City Anti-Prostitution Hysteria
Why is it that people who call themselves journalists instantly toss every shred of objectivity overboard when it comes to the issue of sex work? In today’s PI, guest columnist Bonnie Erbe purports to be talking about sex workers in Germany for the World Cup. But in fact, she’ s not actually reporting news, she’s just leaping from one unsubstantiated assumption to the next and frothing at the mouth as she does so.
I’ll make the standard disclaimer here: No one should be forced to do sex work, and it should be adults-only, no kids. However, Ms. Erbe doesn’t make any distinction between adult women and children, and independent businesswomen and rape victims. This line, in particular, is classic: “Whether women enter the sex trade willingly or not, no government should sanction prostitution.”
Because the government knows what’s best for you, ladies. You don’t need to worry your pretty little head about what you think is okay, other people will make your personal choices for you.
And this: “By its very nature, prostitution is demeaning to women and encourages anti-social, some would say depraved, behavior by men.”
It enrages me that people who don’t know anything about sex work toss off lines like this as if it had been handed to them on a stone tablet instead of on a press release from anti-sex-workers activist group. Guess what, Bonnie, you don’t get to define my experience. I’m a sex worker, I’ve had sex for money, and I didn’t feel demeaned by it. My clients are actually very ordinary men with jobs and mortgages and the whole American Dream thing going on, and I bet if I did a line-up, you’d be utterly unable to distinguish guys who were my clients from guys who weren’t.
So you can take your demeaning and depraved soundbites and stuff them. That would be doing us sex workers a major-league favor.
MM: Contact the PI and ask to do a counter-editorial. Getting a guest editorial in the local papers isn't that hard.