I'm often asked whether my work can be supported financially - now there's something where you can help:
A team of 6
#prostitution
,
#porn
, and
#sextrafficking
survivors, as well as 2 allies (including myself), are launching a podcast project:
Is anyone actually falling for this? Nearly all sex trafficked people will appear in online advertising as smiling, "enthusiastic", often suggesting its "part-time" and a "hobby". It makes the consumer feel good to believe it and helps to line pimps' pockets. Its an easy lie.
This is hilarous. I remember when barbies stood for patriachal beauty standards and gender roles so burning dolls (in general) was a feminist symbol 🙈 What a time to be alive.
Prostitution arose historically with land ownership, class society, militarization and slavery. The earliest records we have strongly indicate that the first women were in situations of sexual slavery - debt bondage at best - and many were first sold to be raped as girls.
So depressing to hear women say that they think they were born for porn/prostitution because they are good at dissociating during sex. I know I'll be accused of spreading stigma but I will say it anyway: Dissociation during sex is a trauma response and not a job skill. End of.
@kattenbarge
Anyone who watches any porn online will soon not only to be unable to tell what was brought onto the platform by trafficking, poverty or choice but also whether it is deep faked. There should be 1) harsh penalties for creating this material and 2) a general boycott of porn.
Several German prisons experiment with letting convicted rapists close to finishing their sentences go to brothels as a form of "therapy to learn sexual interactions with women that are free of violence".
No woman is "experimental ground" for rapists.
Innumerable shows and movies depict the explicit rape & sexual exploitation of women in a titillating manner excused through "historical accuracy" or "societal critique"
...men ought to be able to cope with a clearly fictional toy world where women are (non-violently) on top.🙄
German police confirm: Traffickers are targeting Ukranian women and children arriving in Germany with dubious promises of shelter and employment. There isn't a crisis that they won't exploit. Paid access to women's bodies is in high demand in 🇩🇪, this is the logical result.
Und jetzt wittern die Zuhälter und Menschenhändler getarnt als Helfer das Big Business für ihre Bordelle. Sie nehmen gezielt die vielen hilflosen und vulnerablen Frauen und Mädchen aus der Ukraine ins Visier. Meldet es der Polizei,wenn ihr es bemerkt!
Am I loosing my mind or does a significant number of people who view themselves as leftists truly believe that prisons should be mixed sex?? I've seen repeated arguments today that since female on female violence exists we could just let men in. Wtf is wrong with these people?
Rich couple pays poor woman to carry their child because... presumably a pregnancy would interfere with their schedule? The sleep deprivation and the stress of child rearing can then also be outsourced to a less affluent woman. And liberals sell this to us as female freedom 🤦🏻♀️
One of Germanys biggest news magazines, Der Spiegel, headlines:
"We will be ashamed"
Deploring 20 years of failed German
#prostitution
policy.
Here's the story of how the law let women down, the people (often survivors) ringing the alarm & the politicians admitting the mistake
I really cannot take suggestions such as "prostitution is necessary cause autistic men need it" when we can't even get our governments to stop supplying convicted rapists, murderers and soldiers in war zones with women "cause men need it". Access to women is nobody's human right.
“You have 12-year-olds who think choking is normal as part of kissing someone. There was one school where they have had to get continence nurses in because older teenage girls are being injured by acting out what they see in porn.”
Miss me with this "women have pussy power over men" shit. This is an MRA talking point youre parroting. For every pretty girl who gets a guy to carry things for her, there are dozens of us harassed, stalked and assaulted by men who found us just "too enticing".
If
#sexworkiswork
, then this is not rape but "bad customer service" and a woman "not fit for the job". That is definitely what the man in question here thinks which is why he keeps going though she shows clearly that she doesn't want sex. How does him paying her make it okay?
Since we're once again comparing
#prostitution
to retail jobs, it doesn't hurt to have a list of disproportionate physical risks of being in the sex trade. This is not to shame women in it or to suggest women's bodies are "broken", but to highlight why these comparisons lag.
100% of johns could be pitiful depressed socially anxious men (they're not they're literally any guy from the homeless to the president, from the incel to the thrice married father of children) and it still wouldn't justify the sex trade. Women aren't therapy stations for men.
It's 2022 and survivors of prostitution in Germany cannot speak publicly without harassement and threats. A number of survivors, social workers and other experts will be speaking at a series of events in Berlin and the venue is being intimidated in hopes that they will cancel.
It's amazing to me how people can celebrate historic prostitution. For every Theodora of Byzantine there's countless who endured unwanted pregnancies, illness and death from STIs and child birth. The life expectancy of a woman in prostitution without condoms would have been low.
This is what the men are saying to a woman, a photographer/journalist, knowing it will be public to the world! Can you imagine what needs to happen that they'd be too ashamed to tell? And people tell me that john forums don't represent anything meaningful:
It's actually because of the widespread myth that women in prostitution are cut from a different cloth than everyone else that makes them supposedly totally unfazed by the look, feel, weight, smell and taste of men they don’t desire that creates the myth that they can't be raped.
The problem with ‘all SW is rape’ is that when SWers are raped no one believes them. I’m disturbed by how reactionary younger feminists are tbh. Feminism is complicated because women’s lives are complicated and if your feminism doesn’t make space for that it isn’t feminism
@miakhalifa
Its long overdue society starts taking responsibility for the fact that we've told generations of women and girls that they're worthless and unloveable unless attractive and sexually available to men. The sex industry capitalizes on that socialization. Thank you for speaking out.
No matter who you are (gay, poor, disabled...) you never have a right to access another person's body. Not for sex and not for reproduction. Babies are also human beings and not a human right. Being gay is no excuse for patriarchal entitlement. This is vile.
Two gay men who both attended law school filed a legal complaint against the City of New York arguing that not having access to a woman's reproductive potential is a form of discrimination, and that they are entitled to have the City pay for a "surrogate".
Something I noticed when looking into legal German escorting sites:
The majority of women look to some degree unkempt or unwell.
That tells you a lot about the buyers:
They want someone who comes pre-degraded so they feel no/less remorse for what they're about to do to her.
@agenttwelvetoes
Women & girls in developing countries getting raped in bushes and fields, urinating on themselves, collapsing and dying because of no access to female only bathrooms - also girls in developing countries holding in pee all day cause they feel unsafe in unisex bathrooms. But go on.
This is a result of framing prostitution as "therapy for men". If men can get psychotherapy in prison why not sexual therapy? A therapist may help them work on social skills - according to several German prison wards a woman in prostitution should teach him not to rape. Insanity.
The photos above and below are of real German
#sexbuyers
photographed and interviewed in the "Johns" series by
@BettinaFlitner
. They agreed to have their image and words public, so here is the translation of what they had to say to the question: "Why do you buy sex"?
Conservative voices in Germany, too, calling to let brothels reopen during the 2nd wave of the pandemic: Because
#prostitution
is a hostage situation and we are offering nothing to women except to "kindly let them fuck to survive" as
@HuschkeMau
put it.
Andrea, 19, was a woman suffering from schizophrenia exploited in the German sex trade, sold between pimps like chattel and finally murdered when she was too ill for them to turn a profit. Her first pimp has just been sentenced to 4 years. His accomplice got 1 year probation...
The word
#porn
comes from the lowest classes of women enslaved in prostitution, the "pornai" in Ancient Greek, who had the lowest income and had to be available to men of all classes.
#Pornography
therefore means "depiction of the lowest class of whores/sex slaves".
Also sick of the choice of image: Women's legs in high heels. Women are worried, desperate, some homeless and hungry and we still sexualize them. And it's not just Bild Zeitung which is cheap papers, all news outlets do this all the time! Even when women are raped or murdered.
I just went on Germany's biggest
#prostitution
advertising site (literally named "BuyMe") and the 2nd image I see is a woman's bruised pregnant belly. A john reviewing her confirms the pregnancy. This is illegal and abuse but still happening in plain site!
Going into a brothel to learn about consent is the most upside down idea ever. In most of these scenarios they did not inform the women so they had no idea they were facing a convicted rapist. Like with any john they had to pretend to enjoy it no matter how gross or torturous.
Germany has lost the plot on
#prostitution
so completely that we are seriously after 20 years of legal free-for-all for sex buyers debating whether maybe letting them gang-bang women in a state of advanced pregnancy might be just slightly medically and ethically questionable? 🤦♀️
Switzerland is one of several countries permitting imprisoned convicts access to women in
#prostitution
in order to "practice", "resocialize" and decrease "sexual tension" inside prison. In Geneva, therapists routinely took convicts on visits to brothels.
The horrific case in Crete involving the human trafficking of overwhelmingly Roma women into
#surrogacy
happened under an "altruistic surrogacy only" law regime.
I repeat: We need a total ban on surrogacy because any loophole will be used for profit, often by organized crime!
I wish absolute hell on every "sex" buyer currently celebrating war in Ukraine and how it will deepen the already present desperation and vulnerability of local populations so its easier to exploit them for
#prostitution
. How is it possible that anyone's first thought is this?
There is more porn out there than 1 person could watch in many lifetimes and still more is being produced. AI won't stop the proliferation of any type of porn incl recorded child sexual abuse. It will however make it harder for investigators to distinguish real from fake victims.
Was just told I must support
#surrogacy
cause transwomen need it to reproduce. Wow.
Everyone has the right to their own fertility and fertility treatments as they regard themselves - no one, no matter how marginalised, has rights to anything that involves another person's body.
We hear about vulnerable Eastern European women being exploited in the legal (and illegal) Central and Western European
#sextrade
. Let's make this less abstract and look at a concrete example:
The women from a small ethnic minority village staffing most of Zurich prostitution.🧵
Somehow the things that are promoted as epitomes of women's autonomy (prostitution, porn, surrogacy, bdsm, plastic surgery) all benefit others (mostly men & wealthy people) & are super dangerous to the body & mind. Why are none of these ever held up as forms of male autonomy? Odd
For those arguing labor rights will decrease violence in the sex trade what are ur proposals for men who want to pay to harm women? Will you set an acceptable duration for strangulation? The amount of urine & feces that one can make women consume? How many can "gang bang" 1woman?
Omg I just learned something that changes my entire outlook on the world: Did you know that there are not only women in prostitution??? I had no idea 🤯 In my country its 93% women, 4% trans people and 3% men in the industry. 99%+ of buyers are male. Clearly NOT a gendered issue!
This bears repeating!! We don't particularly care if you learn to apply eyeliner or show emotion (plenty of abusive men are very open about their emotions, so only counts if you're genuinely trying to connect with not manipulate, guilt trip and intimidate women and girls)
#gncmen
The earliest records from Mesopotamia do suggest there was some connection between sexual rites in temples and the development of the sex trade. However, prostitution appears to be framed as punishment by the writers, not as a place women (and girls!) would clamour to be.
This survey is a depressing illustration about the number of people who think if a man starts having sex with a woman (esp if he paid for it) he can do whatever he wants to her during it without asking first. About a third of people find it "bad behaviour" not rape (which it is).
An escort has sex w/ a client. Without asking, during sex the client gets a bit violent; biting and slapping body hard, saying aggro degrading things like "you're just a fucking whore". The escort is afraid of what he'd do if she said no, so she pretends to like it.
This is:
I know the Daily Mail isn't the best of sources but this is a good summery of the report.
Access to smartphones and hardcore pornography are linked by expert criminal investigators to a staggering increase in child-on-child (mostly boy-on-girl) sexual abuse.
Porn IS a crisis.
Children are committing 18 rapes a DAY and 15,000 rapes and sex attacks every year, shocking report finds as police warn sexual violence has been 'normalised' by online pornography
My thread on the disproportionate and unique health risks of prostitution is now available as a blog post: It's a grim read but should be mandatory for anyone who makes the comparison with retail work or otherwise portrays the sex trade as inconsequential.
Adoption has its issues but it tends to be regulated enough that no one would let you adopt 24 children. But you could purchase 24 children through
#surrogacy
: Babies aren't products, impoverished women aren't baby farms. Surrogacy is a game for the rich.
What is the absolute worst outgrowth of "choice feminism" you ever encountered?
To me it was two people arguing that female genital mutilation can be a personal choice and should be respected as someone's "culture" and if you disagree as a Westener that's imperialism.
In prostitution, the payment acts as hush money: The things men do to women - centrally making them endure unwanted sex aka rape - would be actionable, but by virtue of the payment she has superficially consented and loses legal recourse. These are rape cases not "bad service":
Just heard someone say that breast implants are a female privilege because women can just pay to become more attractive. Not only do these surgeries carry significant risks, the claim that women will get love and wealth for them is a total lie. All she gets is objectification.
There are women and girls dying in menstrual huts, considered adult and married off at the onset of menses, unable to afford tampons or pads, forbidden from going to school or places of worship, most of this in the global South - literally how is advocacy here "white feminism"?
People want so bad for there to be a form of prostitution that's ethically fine. At least a futuristic vision where all women pick the johns, spent time getting to know them so its safe, uphold boundaries and everyone enjoys themselves. You'll find that sex like that is... free.
The practice of letting convicted rapists "experiment how not to rape" on women in prostitution has been going on in Germany since at least 2001- so a year prior to our liberalisation law showing how entrenched the "prostituted women as rape fodder" myth was all the way back then
I'm glad plenty of people are recognising this as objectification hinting at a power differential and possibly abuse.
Can we apply the same critical lense to the sex trade because the objectifying visual language is this and much worse with even more obvious power differences?
"We are on a
#surrogacy
journey" is such a gross way for rich entitled couples to describe risking the health and the life of a likely impoverished surrogate mother and often also an egg donor, so they can have genetic children despite not being willing or able to get pregnant.
Conservatives will rail against pornography and try and claim they're the only ones fighting
#sextrafficking
, then turn around and defend pornographers credibly accused of sex trafficking if it helps promote aggressive masculinity and piss off the left.
🤮
@RealCandaceO
you had one job.
Candace: “They are kind of stretching the definition of sex trafficking in your case, I’ve taken a look at it.”
No, they are not. They recruited, deceived, transported, and coerced them, for the purpose of commercial sex work (Only Fans).
German sex buyer reports a woman he encountered started crying during "sex" and he just doesn't really get why?
A conversation ensues on the forum on whether what he did was
#rape
or just another day in the "sexual services" industry.
Quotes researched by survivor
@Kali_im_Exil
A feminism that decenters the female body is fucking pointless. Female infanticide, FGM, menstrual shaming and exclusion, child marriage, forced marriage, forced impregnation, abortion, steralisation ... - how can you advocate against them when you can't name who does it to whom?
I don't want to debate anymore whether serving food to survive is comparable to being penetrated and enduring sex acts to survive. I've heard it on a nearly daily basis for years and I'm just done. People are not interested in what's true but in what helps them sleep at night.
People are seriously saying that
@billieeilish
would not have been traumatized by porn if only she had gotten better sex ed. How could any level of sex ed prepare you for the level of brutality of acts committed against women in porn? Truth is: It couldn't.
It is a myth that deeply religious patriarchies are anti sexual exploitation, they're exceptionally coducive to it with rigid power structures, oppression of women, ownership over children, a belief in a male right to sex etc.
“Muslim Clerics acting like pimps.”
I haven’t watched this, as the intro alone has made me feel really sick. Watch below to hear a cleric say “9 yrs and over, there’s no problem at all”. Guess where they got that age from?
I've been shouting about everything in this article for years! Porn addiction, imitation and porn inspired assault were already massive problems when I was in high school 10 years ago. How much worse must it have gotten for it to make headlines now? My heart breaks for the girls.
Romanian women and girls are some of the most sexually exploited and trafficked women in all of Europe. This is not an isolated case but a pattern that's been going on for 15+ years. The majority of brothels/escort are staffed this way and should be boycotted & ideally shut down.
Andrew Tate’s video in response to Greta Thunberg allowed Romanian authorities to confirm he was in the country, and arrest him in human trafficking investigation, due to the pizza chain shown in the 2-minute rant.
I am very suspicious of these "street interviews" because I expect the interviewers to approach hundreds of people and then edit together the 5-10 most insane responses.
@ My Japanese followers - is this humbug or some truth to it?
Gimme a fucking break: I'm researching drug consumption in connection with
#prostitution
and am so sick of the self contradiction of people saying "its a job like any other but mysteriously so many women can't stand it unless they're drunk or high". Use. Your. Brains. I. Beg. You
@deadsbirth
Housework is work.
Working class women and women in rural areas always worked while also doing the housework.
Women's labour was constant, back breaking, under appreciated, unpaid or underpaid...
Ya'll always think you would have been aristocracy. Open a book for Christ's sake
Coomers wished women who do/did porn just lived in their computer/phone and hibernated there till the next time he needed to nut. When it turns out she's a human being with human relationships they have to disparage it to maintain their dehumanised image of her.
#Misogyny
I'll repeat myself: The acceptable number of women raped in prison is 0. The acceptable number of transwomen raped in prison is also 0. Since its impossible to tell who will be a threat to women (though convicted for rape is a strong indicator) third spaces is the only solution.
In case we need evidence that we live in a patriarchy: The societal belief in a male right to access women sexually is so incredibly strong that there are enforcers of this "right" even for convicted violent criminals. Women in
#prostitution
are expected to absorb all social ills
Funny how the female autonomy that is so feverently defended by liberals is always about women risking their comfort, health and lives (surrogacy, prostitution, painful risky sex acts) and rarely about things that are actually objectively beneficial??
People refer the hetaera as evidence that the sex industry was a way for women to get status. There were always educated & talented women in prostitution but it would've been as "romantic" as modern day sugar babies: personal sex toys for rich men with a veneer of sophistication.
For 3 years I've wanted to write about why men murder women in the sex trade. I've been waiting for the publication of a study on the subject in Germany that finally come out a month ago. Stay tuned for my summary. Its painful but necessary to know who, when, where and why.
This thread could go on.
Stop gaslighting people - sex is not work. Unwanted sex is rape. Paying someone makes absolutely no difference to the physical and mental harms incurred. Prostitution is an industry that kills women and their sexuality, not a place where it is set free.
I'm sorry no cashier or office worker or firefighter or soldier or any other thing people do to earn a living will result in an unwanted pregnancy. Breathe and think for a moment what unbelievable pain we're allowing men to cause to women in the sex trade.
In other cases prison wardens ordered women in escort prostitution to come into prisons and teach mentally handicapped convicted rapists about consent through pain sex acts. I don't even know what to say about that... It's so utterly inhumane towards those women.
Amazing reversal: A few times now I've been told that it is me sharing sex buyer quotes that is dehumanizing women in the sex trade. Not the quotes themselves or the things men physically do - me sharing it is the boot on women's neck. You heard it here first folks!
I'm always amazed at how it is possible to write pages upon pages on the subject of
#prostitution
and never once mention that largest group of people involved: The buyers. I'm so tired of the sex trade being presented like it's something women do alone in a room...
How women in
#prostitution
are advertised. An example from a legal supposedly "alternative" brothel in Berlin called "Candyshop". A🧵
I cannot legally nor do I want to share the images. I will just describe them and translate the advertisement text about the women.
I want to spell this out - its important: The demand for prostitution & trafficking are one and the same. Trafficking exists to fill the gap in demand & supply in the "sex" trade. A trafficked woman, a woman driven by poverty & one who made a free choice - they meet the same men.
This is only possible through the complete dehumanization of women in prostitution specifically by supposed experts of mental health and crime prevention. They must believe these women are unrapeable 24/7 nymphos... otherwise they're saying it's okay if THOSE women get raped.
Sex buyers know about this physical damage, btw and talk about it - or rather "complain". "She couldn't do xy cause she's got x pain, so annoying." Trigger warning: Rape and dehumanization.
If men interacting with objects that look like women didn't increase the rate of them treating actual women like objects, I would be happy for misogynists to lock themselves in with their bots.
As it stands if a man owns an however sophisticated masturbated doll he's highly sus.
Until 1997 German men could legally rape their wives. Furthermore the law held that women had to pretend to enjoy
#maritalrape
our be found at fault in case of divorce. Here's the reasoning of the Federal Court of "Justice" from 1966 translated to English:
We need to talk about
#surrogacy
again - many get why the commercialized version is utterly harmful & exploitative. But the medical risks commonly associated with surrogacy don't disappear when it's altruistic. Aside from the fact that commercial likes masquerading as altruistic.
I'm so tired of sending stats to people about age of entry, poverty, migration status, race, trauma history, health etc. of women in the sex trade who assert based on nothing but a general feeling that "most prostitutes choose the life". YOU present the evidence for your claim.
This is a screenshot of the categories by which men rate women on a nation-wide U.S. American
#prostitution
review forum. Please tell me more about how men are just "clients" seeking a "service" and aren't commodifying women's bodies and dehumanizing them.
Abolish strip clubs. Give struggeling moms real support not harrassement, groping, possibly threats and coercion into prostitution by disgusting men in exchange for not going homeless and hungry.
One more time for the people in the back: Being lonely is not an excuse to purchase access to the body of a woman who does not desire but endure you. The healthy way of dealing with loneliness is joining a team, a club, creating a new friend group, reviving old friendships etc.
Look, I really get that people want women in the sex trade to get the same societal respect as e.g. psychotherapists and that's why many push for the "sex work is healing work" narrative. But most of the implementation looks more like "prostituted women are rape fodder".
@DrProudman
A man in Germany did successfully sue a woman in prostitution for not making him orgasm. A female judge agreed she defrauded him. She had to pay for court proceedings. Survivors of
@NetzwerkElla
paid for her costs. In
#sexworkiswork
land this can happen.
If you still feel that comparing cashiers to women in
#prostitution
or pornography is fair, then I don't know how to help you. We should absolutely decriminalize and destigmatize women in the sex trade, but not the system or the (mostly) men who cause this unbelievable harm.