The Spitzer Backlash

Tweet

Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.counterpunch.org/blader03122008.html

Liberal apologists seeking to normalize Spitzer’s behavior are forced to resort to the same lies about prostitution indulged by Dershowitz. They ignore the fact that by defending men’s right to paid sex with women, they applaud the atrocious exploitation of the same sorts of market inequalities they decry when the victims are blue-collar workers.

Long duped into believing that treating the sex industry as legitimate work will foster a more “humane prostitution” while satisfying natural, male impulses, such liberals deny prostitution’s well-documented harms. In fact, the condescension that allows the confounding of prostitution with legitimate, but unpleasant labor betrays a strong bias, both against workers and against women.

The fact is that all prostitution, including Spitzer’s brokering of a high-priced call-girl, is dangerous for several reasons: first, as a population, prostitutes suffer grave victimization and physical harm; second, prostitution degrades the status of all women by affirming the pathology of associating sex with property; finally, prostitution undermines perhaps the most important moment of reckoning in our country’s history – when we established legally that human beings cannot be bought and sold.

For many prostitutes, “sex work” follows naturally from childhood sexual exploitation or incest victimization. 8 times out of ten, victims of rape or incest prior to engaging in prostitution. Prostituted women are routinely raped. Their life expectancies are shorter than average. They represent 15% of the women for whom suicide attempts result in hospitalization. Most prostitutes experience physical violence. They come from poverty and remain in poverty as prostitutes. This is the norm to which there are few exceptions.

Furthermore, prostitution comes at a high psychic cost to its “workers.” Renowned psychotherapists like Lenore Walker and Judith Herman confirm, based on their clinical experience and research, the overwhelming presence of PTSD in prostituted women. Melissa Farley, whose international research substantiates the consistency of prostitution’s extensive harm, stresses the importance of understanding the “choice” to pursue prostitution. She writes, “conditions that make genuine consent possible are absent from prostitution: physical safety, equal power with customers and real alternatives.” Comparative studies underscore the ridiculousness of accepting prostitution as a vocational choice. In a 2003 study, Farley and Cotton reported a 75% homelessness rate among respondents, and 89% of prostitutes in the 9 countries they studied expressed “their desire to get out of prostitution.”