NYTimes: The Quiet Magic of Middle Managers

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Cassian of Imola: Feb 9, 2011; Keeping her memory alive!

A Buttery Pastry posted:

In any case, the existence of worse alternatives does not mean the Swedish model doesn't suck rear end, it just means some other models suck more rear end.

I was responding to a post that made the comparison between the nordic model and others:

quote:

IIRC, that system encourages Johns to behave even more like criminals because they need to hide what they're doing/have more to lose if found out, which makes sex work more dangerous and encourages sex trafficking.

I don't have a strong opinion on the absolute merits of any one system except that any regulatory framework should involve appropriate sanctions for Lloyd Evans. I'd be open to reading an article or something summarising the arg of Revolting Prostitutes

# ? Apr 19, 2024 10:49

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# ? May 2, 2024 21:01

Sanlav: Feb 10, 2020; We'll Meet Again

cat botherer posted:

They have mystical secrets.

it's not dark magic. I'm autistic and I masked myself through a lot of early sexual encounters in my life. I learned to manage the mechanics of sex w/o that magical disney romance part long before I ever found something like it.

# ? Apr 19, 2024 10:57

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Making sex work illegal is not ideal, because throwing sex workers into the carceral system for participating in sex work does not help, and especially since sex work has a measure of economic coercion behind it (indeed, once all other measures of economic coercion have been exhausted)

At the same time, the long-term, or one might even say utopian goal should be that nobody should be engaging in sex work to begin with. Indeed, legalized sex work has a seedy undercurrent in that it creates a perverse incentive for human trafficking as sex work becomes industrialised.

Ergo, as long as we're under capitalism, sex workers should enjoy protections and rights and respect for their humanity as they engage in sex work, but that doesn't mean that sex work is something we should expect human society to have in perpetuity.

The conflict is usually in terms of verbalizing the latter, when we're still neck-deep in dealing with the former

# ? Apr 19, 2024 11:10

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Cassian of Imola posted:

I was responding to a post that made the comparison between the ~~nordic~~swedish model and others:

yeah? It makes it more dangerous compared to existing better alternatives, which is the only relevant comparison.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Making sex work illegal is not ideal, because throwing sex workers into the carceral system for participating in sex work does not help, and especially since sex work has a measure of economic coercion behind it (indeed, once all other measures of economic coercion have been exhausted)

At the same time, the long-term, or one might even say utopian goal should be that nobody should be engaging in sex work to begin with. Indeed, legalized sex work has a seedy undercurrent in that it creates a perverse incentive for human trafficking as sex work becomes industrialised.

Ergo, as long as we're under capitalism, sex workers should enjoy protections and rights and respect for their humanity as they engage in sex work, but that doesn't mean that sex work is something we should expect human society to have in perpetuity.

The conflict is usually in terms of verbalizing the latter, when we're still neck-deep in dealing with the former

that's why abolitionism, where the logic of capitalism and rent-seeking (pimps and brothels) is specifically NOT legal, is the best option we've come up with so far.

# ? Apr 19, 2024 11:18

Cassian of Imola: Feb 9, 2011; Keeping her memory alive!

Sanlav posted:

it's not dark magic. I'm autistic and I masked myself through a lot of early sexual encounters in my life. I learned to manage the mechanics of sex w/o that magical disney romance part long before I ever found something like it.

the kwisatz haderach...

# ? Apr 19, 2024 11:45

YaketySass: Jan 15, 2019; Blind Idiot Dog

All sex should be considered work, with minimum wage.

# ? Apr 19, 2024 11:54

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

Alright grabbed my copy of Revoluting Prostitutes and will attempt to very briefly summarize the 35 page chapter entitled "The People's Home", which deals with the Swedish Model (also called Nordic Model). I once again wish to encourage actually reading the drat book in its entirety if you actually care about this topic at all.

Example countries listed in which this model has been implemented are Sweden, Northern Ireland, France and Iceland.
Definition: A legal regime that criminalises the purchase of sex and punishes third parties (such as managers, drivers and landlords) while ostensibly decriminalising those who sell sex.

The theory behind this legal regime was "the women is given support to leave the harmful situation she has found herself in, and targeting demand will have a disciplinary effect on a culture of patriarchal male entitlement: men will be rehabilitated. This should mean that over time, fewer women will be exploited in prostitution, making countries with such a law less attractive destinations for traffickers."

The law has 4 priorities: buyer, seller, exit services and third parties (traffickers or pimps). Arguably the strongest priority is to go after the buyer and in doing so, end demand. This is the distinguishing feature of this model. This book is primarily concerned about people who sell sex, and how laws and policies surrounding this affect them, and thus will examine this law from that perspective. So what happens to to people who sell sex when their clients are criminalized?

Criminalizing clients means less clients, means more time spent on the street looking for clients. Then if a dodgy client the sex worker was warned about by other sex workers, or who seems under influence, shows up, the sex worker has less power to turn that client down. This is a recurring motif throughout this book, which is explained in earlier chaper. You see, sex workers sell sex because they need money. So lowering demand for sex workers means sex workers suffer in income, which they still need to live. Less money means less power to choose their clients and the circumstances in which they service those clients, means more vulnerability. For example through not being able to say no to reduced rates, or having to accept not using a condom. The criminalized client will want to prevent being seen, so the sex worker will need to help the client to stay hidden.

Criminalizing clients means some potential clients, like say, guys with marriages and kids and stable jobs, now risk losing too much if they get arrested, so this type of client disappears. The type of client who has less to lose remains. For example those who were planning to commit a robbery against the sex worker in the first place, or those who already have convictions so what's one more if they get arrested for buying sex? Pro-Nordic Model politician Rhoda Grant even described this dynamic while advocating for its introduction in Scotland, saying "While those who currently break the law will not see the criminalisation of the purchase of sex as a deterrent, may others will".

Strategies used by sex workers to protect themselves, for example working in a group, taking time to assess a client before getting in their car, having a friend write down the number plate to signal that someone knows with whom she left, all make you more visible as sex workers and increase the risk of the client getting caught. This means doing these things will scare off clients. But the sex workers still need the money. So they will stop doing these things. There are multiple quotes from sex workers from Norway, Sweden and Vancouver saying exactly these things in their own words. There is a citation of a report of the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare and a report by the Norwegian Ministry of Justice and Public Security which says exactly these things, and concluding that more abuse takes place. "For those forced to work on the streets, life has become much harder". The book goes on citing sex workers and government reports for the next couple of pages just repeating and backing this up over and over. Then looks at sex workers working indoors and does the same thing.

The key paragraph is "All of this is inherent to the approach of "ending demand", which takes much of its basis from simple economics. The idea is that a reduction in demand will lead to a "correction in the market" whereby, because fewer people want to pay for sex, fewer people will sell it. What this smooth story misses is that the first thing which happens when you reduce demand on any product or service is that the price at which it can be sold goes down, and sellers desperately compete to retain a share of a shrinking market. In other words, the law is working how it is intended to work when it makes people who sell sex poorer and more precarious. Ann Martin, head of Sweden's anti-trafficking unit, admitted this: "I think of course the law has negative consequences for women in prostitution but that's also some of the effect we want to achieve with the law. It shouldn't be as easy as it was before to go out and sell sex." There is no "end demand" which does not make people who sell sex poorer - and making people poorer reduces their power in interactions with clients. Advocates of the Nordic model, are correct that most people go into sex work with few (or no) other options. That lack of options is one of the things that makes reducing demand so harmful. When people have few or no other options, they cannot easily "exit" the sex industry because conditions become harsher.

So second priority: exit services.

Exit services are supposed to be an integral part of the sex purchase ban. Firstly the name itself is problematic, as it focuses not on where a person is trying to get to, but instead keeps a shaming focus on where they came from. In the abstract, effective and non-judgmental support schemes are a good thing. In practice, projects that aim to shift sex workers out of prostitution often are ineffective and judgmental. The main stumbling block is that such programmes need money. People who sell sex often have a range of complex need and require holistic support which cannot be provided on the cheap. The easiest solution to get sex workers out of sex work is to simply give them the money they are making through sex work. The book goes into detail explaining this isn't the same as giving them another job that earns the same money, as the motivation for sex work might be that the sex worker can earn that money in much less time spent working than in another job, and that due to their personal circumstances they might not be able to put in that time or that type of work in said other job.

The book then examines Sweden's exit services in detail, and finds that since the introduction of the Swedish Model laws, no extra funding was provided for social services, while police funding was increased multiple times. The book also points out an example of a man receiving a lower sentence for rape because his victims were prostitutes, and quotes a Swedish Detective Superintendent saying "It should be difficult to be a prostitute in our society - so even though we don't put prostitutes in jail, we make life difficult for them". The book goes on quoting social workers, government officials and politicians to demonstrate that this whole model is a sham not motivated out of genuine concern for the wellbeing of sex workers at all. It then goes into

The third priority: the seller

The Nordic model is supposed to be about decriminalizing prositutes. It first quotes a bunch of supporters of this model, both in places where it has been implemented and in places where some advocate for it, which all put emphasis on this point. It then contrasts this with the actual reality of the lives of sex workers in places where the Nordic Model is implemented. In France for example, while nationally the law against soliciting might be repealed, there are still various municipal anti-prostitution decrees leading to continued arrests for street based sex workers. When Ireland implemented the Nordic model, they rejected a provision that would have allowed sex workers to keep the money they had on them when their client was arrested. Instead, when a client is arrested, the police take all of her cash as "proceeds of crime". The book describes how in Norway, sex workers are regularly evicted by police if they find out where they live (on the same day, no less), and by the way, refusing to give your address to a police officer when asked is a crime in Norway.

In almost every jurisdiction where the Nordic model operates, sex workers sharing flats are criminalised. In Oslo, Norway, a sex working woman was prosecuted as a brothel-keeper for sharing her flat with two friends - even though the court acknowledged that her primary motive was safety. Police in Sweden stake out flats to "catch" pairs of sex workers. In Northern Ireland, the first arrests made when the Nordic model was implemented was one client - and three sex working women, who were arrrested for brothel-keeping as they were found, during the raid ostensibly aimed at catching the client, to be sharing a flat.

Examples of arrests, evictions, police abuse go on for another 3 pages, followed by another 3 pages about all this also being used to deport sex workers. Including that police in Nordic countries routinely use sex workers' reports of violence to deport them.

The book then goes on to go into detail on the 4th priority, the so-called third parties, and finishes the chapter by making the case that the Nordic model, while not quite as bad as the "Victorian Hangover" of England or the "Carceral State" of the US, is basically a sham. The motivations for the sham being to keep intact some mis-earned reputation for progressiveness and feminism that stick to the Nordic countries. It also goes into detail on how so-called Radical Feminist proponents who support the Nordic model do so out of a sense that prostitution is an important part of the patriarchy and its continued existence helps keep intact the oppression experienced in their own upper- and middle-class lives, and thus these well-to-do white feminists are going after prostitution, without giving one flying gently caress about the (mostly poor, often non-white) women whose lives they materially worsen and endanger in the process. I'm paraphrasing a lot here, if I'm mischaracterizing anything blame me and not the authors of the book.

Anyway, read the drat book.

# ? Apr 19, 2024 14:27

Cassian of Imola: Feb 9, 2011; Keeping her memory alive!

Orange Devil posted:

nice, ty

Taken on their own terms, many of these objections to the Nordic Model seem to (1) argue for a more robust welfare state and looser immigration policy, not against criminalisation of johns, and (2) implicitly acknowledge that most women would avoid prostitution (i.e., sex w/ clients as opposed to other kinds of sex work) if they could.

Reducing the income it's possible to earn through prostitution is only a problem if they have no alternative. One alternative would be a job with comparable pay and perks. You mentioned low working hours, for an example of a perk. I don't think that matches the experience of most sex workers engaged in prostitution, but let's say for the sake of argument they're all highly paid freelancers. Despite the pay and perks, you frame their situation as them being forced to engage in prostitution, something they would avoid doing if they could find anything better. I think that's right. Prostitution is dangerous work, and necessarily involves a degree of subservience to the whims and fetishes of strange men. I sure as hell wouldn't do it if I could help it.

Countries choose to outlaw many other kinds of work: child labour, labour paid less than minimum wage, labour in an unsafe environment, labour without proper education/certification, child prostitution, etc. They outlaw those forms of work because, not to be too glib, the conditions are judged to be bad for the worker. The expectation is that those who can't get jobs (because the jobs they would be able to get in an unregulated market are illegal) will instead be supported by the rest of society as nonworkers, imo ideally via welfare. Surely, given their awful working conditions, most women working as prostitutes would take advantage of benefits for nonworkers if they were available instead.

The working conditions of prostitution even in fully decriminalised/legalised regimes also tend to be quite poor. I think poor conditions are probably an inherent feature of work where a man pays to sexually dominate you, but they would also arise because legal brothels camouflage organised crime and sex trafficking. So why do countries with strong welfare states still have prostitution? The answer is that they're almost all foreigners subject to deportation. You mention this yourself. Most of the sex workers suffering under the Nordic Model would still be suffering under a more liberal regime because they would still be subject to deportation and unable to protect themselves from exploitation. The educated, native European, 'Marxist' sex workers complaining about having to accept skeevy, low-paying clients are just experiencing what less privileged women are subject to anyway in a regime where there are more johns to go around.

If you accept that prostitution is an undesirable line of work, as you imply by saying the women have no alternative and are 'forced' into it, then deregulating the market simply increases the number of women who can be forced into it, and shifts the most dangerous and undesirable work to those in the most desperate situations while natives snap up the nice rich stable clients.

Taken on their own terms, then, I see these arguments as making a much more direct case for a robust welfare state (obviating the need for 'exit services') and a humane immigration policy, not for increasing demand for prostitution.

Cassian of Imola has issued a correction as of 18:57 on Apr 19, 2024

# ? Apr 19, 2024 15:59

Al!: Apr 2, 2010

oops i bought Revolting Prostitutes instead

# ? Apr 19, 2024 16:08

Cassian of Imola: Feb 9, 2011; Keeping her memory alive!

Al! posted:

oops i bought Revolting Prostitutes instead

not for the first time either I bet

# ? Apr 19, 2024 16:10

Al!: Apr 2, 2010