wasza_bogini
03.09.03, 22:18
The commercial sex industry includes street prostitution, massage brothels,
escort services, outcall services, strip clubs, lapdancing, phone sex, adult
and child pornography, video and internet pornography, and prostitution
tourism. Most women who are in prostitution for longer than a few months
drift among these various permutations of the commercial sex industry.
All prostitution causes harm to women. Whether it is being sold by one’s
family to a brothel, or whether it is being sexually abused in one’s family,
running away from home, and then being pimped by one’s boyfriend, or whether
one is in college and needs to pay for next semester’s tuition and one works
at a strip club behind glass where men never actually touch you – all these
forms of prostitution hurt the women in it. (Melissa Farley, paper presented
at the 11th International Congress on Women’s Health Issues, University of
California College of Nursing, San Francisco. 1-28-2000)
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"The everyday life of prostitution is distant from most of us. And here, our
imagination is a poor assistant. Negotiate a price with a stranger. Agree.
Pull down one pant leg. Come and take me. Finished. Next, please. It becomes
too ugly to really take it in. The imagination screeches to a halt." (Cecilie
Hoigard and Liv Finstad, Backstreets: Prostitution, Money, and Love, 1992,
translated by Katherine Hanson, Nancy Sipe, and Barbara Wilson; first
published as Bakgater in Norway, 1986, Pennsylvania State University Press,
University Park, Pennsylvania).
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Men call up the image of the whore when they are abusing their partners. The
accusations in between the kicks and slaps: "You slut....whore...."
Historically, the words mean "subhuman," "having no rights," "invisible,"
and "wicked." As recently as 1991, police in a southern California community
closed all rape reports made by prostitutes and addicts, placing them in a
file stamped "NHI." The letters stand for the words "No Human Involved."
(Linda Fairstein, Sexual Violence: Our War Against Rape, 1993, New York,
William Morrow.)
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"[The prostitute] is a victim of every bad thing men do to women: physical
and sexual abuse, economic oppression and abandonment." (Mick
LaSalle, "Hollywood is hooked on hookers, " San Francisco Examiner, December
3, 1995).
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Women in prostitution are purchased for their appearance, including skin
color and characteristics based on ethnic stereotyping. Throughout history,
women have been enslaved and prostituted based on race and ethnicity, as well
as gender (Kathleen Barry, 1995 ,The Prostitution of Sexuality, New York
University Press).
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We usually don't see prostitution as domestic violence because it is just too
painful: "...the carnage: the scale of it, the dailiness of it, the seeming
inevitability of it; the torture, the rapes, the murders, the beatings, the
despair, the hollowing out of the personality, the near extinguishment of
hope commonly suffered by women in prostitution." (Margaret A. Baldwin "Split
at the Root: Prostitution and Feminist Discourses of Law Reform" in Yale
Journal of Law and Feminism, 1992, Vol 5: 47-120)
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"Male dominance means that the society creates a pool of prostitutes by any
means necessary so that men have what men need to stay on top, to feel big,
literally, metaphorically, in every way;..." (Andrea Dworkin, Prostitution
and Male Supremacy, in Life and Death, Free Press, 1997).
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"Prostitution isn't like anything else. Rather, everything else is like
prostitution because it is the model for women's condition." (Evelina Giobbe,
1992, quoted by Margaret Baldwin in "Split at the Root: Prostitution and
Feminist Discourses of Law Reform," Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 5:
47-120).
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"The sex industry markets precisely the violence, the practices of
subordination that feminists seek to eliminate from the streets, workplaces,
and bedrooms." Sheila Jeffreys, (1997) The Idea of Prostitution, Spinifex
Press, North Melbourne, Victoria.
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The practice of prostitution is a practice of sexual objectification of
women. "... every act of sexual objectifying occurs on a continuum of
dehumanization that promises male sexual violence at its far end." John
Stoltenberg (1990) Refusing to be a Man, Fontana, London.
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The average age of entry into prostitution is 13 years (M.H. Silbert and A.M.
Pines, 1982, "Victimization of street prostitutes, Victimology: An
International Journal, 7: 122-133) or 14 years (D.Kelly Weisberg, 1985,
Children of the Night: A Study of Adolescent Prostitution, Lexington, Mass,
Toronto). Most of these 13 or 14 year old girls were recruited or coerced
into prostitution. Others were "traditional wives" without job skills who
escaped from or were abandoned by abusive husbands and went into prostitution
to support themselves and their children. (Denise Gamache and Evelina Giobbe,
Prostitution: Oppression Disguised as Liberation, National Coalition against
Domestic Violence, 1990)
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The age of entry into prostitution is decreasing. For example, how do we even
conceptualize "juvenile" prostitution, when the age of consent for legal
sexual activity is constantly lowered, as in Netherlands and Philippines?
(Kathleen Mahoney, Professor of Law, Calgary University, Canada, 1995)
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*
"Incest is boot camp [for prostitution.]" (Andrea Dworkin, "Prostitution and
Male Supremacy," in Life and Death, Free press, 1997)
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Estimates of the prevalence of incest among prostitutes range from 65% to
90%. The Council for Prostitution Alternatives, Portland, Oregon Annual
Report in 1991 stated that: 85% of prostitute/clients reported history of
sexual abuse in childhood; 70% reported incest. The higher percentages (80%-
90%) of reports of incest and childhood sexual assaults of prostitutes come
from anecdotal reports and from clinicians working with prostitutes
(interviews with Nevada psychologists cited by Patricia Murphy, Making the
Connections: women, work, and abuse, 1993, Paul M. Deutsch Press, Orlando,
Florida; see also Rita Belton, "Prostitution as Traumatic Reenactment," 1992,
International Society for Traumatic Stress Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA
M.H. Silbert and A.M. Pines, 1982, "Victimization of street prostitutes,"
Victimology: An International Journal, 7: 122-133; C. Bagley and L Young,
1987, "Juvenile Prostitution and child sexual abuse: a controlled study,"
Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health, Vol 6: 5-26.
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80% of prostitution survivors at the WHISPER Oral History Project reported
that their customers showed them pornography to illustrate the kinds of
sexual