not all floating around in a cultural vacuum making decisions completely unaffected by structural issues like systemic economic inequality, racism and sexism.

2. Only sex workers are qualified to comment on prostitution

This myth is often used in tandem with the first. And here’s the best/worst example I’ve had sent my way.

While such exchanges may be part of a wider problem of attempting to spuriously employ personal experience to trump research and disprove wider social trends (sexism doesn’t exist because I’ve never seen it!), there is more to these interactions in the context of prostitution. Repeating that only current sex workers are qualified to talk about the sex industry is an attempt to silence survivor’s voices and pretend that the consequences of prostitution apply only to those in prostitution.

It is true that much feminist opposition to prostitution has focused on the harms to women in prostitution, and rightly so, these harms are serious and endemic. But, as advocates of the Nordic Model point out, the existence of systems of prostitution is also a barrier to gender equality.

As long as women (and yes there are men in prostitution, but please, let’s be honest and admit that using “people” here would only obfuscate the fact that the vast majority of those in prostitution are women) can be bought and sold like commodities for sex is an issue for all women. The Swedes recognized this when they introduced the original ban on buying sex in 1999, and the French women’s rights minister is busy explaining it again at the moment.

3. All sex workers oppose the Nordic Model

Firstly, it is important to point out that for every sex worker rights organization that opposes the Nordic Model, there’s a survivor organization that advocates for it.

The idea that every woman with any experience in the sex industry detests the Nordic Model is tactical claim by a number of sex worker rights’ organizations around the world and it relies heavily on myth number two. This claim is, more often than not, followed by a link to Petra Ostergren’s blog which proves (we’re told) that all women in prostitution hate the Nordic Model and would prefer legalization.

It is clear that there are a number of very vocal opponents of the Nordic Model within the sex industry who have a significant platform. But it can hardly be said that these organizations represent all women in prostitution around the world, or that the odd blog post (light on references or other evidence) proves that the Nordic Model is a failure.

4. The Nordic Model denies sex workers’ agency

One of the things that critics seem to find so difficult to comprehend about the Nordic Model is that it is actually about restricting buyers, not about restricting those in prostitution. That is why it decriminalizes prostituted persons. The Model doesn’t discount the possibility of prostitution by “choice” but rather establishes that the buying of women in systems of prostitution is something that the state should actively discourage.

It’s pretty simple really. The Nordic Model acknowledges that less demand for prostitution and less demand for trafficking = less prostitution and less trafficking ∴ reducing the number of women exposed to these particular types of abuse and creating a better chance of achieving gender equality.

If you think that the state should encourage the growth of the prostitution industry and treat it as a form of gainful employment for women, then you’re bound to disagree, but that doesn’t mean the Model denies anybody’s agency.

5. The Nordic Model conflates prostitution and trafficking.

Many proponents of the Nordic Model adopt the understanding of trafficking advanced by the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children [http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/ProtocolTraffickingInPersons.aspx] (see Article 3a). This is a more nuanced understanding of trafficking than the “people moved across international borders at gun point” version that is popular in much of the mainstream press. Perhaps this is where the confusion sets in.

But even in employing this more realistic, UN-supported understanding of the mechanics of coercion and trafficking, the Nordic Model does not assume that every woman in prostitution is necessarily trafficked.

What the Nordic Model does do is recognize that there is a connection between the market for prostitution and sex trafficking, specifically that the demand for sexual services fuels sex trafficking. So, if you want less sex trafficking, then you need to shrink the market for prostitution.

This logic was further supported by a recent study of 150 countries, conducted by economists in the UK and Germany, showing that “the scale effect of legalized prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution market, increasing human trafficking.”

6. The Nordic Model doesn’t work / pushes prostitution “underground”.

The contention that the Nordic Model has not reduced demand for prostitution is one often repeated without evidence, but occasionally it is claimed that the Swedish government’s own review of their legislation showed the failure of the Model. As legal scholar Max Waltman has demonstrated, it did no such thing. Research commissioned by the Swedish government for its official review showed that street prostitution had halved.

“Ha!” The critics say, “That study employed a flawed methodology and prostitution has just gone underground.” Perhaps, but that overlooks other sources, including research indicating the number of people in Sweden buying sex has fallen and that police report having intercepted communications from traffickers declaring that Sweden is a “bad market.”

It’s also worth considering what “underground” is supposed to mean in this context, as in legalized and decriminalized systems, like some in Australia, “underground” is taken to mean street prostitution. So if prostitution has moved off the streets, where has it gone? Online and indoors, is the assertion of critics, which is quite odd given that advocates of legalization frequently tout the benefits of indoor prostitution.

7. The Nordic Model deprives women of a living.

This myth is the most intriguing because it is actually an admission that the Nordic Model works, directly contradicting myth six. The Model can only deprive women of a living if it does, in fact, reduce the demand for prostitution. What’s more, comprehensive exit programs are a critical part of the Model, involving access to a wide variety of services including retraining and employment support.

Hashtags like #nothingaboutuswithoutus (used by a number of groups, not just sex industry organizations) regularly appear alongside this claim as though the only satisfactory option available is for everyone to accept a flourishing prostitution market because some people want it that way.

Not just any people though, of course – workers – if you buy the “sex work is work” line. Leaving aside the problems with the concept that prostitution is a job like any other, if we accept this premise, then the argument doesn’t follow, as workers in any given industry don’t get to determine whether or not that industry continues.

Take the brown coal or forestry industries in Australia, for example. These are sectors that have been deemed by governments to be harmful in a number of ways and that, as a result – while they are still potentially profitable – they no longer have a social license to continue operating uninhibited. Workers in these industries are often outraged at seeing their jobs threatened, which is why unions advocate for “just transitions,” providing retraining and facilitated access to social and employment services for those workers affected (sound familiar?). For the most part, these unions have given up arguing that the harmful industry in question should continue simply to avoid employment disruption for workers.

If sex work is work, and prostitution is just another industry, then it is open for wider public discussion and policy changes like other industry, including the possibility that governments will no longer want it to function.

8. The Nordic Model has made prostitution unsafe.

First things first, prostitution is unsafe. To suggest that the Nordic Model is what makes it dangerous is disingenuous. Such declarations also ignore research showing that traditional forms of legalization and decriminalization do virtually nothing to protect women in prostitution from very high odds of physical and sexual violence as well as psychological trauma.

Systems of legalization foster greater demand and create an expanding illegal industry surrounding them, so it is a fallacy to pretend that in localities where prostitution is legalized, all women are actually in legal forms of prostitution. In addition, rates of trauma are similar across legalized, decriminalized and criminalized systems of prostitution.

Sadly, even the Nordic Model is not capable of fully protecting women still in prostitution from many of these conditions – as long as there is prostitution there will be harm – but the idea that it makes conditions worse is spurious.

The “more violence” claims mostly relate to a widely cited ProSentret study which found that women in prostitution had reported an increase in certain forms of violent acts from johns, including hair pulling and biting, after the introduction of the Nordic Model in Norway. What is often left out from these accounts, however, is that the study also found women reported a sharp decline in other forms of violence, including punching and rape.

As for women in prostitution not being able to access adequate social services, this may well be a problem on the ground. If so, it absolutely needs to be addressed. But this is an issue of implementation rather than a flaw in the Model itself.

The original version of the Nordic Model, introduced in Sweden, was part of the Kvinnofrid reforms to funnel more government money and support to a variety of services tackling violence against women, including specifically in prostitution. We’ve seen this again in France, with laws decriminalizing those in prostitution brought in alongside measures to curb other forms of violence against women.

9. The Nordic Model is really a moral crusade in disguise.

Despite the evidence-based policy of the Nordic Model being introduced by progressive and socialist governments, the notion persists that this is some kind of underhanded religious or conservative attempt to curtail sexual expression, rather than an effective way of tackling trafficking and violence against women.

But perhaps this all depends on how you define “moral crusade.” If you view the movement for women’s equality as a “moral crusade”, then I suppose it is. It you are determined to dismiss all of the evidence in support of the Nordic Model and instead want to debate this on a “moral” level, then by all means do. Those who think violence against women is a bad thing are bound to win that argument.

10. Academics who research prostitution make money off the backs of women in prostitution.

This is a relatively new addition to the list of silencing techniques used against those feminists who challenge the sex industry. The first time I came across such an accusation was via the comment section here and then in the follow up emails helpfully advising me that I was just like men who rape women in prostitution because I was using the experiences of sex workers without paying.

So let me be very clear: academics conduct research. For many, like me, this often involves collating existing research and, using that evidence, creating an argument that can be defended. That is our job. And it is our job, regardless of the topic or area that we’re researching.

Engaging in public debates about the Nordic Model, and citing relevant research, is in no way an attempt to speak for women in prostitution. It is an attempt to bring the findings of that research to a broader audience. If this is perceived as threatening by the sex industry, then surely that suggests the Nordic Model is effective?

If you've never found yourself as the victim of a cult, or sexual assault, or abuse, the only thing separating you from people who have been victimized by cults / sexual assault / abuse is circumstance. That's it. Sheer luck. Luck over what family you were born into. Luck over who you were surrounded by when you were emotionally compromised or in any way vulnerable. Ect.

You are not better than people who have been victimized. They didn't do anything wrong to ask to be victimized. Anyone can be victimized by these situations given the perfect storm of circumstances. You are not better than people who have been victimized by cults / sexual assault / abuse.

You need to understand that if you are lucky enough to have never been victimized by cults / sexual assault / abuse, it's very little to do with how smart or strong you are or you doing all the "right" things. Someone can be smart and strong and do all the right things and still find themselves a victim given the perfect storm of bad circumstances.

Bullying.

Funny how when I was being bullied as a kid, I did fight back and I did do everything I could to stand up to my bullies. But that didn't make it stop. All the adults at school just told me that the bullying was my fault because I was "giving the bullies the reaction they wanted, if I would just be quiet and ignore them the bullying would stop."

But now that I'm an adult, I hear other adults saying all the time that kids who get bullied are only bullied because they're too weak and insecure to stand up for themselves.

Isn't that funny? How I spent years fighting back and trying to stand up for myself, and this got me told that it was my fault for not just ignoring them? But now I hear other adults, most of whom are parents, saying if a kid is bullied it's their fault for not standing up for themselves or fighting back?

It's a lose/lose situation, either way if the kid fights back, or doesn't fight back, they're told its their fault for how they respond. It's almost as if, the bullying isn't the victim's fault or smthing 🤔

And this type of victim blaming rhetoric ignores that there's in the majority of cases a power imbalance between the bullies and victims.

Common dynamics we see are: white kids bullying children of color, neurotypical kids bullying neurodivergent kids, gender conforming cishet kids bullying GNC and/or LGBTQIA+ kids, abled kids bullying disabled kids, boys bullying girls (he's only teasing you because he likes you!), rich or middle class children bullying poor children, ect. ect.

And this is exactly WHY adults often victim blame bullied children instead of holding bullies accountable, and these adults blaming the children are often privileged themselves. White adult school staff blaming children of color who are getting bullied instead of holding the white children doing the bullying accountable, neurotypical adult school staff blaming neurodivergent children who are being bullied instead of holding the neurotypical children doing the bullying accountable, ect. ect.

Find someone currently emotionally vulnerable in some way. Isolated, lonely, and/or emotionally compromised in some way (maybe just lost a loved one or experienced an equivalent trauma or tragedy, etc). Then you lovebomb the everliving crap out of this emotionally compromised individual. Then once you've earned their love and trust, you slowly over time chip away at their self esteem, their sense of self, their ability to trust themselves and their own judgement, and slowly exert more and more power and control over them.

If you couldn't tell if I was describing an abuser seeking out their next victim or a cult recruiting their next victim, that's because it's essentially the same playbook.

I think this is really important to point out because personally I've encountered a lot of people both IRL and online who, at least on paper, accept that victim blaming survivors of abuse is wrong, but then will turn around and say that people who join cults are gullible idiots who deserve whatever they endure within the cult for being such gullible idiots.