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The Horrors Of The Legalized Sex Trade w/ Elly Arrow
43 Plays3 years ago
German Sex Trade Abolitionist Elly Arrow visits the Queens to rip open the veil on the legalized prostitution industry. PLUS: Why Cardi B is the karma Johns deserve.
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Transcript
Introduction of Ellie Arrow
00:00:05
Speaker
What's up, queens?
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to the Female Dating Strategy Podcast, the meanest female-only podcast on the internet.
00:00:10
Speaker
I'm Ro.
00:00:11
Speaker
And I'm Savannah.
00:00:13
Speaker
And I'm Lilith.
00:00:14
Speaker
And Buttercup is back!
00:00:15
Speaker
Yay!
00:00:16
Speaker
I'm back, yeah.
00:00:19
Speaker
I have so much to talk about, but we have a guest today, so we're going to focus on our guest, but I'll do the update episode later.
00:00:25
Speaker
Yeah, we have an awesome guest today.
Feminist Activism and the Legal Sex Trade
00:00:27
Speaker
Yes, our guest today is Ellie Arrow, a sex trade abolitionist and educator.
00:00:33
Speaker
Hi, thank you for having me.
00:00:35
Speaker
Thank you so much for coming on the show and for speaking with us.
00:00:38
Speaker
I've personally been really excited to get you on because of all your work around the discourse on the sex trade and sex work as well.
00:00:47
Speaker
So did you want to just give us a bit more information about your background?
00:00:51
Speaker
Yeah, sure.
00:00:52
Speaker
So I'm Ellie Arrow.
00:00:54
Speaker
I'm a feminist activist from Germany.
00:00:56
Speaker
And my main subject is the sex trade.
00:00:59
Speaker
So that's prostitution, pornography, stripping, all these go together, they overlap.
00:01:05
Speaker
And many people know in Germany, it's all legal, basically brothel owning, escort agency owning, sex work management, some people like to call it.
00:01:15
Speaker
So basically pimps?
00:01:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's the huge debate.
00:01:18
Speaker
Is there like an ethical, can you ethically manage the sex trade?
00:01:21
Speaker
Yes or no?
00:01:23
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
00:01:24
Speaker
Well, I think some people might notice as well in recent years, Germany sort of gained a bad reputation, like the press in Europe, they call us the brothel of Europe.
Consequences of Legalization in Germany
00:01:33
Speaker
And it's often regarded as a failure and actually an exploded market and a lot of human rights abuses.
00:01:39
Speaker
And that's what I found when I looked at it.
00:01:41
Speaker
So that's both just reading material from researchers, from the government, from police.
00:01:47
Speaker
And then over the years, I had a chance to speak to a lot of survivors of the sex trade.
00:01:51
Speaker
I've also spoken to women who consider themselves sex workers.
00:01:54
Speaker
So I think we can learn something from them as well.
00:01:58
Speaker
But my stance at the end of the day, this industry is so overwhelmingly exploitative that it can't be reformed, it can't be made ethical.
00:02:05
Speaker
And examples like Germany or New Zealand, I can speak to that as well, show that.
Impact on Sex Workers' Rights
00:02:10
Speaker
Nice.
00:02:10
Speaker
So can you tell us a bit more about what's going on in Germany, where, you know, the sex trade is basically legal, because we see, or there are arguments that, you know, making it legal will make it safer for sex workers, and it will just make it a safer industry.
00:02:26
Speaker
So it'll be really interesting to see if that has been the case in Germany, or has it been the case in Germany?
00:02:31
Speaker
Yeah, so that's a really big question, but maybe we can start with a little bit of the history.
00:02:37
Speaker
So there's a misconception that prostitution was legalized in, well, about 20 years ago in Germany.
00:02:45
Speaker
But really, and this is the case for many countries across the globe, an acceptance towards the sex trade has been...
00:02:53
Speaker
in basically every patriarchal culture from the beginning.
00:02:56
Speaker
And an acceptance of the sex trade does not equal an acceptance of the sex seller.
00:03:00
Speaker
Those are two very different things.
00:03:02
Speaker
So just sex buying as a part of male culture, you know, soldiers or craftsmen or...
00:03:11
Speaker
There's one infamous case that people should know about in Germany, the Council of Constance.
00:03:16
Speaker
It was called in the Middle Ages when there were like three popes at the time and men were trying to figure out who's the true pope and they all got together in the city of Constance for several years to discuss this and they
00:03:27
Speaker
hired a huge number of women to service them as prostitutes during this time.
00:03:34
Speaker
So it's also a misconception that, you know, men of the church were always anti this industry.
00:03:39
Speaker
We have this view today, the left wing, you know, is pro-industry and the right is anti, but it's way more complex.
00:03:48
Speaker
So in Germany, there's a long history of tolerance for brothel keeping.
Historical Context and Legal Challenges
00:03:51
Speaker
So some of the streets where we have brothels today, brothels have been there for hundreds of years.
00:03:57
Speaker
And really what happened about 20 years ago was that they abolished the mandatory health inspections of women, where there's a very long, ugly history in many countries, Britain too, I believe the US as well, where they forced women to undergo medical exams that weren't even necessarily always scientifically sound and that were invasive.
00:04:17
Speaker
I mean, you have to strip down for a doctor and these kinds of things.
00:04:21
Speaker
So we finally abolished that just 20 years ago and then also clarified, yes, a brothel keeper is an employer and a woman in the brothel or escorting or street, she's a worker and this is a business.
00:04:35
Speaker
And this is supposed to give women rights.
00:04:37
Speaker
Like, for example, theoretically on paper, she can take a john to court if he doesn't pay.
00:04:43
Speaker
And that sounds really good.
00:04:45
Speaker
But in practice, in prostitution, the john always pays up front.
00:04:49
Speaker
because the chance that later on he's going to say, oh, I didn't feel like that service was good enough or like I didn't come or whatever.
00:04:57
Speaker
So give me my money back.
00:04:58
Speaker
That kind of situation happens all the time.
00:05:01
Speaker
So she wants the money up front to not have to fight him over the payment.
00:05:05
Speaker
And it's a fight she's unlikely to win as well, most likely, even if she did.
00:05:10
Speaker
Yes.
00:05:11
Speaker
I heard this story, I don't know if it's true or not, that if you're unemployed in Germany, that you have to be applying for jobs and that women who are unemployed are being given adverts to be prostitutes in brothels, for example.
00:05:26
Speaker
And so are there any examples of, first of all, I don't know if that's true or not, but are there any examples of where classifying it as a worker can actually be harmful to women and can actually expose them to more coercion?
Controversial Proposals and Social Perceptions
00:05:37
Speaker
Yeah, there are both these examples of supposed rights that exist on paper that don't actually help, that are not practical.
00:05:44
Speaker
And also these harmful knock-on effects, there's tons of those.
00:05:49
Speaker
And so several women had to go to court to prevent exactly what you said from happening.
00:05:55
Speaker
So there were some cases of women, unemployed women who were offered by the job office, you could go and work in that brothel.
00:06:01
Speaker
Some of it was stripping, some of it was prostitution, some of it was like being a barmaid.
00:06:05
Speaker
So the job us would say, well, we're not making her a prostitute herself.
00:06:08
Speaker
It's just barmaid work.
00:06:10
Speaker
But the women say, well, it's an unsafe environment.
00:06:12
Speaker
Even as a barmaid, I'm exposed to, you know, nudity and harassment and
00:06:16
Speaker
lewd comments and all this.
00:06:18
Speaker
I don't want this.
00:06:19
Speaker
And the courts, thankfully, upheld their rights not to have to take these jobs, but someone had to go to court first.
00:06:26
Speaker
Whenever this happens, we can assume that there are other women who didn't even know that they had this option of protesting.
00:06:33
Speaker
So we don't know 100%, but I would assume that some women entered the sex trade because they thought they had to.
00:06:40
Speaker
And only after these court decisions were the job offices discouraged from doing this.
00:06:44
Speaker
But it might still be going on to some extent.
00:06:47
Speaker
And it could still come back as well, especially, you know, legal precedents can be overturned, for example, Roe versus Wade.
00:06:54
Speaker
So even that's, it's not a guarantee that it's forever going to remain, you know, struck down by the courts as well, which is really scary for women.
00:07:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:02
Speaker
And some people have suggested that prostitution should be, if it's a job like any other, then you should be able to do like a traineeship.
00:07:09
Speaker
Or what we have in Germany, I don't know if you have it in other countries, it's called Girls' Day.
00:07:14
Speaker
It's actually not for girls and boys.
00:07:15
Speaker
Like you spend a day doing a mini internship, you know, as a teenager, a high schooler.
00:07:20
Speaker
Yeah, we have that in the UK.
00:07:22
Speaker
Yeah, we have like a week where you're an intern somewhere.
00:07:25
Speaker
Yeah, like work experience.
00:07:26
Speaker
So some voices from the pro-prostitution lobby have suggested that it should be possible to do that in a brothel.
00:07:33
Speaker
And that would, you know, be making it equal and that'd be destigmatizing and things like that.
00:07:38
Speaker
And if you truly believe sex work is work, then I'm not sure what the issue is with doing that.
00:07:44
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
00:07:45
Speaker
And this is coming from the pro-sex work crowd, right?
00:07:50
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's important for people to know that if you check the documents of who wrote these laws to make brothel keeping easier, unsurprisingly, there's brothel owner associations in there.
00:08:00
Speaker
And especially after the law, they can do lobbying quite openly.
00:08:04
Speaker
Like you can find their websites and you've got these escort agencies and brothels.
00:08:08
Speaker
Well, they have their own political movement, which is obviously, you know, make it easier to open a brothel, decrease the bureaucracy on that, decrease the regulations.
00:08:17
Speaker
One thing that became harder post, I would call it liberalization rather than legalization, because it was legal before, just with more laws on it.
00:08:26
Speaker
For social workers or the police to enter brothels becomes harder.
00:08:29
Speaker
They got the same problem in New Zealand.
00:08:31
Speaker
They can just flat out refuse entry for social workers.
Trafficking and Exploitation Issues
00:08:36
Speaker
Social workers do these routine checkups, which again, if it's a job like any other, why are they doing this?
00:08:41
Speaker
To check if does a woman need help with getting clean from a drug or...
00:08:45
Speaker
whatever her issues might be, they can flat out refuse entry.
00:08:48
Speaker
And the police needs a lot of previous investigations and evidence and a court order to enter a brothel.
00:08:55
Speaker
I mean, this is a whole huge issue in of itself.
00:08:58
Speaker
The prostitution industry hugely, hugely overlaps with the sex trafficking industry.
00:09:03
Speaker
And so a good place to traffic someone to is actually the legal brothel.
00:09:08
Speaker
because the brothel keeper has all these rights and there are all these rules around anonymity and trying to protect women from outing.
00:09:15
Speaker
The biggest issue for women, the sex trait is just social stigma.
00:09:18
Speaker
And we hear this from the sex workers, we're a crowd all the time.
00:09:21
Speaker
It's just the stigma.
00:09:22
Speaker
Anonymity is a priority rather than sex
00:09:24
Speaker
trafficking prevention, which is not really an issue.
00:09:26
Speaker
That's just a conservative myth or something.
00:09:29
Speaker
And so actually just accessing brothel papers, all the paper trails in that area, if there even are any, because obviously there's payment in cash and there's ATMs outside brothels because a lot of these men are married and you don't want it showing up in your bank statements.
00:09:44
Speaker
But anyway, for them, it's best if there's as little oversight as possible.
00:09:48
Speaker
And really the whole sex workers work movement has this narrative of stigma is the most harmful thing.
00:09:54
Speaker
External society is harmful, police is harmful, and there is a very shameful history of police violence, actually.
00:10:00
Speaker
So that's not made up, but they pretend like that's the biggest issue and they just forget about John and Pym violence.
00:10:05
Speaker
And that can really flourish in an environment where you've just removed any external spectator, critical voice or intervention.
00:10:13
Speaker
So one of the things I think is woefully naive about the sex workers work feminists is that for some reason, they think the sex trade out of every other trade that exists in humanity, really, that the power is going to be shifted to the workers instead of the owners and the buyers.
00:10:29
Speaker
So if you make this a legal profession, then what's to prevent brothel owners from going and lobbying people?
00:10:36
Speaker
Congress or the government for owner-friendly laws that are exploitative to the workers, like pretty much every other industry does, right?
00:10:43
Speaker
So what I've read from people who advocate for things that are like the Nordic model, like, is that basically the same thing that you said, which is that by making this illegal...
00:10:52
Speaker
industry, the cops can't then monitor some of the seedy activities that go in and out because they now need like, there's a higher barrier of getting a warrant to go check out if something's happening versus like, if you just know there's prostitution happening in there, you can break it up.
00:11:07
Speaker
And then also that it gives a lot of power to the, both the pimps or the brothel owners and the Johns, because then they are the market and they supply the market demands and the women are the product essentially.
00:11:19
Speaker
Like, I think the way that LibFem's think about is as women as service providers and much like therapists, but that's not how it happens in real life, because this is a desperation job that women only do when they're very desperate, is that women are the product and then they have to try to mold women to be what to whatever the local appetites that men have.
00:11:38
Speaker
And as we've seen in legalized sex industries like porn, that can get really extreme really quickly.
Empowerment vs. Exploitation Debate
00:11:43
Speaker
if there's no stigma and there's no reason for stopping it.
00:11:47
Speaker
Porn basically happened where wages were way down.
00:11:50
Speaker
The only thing that's kind of changed the porn industry is OnlyFans in that there's a few women who are making a lot of money as independent.
00:11:56
Speaker
But even then, most of them started out in the traditional porn industry, which is like they got paid peanuts.
00:12:01
Speaker
One of the most famous porn models, Lana Rhodes, she barely made six figures and she did like 80 films or something like that in like five or six months.
00:12:08
Speaker
She did like a ridiculous amount of films in a small amount of time.
00:12:11
Speaker
She barely made any money.
00:12:12
Speaker
She was coerced and pushed into a bunch of sex action at once, like some of which horribly traumatized her to the point where she's like, I don't think porn should be legal.
00:12:19
Speaker
Like one of the most famous porn stars ever is now, like I don't even think porn should be legal because of what happened to her.
00:12:25
Speaker
When I look at the porn industry and I look at what the effects of legalization have done, in no way has it like put the hands in the workers and it's made a lot of like,
00:12:32
Speaker
virtual brothel owners, as well as, you know, the distributor is very rich, but none of the porn stars themselves.
00:12:37
Speaker
I'm kind of wondering, like, why the conversation never goes back to the idea, like, you know, when it's illegal, it actually allows the women to have a little bit more power, or at least in the Nordic model, where it's decriminalized on their side, but criminalized on the buyer side.
00:12:50
Speaker
It allows women to have more power because then they can't be pushed into as readily into what the market demands.
00:12:57
Speaker
And also, like, the stigma keeps the Johns from being able to, like, lobby the government to make unfavorable laws.
00:13:02
Speaker
for them.
00:13:03
Speaker
Yeah, so it's really frustrating how people forget because even if you take pimping out of the picture and that's an important conversation in of itself, the market forces and poverty as a pimp or homelessness as a pimp or drug addiction as a pimp, like all of those don't disappear.
00:13:20
Speaker
And I don't think people quite realize what becomes legal.
00:13:25
Speaker
They think they're decriminalizing a woman who's got a high school degree and she speaks the language and she knows her rights and she runs her small escort agency from her home or something.
00:13:37
Speaker
And that's not what the average business looks like at all.
00:13:40
Speaker
There's so much to discuss here.
00:13:42
Speaker
I just want to mention that.
00:13:43
Speaker
So when it becomes legal, the market absolutely expands.
00:13:47
Speaker
And that drives down prices.
00:13:49
Speaker
So prices are at an all-time low in countries like Germany.
00:13:54
Speaker
And people like to talk about, you know, it's a privilege to see a sex worker, but any man can afford this.
00:13:59
Speaker
Like there is prostitution for everybody.
00:14:01
Speaker
You can, like on the street, it can be as little as five to 10 euros.
00:14:05
Speaker
In the brothel, an average encounter will cost like 50, 60, 70 bucks.
00:14:11
Speaker
I've heard of these like all you can fuck brothels, that it would be like 20 bucks a month.
00:14:16
Speaker
Well, I've heard it because you've heard the scrotes in the manuscript like legit bragging about this, but like brothels that are basically like a buffet, you can pay a cover charge and then you can just have sex until you're done, I suppose.
00:14:26
Speaker
And it's the women have to turn a lot of tricks to make even like their whatever they owe the brothel back.
00:14:33
Speaker
Right.
00:14:33
Speaker
Because the brothel takes a fee.
00:14:35
Speaker
These are illegal now in Germany because women were dropping from exhaustion and there were men queuing outside these brothels.
00:14:44
Speaker
So Germany has even sort of backpedaled on some aspects of, I can name a few more.
00:14:50
Speaker
I don't think people realize the amount of cruelty that johns can legally do to women.
00:14:55
Speaker
So they've now illegalized the advertisement of heavily pregnant women.
00:14:59
Speaker
That was normal.
00:15:00
Speaker
You could even do a gangbang party with a pregnant woman.
00:15:04
Speaker
What?
00:15:06
Speaker
That's unhinged.
00:15:34
Speaker
If there is a third party, so a flesh and blood pimp, who has you under full control and you really have no autonomy anymore, like you couldn't leave the premises, they basically expect you to be chained up, which nearly no trafficking victim is.
00:15:50
Speaker
And also, I think very important to understand about what the Johns are allowed to do.
00:15:56
Speaker
It was actually legal for a very, very long time to rape a traffic person for money because the idea is it's just a normal service.
00:16:05
Speaker
So if someone's trafficked, let's say, to a nail salon, which does actually happen, and if I get my nails done at a salon and they're trafficked, then I as a customer can't know, so I'm not held responsible.
00:16:16
Speaker
And the idea is that a brothel is the same thing.
00:16:19
Speaker
And therefore, it's not a crime if I, as a John, I go there and I use women even though they don't speak the language or they got bruises on their bodies.
00:16:27
Speaker
All these are things that men readily admit to.
00:16:30
Speaker
I'm not going to get into any trouble because I was just a service user and like getting my nails done or sex acts, whatever, it's all the same.
00:16:38
Speaker
And that's how it was legally treated until very recently.
00:16:40
Speaker
But now, how do you actually prove in court that he knew or didn't know or...
00:16:45
Speaker
There haven't been a large number of prosecutions.
00:16:48
Speaker
Like, Johns are still not scared of any consequences.
00:16:51
Speaker
The only time that I see that men are a bit scared is when they encounter minors, which does actually also happen.
00:16:57
Speaker
And I mean, some people are crazy enough from the sex work crowd to suggest they call these underage sex workers.
00:17:02
Speaker
I don't know if you've seen that language.
00:17:04
Speaker
I find that so disturbing.
00:17:05
Speaker
If we go after these men too much, then the child rape will just go underground.
00:17:10
Speaker
And I'm like, is child rape better when it happens?
00:17:13
Speaker
Like when the children are like visible or the young girls, young boys standing on the street, like, is that, does that make the crime any less worse?
00:17:21
Speaker
Like there's that too, the connection to, to child abuse, like a third of the women who entered the sex trade enter as minors.
00:17:29
Speaker
So it's a minority, but that's a huge group.
00:17:31
Speaker
And many others are survivors of childhood trauma.
00:17:34
Speaker
That's not a stereotype.
00:17:35
Speaker
Like we have clear statistics on that.
00:17:38
Speaker
There's been like a lot of discussion about like who is the sex trade workforce.
00:17:42
Speaker
And it's really hard to track in the United States because obviously it's a transient type job.
00:17:46
Speaker
But quite a few of the people who end up in the sex trade, I think from their best numbers, 30 to 40% of them have had contact with the foster care system of some kind.
00:17:55
Speaker
So you're talking about a workforce that is quite literally fed as a pipeline from abused, disadvantaged, neglected children who have been wards of the state in some type of way.
00:18:06
Speaker
So it's kind of scary.
00:18:08
Speaker
And the only reason they know this is because they're basically going by like arrest records.
00:18:11
Speaker
So when people get arrested for drugs or prostitution or something like that, they look at their background and sometimes they're already in the system.
00:18:18
Speaker
So when you look at that, you're like, wow, a huge percentage of like the training ground to be a sex worker is neglect and abuse.
00:18:25
Speaker
That's why the idea of creating a job training or treating this like a normal job is absurd is because the neglect and the abuse and the ability to treat women like disposable objects are something that would only seem normal to a person who's experienced that already.
Systemic Issues and Survivor Stories
00:18:41
Speaker
And it's so disturbing because I feel like the sex work is work...
00:18:45
Speaker
crowd are trying to normalize the idea that it's okay to treat people this way.
00:18:50
Speaker
And they seem woefully naive about what the actual sex trade entails.
00:18:54
Speaker
And the few women who are like privileged enough to, I guess, be like high class call girls are the ones that a lot of times over-focus on, not realizing like that's in no way the vast majority of the job.
00:19:05
Speaker
And the women who are in it, who even are the high class quote unquote call girls,
00:19:08
Speaker
are still a lot of times being like vastly underpaid for their services and aren't really truthful about it until they leave their profession, right?
00:19:15
Speaker
Much like Lana Rhodes.
00:19:16
Speaker
Like, you know, she's a person who could command quite a bit of money as like a high class call girl or whatever.
00:19:21
Speaker
But even then, a lot of them are maybe making six figures and they can maybe do it for a couple of years.
00:19:26
Speaker
And it's not like a profession...
00:19:28
Speaker
that the vast majority, it's not a level that the vast majority of sex workers will even hope to reach, nor is it a situation where they're empowered because often they end up being having to do more and more degrading things to get to keep getting the same amount of money.
00:19:40
Speaker
Yeah, I find that I've read, I think, like now probably 100 plus, like shorter or longer biographies of women who are sex trade survivors.
00:19:50
Speaker
Although, I mean, they call themselves survivors because women actually die in this trade all the time, like their mortality rates, even when it's legal from STDs or drug overdose or violence or just chronic illness that's never properly healed.
00:20:03
Speaker
And a lot of women know someone who was killed or nearly killed, like that's normal.
00:20:08
Speaker
And when I read these, I could just swap out some minor details or cities.
00:20:14
Speaker
It could be Berlin, it could be Christchurch, it could be Chicago.
00:20:18
Speaker
These biographies across the globe are so similar.
00:20:21
Speaker
Like maybe there's some details, let's say I'm a woman in India and the caste system or something.
00:20:27
Speaker
But a lot of the time, these stories are so similar.
00:20:29
Speaker
And now there is a global sex trait survivor movement.
00:20:32
Speaker
And these women can really a lot of time connect with each other because the stories are similar, despite vast geographic distances between them.
00:20:41
Speaker
And I was just going to add this aspect that
00:20:44
Speaker
Again, the population varies where you look at, but the other factor next to poverty and abuse is also being part of racialized minority.
00:20:52
Speaker
In Canada, with missing and murdered indigenous women vastly overrepresented in the sex trade, US, same Native women, Black women,
00:21:02
Speaker
women migrating from Latin America.
00:21:04
Speaker
In Europe, we have a huge over-representation of Roma women.
00:21:09
Speaker
So this is like one of the poorest, most marginalized community in like all of Europe, who are basically a lot of the time outside the regular economy.
00:21:18
Speaker
And the men from this community, they will work like in meat factories.
00:21:24
Speaker
So doing this really traumatizing work,
00:21:25
Speaker
our meat comes from butchering the animals or they'll work in agriculture and the women are staffing our brothels.
00:21:32
Speaker
And this happens and this is intergenerational too.
00:21:35
Speaker
It's not like, okay, so this Roma family sends one boy in the meat factory and one young woman into the brothel and then
00:21:43
Speaker
They can set up their own business and they exit.
00:21:45
Speaker
No, it's like a lot of these women like this happened to my mother or even my grandmother, too.
00:21:49
Speaker
This is not a road out of poverty at all.
00:21:52
Speaker
And there's this like huge racist component as well.
00:21:56
Speaker
In New Zealand, it's, you know, it's Asian women and Maori women, Pacific Islanders vastly overrepresented.
Racial and National Stereotyping in Sex Work
00:22:01
Speaker
And they also in the advertisements like we can.
00:22:03
Speaker
have this whole conversation about prostitution advertising.
00:22:06
Speaker
Like I don't need to look at sex trafficking.
00:22:08
Speaker
I just look at the advertising sites.
00:22:10
Speaker
A lot of these women have to advertise themselves according to racist stereotypes.
00:22:14
Speaker
And I can also, if let's say I'm from Romania, if I put in my bio on my sex worker bio that I'm actually Spanish,
00:22:22
Speaker
I will get more money because I'll be, you know, the rarer the wares, the harder to access this group of women is, the more money men will pay.
00:22:32
Speaker
So Romanian is considered cheap.
00:22:33
Speaker
It's Spanish or German, English, French.
00:22:35
Speaker
That'll be high quality.
00:22:36
Speaker
Can I just say how insane it is to me that like certain countries of women are deemed higher or lower quality that like the sort of
00:22:46
Speaker
commodification of women?
00:22:48
Speaker
They're all just human beings, but the country that they're from is a reflection of their quality, the same that you might like an inanimate object.
00:22:56
Speaker
What's wild to me is how they're marketed to different groups of men outside of their country versus the perception of the women of the men in that country.
00:23:04
Speaker
If they market it hot submissive Russian wives to men in the United States, but then if you go to Russia, they're all talking about like, oh, these bitches are too uppity now.
00:23:14
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:23:15
Speaker
Like it's like a completely different, they always like market women from other countries as if they're like exotic and like submissive and catering to men.
00:23:23
Speaker
Whereas like men have the perception of the women in their own country as like pedestrian and too feminist.
00:23:28
Speaker
And that's like almost across the board.
00:23:29
Speaker
It's like a circular thing.
00:23:31
Speaker
So if they're advertising, like if it was the opposite in like Russia, it's like, oh, we're going to get brides from like a neighboring country and say like, I don't know,
00:23:38
Speaker
or somewhere in like Beirut or something.
00:23:40
Speaker
It's like all the women in Beirut are hot, submissive, and willing.
00:23:42
Speaker
And all the bitches in like Russia are like uppity feminists.
00:23:46
Speaker
And then they're being advertised in the United States as if like they're hot, submissive.
00:23:49
Speaker
And then like the perception is that they're uppity feminists, that we're uppity feminists in the United States.
00:23:54
Speaker
So like that to me is like a really almost like universal perception.
00:23:58
Speaker
And it's one of the things I learned actually from other FDSers about how
00:24:01
Speaker
from other women in other countries about how like they're stereotyped as always being horrible
Coercion and Consent Dilemmas
00:24:05
Speaker
harpies.
00:24:05
Speaker
And then all these women from these other countries are like exotic and amazing, but really they're just trafficked women.
00:24:10
Speaker
And that's the only reason why anybody would be submissive to any type of scrote, really.
00:24:14
Speaker
Who would buy sex orders.
00:24:16
Speaker
Yeah, I was going to say, like, this topic is so huge, you can always go like five different directions.
00:24:21
Speaker
I was going to talk about the submitting to the John.
00:24:25
Speaker
So, I mean, a lot of people imagine in a legal trade, they have the specific agreement, we'll do X, Y, sex acts for this amount of money for this amount of time, and then he'll stick to it.
00:24:34
Speaker
I mean, not only do Johns break these rules, I think it's important to
00:24:38
Speaker
Like every man who goes to a sex trade establishment should consider, they should know, and a frightening number of them do know about this.
00:24:45
Speaker
It's called, the practice that PIMS do, it's called breaking in.
00:24:48
Speaker
So that's when the traffickers serially rape women until they won't say no to anything anymore.
00:24:55
Speaker
And some Johns partake in this, the sadist kind.
00:24:57
Speaker
The majority are not sadistic.
00:24:59
Speaker
They just want her to submit and smile.
00:25:01
Speaker
And one way to achieve that effect is this breaking process.
00:25:05
Speaker
So when she has been broken in, she's given to like the regular non-statistic Johns who like want the girlfriend experience or whatever, and they will use her and she will never talk back.
00:25:16
Speaker
She'll be too psychologically broken.
00:25:18
Speaker
So sex straight survivor Hushkema always says this, like she just repeats it every time she's in the media platform, which they should do way more often.
00:25:27
Speaker
She says, every John who goes to the brothel, he has no idea why that woman is submitting.
00:25:31
Speaker
She could have been, like I said, serially raped by traffickers.
00:25:34
Speaker
It could be poverty.
00:25:35
Speaker
It could be she's hungry.
00:25:37
Speaker
It could be a million different reasons.
00:25:39
Speaker
She will always pretend or very often she'll pretend to enjoy it because then he'll come back, he'll pay more, etc.
00:25:45
Speaker
He won't complain about the service, he'll leave a positive review.
00:25:48
Speaker
Her ads will always say, I love this, I'm a nympho, I just love men, blah, blah, blah.
00:25:54
Speaker
He has no way of telling.
00:25:56
Speaker
So even if we can point, I think, a very small group of women who choose to do this, that John can't know.
00:26:02
Speaker
So how can that decision possibly be ethical?
00:26:04
Speaker
Like every time you go to the brothel or escort agency or street, it doesn't matter.
00:26:08
Speaker
You're risking a very, very high risk of accidentally raping somebody.
00:26:12
Speaker
And I was going to say another
Safety and Legal Protection Challenges
00:26:14
Speaker
thing.
00:26:14
Speaker
Like I said, we can take this conversation like a million different paths to explain how it's possible that, for example, there's this racist advertising or there's no protection for pregnant women, all these things.
00:26:25
Speaker
It's because nearly everyone is an independent contractor from a legal perspective.
00:26:31
Speaker
They're not an employee.
00:26:32
Speaker
Like think about OSHA requirements like occupational health and safety requirements.
00:26:36
Speaker
You should be protected from direct contact with bodily fluids.
00:26:39
Speaker
Even just the conversations that Johns have with women, they would be sexual harassment in every other job.
00:26:43
Speaker
But as an independent contractor, a lot of these protections don't apply.
00:26:47
Speaker
So that's how the brothel owners and the Johns get away with a lot of these things.
00:26:51
Speaker
So it's even crazy to think like you're going to have a labor movement to counteract this when there is on paper, there is no boss.
00:26:58
Speaker
He's just someone renting rooms to her, if that makes sense.
00:27:01
Speaker
Like this gets lost in the conversation as well.
00:27:04
Speaker
And I think it's very important to understand.
00:27:06
Speaker
I'd like to talk more about the safety issues because that's another thing that I've always found so contradictory with the legalization discourse is that the sort of things that are part of the quote-unquote job in prostitution would be considered illegal in any other job.
00:27:22
Speaker
Yeah, so contact with bodily fluids.
00:27:24
Speaker
You know, a lot of sex workers say, oh, you know, I always use condoms and so on.
00:27:29
Speaker
But
00:27:29
Speaker
The reality is when you look at the sex worker forums, you know, that's not always followed or the guy just pays extra to not use a condom, right?
00:27:37
Speaker
You imagine construction worker, for example, like if their boss paid them extra to work, you know, without a hard hat or without any like safety or PPE or without face protection, like that's illegal in Canada where I'm from, right?
00:27:50
Speaker
You cannot pay workers more money to put themselves in danger.
00:27:53
Speaker
It's just a hard boundary.
00:27:54
Speaker
Like it's illegal no matter how much you pay them.
00:27:57
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:27:57
Speaker
Can you talk more about that kind of like, how do you combat that kind of rhetoric or, you know, how have you dealt with that?
00:28:03
Speaker
Because it's really hard to have that conversation with people or they just don't want to hear it or they just say like, well, you know, men want to have sex with a condom and, you know, that's just what men want kind of thing.
00:28:14
Speaker
Yeah, so it was actually legal for Johns to not use condoms in Germany until 2017.
00:28:18
Speaker
There was no mandate except like in the more conservative states in the South.
00:28:23
Speaker
So like, excuse me, a gang bang, which I think is a gang rape.
00:28:27
Speaker
You could do that without condoms.
00:28:29
Speaker
This is going to get gross, but there's even these Johns who have a fetish about a woman who has been like pre-cummed.
00:28:36
Speaker
They want the semen of the previous man to be in there because, I mean, I know you talked about men's fetishes.
00:28:42
Speaker
It's an endless hellhole.
00:28:44
Speaker
Yeah, cuckoldry.
00:28:45
Speaker
They have a cuckoldry fetish sometimes or I don't know.
00:28:48
Speaker
Like, I know what you mean, but yeah, growth.
00:28:50
Speaker
Yeah, or just wanting the woman to be dirtied up and just have a symbol of her dirtiness, which allows you to treat her however you want.
00:28:57
Speaker
So like I said, condom use wasn't mandatory for a long time.
00:29:01
Speaker
Now it is.
00:29:02
Speaker
But how do you enforce that?
00:29:04
Speaker
So you can check if the brothel has installed a dispenser.
00:29:07
Speaker
but who's to say they actually use it?
00:29:09
Speaker
So it is true that a huge number of condoms go into this industry.
00:29:12
Speaker
I read once that a fourth of the German condom production, a fourth goes into the sex trade.
00:29:18
Speaker
And it is true that, you know, women do try and protect their health as best as they can.
00:29:22
Speaker
So people have the stereotype of the woman who just
00:29:25
Speaker
excuse me, like whores around and doesn't mind.
00:29:27
Speaker
No, like women are very meticulous about this, but they say a lot of the time it's an active battle with the john to enforce the condom use.
00:29:35
Speaker
Like you said, like men will just pay extra.
00:29:38
Speaker
And then there's like a brothel and one woman offers it without a condom.
00:29:41
Speaker
All the others are going to be pressured by market competition, not pimps, market competition to also forgo condom use.
00:29:48
Speaker
Or a lot of people forget you can get an STI even from oral sex without a condom.
00:29:53
Speaker
So even if it's
00:29:54
Speaker
you know, used for vaginal and anal, that's not enough.
00:29:57
Speaker
And Johns have been just so used to this.
00:30:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:01
Speaker
And men don't want to get a blow job with the rubber.
00:30:02
Speaker
Like they actively complain about that.
00:30:05
Speaker
Like they're like, what's the point?
00:30:06
Speaker
So in any other industry, if it's not possible to do the job safely, you don't do the job.
00:30:12
Speaker
You find a way to do it safely or you just don't get the job done.
00:30:15
Speaker
If it's not possible to do it safely, then you don't do it.
00:30:17
Speaker
And I was going to add, the reality is if she does catch an STI that's not curable, like AIDS, or there's a whole horrible range there, a lot of the women cannot afford to take breaks.
00:30:29
Speaker
The same as if they have an intimate injury.
00:30:31
Speaker
There's all these issues.
00:30:32
Speaker
If you read health reports, I've read reports by gynecologists that treat women, and I had to
00:30:37
Speaker
stop because I was starting to cry because it's just so horrific.
00:30:41
Speaker
Like I wrote about this on my blog, like the range of health issues that people don't even think about, the way that it can destroy basically everything in your abdominal and genital area is at risk.
00:30:51
Speaker
The reality is if she catches the disease, like not only can she often not stop, she'll have to keep going even if she's in pain.
00:30:58
Speaker
Or like women who've given birth, they go right back.
00:31:00
Speaker
A lot of the time.
00:31:02
Speaker
The fact that they're classified as workers, do they get medical leave?
00:31:05
Speaker
You know, if a sex worker is injured on the job, are there worker protections?
00:31:10
Speaker
Like, does she get paid like medical leave, anything like that?
00:31:14
Speaker
So there are some free health services, thankfully, but no, she's an independent contractor.
00:31:19
Speaker
Like unless she has to take care.
00:31:21
Speaker
She doesn't get wage loss.
00:31:22
Speaker
No, she has to take care that like getting an additional insurance to cover things like maternal leave or holiday.
00:31:28
Speaker
There's no holidays, like every risk as an independent contractor.
00:31:32
Speaker
Like we know that there are women without even health insurance in the legal European sex trade, because that's how much they slip through the cracks of the system.
00:31:39
Speaker
And I was just going to say, then when she actually has an incurable disease of places like Austria, which is quite similar loss to Germany, though a bit more strict, they will just deport her.
00:31:49
Speaker
So instead of helping her, she gets deported back to Romania, Bulgaria, wherever, and that home country can take care of her, which really a lot of these women then end up, you know, desperately poor or homeless back home because there's no infrastructure.
00:32:02
Speaker
That's why they came here in the first place.
00:32:04
Speaker
There's no jobs there.
00:32:05
Speaker
That's so dystopian.
00:32:07
Speaker
I can't believe that there are people actually defending this industry.
00:32:10
Speaker
Like...
00:32:12
Speaker
I just wonder if it's just like they buy into everything at a surface level because I have that same reaction too where I'm like, on what planet is this going to be like an empowering industry for women?
Media Narratives and Misconceptions
00:32:23
Speaker
I noticed a lot of times they interview women who, first of all, are like the most privileged out of everybody because they're the ones that are willing to talk to the media, right?
00:32:31
Speaker
And some of them, even the ones that we've talked to casually, it seems like they still come from backgrounds of abuse, but like
00:32:38
Speaker
because they're so used to the abuse, they'll be like, well, some of my Johns treat me nicer than any other man has.
00:32:42
Speaker
Right.
00:32:42
Speaker
Which is really, really sad.
00:32:43
Speaker
So like a lot of times it's perception for women who have not been treated well.
00:32:48
Speaker
So like for them, that is better treatment because they came from a household where they might've been heavily abused, right.
00:32:54
Speaker
Or heavily sexually abused even.
00:32:56
Speaker
So sometimes it's just like the workers who are reporting that this is empowering for them.
00:33:00
Speaker
It's because they come from like extremely, extremely abhorrent circumstances and
00:33:04
Speaker
And also they aren't yet aware of all the ways that they're being coerced.
00:33:08
Speaker
We just did a bonus content about the Playboy Mansion.
00:33:11
Speaker
And also we've seen like the arc of someone like Jenna Jameson, who was a really famous porn star in the 90s.
00:33:16
Speaker
She came out and she said, I thought all this time when I entered the sex trades of my choice, when she started going to therapy, she realized like she was actually trafficked by her older boyfriend at the time when she was like 14, 15.
00:33:27
Speaker
In her mind, she was like, I made the choice to be a porn star when I was 14, 15 and to try to enter the sex trade.
00:33:33
Speaker
But then in hindsight, she now understands like, no, actually I was plied with drugs by my 20 something year old boyfriend when she was a young teenager and then pushed into this industry so he could make money off me, etc.
00:33:43
Speaker
But she didn't realize that until like, you know, gears into her career about like the path that led her into getting into the sex industry in the first place.
00:33:50
Speaker
So a lot of times I feel like they don't have the perspective because either they come from extremely horrific backgrounds,
00:33:57
Speaker
that are unimaginable.
00:33:58
Speaker
And so then like slightly nice treatment for men might feel like a leg up for them.
00:34:02
Speaker
And then also because they don't yet understand all the ways they're being exploited.
00:34:06
Speaker
And you see a lot of the people coming out of Playboy Mansion telling the same thing.
00:34:09
Speaker
They left their penniless.
00:34:10
Speaker
They thought they could gain power in that environment and did nothing but have to fuck a teriatric old man and get disrespected constantly and blackmailed.
00:34:19
Speaker
So I think they're just not aware.
00:34:20
Speaker
But that's why I think it's important for people to study this to not take that kind of thing at face value the way some people seem to do.
00:34:25
Speaker
Yeah, no, this frustrates me so much.
00:34:27
Speaker
I've seen so much media where they interview a happy sex worker, and then if you actually listen carefully, she will describe really disturbing things.
00:34:36
Speaker
Like, I do listen to sex workers all the time, and then they describe something that's legally raped or that's trafficking, but they don't recognize it as such.
00:34:44
Speaker
And...
00:34:44
Speaker
I know there's a lot of anger around this, like saying that, you know, we're denying women's agency or we're insulting their intelligence.
00:34:51
Speaker
No, I'm just saying that people's normal of what is violence or fair treatment varies widely.
00:34:57
Speaker
And most trafficking victims probably don't know they are trafficking victims.
00:35:01
Speaker
like I said, interviews on live TV where I, because I spent like hours and hours studying the laws and they're so complex, they make my head spin.
00:35:08
Speaker
So like I've had the privilege of a university education and they still make my head spin.
00:35:12
Speaker
And then like these young women out of high school or from abroad, they're supposed to understand the laws.
00:35:17
Speaker
And when a man has crossed into the illegal zone in practice, men also get away with so much harm because to the women, what's just normal, for example, one woman from Australia said like,
00:35:28
Speaker
Yeah, so like men come in and they're really coked up and I tell them like, please don't stick a finger in my anus and they just do it
Survival Strategies and Abuse
00:35:35
Speaker
anyway.
00:35:35
Speaker
And then I have to, you know, laugh it off.
00:35:37
Speaker
Like women develop all these strategies that I understandably they get attached to these survival mechanisms of like, I just play it cool.
00:35:44
Speaker
I just laugh about it because you can never hurt his ego.
00:35:46
Speaker
That's the most dangerous thing you can do.
00:35:48
Speaker
That's when you can actually get murdered.
00:35:50
Speaker
Do not hurt his ego.
00:35:51
Speaker
So whenever he actually assaults you, play it off.
00:35:55
Speaker
Just calm him down carefully, nicely.
00:35:58
Speaker
Never name what actually happened to him or to yourself.
00:36:01
Speaker
I often do compare prostitution to an abusive relationship.
00:36:05
Speaker
Many of us have either been that woman or had a friend who was in an abusive relationship and she just couldn't see what was going on.
00:36:11
Speaker
She just could not.
00:36:12
Speaker
Maybe they lived together, she needed the living space or the partial income or whatever was going on, or they had kids together, or she was just really emotionally attached for whatever reason.
00:36:22
Speaker
And she keeps reporting these disturbing things like, oh, sometimes I don't want to have sex here.
00:36:26
Speaker
And then I acquiesce and we have sex anyway.
00:36:29
Speaker
And as a friend, I'm like, oh my God, that's not okay.
00:36:31
Speaker
Like that's abuse, that's rape.
00:36:33
Speaker
but it takes the victim months or years to realize that's what it was.
00:36:38
Speaker
That's like a very, very normal psychological pattern that basically every abused person has gone through at some stage.
00:36:44
Speaker
And it frustrates me that people can't see that this happens in the sex trade all the time.
00:36:48
Speaker
And that, yeah, I understand like you need to give women time to come to their own conclusions.
00:36:52
Speaker
Like I spend a lot of my time just attacking the Johns and just naming them.
00:36:56
Speaker
Like I don't go up to women and try to lecture them.
00:36:58
Speaker
Like that doesn't help that much because when they do realize that it has been abuse, I want them to be able to come to the social services that are run by, you know, sex, straight survivors and feminists that now the women think are the enemy.
00:37:10
Speaker
Those are the swerves, right?
00:37:11
Speaker
But when she needs help, like I want her to know that she can come to us and get support and solidarity and actual services.
00:37:18
Speaker
That's a fantastic approach, by the way, I want to say.
00:37:20
Speaker
I really appreciate that.
00:37:21
Speaker
I'm glad that that's your strategy.
00:37:23
Speaker
I try.
00:37:24
Speaker
At the end, I still upset a lot of women doing this activism.
00:37:27
Speaker
I'm sure you get this too.
00:37:28
Speaker
There are women who are like, you've saved my sanity or even saved my life.
00:37:32
Speaker
And others are like, you're harming me and or putting me at risk.
00:37:36
Speaker
And you have blood on your hands.
00:37:38
Speaker
You get the full spectrum of opinions.
00:37:41
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely do too.
00:37:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's wild to me.
00:37:44
Speaker
Like I said, what bothers me the most is the misrepresentation of sex work, critical feminists.
00:37:50
Speaker
I feel like they completely paint people who are critical of sex work as like Christian right fundamentalists who believe like
00:37:57
Speaker
some kind of patriarchal notion that women can't make choices for their own body instead of like the very hard, the very like concrete reasons that we've laid out in this entire episode, why it's a bad idea that have nothing to do with like morality and everything to do with the economics of the situation and the reality of a very exploitative industry that deals with a lot of abused and exploited people.
00:38:18
Speaker
Yeah, but the misrepresentation of our views is part of the abusive relationship because in the same way that an abuser, for example, will say, oh, I don't like your friend, you know, say, you know, a woman's in an abusive relationship and then she goes to her friend for support.
00:38:33
Speaker
Her abuser might say, oh, I don't like your friend.
00:38:36
Speaker
She's toxic.
00:38:37
Speaker
She wants to break us up.
00:38:39
Speaker
She secretly hates you.
00:38:40
Speaker
He'll say all these things to try to make her doubt the friends, basically isolate her and prevent her from being able to access support.
00:38:48
Speaker
So this idea that Swerf's are the bad guys, it's the exact same thing.
00:38:52
Speaker
They're trying to turn women away from their support network.
00:38:55
Speaker
Well, I understand that definitely from men, but I don't understand it from feminists.
00:38:59
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:39:00
Speaker
Like that's the divide that they don't understand because I totally understand why men would defend this.
00:39:04
Speaker
But like women can be flying monkeys for abusers, too, unfortunately.
00:39:07
Speaker
Yeah, that's the sad part is like it's a lot of very prominent feminists who are getting huge microphones, huge media platforms and like have these big followings.
00:39:17
Speaker
And I'm just like.
00:39:18
Speaker
It's not just that they can disagree with us, it's that they're actively hateful if like six were critical from us and say that they're card carrying for the paycheck.
00:39:24
Speaker
I'm like, well, that's insane.
00:39:25
Speaker
I think it's a cope as well, because these same sex workers and these same sex posi-feminists, they will rant about how abusive their job is, how they can't wait to leave, how they're saving up to
Economic Realities vs. Empowerment
00:39:38
Speaker
leave.
00:39:38
Speaker
So I think part of it is literally just cope as well, because especially your average sex worker is likely, even the so-called choice ones in quotation marks, they're likely there because they either didn't have any other options or they didn't feel like it.
00:39:52
Speaker
they had any other option but to be a sex worker hence the reason why they always compare sex work to minimum wage jobs like you know working in a factory that's their favorite one when it's like if they felt like they actually had options or if they had options they would not have chosen sex work because the only jobs they can think of besides sex work is minimum wage jobs because like they'll never say like oh i used to be a director within google and i've switched to sex work and i'm so much better off and
00:40:22
Speaker
None of them ever say that.
00:40:24
Speaker
And I was going to say that that's another thing that comes with legalization.
00:40:28
Speaker
People think it'll be destigmatizing.
00:40:30
Speaker
And I actually think it just changes the stigma up.
00:40:34
Speaker
So how it works is that the moment that a woman's been hurt in the sex trade or traumatized, then she just wasn't fit for the job.
00:40:41
Speaker
She was in the wrong job and she stayed in it too long.
00:40:43
Speaker
Should have just gone and worked at the supermarket checkout, completely ignoring the fact that there are lots of reasons why women cannot just switch to the supermarket checkout.
00:40:52
Speaker
So these women who are coming in from abroad who barely speak the language, like you need to know German or English to even get these low wage jobs, like they straight up cannot get them.
00:41:01
Speaker
Or just the other thing, a lot of women come out of the sixth trade and for years and sometimes their whole life, they cannot work a normal job because of
00:41:09
Speaker
physical and mental health issues.
00:41:10
Speaker
Like, I don't think people realize how many women, if they're lucky, they can get benefits.
00:41:15
Speaker
I know even young women who are so ill, they have to survive on benefits and they just, they stay poor.
00:41:20
Speaker
They come out of the sixth grade poor.
00:41:21
Speaker
They don't have tons of savings and then retire at 35 to a villa.
00:41:25
Speaker
I think that's what a lot of people imagine happens.
00:41:27
Speaker
that basically never happens.
00:41:29
Speaker
Like being in the sex trade harms.
00:41:31
Speaker
Like a lot of the reasons women get in is like they have a student debt or they're victims of loan sharks, or they got an abusive boyfriend who's got gambling debts and they try to fix that right now.
00:41:41
Speaker
But actually, and then they think like, when I've paid that off, I'll leave.
00:41:44
Speaker
But the way the industry works is you accrue new debts, like the brothel owners.
00:41:48
Speaker
So you got the same in strip clubs.
00:41:50
Speaker
They got all these fees they put on you.
00:41:52
Speaker
So you create new debts.
00:41:53
Speaker
You could
00:41:54
Speaker
be one or two years into the sex trade and your financial situation is worse than before rather than better.
00:41:59
Speaker
So I think I feel like there's a lot of people, we got the empowering narrative and then we got another group that's a little more honest saying, yeah, the sex trade is actually really awful, but you know, it's a bandaid on poverty.
00:42:10
Speaker
Like as long as there's first abolished poverty and then the sex trade.
00:42:13
Speaker
And I see all these ways that prostitution is,
00:42:16
Speaker
Like I mentioned with the intergenerational situation where like grandmother, mother, daughter, they're all in the sex trade.
00:42:22
Speaker
It actually makes the poverty worse and your chances of working a normal, at least like a job where you're not worried about murder or rape every day, later on, it's going to make that harder rather than easier.
00:42:34
Speaker
Like you're not actually putting down brothel on your resume.
00:42:36
Speaker
That doesn't happen in Germany or New Zealand.
00:42:39
Speaker
So even places where it's completely legal, it doesn't magically get rid of the stigma.
00:42:44
Speaker
Like I've made the argument before, the stigma is by design because men want to be able to treat these women as disposable and to degrade them.
00:42:52
Speaker
That is the product.
Stigma and Societal Impact
00:42:54
Speaker
So trying to make it into like a service provider, I think it seemed like it's on the same level of being a therapist.
00:42:59
Speaker
And I've seen that kind of language of like,
00:43:01
Speaker
Actually, Teen Vogue, if I'm not mistaken, put out a article where they compared sex workers to doctors and said that like for a lot of sex workers, they provide a service to underserved populations.
00:43:12
Speaker
Like they made that connection.
00:43:14
Speaker
It was really, really insane then.
00:43:16
Speaker
But it's like that's the pipe dream for liberal feminists that somehow these women are going to become respected workers of society.
00:43:21
Speaker
But the truth of the matter is, is that men want sex.
00:43:24
Speaker
the stigma.
00:43:24
Speaker
They want the degradation.
00:43:26
Speaker
The point is the disposability of this women.
00:43:28
Speaker
If it wasn't, then they would just date women like normal and treat them like human beings and try to have sex.
00:43:33
Speaker
No, the point is that they don't have to respect anything about these women.
00:43:37
Speaker
It's transactional.
00:43:38
Speaker
I was going to add to that.
00:43:39
Speaker
Actually, the idea that women are kind of therapists is very dangerous.
00:43:43
Speaker
What it culminates in is we got some prisons and these mental health facilities where convicted rapists like sex offenders are housed.
00:43:52
Speaker
doing these experiments in germany with so-called sexual therapy uh hiring women in prostitution to have sex with these men to teach them how to not rape so i just want people to understand like if the women in prostitution is a therapist like these are confirmed cases this is not rumors this actually happens it's not like huge uh scale like not
00:44:17
Speaker
tens of thousands of cases, but this shouldn't be happening at all.
00:44:20
Speaker
Like this is treating women and sex trade as rape fodder.
00:44:22
Speaker
But if your expertise is, you know, calming down men's aggression, if that's your therapeutic function, that is the logical consequence.
00:44:30
Speaker
And I think many might have heard of the case in Canada, where this man who murdered his girlfriend was let out on parole.
00:44:37
Speaker
I believe it was also for like a therapeutic function.
00:44:40
Speaker
The prison staff signed off on him going to completely illegal brothels because, I mean, Canada has the Nordic model.
00:44:47
Speaker
So like an illegal massage parlor brothel where he then killed a woman while out on day parole.
00:44:53
Speaker
Like this can only happen when the prison staff thinks, yeah, this is a, the brothel is a healing place, which sounds really good on paper, but these are the logical outcomes of that thinking.
00:45:04
Speaker
Again, that's very dystopian.
00:45:05
Speaker
The more we talk about prostitution, the more dystopian and horrifying it sounds.
00:45:10
Speaker
I didn't hear about that case, but I'm Canadian.
00:45:13
Speaker
I'm like, I'm going to go Google that because holy shit.
00:45:16
Speaker
And also on the subject, a lot of people defend the sex trade.
00:45:19
Speaker
Like right now, there's a campaign I mentioned in the south of Germany, people are a bit more conservative, more Catholic.
00:45:25
Speaker
You know, the place where we have Oktoberfest is also where like, you know, the wealthy Catholics live.
00:45:30
Speaker
And a lot of the rules there are stricter around the sex trade.
00:45:33
Speaker
But there's now a campaign to get rid of a lot of these no-go zones so that we actually still have prohibitionist zones across the country, especially in the South, where you can still be fined and arrested for selling sex.
00:45:44
Speaker
So they're like fining and arresting like these homeless Bulgarian women.
00:45:47
Speaker
It's horrific.
00:45:48
Speaker
So I actually oppose the punishment of the women, but the punishment on the johns keeps it down a little bit.
00:45:52
Speaker
And now the argument of the pro-prostitution lobby as to why they need to expand the legal zones is because men in wheelchairs are having a hard time getting to these brothel zones.
00:46:02
Speaker
And there's so much wrong with this.
00:46:04
Speaker
We could probably talk just an hour about the ableism in that.
00:46:08
Speaker
Because actually the statistics show that a huge number, like the rates of disabled men in relationships is actually roughly the same as able-bodied people.
00:46:17
Speaker
It's not that much less.
00:46:18
Speaker
Like a lot of these men can get a date and do want an actual relationship, not a 30-minute quick, you know, blowjob or something.
00:46:25
Speaker
I really hate this thread of thinking that men not getting their penis touched is a tragedy that society needs to solve.
00:46:34
Speaker
That is actually the craziest thing I've ever heard.
00:46:37
Speaker
And actually, we just did a roast of a politician that was trying to make a similar argument that they try to make it seem like men not having sex is some kind of societal problem we have to solve instead of an individual thing that they need to figure out.
00:46:50
Speaker
You need to figure out how to make yourself sexually desirable people
00:46:53
Speaker
to women if you want to have sex.
00:46:55
Speaker
But instead of that, they'll say like, well, what about this guy?
00:46:58
Speaker
He has no arms and no legs and he can barely breathe.
00:47:01
Speaker
And so he can't go get women.
00:47:02
Speaker
Don't you want him to go around life with no, his penis not being touched and like hope that elicits like sympathy from people, which is like,
00:47:09
Speaker
Pretty insane, like you said, because it is like there is a lot of inherent ableism as if like there's not other people who would date people who are disabled and other women who are disabled who would also date this person.
00:47:18
Speaker
But there's like zero sympathy for the women who might have to service anybody like would have to service anybody who could be
00:47:24
Speaker
A jerk or disgusting or, you know, a guy in prison who probably shouldn't procreate or be touching women because that's actually part of the deal.
00:47:31
Speaker
That's why we put you behind bars because it's supposed to be a punishment, right?
00:47:35
Speaker
Like, so they have this overwhelming amount of sympathy for the men and them not having their penis touch, but like zero for what kind of women and what kind of circumstances the women would be put into in that type of situation.
00:47:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:47
Speaker
So prostitution can be so damaging that women end up permanently disabled, but I've never heard that spoken about.
00:47:53
Speaker
Like the intersection of prostitution and disability is always about men and their penises.
00:47:58
Speaker
And there's so many really horrible ethical issues around this.
Ethical and Safety Concerns
00:48:03
Speaker
So for example, we've got something called like sexual assistance in old people's homes or disabled people's homes.
00:48:10
Speaker
And there's a difference between saying, okay, we've got a disabled person and they need assistance to have sex with their partner.
00:48:16
Speaker
I don't know the details of how that works, but that's sort of often conflated with prostitution.
00:48:22
Speaker
But yeah, we've got this routine practice of actually sending a woman from the brothel or escut service into a care home.
00:48:28
Speaker
And sometimes these women report, you know, this disabled man or this man with dementia, I'm not even sure he wants to have sex.
00:48:35
Speaker
Like, okay, so he did have an erection, but an erection is not consent.
00:48:39
Speaker
He's nonverbal.
00:48:40
Speaker
How am I supposed to know what he wants?
00:48:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:42
Speaker
Like there are these carers of disabled and demented men deciding, oh, he seems a sexual person because like he gets an erection or maybe he has harassed the female staff.
00:48:52
Speaker
Therefore, we got to send someone in.
00:48:54
Speaker
But this is not even sound consent on the part of the John in that scenario.
00:48:59
Speaker
And also this, like, we got to protect the female nurses.
00:49:02
Speaker
Like all of this always goes back to this very, very, very ancient mentality of prostitution as a place that absorbs male aggression and that'll prevent rape for other women.
00:49:13
Speaker
And there's this quote attributed to Thomas Aquinas where he says, like, the brothel is like the palace sewer, right?
00:49:19
Speaker
It's disgusting, but necessary.
00:49:21
Speaker
And really, if you ask people who live around brothels, you will learn that actually the violence spills out.
00:49:28
Speaker
from the brothels.
00:49:29
Speaker
So like, I mean, you got these curb crawling areas like Leeds in the UK is very infamous for this.
00:49:35
Speaker
I think they shut it down now, but they had this tolerance zone.
00:49:37
Speaker
This is one of the poorest parts of all of the UK where like high school girls going to school or being curb crawled, which is
00:49:45
Speaker
frighteningly common experience.
00:49:47
Speaker
So like the local communities, like nobody wants a brothel in their neighborhood, because actually, the pimps will spill out of the brothels, the drunk or coked up johns will to go home to their families and reenact a lot of that stuff on their wives.
00:50:00
Speaker
That's the next horrible thing.
00:50:01
Speaker
or just their sexual expectations in general are going to be warped by their experience in the sex trade, which is why I think this is a lot of people say, you're not a sex worker, so shut up.
00:50:10
Speaker
And I'm like, but I've been propositioned by landlords.
00:50:13
Speaker
So this issue does very much affect me.
00:50:16
Speaker
And it affects all women as well.
00:50:18
Speaker
I think that is quite a redundant argument as well, because if you think about it, you don't have to necessarily be part of something to have an opinion.
00:50:28
Speaker
So the people, for example, advocating for people who are being exploited in factories owned by Nike, they've not been a factory worker.
00:50:35
Speaker
So that's also really redundant.
00:50:37
Speaker
But generally speaking, as women, the sex trade does impact all women, you know, whether they are in the sex trade or not.
00:50:43
Speaker
So if they've been propositioned, like I've been propositioned as well, you know, a man on Reddit several years ago when I was, you know, first beginning to use the site asked if he could buy my nudes, for example, and I was really, really young.
00:50:54
Speaker
And it also bleeds into, because it also feeds, you know, that male entitlement that Roe was talking about when they are entitled to sex, because
00:51:03
Speaker
Even though I completely abhor the idea that sex workers should be receptacles for undesirable, unwanted, unattractive men, I don't think that should be the case at all.
00:51:14
Speaker
But then that ideology and that misogyny, it also carries over to women who are not sex workers as well.
00:51:20
Speaker
Yeah, so like a lot of feminists have said, the treatment of women in prostitution is kind of a litmus test for society.
00:51:26
Speaker
If you want to see how misogynistic and violent it really is, see how it treats like the most vulnerable women, which are going to be women in the sex trade, like the most murdered women on the planet, then yeah, you'll see where society is really at in terms of equality.
Gender Equality and Societal Norms
00:51:41
Speaker
And yeah, if we want to continue on the road of the effects that spill out, like I've read these reports from men saying even just hearing an Eastern European accent
00:51:49
Speaker
makes him sort of hot.
00:51:51
Speaker
He finds that titillating because so many of the women in the brothel in Europe are from that area.
00:51:56
Speaker
Well, really Eastern European women are trafficked globally at this stage.
00:51:59
Speaker
So even just hearing the accent, so how is the, you know, let's say I'm an office worker and I'm a John and I got this colleague from Bulgaria, how is she ever going to be equal on the job?
00:52:08
Speaker
If I look at her and I just see prostitute or speaking of office jobs, like now men are holding, like some brothels have conference rooms where
00:52:18
Speaker
where like businessmen can get together and discuss things.
00:52:20
Speaker
I mean, anyone in business knows that a lot of the important deals are made in the back room, like at the after party, a lot of the connections, like these are really important.
00:52:28
Speaker
And just the fact that they take place at brothels means an implicit exclusion of the female.
00:52:34
Speaker
colleagues and workforce.
00:52:36
Speaker
And I mean, I think strip clubs have that same function globally and brothel is kind of a step up from that.
00:52:42
Speaker
And yeah, I think we're never ever going to get rid of the mentality of men saying like, I paid for the date or I paid for the trip or I gave you a gift.
00:52:50
Speaker
I helped you move, like whatever makes men think they're entitled to access to a woman.
00:52:54
Speaker
We're like, we're never, ever, ever getting rid of that mentality if it's normal for men to just have the sex trade around, whether that be nude images, which I think is already damaging and objectifying and dehumanizing enough, or full-on flesh and blood access to another person.
00:53:09
Speaker
Yeah, we'll never end that with the trade around, like it's necessary for all our safety and equality and liberation for that to go.
00:53:17
Speaker
I'm sorry, just to finish off then the episode before we get to the roast of the Johns, I'm really looking forward to that bit.
00:53:23
Speaker
But so what do you think are some practical tips that our listeners, that we as women, people in our lives can do to progress the abolition of the sex trade globally?
Supporting Abolitionist Movements
00:53:35
Speaker
So I know this issue seems really daunting because it's so huge and it affects so many people.
00:53:40
Speaker
And like, for example, helping women exit the sixth street is actually very complicated.
00:53:43
Speaker
That can be a month or year long process and costs quite a lot of money because women need so many different services like childcare and homes and a detox and psychotherapy.
00:53:54
Speaker
So many things.
00:53:55
Speaker
But like one thing that you can do is there is now an international abolitionist movement.
00:54:00
Speaker
So that's sex straight survivors, psychologists, doctors, social workers, people with lots of different expertise working together.
00:54:08
Speaker
And there are a lot of local organizations.
00:54:10
Speaker
So I check in the area if people want to do something on the subject, check what's in the areas there are supposed to.
00:54:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:33
Speaker
And people can bring different kinds of expertise to the table, right?
00:54:37
Speaker
Survivors have their expertise, social workers have theirs.
00:54:40
Speaker
I figured I'm not made to be a social worker.
00:54:42
Speaker
I'm more of a communicator or I make media pieces.
00:54:45
Speaker
So everyone's skills have a place in that effort.
00:54:48
Speaker
I think maybe start with figuring out like, what's the situation like?
00:54:52
Speaker
What's going on here?
00:54:53
Speaker
And informing, connecting,
00:54:55
Speaker
And then you figure out where can I use my skills?
00:54:58
Speaker
And it's a very difficult year-long battle to change laws.
00:55:02
Speaker
And then when you have the laws, you have to fight for implementation.
00:55:04
Speaker
Like women in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, all these places with the Nordic model are still fighting for implementation.
00:55:09
Speaker
And we can see Canada as a place that sadly really lacked implementation.
00:55:13
Speaker
Like you have to then, when you have the law,
00:55:16
Speaker
like actually force the police, force the social workers to actually implement.
00:55:20
Speaker
But even before that, there's a lot you can do locally.
00:55:22
Speaker
Like, for example, like I mentioned in the south of Germany, we're trying to get women decriminalized.
00:55:28
Speaker
So they're not at least not going to be fined anymore for trying to survive.
00:55:32
Speaker
So kind of have these incremental steps towards the Nordic model rather than advocating for the whole law, approach it slowly.
00:55:38
Speaker
And there's a lot you can do locally because so much depends on local authorities that
00:55:42
Speaker
If you can even be in a country with prohibition, like most of the US, if you can convince the local state's attorney or whoever to not prosecute the women, but keep prosecuting the men, that's a step that you can take.
00:55:54
Speaker
And I think as well, from a gender dynamics perspective, we just have to make it more costly for men who choose to buy sex or watch porn and just dish out societal consequences, so refuse to date them.
00:56:10
Speaker
you know, call them out on it when they are, you know, when they're talking about it.
00:56:13
Speaker
I find that can be quite effective because, you know, men, if they're talking about, you know, sex workers, just act disgusted because it is disgusting what they're doing and just, you know, dish out, you know, social consequences in that way.
00:56:25
Speaker
And also celebrate when they get scammed by escorts as well, which is what I do.
00:56:30
Speaker
Yeah, you can always start at the dinner table and just talk to family and friends.
00:56:33
Speaker
A lot of people will be uncomfortable.
00:56:35
Speaker
These conversations aren't easy.
00:56:36
Speaker
And I mean, the thing that I have to warn people about, you will find out that a bunch of men you know are Johns.
00:56:42
Speaker
And you have to be mentally prepared for that.
Social Consequences for Johns
00:56:44
Speaker
It could be your close relative or partner, ex-partner, friend, colleague.
00:56:48
Speaker
I think those conversations in your real life...
00:56:52
Speaker
That's a start.
00:56:53
Speaker
And as a lot of men say, the thing they're most afraid of with the Nordic model is not necessarily the fine.
00:56:59
Speaker
Okay, that's more money.
00:57:00
Speaker
He's got excess money anyway.
00:57:01
Speaker
That's why he's buying sex.
00:57:03
Speaker
It's actually getting a letter from the authorities that his wife or girlfriend at home might open or that maybe his boss is going to be informed about this.
00:57:12
Speaker
And in parts of Scandinavia, men can actually lose their jobs.
00:57:15
Speaker
like even celebrities there was this you know the twitter account john's posting else profile picture is the swedish boxer who was super famous for a long time but then he had this scandal it was found out he was like abusing romanian women for money and he just lost everything his like his girlfriend his job and these are the most important consequences so actually men's aggression entitlement can absolutely be contained if we have these social consequences oh i love that i didn't actually know who that person was but
00:57:45
Speaker
like the ultimate L and good for him.
00:57:47
Speaker
Well deserved.
00:57:49
Speaker
Okay, let's roast some Johns.
00:57:50
Speaker
Okay, so the roasting of Johns.
00:57:52
Speaker
So honestly, this is one of my favourite pastimes, even though I'm not really on Reddit actively anymore.
00:57:58
Speaker
But I like to go over to where the sugar daddies are and where the hobby is.
00:58:04
Speaker
So there's hierarchies of Johns, you
00:58:07
Speaker
you know, your garden variety John, who's just, who is basically still a screw because he's paying for sex and exploiting women.
00:58:13
Speaker
And then you have the hobbyists who literally are basically like a John, but are a lot more sadistic and shitty.
00:58:21
Speaker
They are the Johns that are thinking of forming unions to drive down the prices of sex workers.
00:58:27
Speaker
They are the Johns that will stealth women.
00:58:29
Speaker
They are the Johns that will basically try to
00:58:33
Speaker
extract labour in quotation marks from sex workers and not pay or pay extremely little so they're real pieces of shit and there is a twitter account called john's posting l's that basically posts the l's from several johns i think for me
00:58:48
Speaker
I mean, generally speaking, I'm not obviously a fan of people being scammed, but when a John gets scammed out of money, so when he has to pay a deposit and the sex worker doesn't deliver for whatever reason, it just makes me so happy.
00:59:01
Speaker
And I have absolutely zero sympathy for them.
00:59:03
Speaker
And what makes me even happier is that because of the system that these men have created, they don't really have any recourse as well.
00:59:11
Speaker
Obviously, I still feel bad for these women having to engage with them at all.
00:59:14
Speaker
But yeah, John's getting scammed makes me really happy.
00:59:16
Speaker
And that's
00:59:18
Speaker
Twitter account is basically full of accounts from men who've either been scammed, who've either felt degraded in quotation marks by having to pay for sex, even though nobody told them to pay for sex, basically being victimized by their own sadistic sexuality.
00:59:33
Speaker
It's just a great case of, is it Schadenfreude?
00:59:36
Speaker
Is that the word?
00:59:37
Speaker
Is it Schadenfreude, the German word?
00:59:39
Speaker
Schadenfreude.
00:59:41
Speaker
Yeah, that's it.
00:59:42
Speaker
It just makes my heart sing.
00:59:43
Speaker
Great word, by the way.
00:59:45
Speaker
The German language has some fantastic words.
00:59:48
Speaker
They have the best words, honestly.
00:59:50
Speaker
But yeah.
00:59:51
Speaker
I could talk about hobbyists and Johns all day, but I think that could be a part two episode, because that is something that is again missed in the discourse around should we legalize sex work?
01:00:01
Speaker
Sex work is empowering, is the words of the Johns and the
01:00:06
Speaker
you know, the way in which they actually see these women.
01:00:09
Speaker
Because the weirdest thing to me is that the men who are buying sex are not even hiding the way that they feel about these women.
01:00:18
Speaker
But the dominant discourse within society is that sex work is work.
01:00:22
Speaker
You know, if it wasn't, you know, as you said earlier, that if it wasn't illegal, then it would be a respectable profession when the people buying it clearly have no respect for the women involved.
01:00:31
Speaker
Absolutely none.
01:00:32
Speaker
And that's the appeal for them as well.
01:00:34
Speaker
They will literally say the reason why I go to a sex worker is that I can do to her what I can't do to a real, in quotation marks, woman.
01:00:42
Speaker
Should we read out?
01:00:43
Speaker
Did you want to read out some of these?
01:00:45
Speaker
Like a few short ones?
01:00:47
Speaker
Okay, so this one was from a sugar baby site.
01:00:52
Speaker
And this John said, just drove 90 minutes and into another state to get scammed.
01:00:59
Speaker
So I met a potential sugar baby at a Panera Bread.
01:01:03
Speaker
Is that a restaurant row in the United States?
01:01:05
Speaker
I don't know what Panera Bread is.
01:01:07
Speaker
Yeah, Panera Bread is like a fast casual bakery.
01:01:15
Speaker
It's like a pretend bakery.
01:01:19
Speaker
It's basically the same bread you get from Subway, but they make it into little shapes, so we pretend like it's fancy here.
01:01:25
Speaker
Okay, so bearing in mind this guy characterizes... It's no real butter or anything like that.
01:01:31
Speaker
Okay, so basically it's a cheap restaurant, a cheap bakery basically.
01:01:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:36
Speaker
So this is a potential sugar daddy who is meeting a sugar baby for the first time at Panera Bread.
01:01:41
Speaker
And he says, you know, she was a beautiful girl.
01:01:43
Speaker
She was sweet, engaging and stunning.
01:01:45
Speaker
We were having a great convo.
01:01:47
Speaker
I felt like the vibe was great.
01:01:48
Speaker
They always do.
01:01:49
Speaker
She had made it clear before meeting that we would meet here, then go back to her place on the first date.
01:01:54
Speaker
And I would agree upon a mount here and the other half at her place.
01:01:57
Speaker
Most people who try to scam me don't bother actually meeting up.
01:02:01
Speaker
They want you to cash at them.
01:02:02
Speaker
And I thought it was fine.
01:02:04
Speaker
She had to get up from our table to go to the bathroom sometime.
01:02:07
Speaker
Sorry.
01:02:10
Speaker
I can't believe I sleep in disguise.
01:02:12
Speaker
Anyway.
01:02:12
Speaker
And so she had to get up from our table to go to the bathroom sometime after she got her first half.
01:02:17
Speaker
And then I never saw her again.
01:02:19
Speaker
Queen.
01:02:19
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:22
Speaker
Can I say, actually, I just want to say, first of all, as a former, as someone who dabbled in sugar babying, taking your date to Panera Bread as a first date, like really, you deserve to get scammed, honestly.
01:02:33
Speaker
Exactly.
01:02:34
Speaker
A hundred percent.
01:02:35
Speaker
That should have been the first red flag.
01:02:37
Speaker
It's the Starbucks of bakeries where it's too expensive for the quality.
01:02:40
Speaker
Yeah, but this guy supposedly, like, a sugar daddy, like, he didn't even, like, come correct with, like, a restaurant or somewhere, you know, more upscale.
01:02:48
Speaker
I completely support this woman.
01:02:50
Speaker
I think she absolutely did the right thing.
01:02:53
Speaker
I like the future faking aspect of it.
01:02:55
Speaker
And yeah, he also, the fact that he wasted his own time, drove an hour and a half into a different state only to be scammed.
01:03:01
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:04
Speaker
Anytime I hear of a man getting scammed, robbed, or beat up because he was trying to meet a prostitute and it turned out to be like an ambush robbery, I'm happy inside.
01:03:13
Speaker
I actually think that that strategy would be like robbing sex buyers, I think is a much better strategy for eliminating prostitution than legalization.
01:03:22
Speaker
It's true.
01:03:24
Speaker
I think there needs to be stronger deterrence.
01:03:25
Speaker
Like I think that although unfortunately, I think that there probably would be some unintended consequences.
01:03:30
Speaker
Like, you know, the men that want to see these sex workers would probably do so under much more abusive circumstances.
01:03:35
Speaker
But for the general population, the general male population, I do think they need to be scared straight.
01:03:40
Speaker
They need to like hear so many stories of women, you know, scamming them in the context of prostitution to make them too scared to see a prostitute.
01:03:46
Speaker
That's the only solution I can see.
01:03:48
Speaker
Stealing their kidney and selling it on the black market.
01:03:50
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:51
Speaker
Like, even if they're not even true, we need to like spread a bunch of urban legends about like prostitutes stealing your kidneys.
01:03:57
Speaker
Or just like draining your bank account.
01:03:59
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:59
Speaker
And then when a guy gets scammed, just be like, well, what were you thinking?
01:04:02
Speaker
Like, you know what it's like, you know, you were asking for this by going to see a prostitute.
01:04:05
Speaker
So you deserve it kind of thing.
01:04:07
Speaker
Like we should just gaslight them.
01:04:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:09
Speaker
I'm all for that.
01:04:10
Speaker
Cardi B straight up said that when she was a stripper and she needed extra money, she used to lure guys in with the promise of prostitution, drug them and rob them.
01:04:17
Speaker
Queen, I support that completely.
01:04:19
Speaker
Right, exactly.
01:04:20
Speaker
And everyone's like, this is horrible.
01:04:21
Speaker
This is on the level of Phil Cosby.
01:04:22
Speaker
I'm like, not really.
01:04:23
Speaker
This is prostitution is illegal.
01:04:25
Speaker
And she didn't rape them.
01:04:26
Speaker
She just robbed them.
01:04:28
Speaker
Vigilante justice.
01:04:29
Speaker
I consider her like Robin Hood, honestly.
01:04:31
Speaker
Cardi B is morally the same as Robin Hood in my mind.
01:04:34
Speaker
And also, what about the fact that the guy clearly had no issues with exploiting her, like, sexually?
01:04:40
Speaker
They were only the victim when they got robbed, yeah, I'm here for Cardi B and any other sex worker who does that.
01:04:46
Speaker
If it's fine that Jay-Z stabbed his own brother and we still celebrate him as a great rapper...
01:04:53
Speaker
Oh, my God.
01:04:54
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:04:55
Speaker
There's a lot of these rappers that have been involved in nefarious criminal activities, but suddenly they want to find their morality because of Cardi robbing somebody.
01:05:02
Speaker
That sounds kind of insane, right?
01:05:04
Speaker
Like the double standard never ceases to amaze me.
01:05:06
Speaker
And like I said, yeah, if men thought participating in the sex trade is a lot more dangerous, they would perhaps be deterred from participating.
01:05:13
Speaker
And I have also looked at what John say from the US, like from American John forums, and I find a lot more scam stories over there than here in Germany.
01:05:22
Speaker
Like quite a lot of like, she wants me to pay upfront, oh, okay, let me do that.
01:05:26
Speaker
And then she's poof gone.
01:05:28
Speaker
And I did enjoy reading that, but I don't wanna be too depressing.
01:05:32
Speaker
Like the bar that Johns have for considering themselves scammed is very, very low.
01:05:37
Speaker
Like her not smiling scam, like her not moaning scam.
01:05:41
Speaker
And the German Johns on their forums, they have a term for women, they call them rip off cunts, like abbreviated to like R-O-C, well, the German equivalent of that.
01:05:52
Speaker
And like for the smallest lack of service, they'll like ask for money back or complain to the pimp or there's one case that
01:06:02
Speaker
documented case of a man actually taking a woman to court for not giving him an orgasm.
01:06:07
Speaker
And he won that case.
01:06:09
Speaker
And she had to pay him back money.
01:06:11
Speaker
And abolitionists crowdfunded, survivors crowdfunded to pay her expenses.
01:06:16
Speaker
So prohibition is horrible in a lot of ways when the authorities do go after the women.
01:06:22
Speaker
They don't always do that in practice, thankfully.
01:06:24
Speaker
Yeah, because it's such a shady industry, there is more scamming.
01:06:28
Speaker
I also find like when I was in Germany, I found Germans to be strangely very law abiding, you know, like things like, you know, you don't cross the street unless it says that you can cross the street kind of thing.
01:06:39
Speaker
And like Germans always thought I was crazy for not following rules.
01:06:43
Speaker
But I found that the Germans are very like strict about rule following, which culturally I just did not understand.
01:06:50
Speaker
And so I feel like in the context of prostitution, I feel like that need for rule following would be potentially very abusive because if they go into that interaction thinking like, I am exchanging 50 euros and you will provide me with good service.
01:07:05
Speaker
Like, sorry.
01:07:09
Speaker
And in their mind, they're like,
01:07:10
Speaker
oh, she doesn't smile, she doesn't give me like, in their opinion, 50 euros worth of service, then they feel like they've been robbed or scammed or, you know, in their perception,
Cultural and Legal Perceptions in Germany
01:07:20
Speaker
right?
01:07:20
Speaker
I think that German culture could use a bit more like chaos.
01:07:24
Speaker
I don't know.
01:07:25
Speaker
I just feel like maybe this isn't translating well, but like, you know, I feel like
01:07:29
Speaker
In a culture that's very rule following, like, I almost feel like the stigma around being a sex buyer should, in order for to like combat some of that, like the stigma around being a sex buyer needs to increase like massively.
01:07:40
Speaker
And so that like, even if it's legal, it's like, you're still a piece of shit.
01:07:43
Speaker
And you're still like, quote unquote, breaking the rules, or you're still like going against kind of the quote unquote rules in a way.
01:07:49
Speaker
Does that make sense?
01:07:50
Speaker
Yeah, like a lot of people say like, there's no point in changing the law, men will do it anyway.
01:07:54
Speaker
And not only do I not think so, we do have some surveys where you ask them, and the bar to make them stop is actually quite low.
01:08:01
Speaker
Like I mentioned, a letter home, or a fine, a little note on their record.
01:08:05
Speaker
And I see that on the forums too.
01:08:07
Speaker
Like, this is a very brief quote from a man, this is like back in 2015.
01:08:11
Speaker
So unfortunately, we're not quite there yet, but we're inching closer and closer.
01:08:15
Speaker
This guy says, it's just a matter of time until we get Swedish laws over here.
01:08:19
Speaker
If it comes to that, I'll quit the punting life.
01:08:21
Speaker
Welcome back, my hand.
01:08:23
Speaker
So actually, every guy has a hand.
01:08:26
Speaker
He can take care of it himself.
01:08:28
Speaker
There's no need for this industry.
01:08:30
Speaker
That's the other thing that's... Sorry, I keep switching between some of this is funny, but a lot of it is very dark and depressing.
01:08:35
Speaker
We are literally sacrificing women's and...
01:08:39
Speaker
some young men and children's lives for male orgasms.
01:08:43
Speaker
How insane is that?
01:08:45
Speaker
People do die in things like construction and we don't need football stadiums in Qatar.
01:08:50
Speaker
I'm against that too, but we do need housing and we need to make construction as safe as possible.
01:08:55
Speaker
But we do not need orgasm facilitating institutions for men.
01:09:02
Speaker
I actually wanted to, Ellie, I had another idea I wanted to bounce off of you.
01:09:06
Speaker
I posted a tweet about this a while ago about how I think that here's maybe a good solution for the Germans who are law abiding.
01:09:13
Speaker
There should be a registry for sex buyers.
01:09:16
Speaker
So like, I don't know if you saw that tweet, but like, you know, in order to purchase sex legally, like you would have to apply for like essentially a driver's license as like a sex buyer.
01:09:25
Speaker
And that if like, there's a system in which basically like
01:09:29
Speaker
these sex workers could file complaints and that would be on their record that would carry them around.
01:09:34
Speaker
And anytime they wanted to get you sexual services, they'd have to use that license and that would pop up.
01:09:38
Speaker
Do you think that would do anything?
01:09:40
Speaker
Well, I would love that.
01:09:41
Speaker
I prefer that to the current model because since a few years, it's actually the women who have to register and carry around a piece of plastic that says, I'm a prostitute.
01:09:49
Speaker
So I actually agree with the pro-prostitution lobby that that's not fair and not helpful because they can't actually screen out the abused women.
01:09:56
Speaker
from the very few who choose it.
01:09:59
Speaker
There are some escort agencies that have that system.
01:10:02
Speaker
They have client lists.
01:10:03
Speaker
And I know about this because women still get murdered and they can identify the killer quicker, but that is not enough to stop violence.
01:10:12
Speaker
Not a client list.
01:10:12
Speaker
I mean, like a government registry and that information is publicly available.
01:10:17
Speaker
So that here's the other thing is I would want a system in which like we can look up a guy's like name, for example, you know, if you do like a background check on someone and you can see if someone has a criminal record, you can do a background check on someone to find out if they have a history of visiting prostitutes.
01:10:32
Speaker
And like, it's not illegal.
01:10:33
Speaker
They're following the law completely.
01:10:35
Speaker
But like,
01:10:35
Speaker
I do think that that should be like publicly available information and that should be like a stigma.
01:10:41
Speaker
And like, in order for them to access sexual services, that there needs to be a record of that.
01:10:45
Speaker
Like, I think like, I would love a system where like, say I'm married and I want to just like, see if my husband's been seeing prostitutes.
01:10:52
Speaker
I can just like look up his name on some kind of like public registry and be like, Oh yeah, last Tuesday, he went to this brothel down the street and have that be like public information.
01:11:00
Speaker
I would love that, but I don't think that's ever going to happen because the anonymity is a huge part of the appeal.
01:11:05
Speaker
Men would not comply with this.
01:11:07
Speaker
Very, very few would.
01:11:08
Speaker
But why wouldn't they?
01:11:09
Speaker
Is it because they want to commit crimes?
01:11:11
Speaker
Is it because they want to break the law?
01:11:12
Speaker
You know what I mean?
01:11:13
Speaker
I think you need to sort of... Each country is unique.
01:11:16
Speaker
You kind of have to use a sort of strategy that's going to work based on the culture.
01:11:19
Speaker
I find Germans are very law-abiding.
01:11:22
Speaker
Having a system of laws that would deter them from that might be something worth looking into.
01:11:27
Speaker
No, I mean, that would be great.
01:11:29
Speaker
But anonymity is so important to these men.
01:11:31
Speaker
Like, you know, the high time for buying sex is the lunch break.
01:11:33
Speaker
Like men go during work or directly after work because that's an automatic alibi because so many of them have women at home.
01:11:40
Speaker
But I would love like feminists to have like almost like a troll political campaign where they start to campaign for this.
01:11:45
Speaker
And then the men would complain about it and then have the feminists be like, why do you want the anonymity?
01:11:51
Speaker
Like, why do you want to keep this a secret?
01:11:52
Speaker
Why do you want to cheat on your wife?
01:11:54
Speaker
And basically like...
01:11:55
Speaker
use their own system of law abiding against them.
01:11:58
Speaker
Does that make sense?
01:11:59
Speaker
No, it does.
01:11:59
Speaker
Like maybe as a mock campaign, but as an actual policy, the only way that we could, you know, Germany is actually very heavy on like data protection and all that stuff.
01:12:08
Speaker
So we would have to argue like, why are they on this registry if they're getting a legal service?
01:12:13
Speaker
There's no actual legal argument there.
01:12:15
Speaker
Hmm.
01:12:16
Speaker
Okay, okay.
01:12:17
Speaker
Something might be worth exploring.
01:12:18
Speaker
I wish I was German in Germany so that I could like have a troll camp.
01:12:21
Speaker
I want to move to Germany just so I could have this troll campaign.
01:12:24
Speaker
You know what I mean?
01:12:25
Speaker
I have kind of a related question.
Dating Norms and Social Impact
01:12:27
Speaker
So how do women react to the fact that sex buying is legal in your country?
01:12:34
Speaker
I mean, I have to imagine effects like the dating market, right?
01:12:37
Speaker
Like are women, is it just sort of a normal accepted practice that some guys that you'll date have visited prostitutes or is it still stigmatized when you date?
01:12:45
Speaker
It's a very, very complicated space.
01:12:48
Speaker
So like I mentioned, like most men still don't feel comfortable telling people, I think you'll have a higher chance of getting a German man to like be interviewed and even have this picture in the paper saying, yeah, I'm a John, like those men do exist.
01:13:01
Speaker
But I still think that's a minority.
01:13:03
Speaker
A lot of women don't disapprove of the industry necessarily.
01:13:07
Speaker
Like they think it keeps rapists away from them.
01:13:09
Speaker
I hear that all the time from very young women.
01:13:12
Speaker
But then if they found out
01:13:13
Speaker
their partner was doing this, they would still be bothered.
01:13:16
Speaker
Like women are in this very complicated headspace of like, yeah, it's okay, but I wouldn't want to do it.
01:13:21
Speaker
And I wouldn't want my partner involved in it.
01:13:23
Speaker
And I think a lot don't, the statistics that I know is like 23, 24% of German men have bought sex in their lifetime.
01:13:30
Speaker
So every fourth man.
01:13:31
Speaker
And most women don't know this.
01:13:33
Speaker
And it's just not part of their daily life and their daily thinking unless they live next to the brothel next door.
01:13:40
Speaker
And I mean, that's another thing that people should know.
01:13:42
Speaker
The average brothel is not like this huge neon sign building.
01:13:46
Speaker
It's actually a normal apartment in a normal residential building, like an apartment brothel.
01:13:51
Speaker
So you could actually have a brothel next door and not know unless maybe a coked up John rings your doorbell.
01:13:57
Speaker
So, but I think a lot of women are sort of pushing it down, pushing it aside.
01:14:01
Speaker
And we are just very slowly, there are these women emerging who are like the wives who have been cheated on and the girlfriends and the harm from that to their physical and mental health, but they're not really yet a public voice.
01:14:13
Speaker
Like there's a lot of really cruel jokes about that.
01:14:17
Speaker
And some do enter this mentality of,
01:14:19
Speaker
when they're not broken up yet, like, okay, so to keep my man, I'll have to sexually compete and I'll have to give him the at home brothel.
01:14:26
Speaker
Yeah, this is very sad stuff.
01:14:28
Speaker
I think my understanding is most women would actually be upset about this and a lot of them would break up.
01:14:33
Speaker
So it's not so normalized.
01:14:34
Speaker
They'd be like, oh, that's cool.
01:14:35
Speaker
Like I just gave birth.
01:14:37
Speaker
So I understand like he has needs, like thankfully we're not, that attitude isn't normal.
01:14:42
Speaker
Okay.
01:14:42
Speaker
So it's not normal for committed relationships, but it would be a deal breaker if you were dating someone and he revealed he used a prostitute.
01:14:50
Speaker
Because I feel like here, because it's clearly illegal, the vast majority of women walk away from any men who even had a hint that he did visit a sex worker versus like if maybe one quarter of the population of men in Germany have done it, is it considered much more of a deal breaker on dating such that men would not bring it up?
01:15:06
Speaker
I don't think men would bring this up.
01:15:08
Speaker
I think it's still a deal breaker, but I don't have statistics on that.
01:15:11
Speaker
I would love really detailed opinion research on this.
01:15:15
Speaker
The opinion research I do know of is that most Germans, like 60%, do think the sex trade is overwhelmingly exploitative.
01:15:22
Speaker
So I think there's more disapproval than approval.
01:15:25
Speaker
And men would hide that very well, most of the time.
01:15:27
Speaker
I hope it wasn't too all over the place, because like I said, there's so many paths to go down with this issue.
01:15:33
Speaker
No, I really appreciated this conversation.
01:15:35
Speaker
Thank you so much, Ellie.
01:15:36
Speaker
And it was absolutely worth coming back.
01:15:37
Speaker
Thank you.
01:15:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's definitely scope for a pot too at some point for sure.
Conclusion and Social Media Engagement
01:15:42
Speaker
Should I plug my stuff as well?
01:15:44
Speaker
If people want to find me, they can find me as Ellie Arrow.
01:15:47
Speaker
So that's Ellie with an E and Arrow as in Arrow and Bow.
01:15:51
Speaker
And if you find me on Twitter at Ellie Arrow, you can find my link tree and then you'll see my blog.
01:15:56
Speaker
All of that's in English and my YouTube channel.
01:16:00
Speaker
And also links to websites from the German prostitution survivor movement.
01:16:05
Speaker
So blogs from women survivors sharing their experience and their political analysis, as well as the John Quote projects.
01:16:12
Speaker
They're all there.
01:16:13
Speaker
Alrighty.
01:16:14
Speaker
So that's our show.
01:16:15
Speaker
Check us out on the website.
01:16:17
Speaker
If you want to discuss this episode on the female dating strategy.com forward slash forum.
01:16:23
Speaker
Also check us out on Twitter at femdatstrat and our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash the female dating strategy for weekly bonus content.
01:16:30
Speaker
And you can spend a roast to scrote and talk to us about this episode on the Discord.
01:16:33
Speaker
You can also follow us on Instagram at underscore the female dating strategy.
01:16:38
Speaker
Thanks for listening, queens.
01:16:39
Speaker
And for all you Johns out there, I don't care if you get robbed.
01:16:41
Speaker
Die mad.