‘Sex Work is Work’ Versus the Reality
By Dr Em, Feminist author and disability rights activist. @PankhurstEM
On Friday, 17 June 2022, 12 years of Unison policy changed as it voted at its National Delegate Conference (NDC) in Brighton to drop support for the Nordic Model and move towards backing the sale of women as a solution to poverty. This notion, that women and girls desire to be sexually abused, has been trendy for some time. Indeed, in 2015 Catherine Murphy, then Amnesty International’s Legal and Policy advisor, tried to sell the world the idea that decriminalising men purchasing poor women’s bodies to use as sexual playthings was a human right to campaign for, which would empower the women being sold. Murphy has subsequently moved on to become the executive director of trans lobby group Engender and to campaign for male access to female single-sex spaces. As Julie Bindel has highlighted, Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch (and a highly paid white man), has lobbied for the removal of all laws pertaining to prostitution, including pimping and brothel owning. From university student unions to magazines for teen girls, girls and young women are being fed a steady drip of how selling men sexual access to their bodies is empowering and the latest human rights campaign.
Unsurprisingly, a host of celebrity men have joined this females for sale bandwagon. For example, according to Louis Theroux, a man who is unlikely to have to suck an unwashed penis to pay rent, ‘sex work is a valid occupation in the modern world’. The ‘sex work is work’ mantra obscures what is being done to prostituted women and girls. Maybe they should chant ‘he defecates in her mouth for €200’, to be more accurate. Or ‘urinate on her and make her drink it for €10 extra’! This is what is advertised in the surcharge section of online escorts in Germany, that model of legalisation that the sex trade lobby hold up to be imitated.
Since Germany legalised the sale and purchase of women in 2002, the brutality of what is being demanded has increased. Influenced by pornography and the cultural messaging that women exist to sexually service men which legalisation spreads, the men on sex-buyer forums have been emboldened. For example, one man in Berlin asked for assistance as he was ‘looking for a lady who will let me shit and puke on her – slim, cause I don’t like fatsos’. The dominatrix Ellen Templin observed in 2007 that “since the reform you can see that not only have the advertisements become uninhibited, the buyers of sex have become more brutal... Today, buyers ask on the telephone if they can piss on your face, wanting to do it without protection, wanting to do it anally… it’s an everyday occurrence.
Before, buyers still had a guilty conscience”. It is not a few male loners, pre-Covid the industry in Germany was ‘estimated to be worth $16.3 billion’. ‘It is estimated that 1.2 million men buy sex every day’ and ‘80% have been in a brothel’. Legalisation has caused demand to sky rocket and the German government is profiting from this abuse of women through heavy taxation. Inge Kleine argued that ‘in practice tax debts in Germany are a major barrier to exiting prostitution. The new law has made that worse, by making it more systematic’. Kleine informed me over email that the 2016 “Prostitutes’ Protection Law” was ‘supposed to ban gang bang, group rape, and flat rate offers’ however the websites linked in this essay ‘show that this is nothing but window dressing to more effectively approve the sex industry’. The “protection” of women in prostitution is limited to registering them, making health counselling mandatory and recording enough personal details for them to be made to pay their taxes (partly collected as VAT via brothel keepers)’. On the government website the words “tax obligations” jump out at any reader. The German government itself is keeping women prostituted through tax debts and thus removing their choices. The German legal system is then issuing fines to women who have not sexually satisfied the men who bought them. Kleine described how in February 2020 ‘a punter took a woman to court because he didn’t cum. He’d demanded oral without a condom (… illegal for punters under the new law), she had cut down the time with him, the judge (a woman) ended the trial without a sentence, but made the woman pay €500 in fines and fees. That’s what the legal situation is, and such is the “choice” and free will allowed to women in prostitution’.
What is it like for these women without choice? For €200 a man, or group of men, can anally penetrate 22-year-old Zara, tie her up, spank her, ejaculate in her mouth or on her body, defecate and urinate on her. Or for €200 per hour a man can tie up 22-year-old Morena, beat her, spank her, ram his fist up her vagina, shove his penis down her throat until she chokes, penetrate her, ejaculate on her, defecate and urinate on her. For the standard €200 a man can tie up 22-year-old Babic from Argentina, anally penetrate her, ram his penis down her throat, ram his fist up her vagina, force her to lick his anus, beat her, ejaculate on her, then defecate and urinate on her. Or for €100 a man can penetrate 22-year-old Amber’s anus, vagina, ejaculate in her mouth or on her face and then urinate on her. For a negotiated price 23-year-old Elvina is available to fulfil all of a man’s, or men’s, fantasies. He can tie her up, beat her, whip her, pull her hair as she pretends to be his slave, force her to lick his anus, ram his penis down her throat, ram his penis in her anus as another man penetrates her vagina, then these men can urinate and defecate on her. Or for a €30 surcharge the man can purchase 21-year-old Lithuanian Darina for anal penetration and €90 an hour to penetrate her as much as he likes, with a €10 surcharge to urinate on her afterwards. This can be done in a truck or a car, we are informed, in case you were under the illusion that Germany’s legalisation and ‘regulation’ of the sale of women meant it moved from the street into nice, comfy rooms. What does that do to you psychologically when a man, or men, who have paid to rape you, then urinate and defecate on you? Potentially make you eat their faeces? Could there be a crueller expression of what they think about you, your value?
Those adverts are not outliers. On Global Escorts for €200 a man can anally penetrate 23-year-old Clara, ejaculate in her mouth and on her body, ram his fist up her anus, urinate and defecate on her. On a different website, for a negotiated price, a group of men, or one man singularly, can penetrate 26-year-old Kayla, a Spanish woman in Berlin who doesn’t speak German and thus wouldn’t be able to express boundaries, all at the same time (she ‘offers’ double penetration along with a gang bang), pull her hair, urinate on her and defecate on her. Similarly, men can tie up and whip 25-year-old Clothide from France who also doesn’t speak German, the men can pull her hair, have her pretend to be their slave, urinate on her, or maybe a group of men will pay to penetrate her as a gang and then ejaculate on her face. For all those fools who chant that woman have agency in sex work, how do they think these women are discussing terms when they do not speak the language? Who is arranging these violent encounters?
When a woman is for sale, being traded between men, maybe she has had her passport confiscated, maybe she is being threatened, how much agency does she have to decide what men will do to her? Will these men who purchase her for their sexual use be kind and charming? Or, will these be the worst of men she is being offered up to? How much agency does she have when she is offered up as part of an ‘All You Can Bang’ brothel menu? Since legalisation, in some brothels women are offered up like buffet food.
‘The King George was Germany's first flat-rate brothel, it was ‘the sex industry's answer to the global recession. In Berlin there are about half a dozen of them’.
Men pay €88 ‘to join in any time’ with any woman at the all-inclusive Anni Porsche Club where ‘there are no hidden costs… and for all sexual games no additional money is expected and never asked for… because the Porsche party girls enjoy the rich variety of sex!’. It is being advertised that the women have no choice of refusing ‘additional services’ or to say no. At a different brothel one man did not enjoy his all-inclusive consumption of women and complained that
‘After half an hour I … went to a private room with Amara… First of all she really wanted to clean my freshly cleansed male piece of glory with a wet tissue and then she kept telling me that I absolutely couldn’t spray my cum into her mouth... Blowjob and fucking both were performed so apathetically and with such disgust, that my man-piece practically went on strike after 10 minutes. Yet she did not want to let me go, because she’d get into trouble if I didn’t stay in the room for at least 20 minutes’.
Her dislike and fear did not stop this man, he just resented her for it.
This glimpse into the reality of ‘sex work’ in Germany should begin to explain why I have no time for the argument that being sold to men to be sexually used is exercising female agency. These women have very little to no choices. If a man has bought your consent he has paid for you not to say no. The only agency which legalisation of prostitution increases is that of the buyer and of the pimp. The buyer is emboldened to demand more and more degrading acts and the pimp is supported to force women to meet buyer demands, citing market forces and that it is legal. It creates a culture of use and objectification of the female. This is how Rufus Hound can respond to prostituted women being forced to eat men’s faeces that ‘you realise that if it’s being offered in a brothel, it means people [men] are willing to pay for it? That, thus, they must value it?’.
It is precisely because women and girls are not valued as full human beings that they are being systematically and legally sold to males, Rufus.