Category Archives: BLOGGERY: politics, religion & brain purges……

Nordic Model

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Here’s part of a piece from the New Statesman, by the glorious Mistress Magpie, on how the Nordic Model of criminalising the clients of sex workers will affect professional dominatrices:

‘…I decry the Nordic Model because it undermines sex worker safety and strengthens moralism in the name of preventing trafficking, even as it ensures that all sex work is driven deeper underground. To become a dominatrix is to enter a caring profession; to establish rapport with a client is delicate and difficult, especially when a session involves physical or psychological torment. If hiring us becomes illegal, how can a client entrust himself to our care? “[Kink] is already widely stigmatised in society, so clients have a greater need for privacy and discretion than more mainstream sexual orientations require. Clients already face the threat of losing their reputations, jobs and families if outed, and criminalisation just adds one more layer of risk,” says Ms Slide, an experienced London dominatrix (pictured below).

Today, British dominatrices fall into a grey area, sometimes overlooked by law enforcement but subject to archaic laws banning “disorderly houses.” Generally, we don’t offer sex, so we don’t yet know whether we would fall under the aegis of a Nordic-style law in Britain. We do know, though, that sex workers in Nordic Model countries suffer decreased income and increased risks; Laura Watson, spokeswoman of the stalwart English Collective of Prostitutes, says that workers report new complications, such as client reluctance to call from unblocked phone numbers or pay deposits. Worse, criminalisation will inevitably filter the client pool, discouraging those who are unwilling to break the law. “The focus of the police will be on criminalising the clients rather than on the safety of sex workers,” says Watson. “That’s already the case, and it’s a complete disaster; for example, the police have already said that they will sit outside the flats, waiting to catch clients; in Sweden for example they are using phone surveillance to catch clients, so they’re tapping sex workers phones,” she says…’

Read the full article here.

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Freshman

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For this performer – very much a feminist – it’s the stigma, not the work itself, that harms her. Exploitation within sex work is not universal. The way the anti-sex-work agenda silences women like this by dismissing them as mindless victims is just as dehumanising as other harmful stereotypes meted out to sex workers. There are many things about porn that are problematic and need to be fixed, but stigmatising the entire industry and those within it just makes everything worse for everyone. Feminists: the false dichotomy of virgin/victim is just as bad as virgin/whore and as much a product of patriarchy. Here’s part of a wonderful article at XOJane – “I’M THE DUKE UNIVERSITY FRESHMAN PORN STAR AND FOR THE FIRST TIME I’M TELLING THE STORY IN MY WORDS”:

“…It terrifies us to even fathom that a woman could take ownership of her body. We deem to keep women in a place where they are subjected to male sexuality. We seek to rob them of their choice and of their autonomy. We want to oppress them and keep them dependent on the patriarchy. A woman who transgresses the norm and takes ownership of her body — because that’s exactly what porn is, no matter how rough the sex is — ostensibly poses a threat to the deeply ingrained gender norms that polarize our society.

I am well aware: The threat I pose to the patriarchy is enormous. That a woman could be intelligent, educated and CHOOSE to be a sex worker is almost unfathomable.

I find it interesting that porn (a billion-dollar industry) is consumed by millions of people — men and women (and all other equally wonderful genders) alike — yet no one is willing to consider the lives of the people behind the camera. No one wants to hear about the abuses and exploitation that take place, no one wants to hear about the violence committed every day against sex workers, no one wants to consider that we have hopes and dreams and ambitions.

No, all we are is “whores and bimbos.”

I reject this. Instead, what I ask for is simple. I, like all other sex workers, want to be treated with dignity and respect. I want equal representation under the law and within societal institutions. I want people to acknowledge our humanity. I want people to listen to our unique narratives and dialogues…”

Read the full article here.

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Blurred Lines

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I’ve been meaning to address this for ages, but it deserves more time and energy than I’ve had recently. The media has focused on porn’s relationship with rape for several months now, and grandstanding politicians have taken turns to spurt unresearched rhetoric about how access to any porn turns ordinary boys into sexual predators and girls into wanton sluts. Anti-porn feminists have long claimed that all porn is rape, and the current debate about “rape porn” has escalated into David Cameron proposing a block on all internet porn.

There are a whole load of reasons why an opt-out filter is potentially disastrous, not just for open discussion about sexuality and consent, but also for freedom of speech and access to information on the internet in a wider context. For instance, in 2011 the City of London police classified Occupy and UK Uncut activists as “terrorists”, just as the FBI have. Potentially, by this logic, websites that authorities consider to be politically dissenting voices could simply be blocked by default. Filters are far from discerning either. Many have highlighted the dangers of non-porn LGBTQ and sex education sites being blocked en-masse, further limiting young people’s access to sensible, responsible information about the issues that they often (wrongly) look to porn to provide answers to in the first place.

As for what is termed “rape porn”, we aren’t talking about actual filmed rape, or anything that purports to be so. This is already illegal, just as it should be. What the proposed ban refers to is simulated “rape” – consensual non-consent play, something previously discussed by the excellent Emily Rose. By law, pornographers already have to jump through hoops to prove that participants are fully consenting adults. When people speak of “rape porn”, they are not talking about actual rape. They are talking about filmed BDSM scenes that, despite depicting seemingly forceful sex, are explicitly consensual.

Of course, the porn industry still has a long way to go. Practices should be as ethical as possible, but ironically it’s BDSM pornographers that are at the forefront of promoting enthusiastic consent, despite their work also being most demonised by anti-porn campaigners. I will post more on this subject soon, as it’s an ongoing story which is due to progress significantly in the near future with respect to proposed laws and possible challenges to them (also it’s currently 2:35am and I should probably go to bed now).

In the meantime, donate to Backlash if you can. Their work on the above is more important right now than you might imagine.

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