Posts by Jolisa
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Gotta feel sorry for Ásgeir Davídsson:
Ásgeir Davídsson who runs the strip club Goldfinger in Kópavogur is looking into whether he can sue the Icelandic state for compensation.
“I have reached the age where I’m not sure whether I want to bother with this hassle anymore,” he said. “I would be relieved if they just paid me compensation and I would quit.”
Funny thing is, Iceland has already experimented with liberal prostitution laws of a kind likely to please both pragmatists (legal both to solicit sex and to sell it) and utopians (illegal for a third party to profit).
I think they're probably entitled to try something a bit different, in the quest to stamp out trafficking.
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But then you have to explain why, as the availability of porn goes up, sexual violence decreases.
Thing is, I'm not actually convinced that it does, for a whole range of definitions of "sexual violence."
Purely for the sake of argument, what if a silent majority of women and girls (and men and boys) feel violated, sexually, by the visible presence of porn in a place where they're just trying to buy a chocolate fish? That's a kind of diffused rhetorical violence that's simply not accounted for in any of the studies (OK, the one study) Emma linked to.
Still, the science on cause-and-effect relationships between availability of porn and sexual violence (as we traditionally understand it), is pretty sketchy in either direction. Which is why I'd give greater weight to a more philosophical approach, but then I'm weird that way.
Sweden is a deeply perplexing example. It should be a sex-crime free utopia, according to the study Emma linked to: it has classically liberal porn laws (no age limits on possession or viewing!). But sexual violence is indeed apparently on the rise. Both sex crimes and assaults against women (and children, incidentally) -- or the reporting thereof -- have increased in the last ten years -- coincidentally or not, since prostitution was outlawed.
Do the Swedes just need to double down on the porn?
Seriously though, if the availability of a pool of professional sex workers is the only thing standing between any given person and rape, then there's something wrong that merely tinkering with the laws won't fix.
But, in this case, if the evidence does show that [some of] your individual women are more likely to suffer violence as a result of your actions, how much "precedence" do you give that?
Well, the evidence may indeed show that; it might in some cases (small country, known pool of workers) also show the opposite. In the Iceland case, (some of) the women in question were already suffering violence, in one of the already most heavily observed, if not regulated, sex industries in the world.
What other options do you think the Icelandic parliament considered, and why do you think they might have ruled them out in favour of this one?
What kind of evidence would you be obliged to present for the benefits of your new policy, given that it involves a demonstrable cost in human lives?
Fairly persuasive evidence, of the sort likely to win a vote in parliament, I'd have thought.
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And yet earlier in this same thread, people are arguing - without much dispute - for a direct relationship between depictions of misogynist sexual violence, and the attitudes and possibly actions of those who watch it.
Colour me deeply confused! (And also convinced, empirically, that a porny culture can indeed turn perfectly average guys into massive, massive fuckwads, both situationally and semi-permanently).
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Also, I found this part of the article about the beneficial societal effects of porn rather worrisome:
There is no doubt that some people have claimed to suffer adverse effects from exposure to pornography—just look at testimony from women’s shelters, divorce courts and other venues. But there is no evidence it was the cause of the claimed abuse or harm.
Huh? How come we take women's word for it in some cases (work conditions in a brothel, say) but not others (trauma at hands of porn-addicted or -inspired partner or abusive family member, say)? I'm really not clear on the distinction that's being made here, except that it seems a bit wishful.
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not sure what's happened to Schrodinger's Cat in all this cake debate. Maybe it ate the cake and the hundreds and thousands, then got dressed in black and wasn't there at all.
I'm uncertain, on principle.
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Aren't you just making an assumption? Rather paternalistically?
Maternalistically, you mean? And yes, of course I was making an assumption - an explicitly economic one - for the sake of making the argument as compelling as possible (need trumping want, in this case). Even if the hypothetical McDonald's worker simply enjoyed the job and would do it for free, if it was demonstrably a dangerous work environment, that preference would kind of be beside the point.
It seems to me to be simple pragmatism.
As opposed to utopianism, which is an equally valid approach to legislation. I guess I'm a bit of a utopian.
The people working in the sex industry are the people who know the most about it.
OK. But there are many different people working many different kinds of jobs in the sex industry, which is what I was getting at with the McD's analogy.
They know what will work for them, better than someone who's never seen or spoken to a sex worker possibly can.
(Golly, not including me in that last assessment, I hope?)
Yes, of course - although, as above, not monolithically - and only up to a point. That point might be imagining radical systematic alternatives to the familiar setting in which they find themselves. Not a sex work thing; a human thing, which happens in any kind of fixed situation or institutional context that comes to seem inevitable, and to which only incremental fixes can be imagined.
and so every single sex worker has forfeited the right to have a say when their job is taken away from them by legislation?
Bad grammar in my original post: it was the management who had forfeited the right to a say; for the workers, in that hypothetical case, discussion was moot.
Still, yes, in this case, if the workers haven't had a say, it's not because it's sex work or because they're women. Rather, because it's an industry that's been deemed so problematic in its current execution that the government, in its (possibly temporary, possibly flawed, but definitely considered) wisdom has decided, for the moment, to shut it down.
See also whaling. Which has come and gone and come again.
I saw the Feministing piece; I dunno. Nicely argued, but it followed the same rhetorical formula Deborah noted upthread. Indict a feminist initiative for failing to solve the entire problem at once: ergo, this feminist initiative has failed. See for example:
A feminist victory, in my opinion, would be a highly regulated industry that made sure ... workers were paid good wages, were able to unionize, had full benefits, were able to set boundaries with customers and have those boundaries protected... that ensured that these immigrant women were not being brought to Iceland against their will.
... A feminist victory would mean access to jobs and economic opportunity that meant women had options other than strip clubs and sex work if they so chose.
[...] Iceland, I commend you for elevating women to elected office, but this piece of your work is not a victory for my vision of feminism.I believe that the Icelandic initiative, while not corresponding to some "visions of feminism", is coming at the issue in good faith, from the other end. Harm reduction programmes and legal liberalisation concede the inevitability of sex work and seek to mitigate it. Iceland -- for better or for worse, for the moment, for the sake of argument, for a change -- dares to imagine a world that does not commodify sexuality at all. They're working on the second half of the "feminist victory" proposed by Miriam at Feministing; hoping that an egalitarian society will render the first half moot.
Maybe it's doomed, but it's radical, and it's interesting, and I think it's worth discussing without foregoing any conclusions. And if, on reflection (e.g. if the Swedish data proves incontrovertible and persuasive) Iceland decides that it makes more sense to set up a "highly regulated industry", then that won't be a failure for feminism. Just a failure for a particular utopian version of it -- feminism itself not being a zero-sum game.
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I wasn't going to get into this, because it makes me feel like I've been wasting two years of commenting, but
No, thanks for picking it up, and of course you haven't wasted two years of commenting. Not your fault if I haven't read each one and/or agreed 100% with each.
they'll move to out-call stripping. You know, the strippers who come to parties. Or private homes. Full of men who used to go to strip clubs, where there were bouncers, and crowds, and other strippers to back you up. Vast improvement, right?
Well, I don't know. Rhetorical question, yes, I see that. But I really don't know. Speaking as a freelancer (in a slightly different industry, natch), I'm sure there are many ways to profit in business, and many ways to handle one's own management and security issues. In this case, I don't know.
Law around the sex industry should surely be made in consultation with people who work in the sex industry
But (and I'm not being specious here, really) isn't that like saying that laws around the fast food industry should surely be made in consultation with people who work in the fast food industry? If someone wants to keep their job at McDonald's because it's, at that moment, the only thing between them and the dole, but we have intercepted management sending other employees through the burger machine, haven't they sort of forfeited the right to a frank and open discussion about what works for them legislation-wise?
I believe, but cannot be sure, that that's the call Iceland made in this instance, after one example too many of some pretty dodgy trafficking. Why negotiate with terrorists? </strategic exaggeration but only just>
But you're talking about talking to the women, rather than the bosses, yes? I get that. Perhaps the Icelandic government would have come up with a different approach if they'd sat down with the women mentioned in the article I linked to (and we don't know that they didn't). But what? Government-run brothels? That's also been done - see Japan during the Occupation - and it's messy in its own way...
No answers, just questions. As usual :-)
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boomdeyada boomdeyada etc
I love this bakery!
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some of those on screen appeared to have got dressed in the dark.
They do realise these guys are scientists and engineers, right? Lack of dress sense and 'interesting' hair kind of come with the territory....
Yo, mine was rocking a pinny this morning. </boast>
I should add that it was indeed a Large Hadron Cake. Half as tall as it was wide. I'm usually the cake queen, and even I was impressed at how seriously this one contested the laws of physics and baking powder.
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as a rabid but post-sex-wars feminist
Ah, but are the sex-wars over? I feel like we're still just in the middle of it - and it's a hundred years' war. Sure, we have gained a certain amount of free expression (and some crucial decriminalisation), but we are still subject to many of the same old ills (take back the night lately, anyone?), and a few new wrinkles that are, if anything, worse than ever (the perfectionist, one-size-fits-all pornification of pop culture being one).
So, yeah, our daughters and sons can pretty much do what they like in bed without fear of cops bursting into the room waving their truncheons. But they still have to walk past a wall of Phwoar Boobs for Gentlemen!, Real Live Bottoms, and Jug-Fanciers Monthly to buy a bottle of milk or a chocolate fish at the dairy - and half of them daren't do it after dark.
I'm not a pessimist, but I dunno, somehow I thought we'd be a bit further down the line, twenty years on from when I first started thinking about this stuff.
You're not buying and selling -women- in the club, you're buying their performance time.
That is a crucial distinction, ta -- and it's true of many a job.
As to how women might start working at the clubs, then investigate that aspect. Come down like a ton of bricks if people are being trafficked, health and safety regulations are being breached, the workers are not being paid properly, work excessive hours, etc.
They absolutely did but tended to only find the really dodgy stuff by accident. Of course, by closing down the known businesses, you're only left with the unknowns, and not necessarily any closer to finding the real lawbreakers. I guess the hope is that in a place as small as Iceland, there are no secrets.
What are the odds, though; am picturing a small country that decides to go 100% vegetarian. I bet you could sniff your way to a bacon speakeasy if you put your mind to it.
They got Al Capone through taxes in the end.
And fixed the drunk driving problem once and for all :-)
The porn will always be with us, I suppose, as the Bible might have said if it had thought about it. Still, I'm enjoying my little Gate To Women's Country [spoilers!] moment while it lasts.