“There Can’t Be Numbers:” An Interview With Laura Agustín, Part 2

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August 3, 2011

Yesterday, we posted Part One of an interview with Sex at the Margins author Dr. Laura Agustín. Today we present our second and final segment.

It’s incredibly common now to see abolitionists argue that when prostitution is legal, as it in Amsterdam, trafficking only increases. What does the most current research actually suggest?

Everyone wants this thing called research to prove one position or another, but it can’t. Even if there were enough funds to do massive studies with a range of methodologies and amazingly objective researchers, the target is impossible to define and pin down. It’s the same problem as with numbers, the fact that the subjects of interest are operating outside formal networks. Of course you can have small ethnographic studies that provide real insight into particular people at a certain time and place, but those studies cannot prove anything in general. And certainly not about legal regimes, as in the quarrel over which causes more exploitation.

Over a very long period we may come to understand the effects of a regime like the Dutch, but it is too early now. I did research in Holland amongst people concerned with how the policy was working in 2006, when it was already clear that offering regulation only brought part of the sex industry into government accounting. Businesspeople interested in operating outside the law continued to do so; many escort agencies and other sex businesses refused to register; migrants not allowed work permits came and worked anyway and so did people facilitating their travel and work, and, in many cases, exploiting them. None of which proves that the whole system ‘increases trafficking’. You cannot even coherently discuss an increase in trafficking when there are no baseline figures to compare with. On top of which agreement about what everyone means by the word trafficking simply does not exist. This goes for both the Dutch situation and the Swedish – claims about trafficking going up or down cannot be proved.

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“There Can’t Be Numbers:” An Interview With Laura Agustín, Part 1

By

Charlotte Shane

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August 2, 2011

Upon the publication of her book, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labor Markets and the Rescue Industry, anthropologist Laura Agustín became a hero to many sex worker activists. Her research cuts through the usual moral hysteria and emotionality invoked by the idea of trafficking to radically revise discussions about migration and sexual labor. Both her blog (linked above) and her book contain rational assessments of an unfair world in which people exercise choice even when they have limited options; where citizens of developing countries, like citizens of developed countries, have an urge to see more of the world; and where a single story cannot usefully articulate the experience of multiple, diverse human beings. When it comes to her approach, she explains, “I am disposed to accept what people tell me, and believe in their ability to interpret their own lives.” She kindly agreed to answer some questions for us about the current state of trafficking laws, what she calls the Rescue Industry, and public (mis)conceptions.

How did you first become interested in the sex industry?

My interest was in the experiences of friends and colleagues in Latin America who wanted to work in Europe. Travelling outside the formal economy meant having very limited choices, and, for women, selling sex and working as live-in maids were practically the only choices. People I knew conversed in a normal way about how to get to Europe and which of the jobs seemed better for them personally. I saw how certain outsiders were focussing on something they called prostitution, but I didn’t understand their anxiety about it. My original question wasn’t about migrants at all but about these people, who wanted to stop others from travelling and stop them from taking jobs they were willing to accept – all in the name of saving them. During my studies I decided that thinking in terms of commercial sex and the sex industry were one way to resist this Rescue ideology.

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Maria Coletsis’ Behind The Whip

By

Bettie

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July 26, 2011

My ears always prick up when people are talking about fetish or bdsm, because that’s my world and it’s where I earn my living. I am generally struck by how much fantasy is injected into the retelling though. No civilian speaks about bdsm the way another does, because their words are almost always informed by their sexual desires.

Behind The Whip is the first book I have ever read that is honest in that respect. The profiles of the Mistresses featured are just about them, not any projected desires. They are presented to us only as who they are pretending to be.

The book begins with an amazing introduction that reads almost as a sexy history lesson, reminding us how interwoven this world is with the world it exists directly outside of (or beneath, depending on your views).

The stories begin with a woman in London, naturally, but feature women from all over the world. Some very interesting points are made throughout that feel like common knowledge but may not be. Specifically:

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Wrenna Robertson’s I’ll Show You Mine

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story

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July 15, 2011

I’m putting my eyeliner on, but when Diamond, who’s next on stage says, “Hey can I check my shit?” so I move over to give her space at the mirror. She pulls down her panties, she bends over, ass side to the mirror, spreads her cheeks, looks through her legs at the mirror, checks, straightens up, straightens her panties and walks out of the dressing room.

If you haven’t guessed, I’m a stripper in an all nude club. Strippers need to “check their shit” because they show their “shit.” Since I see my coworkers’ vaginas on a pretty regular basis, I’ve learned there’s nothing regular about vaginas and I’ve been on a personal mission to convince women of all occupations that their non-regular vaginas are plain normal. Hence, I was thrilled to be getting a book all about vaginal diversity.

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Chester Brown’s Paying for It

By

Charlotte Shane

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June 14, 2011

The sex worker rights movement desperately needs more men outing themselves as johns, standing with sex workers, and defending the right for consenting adults to buy and sell sex. But while I was reading Paying For It, a graphic memoir by Canadian john Chester Brown who does just that, I kept thinking one thing: I would never want this guy as a client.

I’m not flattering myself—it’s clear that Brown wouldn’t want me either, since I’m over 20 and don’t offer half hours—but it was hard to set aside that reaction in spite of the fact that 1) I’m in complete agreement with his arguments for decriminalizing prostitution, 2) I loved his citation of the nearly defunct $pread magazine in his appendix and 3) we share an obsession with sex work. But I’m not the only one who finds him abrasive. In the book’s appendix, one of his friends writes, “Chester seems to have a very limited emotional range compared to most people. There does seem to be something wrong with him.” Internet commenters routinely tear him apart, though most have assuredly not read the book, reinforcing how far johns will have to go in order to surmount their own set of stigmas when they are now so easily dismissed as perverts and sociopaths.

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