La chroniqueuse Laurie Penny (The Independent) toujours aussi percutante
En novembre dernier, le Kiosque écrivait: « Ça fait du bien de lire ses commentaires sur Amanda Todd, l’adolescente de 15 ans qui s’est pendue après avoir été harcelée pendant des mois par des prédateurs en ligne. »
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This strange neo-Victorian desire to save prostitutes and porn actresses
When « nice » women with regular incomes take a stand to deny the agency and attack the morality of people working in precarious conditions, what else are we supposed to call it? The feminist author Ellen Willis termed this handkerchief-clutching zeal to « save » prostitutes, porn actresses and other « fallen » women « neo-Victorianism ». The convoluted loops of logic that enable this type of neo-Victorian thinking are interesting in themselves.
Firstly, the anti-prostitution lobby makes little or no distinction between sex work in which prostitutes retain a measure of agency and sex trafficking – modern slavery. This is because it’s the « sex » part of those activities that really causes knickers to be twisted in the icy corridors of bourgeois moral opprobrium. It’s a school of so-called women’s liberation that remains fundamentally resistant to any analysis of work or economics: work can’t possibly be the problem, so the problem must be sex.
In reality, sex work isn’t stigmatised because it is dangerous. Sex work is dangerous because it is stigmatised. The fact that an industry in which workers are criminalised and pushed to the margins of society, an industry in which workers are denied agency and control, will automatically become more dangerous for everyone who relies on it to make a living, doesn’t seem to compute for those making laws to send police after prostitutes ‘for their own good’. If sex workers are victimised by the police and the public, if sex workers face higher levels of violence and assault at work, then it can only be because of their dirty moral choice to have sex for money.
This sort of ugly moral judgement is what feeds the myth, widespread amongst both clients and law enforcement, that it’s impossible to rape a prostitute. So-called ‘radical’ feminist groups point to high rates of rape and assault experienced by sex workers as if this were an inevitable, natural consequence of selling sexual services rather than an atrocious working condition made actively worse by the fact that so many sex workers are even more afraid than other women to report their rapists to the police – particularly if they are black, Asian or transsexual. It’s as if someone who sells sex should have no expectation of consent at work. This absolute denial of agency, of personhood – groups like the EWL use the passive term « prostituted women » to refer to sex workers – is deeply dehumanising, especially for a campaign that claims to stand for human rights.
When all other arguments fall flat, the last elastic piece of reasoning holding up the sensible undergarments of the sexually conservative feminist lobby is that women who disagree with their arguments must have been abused as children or traumatised on the job, and as such are not worth listening to. The UK Feminista founder, Kat Banyard, who does stalwart work training activists, claimed in the Guardian that « astronomical rates of post-traumatic stress disorder » among sex workers are evidence of « the inherent harm at the heart of this transaction ». That there is little evidence that sex workers experience any more or less sickeningly unacceptable levels of rape and childhood abuse than women who don’t sell sex, according to a study by the Journal of Sex Research, is beside the point. Too often, in these debates, prostitutes are judged as emotionally and mentally unfit to participate before anyone even thinks of inviting them to the table. It’s as if there were a sort of « prejudging » going on. It’s almost like . . . what’s the word?
Oh, yes. Prejudice.
This isn’t about evidence, not for « Neo-Victorians », not really. It’s about morality, just as it was two hundred years ago when well-meaning upper-class women organised charity centres to ‘save’ street prostitutes from sin by finding them alternative employment as charwomen, in workhouses or scrubbing the streets. Right now, this translates into a belief amongst do-gooders that any kind of work, however exploitative and badly paid, must be better than sex work because it doesn’t involve sex, wicked sex, sinful sex – leading anti-prostitution evangelists like Nicholas D Kristof of the New York Times to argue (as he does in the book and documentary Half the Sky, co-authored with Sheryl WuDunn) that women who currently work in brothels in developing countries should be encouraged to work in sweatshops instead. Because that’s an enormous step up.