Great idea Samlad, especially if our invited guests from Ruhama ever find the courage and integrity to arrive and make themselves aware of who a large proportion of sex workers actually are and what they actually think.
I default to looking on sex work purely as a matter of economics, from the point of view of the sex worker, and it is all very simple.
During a recession, like every other entertainment industry, the market for the sex industry shrinks, at the same time as the numbers of crisis and survival sex workers increase dramatically.
For sex workers, this means that prices and incomes drop, and like any other self employed person, their working life becomes far more stressful. Meanwhile the banks, building societies, utilities credit cards and Tesco all expect to be paid just the same.
So what do you think happens if you criminalise the buyer?
- Many women are getting into sex work for the first time because there is no other work - so you can forget that for starters.
- E-I (and similar) will be getting a lot of new advertisers from other sectors trying to work around the law or "trafficking" themselves out of Ireland on tour through their sister sites.
- If they had the integrity, credibility and moral resources, which they do not, Ruhama do not have the material resources to offer and real assistance to hundreds of women denied their income from sex work. Most of their resources are spent on salaries, premises and lobbying against the wishes and best interests of sex workers. What happened in the 90s recession was that they offered daytime art and personal development classes to women who still had to go out and struggle to find enough business to make a living...not for a few weeks, or months, but for years, feeding them false hope after false hope to keep the claws in and conditioning them to Ruhama's ideology, false memory syndrome (at that time confined to childhood, but now applied to clients and everyday life) and internalised prejudice against themselves for the sex work they still have to do, every step of the way. The psychological and emotional cruelty of it still staggers me to this day, and as Ruhama are so fascinated to know what I have against them so they can pretend to change it, *THAT* would be the biggest part.
- Real women will start to lose their livelihoods, homes and families, with no honest "last resort" to turn to to avert the crisis. With their children at stake, I am betting the best (because they are strong enough to abandon personal morality for the sake of their families) and the worst of them will turn to real crime. Some of them will not get away with it, and there you have family after family, that could have been growing and developing in a healthy, nurturing environment, towards the same kind of safe, bright future all the NGO bunnies got to take for granted, destroyed, regulated to sink estates, drug abuse, welfare dependency and crime.
That's reality...THAT is what has me putting in a full time job to fighting this cr*p at my own expense...I cannot live with knowing what will happen to a fair amount of sex workers and their families if "the Swedish Model" happens here at this time...and that fate will not distinguish between women who want to sell sex and women who have to sell sex, except in the that women who *have* to sell sex will usually be hit first and suffer the most.
...and all because the ladies (of Ruhama) love to impose control...not to mention a way to increase their funding...
But there are issues beyond that (as if there need to be...like E-I I tend to have a "ladies first, last and foremost mindset).
If ye lads were "rapists" then, frankly, the sooner everybody woke up and realised that the better...but there is just one tiny problem. You aren't rapists, and trying to indoctrinate people to see anything as something it is not is a form of psychological abuse called "Gaslighting"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting .
There is a lot of (understandable) focus on how ye lads feel about that, but beyond your feelings, that degree of misrepresentation also has a psychologically damaging affect on the rest of our society, and how we perceive abuse and gender issues...and abuse and gender issues can be such ambiguous things that the last thing we, as a society, need is to permit them to be deliberately distorted.
Something you can see evidence of around you is that this campaign is already beginning to distort the principle of sexual consent. The campaign is cornering sex workers into counteracting it by enthusiastically claiming to enjoy every aspect of their work...but that is not what sexual consent is about.
Bluntly, is is absolutely nobody's business how any person feels about sex in any context. Consent is all that matters and consent is about whether a person voluntarily contracts to have sex, not why. What will happen to the law if rape ceases to be a matter of expressed consent between adults and is tried on third party assumptions about feelings?
The standard pedophile defence seems to be to claim that the child enjoyed it.
Originally Posted by samlad
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) where a woman vacillated between a "fatal attraction" type pursuit of anyone she perceived to be a benign authority figure with some degree of celebrity (always ending in an obviously factitious accusation of abuse, some of which were quite high profile), and, at other times blatantly courting abuse and abusers. She made false accusations of every kind against everybody, including family members...for decades...it was her way of life.
