Dalla redazione
Il divieto di prostituzione - Tra libertà e coercizione (Parte 3)
The Revolution Devours Its Children
Published on 04 November 2013 by Wiegand Grafe at Feministisches Institut Hamburg
What a powerful counterstrike. Ninety celebrities and a great many, mostly academically educated, first signatories are backing a restorative appeal by the magazine "Emma" against the attempt by sex workers to share in the achievements of the sexual revolution. The full text and the list of supporters can be found at http://www.emma.de/hefte/ausgaben-2013/novemberdezember-2013/appell-gegen-prostitution/.
The appeal is directed against the Prostitution Act that took effect in 2002, which regulates the legal status of sexual services in order to improve the situation of sex workers. This apparently exceeded the degree of freedom that can be granted to a minority that notoriously behaves differently from what the emancipatory pioneers consider correct. This must be forcefully countered. The certainty of standing on the morally right side with this appeal has evidently led the authors to make no attempt whatsoever to do justice to complex reality with their argumentation. The appeal is a model of demagoguery, in which commonly known terms, socially acceptable opinions, necessary demands and untenable positions are so skillfully woven together into a moral postulate that even seasoned scholars have apparently lost track and no longer ask themselves what slavery and human trafficking actually have to do with the legal acceptance of sex work. When the supporters of the current legislation are then defamed as lobbyists for women traffickers and so-called "voluntary" prostitutes, and drug and arms trafficking are drawn on for comparison, the moral outrage becomes so great that one can really only sign. In doing so, the activists have apparently forgotten that the high profit margins in the mentioned fields of business are only achieved through illegality, and that we would soon have to bid farewell to the concept of division of labour if we wanted to criminalize every profession in whose vicinity exploitation, contempt for human dignity, and crime can be found.
It can be assumed that the majority of signatories have no experience with sex work (neither as service providers nor as customers) and derive their knowledge of this topic only from current media narratives about prostitution, which presumably have as much to do with reality as medical romance novels have with actual work in healthcare, or an episode of Tatort has with police work.
Nevertheless, they feel called upon to intervene massively in the lives of other people with their vote, without being able to gauge the consequences. If a person decides out of necessity to offer a sexual service, then any form of protection under the rule of law should be welcomed, not fought against. If it was a voluntary decision, this should be accepted and not called into question through legal uncertainty. If a law is abused by criminals, then it is the abuse that must be fought, not the law. Anyone for whom even these simple connections have become too confusing should refrain from interfering in societal decisions, regardless of how great their "celebrity factor," their scholarly reputation, or how significant their political office. It does not help to invoke revolutionary achievements either, even if these are without question well-founded.
In 1971, brave women confess in "stern" that they have had abortions. In doing so they lay the foundation for an initiative that, under the slogan "My belly belongs to me," demands self-determination over their bodies back, and begin a long fight for the legalization of abortion. The activists stand against an outraged majority who consider the termination a crime, call it "abortion," and speak of murdering unborn life. The brave women and their supporters know that with their demand they are placing the legal good of a woman's self-determination above the religiously shaped inviolability of incipient life. One of their most important secondary arguments for legalization was that an illegally performed abortion considerably increases the danger to the life and health of the woman, but that the hardship that leads women to make this choice cannot be compensated for by any ban. Supported by scientific findings and in the finest tradition of the Enlightenment, they freed the discussion from its religious stranglehold and achieved that the majority of society no longer exalts successful fertilization as the beginning of life.
In 2013, the former avant-garde of the sexual revolution feels called upon to oppose the brave women who have long been demanding the legalization of sex work, and to claim for themselves the right to determine what happens to the bodies of sex workers. Here the slogan "Your body belongs to us" could be deployed to great media effect. The activists, now acting as cadres of emancipation, make themselves the mouthpiece of a moralizing majority that considers sex work unnatural, calls it "prostitution," and can only imagine paid sex as an act of coercion and violence. Together with the signatories, they demand the renewed criminalization of sexual services in order to give validity to their notion of morality and gender equality. With their initiative they want to curb the crime of human trafficking, while accepting as a matter of course that the disenfranchisement and danger for the service providers will increase considerably if sex work can only be practiced illegally from now on. Carried by their quasi-religious certainty, they try to influence the majority of society in order to abolish forward-looking legislation, condemn sex work as in the past, and put the sexual proletariat back in its place. The revolutionaries, after their march through the institutions, have now arrived in the middle of society, have made themselves comfortable there, and pass judgment from that position on the acceptability of other life choices. From this position it is inconceivable that anyone would choose a job in sexual services, because anyone who wants to prostitute themselves could, after all, become a journalist, a scholar, an actor, or a politician.
Source: http://www.feministisches-institut.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/DieRevolutionfrisst.pdf
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Sex, Money and Closeness, or: What Do Feminists Actually Have Against Prostitution?
Published on 06 November 2013 by Lucas Schoppe on Cuncti.net, previously on mau tau
He should not "overdo this topic, which isn't among the central concerns of the men's rights movement, and even well-deserved Alice Schwarzer bashing is, in the long run, only of limited entertainment value."
That's what Arne Hoffmann writes on Genderama regarding criticism of Schwarzer's appeal to "abolish" prostitution.
This much is obvious - anchoring the demand for free access to prostitutes as a central concern of a political movement would confirm the verdict of an American journalist that the men's rights movement has by far the worst political instincts of any civil rights group he has ever encountered ("the single worst political instincts of any civil rights groups I have ever encountered").
Nevertheless, the appeal by Schwarzer and her signatories (Senta Berger, Margot Käßmann, Wolfgang Niedecken and many others) touches on themes that are indeed central to the men's movement: the question of the meaning of sexuality, the general presumption that men are prone to violence - and the fact that men pay for women. The critical aspects of the appeal can be dealt with fairly quickly.
Red-green women traffickers and the coercion of voluntariness
In an article on the topic, Schwarzer manages the feat of, on the one hand, portraying "at least" every second man - but really as many men as possible - as clients of prostitutes, while on the other hand insisting that "a world without prostitution" is conceivable.
This is clearly utopian - what is at stake is not abolition but a ban on prostitution. Naturally one must assume that this would not make prostitution disappear, but simply push it out of visibility. In Sweden, where prostitution is banned and clients - though not the prostitutes - can be severely punished, some findings suggest that this has made things worse rather than better for prostitutes.
"Indications that women in prostitution feel less safe, as well as the deterioration of the situation of migrant women, are blanked out in Sweden in favour of a higher societal goal,"
writes the German Ministry for Family Affairs and Women on this matter.
"The abolition of slavery, too, was considered utopian not so long ago." In this quote from the appeal, Schwarzer and her signatories evidently confuse moral condemnation with factual assessment: that for them - unlike for prostitutes themselves - prostitution is morally equivalent to slavery does not mean that it can actually be abolished in the same way.
"The 2002 reform of the Prostitution Act, which was supposedly meant to benefit the estimated 700,000 women (average) in prostitution, bears the fingerprints of women traffickers and their lobbyists."
With sentences like these, one may doubt whether Schwarzer's signatories actually even skimmed the text before signing it. After all, without any evidence, they accuse the responsible red-green government here of having been bought by international women traffickers, thereby giving them the ability to formulate laws to their own liking and push them through parliament.
"The system of prostitution degrades women to a purchasable sex (…)." Only someone who understands sexual intercourse between women and men, of whatever kind, as the man taking possession of the woman could claim such a thing. In keeping with this, a "deregulation of women trafficking and prostitution" is decried - as if women trafficking, which of course remains banned, had been "deregulated" by the red-green government. The blanket assessment of prostitution as the man buying the woman does not allow for perceiving differences between voluntary prostitution and forced prostitution.
Whether forced prostitution can actually be prevented this way is questionable.
"In my view, the best way to combat forced prostitution is to legalize prostitution, because this would curb the black market, shed light on the darkness of criminal mafia structures, and deprive them of their business basis,"
writes Adrian on the blog Gay West.
Even though it is conceded that the legalization of prostitution has made police raids on brothels more difficult, and could thus also favour illegal forced prostitution, this problem can be addressed without banning prostitution as a whole again (on this, see for instance the Frankfurter Rundschau in a piece on the coalition negotiations).
So the demand for an "abolition" of prostitution shoots, in its metaphors and comparisons - Schwarzer, in another text, even equates prostitutes with sexually abused children - and also in its demands, well beyond what can be factually justified. The reference to forced prostitution is apparently necessary because otherwise the demand for a ban on prostitution could hardly be justified - yet the issue is prostitution as a whole, not the coercion that is already illegal anyway.
But what exactly do Schwarzer and her signatories actually have against prostitution?
Money for closeness, or: why one cannot pay well for sex with the patriarchal dividend
The question becomes all the more interesting since some aspects of prostitution should actually appeal to a misandristic feminist. Here the man pays for a woman's closeness - "closeness" not understood in an emphatically sentimental sense as a meeting of souls, but still as physical closeness. From a men's-politics perspective, this aspect of prostitution is rather off-putting (and for me personally, incidentally, this was one reason why I have never gone to prostitutes).
After all, there is no reasonable reason why a man's physicality, closeness, and attention should be worth less than a woman's physicality, closeness, or attention. If I wish for and can experience closeness to a woman, then my closeness to her is a perfectly sufficient consideration in return - I see no reason why either she or I should be entitled to any further claims to compensation beyond that. The fact that men have to pay for women's closeness is an aspect of prostitution that can make it degrading for men - it's as if a woman would have to be compensated for enduring a man's physical closeness.
Here, however, prostitution evidently fits well into traditional forms of initiating relationships. That the man is to pay first - for instance, to treat the woman on a date - is a traditional matter of course that many women and men still cling to today. This is easily explained by drawing on evolutionary-psychological considerations: the man, accordingly, must first demonstrate his willingness and ability to provide for the woman - and possible offspring - and not to invest his available means solely in himself, in order to qualify as a partner for a woman.
Today, however, since such clear gender-role assignments have long since lost their functionality, the expectation that the man pay for both takes on a different character - at least when it goes beyond the purely playful staging of traditional roles. This expectation now suggests that the man's closeness and attention, as a counterpart to the woman's closeness and attention, cannot be sufficient, but that the woman is entitled to further compensation.
But why are structures in which the man implicitly has lesser worth than the woman, and must compensate for this through financial outlay, unattractive to misandristic feminists?
This can be well explained using a text that happened to appear almost simultaneously with Schwarzer's appeal and which was already discussed here. When Antje Schrupp explains how she became an unfriendly person, citing an experience she had at fourteen as the reason, she is actually drawing on a very traditional literary pattern: that of the initiation story.
But she experiences, as it were, a perverted initiation - not an entry into the world, but into the "patriarchy." Unlike classic female writers such as Jane Austen, who again and again depicted "a young lady's entrance into the world," for Schrupp the consequences of this entry are negative, not positive. She does not gain anything by the world opening up to her and her to it; instead she loses something - as a woman and young girl she was actually already complete, resting within herself, but patriarchal violence tore her out of her center of gravity, so to speak.
This fantasy of comprehensive male dominance, which incidentally bears distinctly narcissistic traits, also shapes Schwarzer's appeal. It is uninteresting to her and her signatories to speak with prostitutes themselves, just as the differences in living conditions between forced prostitutes and luxury call girls, between women on the drug-fueled street trade or in occasional prostitution, seem to be of no concern to them. Male prostitutes or female clients have absolutely no place in this picture, and are at best dutifully mentioned in passing. Prostitution here is simply an occasion to strike up once more the old song of male rule.
But precisely this fiction of comprehensive patriarchal violence re-establishes women's claims to compensation from men - claims that should actually have long since been abandoned in favor of an equal relationship between the sexes. Since women, in a feministically inspired gender politics, are portrayed across the board as victims of a male dominance that remains diffuse yet apparently unshakeable, the compensation supposedly owed to them is, in principle, infinitely large. There is simply no discernible point at which "the patriarchy" and its beneficiaries (in principle all men) would have paid enough for the sin of their dominance.
Precisely for this reason, though, feminists like Schwarzer likely experience prostitution as a provocation. Here too men must financially compensate women simply for approaching them at all - but here the compensation, however large it may be, is in principle limited and is the result of negotiation processes in which both sides participate voluntarily.
That is why, for Schwarzer and others, the thought is so unbearable that there are women who prostitute themselves voluntarily - because then they are not helpless victims of male dominance, and once the man has paid the agreed price, he has done enough and owes her nothing further. This is precisely what the supporters of a prostitution ban do not accept - especially and precisely when the man has paid, he has not, in their view, done his duty, but must instead be punished for having made a woman available to himself as a beneficiary of the patriarchal dividend.
Who exactly is perverse here?
Nevertheless, prostitution is not a completely normal profession. If a schoolgirl told her class that her career aspiration was "prostitute," teachers would probably react with irritation rather than advising her that she would surely meet lots of interesting people there, or similar. However, as a teacher I have also never encountered a boy whose career aspiration was working in garbage collection or road construction. It goes without saying that young men take up these and other, possibly highly hazardous, professions not out of inclination but out of financial necessity. Why is that so much less scandalous than female prostitution?
"Banning prostitution would lead to the absurd situation where sex is legal, earning money is legal, but the connection between the two is not,"
writes Adrian in his text. Perfectly normal, everyday negotiation processes apparently become illegitimate as soon as sexuality is involved, and everyday sexuality becomes illegitimate as soon as it is embedded in negotiation processes. This can only be explained by a highly implausible view of sexuality.
On the one hand, sexuality here is apparently still experienced - against all sex education of the past decades - as something sinful and dirty, as something that also sullies ordinary business relationships that would undoubtedly be legal in other contexts.
On the other hand, sexuality can apparently be redeemed from its sinfulness - when it appears as something pure, uncorrupted, as a completely free meeting of souls. This redemption, of course, is denied to it when it is embedded in everyday negotiation processes and paid for.
In this way, the appeal is shaped by a stark black-and-white image of sexuality that oscillates between condemnation and sacralization, whose two sides are hardly reconcilable with one another. A pragmatic, sober interaction between the sexes is thus hardly possible. This is all the more serious given that the appeal neatly divides both sides of sexuality between the sexes - if the dirty part were not assigned to male sexuality and the pure part to female sexuality, it would hardly be possible to explain, for instance, why (male) clients are to be punished but (female) prostitutes are not.
Schwarzer's signatories may subjectively have the motive of enabling more loving, more respectful relationships between the sexes. Supporting a misandristically motivated ban on prostitution evidently contributes nothing to that. It would be far more sensible to accept that neither sex is, in principle, endlessly indebted to the other - and that love, closeness, and sexuality can of course also be objects of everyday civil negotiation processes, in which concepts like fairness and autonomy are far more important than contrasts of sin and holiness.
One of the cruelest and most destructive German laws I know establishes conditions under which a mother acquires - not only for the children, but above all for herself - a claim to extensive payments from the father precisely by arbitrarily separating fathers and children from one another and preventing paternal care for the children. I know many fathers and children (myself and our child included) who suffer considerably under such arrangements.
By having gotten close to the woman and fathered a child with her, a man has apparently become liable to compensation in a way that overrides all conventional fairness considerations and considerations of the child's welfare. It is such arrangements that cast the principle of money for closeness into law and drive it into final perversion.
So anyone who genuinely wants to promote more loving and respectful relationships between the sexes has good, varied and worthwhile opportunities to become active here.
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Prostitution Is a Deal
Published on 10 November 2013 by Bernd Begemann in "Die Welt"
Bernd Begemann lives on St. Pauli and knows many people from the trade. He considers the ban campaign initiated by Alice Schwarzer demagogic and totalitarian.
I live on St. Pauli. Yes, that's the district where all good Germans pass through at least once in their lives to behave really badly. Differences from the district you live in? Oh, several! For example, a man here can wear women's clothing without being beaten up by "real men" for it. The women you probably call "hookers" walk around openly here, instead of having to hide.
At some point you unintentionally overhear their conversations at the bakery, somehow you end up listening in. Yes, they live in Pinneberg or Winsen an der Luhe, yes, they're proud of their black Golf GTI convertible, no, the neighbors don't know anything. Some "turned their hobby into a job," others chose the lesser evil because they "weren't into the alternatives." You hear a few funny stories, a few sad stories. A bit of melancholy, a bit of anger, a bit of hope. Actually just like hanging out with car mechanics or doctors.
But surely these aren't the women Alice Schwarzer meant with her "Emma" appeal against prostitution, are they? They probably are. In her appeal she calls them precisely the "so-called 'voluntary' prostitutes." Because, you see, these people are so damaged, frightened, traumatized that one cannot grant them anything like free decision-making capacity, and one must under no circumstances let them speak for themselves.
Their self-founded, self-run interest associations? Will-less playthings in the hands of foreign human traffickers. Their contributions to the discussion? Blocked on the Emma forum, because, you see, they threaten to erode feminism. The woman who set out to liberate her sisters cannot bear their disruptive chatter. From this point on, Alice Schwarzer's worldview is a hermetically sealed and rigidly exclusionary system, comparable perhaps to that of a Stalinist in the 1950s: the great war has been won, now it's a matter of finally dividing the world into friends and enemies and drawing the Iron Curtain shut.
While a Stalinist at that time interpreted all worldwide events as part of the "eternal" class struggle, Ms. Schwarzer and her cadres can only grasp the world within the framework of "eternal" patriarchal structures. This is extremely reductive, intellectually lazy, and, in the case of her appeal, totalitarian toward a great many people.
I am outraged by someone who does not accept my neighbors in the district as consciously acting human beings, but only as helpless, backward "victims" who must be led into the light. Yes, this reminds me of the cruel forced conversions of the colonial era, complete with the benevolent posturing that inevitably accompanies "measures" for "containment" and "abolition."
Lately Ms. Schwarzer has been acting like - sorry, I can't find a better word for it - an insidious demagogue. What does a demagogue do? He hides his agenda under the cloak of compassion, of concern: in this case, concern for the poor victims of patriarchy and, if one is to believe the subtitle of her book, for national honour (a classic!). What else does a demagogue do? He ensures that terms no longer mean what they used to mean, but rather now mean whatever the demagogue charges them with.
The demagogue ensures a reinterpretation that he sells to the fascinated public as a given fact. And, one has to admit, Ms. Schwarzer has succeeded frighteningly thoroughly at the latter. Since the start of her efforts, many people in this country see many things differently, are "no longer sure," and say things like "there must be something to it." We no longer see the term "prostitution" as we used to, as part of life. No, now it is something hellish. A few simple, rhythmically repeated reinterpretations have taken hold. They are: Prostitution IS human trafficking. Prostitution IS slavery (what mockery toward people who had to and still have to endure real slavery!).
With your kind permission, I will now relate what the word "prostitution" means for the male and female hustlers, the whores, the escort men and women whom I have had the privilege of meeting: a deal. A rather simple, transparent and time-limited exchange called "give me a certain sum of money and I will grant you intimate attention in your preferred manner." Both sides want it, both sides go their own way afterward. That is prostitution, no more and no less.
When people are threatened, beaten, and forced into sexual acts with others, that is clearly defined as extortion, bodily harm, and coercion. What interest could anyone have in calling these criminal acts "prostitution"? This demagogue wants to declare an agreement a crime. Because the human being behind the demagogue, and this much must be granted him, feels genuine disgust toward this activity, perhaps for emotional reasons, perhaps for ideological ones. But this person has no right to impose his pain on other people who simply feel differently. He has no right to discipline the world according to his personal whim. I say "shame" to Emma's anti-prostitution appeal, because it seeks to strip of agency exactly those it claims to help.
The author is a musician and lives in Hamburg. Source: http://www.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/article121733732/Prostitution-ist-ein-Deal-kein-Verbrechen.html
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Prostitution: Do Sex Workers Enjoy Their Work?
Published by Antonia Baum on 19 November 2013 in "FAZ"
How can it be that everyone has such a clear opinion on the subject of prostitution? Isn't it rather undignified to work at the supermarket checkout for nothing? Doesn't everything have to be changed first, before one abolishes prostitution?
The so-called panel discussion that Alice Schwarzer convened in Berlin to present her book "Prostitution - A German Scandal" was, by its very designation, truly a joke - a dictator's joke that one is only capable of staging if one is either crazy or ruthlessly kamikaze-minded. It is very boring and completely unproductive to rail against Alice Schwarzer, and that is not what this is about here, but the story cannot be told without Alice Schwarzer, because she is the one who wants to save "the prostitutes" (all of them, indiscriminately), whom, for her, are always victims.
Back to the panel last Thursday: up there, alongside Alice Schwarzer, who, of course, moderates the discussion, sit four people who share Schwarzer's opinion, namely the book's co-author, a social worker who runs a meeting place for prostitutes, a former prostitute, and a senior detective - all recruited by Schwarzer to tell Schwarzer her own opinion, which is just as predictable as it is unbelievable, because there are so many people in the audience who hold a completely different opinion, who are not allowed to be heard, because the book's presenter is absolutely certain about what the correct opinion is.
While, uh, discussion is taking place - that is, while everyone on stage reassures each other - some people in the audience shout interjections; a few women try to draw attention to themselves by carrying a banner reading "My job belongs to me," but they are immediately removed by ushers because they hold a different opinion and are not supposed to disturb the sameness up on stage.
Deciding by numbers
And that is really the central point of nonsense in the debate over whether prostitution should be banned or not, whether men should be allowed to buy sex from women (because that is the only model Schwarzer is concerned with), and, quite simply, in the end: whether one finds prostitution right or wrong - yes, the central point of nonsense is that it's about right and wrong and about deciding. More a matter of feelings, then, since there are hardly any reliable figures, neither on the number of prostitutes working in Germany nor on their origins, and consequently it is also hard to answer who does what, why, and how voluntarily.
Alice Schwarzer has so far thrown around remarkable figures, and nobody knows where she actually got them from: 90 percent of prostitutes want to quit, she knows; furthermore, 90 percent of Germany's "fresh meat" allegedly comes from Eastern Europe, and, as a general matter, "over 90 percent" of prostitutes have supposedly already been abused as children. This extremely determined guesswork is thus the hallmark of the debate, as well as of the dispute on the panel, which was originally sparked by the largest coalition of opinion-guessers of all, namely by the signing of celebrities to the "Emma" appeal against prostitution. Even then one wondered whether it was oneself or the signatories who no longer understood the world, because how do Margot Käßmann, Senta Berger, Maria Furtwängler, and Frank Schätzing know with such absolute certainty what is right and how the reality of "the prostitutes" is to be judged? How does one manage such a thing?
Who exactly is "we" and "them"?
Because once one begins to think about it, one's head almost collapses under the great weight of questions: Are there people who regard prostitution as a normal profession? Yes, there are. Doesn't it still hurt them, doesn't it leave damage? Is one even allowed to decide for another person that they may not do something because they might be harmed by it? What is harm anyway? Do sex workers do their work gladly, voluntarily, because they have to? When can one call what one does voluntary? Does anyone go cleaning voluntarily? Is an activity one has to do to earn money still voluntary? Is work even something voluntary at all, and wouldn't it be far more consistent and helpful if Alice Schwarzer demanded an unconditional basic income?
But that would never occur to Alice Schwarzer, who still sits on the panel and, together with her guests, holds forth in frontal-instruction style, no matter that at the sides of the tiers members of the "Professional Association for Erotic and Sexual Services" stand and protest. They have formulated the counter-appeal "PROstitution" and demand the participation of "sex workers" in political processes dealing with the topic of prostitution. They want neither an expansion of police powers nor a criminalization of clients. They are for education instead of prohibition, for state-funded further-training programs, and for respectful treatment of prostitutes. In their leaflet they write: "Everyone talks about us, but nobody talks with us. (...) We are not victims! We are people who have chosen our profession by self-determination, as others do too." But who exactly is "we" here? One doesn't know. All prostitutes? All who call themselves self-determined sex workers?
In Schwarzer's categories, however, such women, standing there completely intact and strong, are inconceivable. They don't exist, they are probably fooling themselves in her view or are otherwise damaged, which is of course a maximal disenfranchisement of these women - but such women may apparently be disenfranchised as long as it serves Schwarzer's ideological super-goal: a world in which men are not allowed to pay women for sex, which for her is equivalent to: men must not buy women, which immediately places prostitution in the vicinity of serfdom.
Schwarzer sees in prostitution a particularly ugly manifestation of patriarchy, and it cannot be denied that when it comes to sex and money, it is always also about power. And it is just as wrong to blank out this potentially harmful connection as it is to hop around on it one-sidedly. Nevertheless, it may be absolutely true for some prostitutes. The social worker on stage speaks of this credibly and, unlike Schwarzer, also with nuance: the women she deals with in Stuttgart are poor, young, often ill, they barely speak German, and are prostitutes because they have to be. She, the social worker, told them about prostitutes who do this job because they want to, and these young women simply could not believe it.
Are clients pigs?
The chief detective describes his average prostitute: between 18 and 20 years old, from Eastern Europe. Then the PROstitution activists call out again: that's not how it is, reality is different. Even though they are not heard this evening, they say prostitution is neither slavery (an odd comparison indeed) nor human trafficking, unless it happens against the women's will, in which case it constitutes a criminal offense. How is one supposed to debate this without knowing more precisely? What do the prostitutes think who stand, worn down and drug-addicted, on Berlin's Kurfürstenstraße and are not represented at all this evening? What would the young women the social worker spoke about say?
Here too: one group, one - and of course the correct - opinion. A young woman, unlike the Femen activists sitting in the audience as Schwarzer supporters, doesn't take off her T-shirt but pulls down her pants and walks across the stage with a bare bottom, which leads to cheers and boos, and after everyone has agreed with each other, with brief interruptions, long enough, a few audience comments are finally allowed: a man in a wheelchair recounts that he regularly goes to prostitutes and has already experienced several times that a prostitute rejected him because of his disability, in which he sees a self-determined act. He cannot recognize the misery described on stage. Furthermore, he is not a pig, furthermore not all clients are pigs.
The problems are called: sexism, racism, poverty
Schwarzer wants to install exactly the opposite opinion in the minds of this country in the future: clients should be ostracized. Ostracism - what a witch-burning vocabulary word in the democratic constitutional state in which we live, as Schwarzer constantly emphasizes. She looks down at the man in the wheelchair and reminds him, quite grotesquely, that as a disabled person he has other options to live a sexually fulfilled life, and besides, it's now someone else's turn. Bang, next. A woman recounts that she has worked as a prostitute for a long time. She's from Bulgaria and has never met a woman forced into prostitution, which Schwarzer refuses to take note of at all, just as she does not hear any of the further contributions that follow, but instead very quickly folds up and cuts off the discussion, which by this point in the evening might approximately be called one.
Later, about twenty people, mostly women, walk through the streets of Schöneberg looking for a bar. Many of them call themselves sex workers and are pretty angry. One of them is named Paulita Pappel and speaks so quickly and cleverly and forcefully that one wishes she had sat on the panel and taken part in the discussion. She is the woman who showed her bottom earlier. Her mother is an Alice-Schwarzer feminist; Paulita is from Spain and is 25 years old. She is currently finishing her degree in literary studies. "When I was 17, I thought the same way! I was against prostitution. Now I earn my money as a prostitute and appear in porn films. I work four days and can live off that for three months. That's great! I had to go on stage earlier and show my bottom, because the discussion is so stupid and one-sided. Prostitution is not the problem. The problem is sexism, racism and poverty! That's what needs to be talked about!"
Another young woman, of whom one imagines she certainly has incense sticks and Indian figurines at home, says: "I would rather massage a man's cock with devotion than sit at a checkout." Sitting at a checkout, cleaning, pushing junk on people at Douglas or somewhere, keeping this misanthropic capitalist grinder running in the most mind-numbing way - isn't that also totally harmful to the mind? Does anyone actually do that truly voluntarily? And isn't that an entirely legitimate question, if one separates forced prostitution, human trafficking, and prostitution?
A sex therapist, who also does something with sexual massages, tells in the pub about his many totally nice but broken high-achieving clients with careers. He said he sometimes also advises them to go to a brothel. Always having to function, constant sex everywhere that they usually don't get at home - that causes tremendous frustration. Our society is like a pressure cooker and sex workers are the valve. Perhaps - no, surely - Alice Schwarzer, if she weren't Alice Schwarzer, would have to demand the abolition of this society.
Then there are two possibilities. Either men fundamentally never get into existentially coercive situations, which is actually quite unbelievable, or women resolve their coercive situations differently from men. If women resolve it differently, then again there are two possibilities. Either men end up in situations just as reprehensible as those of women who prostitute themselves out of such coercion. Why then is there no public discussion about the reprehensible situations of men? Or men accept these situations or resolve them in a morally impeccable way. The interesting thing is that in every possible situation just described, many affected women in the end do not manage to achieve an emancipated solution to such coercive situations. That would say little for the emancipation of women themselves. In doing so, the dear feminists deny women in dire straits a sensible solution to their problems. Might it not be possible that, for a not insignificant number of women in coercive situations, this represents a very simple solution to their problems and is thus indeed wanted, precisely because all other solutions are not so simple?
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On Sex for Payment
Published by Harald Martenstein on 28 November 2013 in "Die Zeit"
I would like to describe how I formed an opinion on a controversial political question about which I was initially unsure. It concerns the ban on prostitution. Alice Schwarzer and others have for weeks been demanding that it be banned for people to pay money for sex. So I thought about the reasons why people have sex with each other at all, or sleep with each other, or whatever one wants to call it. Why do people do that? Are they, prostitution aside, always reasons beyond any moral doubt? And if not: what of it should remain allowed, and what should be banned? People have sex because they are in a relationship or a marriage and find each other attractive both physically and in character. People have sex because they've been used to it for years, even though the attraction between them has diminished considerably. People have sex because they find the other person physically attractive, without thinking about a further-reaching relationship. People have sex because they are under the influence of alcohol or drugs and their judgment is impaired. People have sex because they expect career advantages from it, for instance with superiors. People have sex because the other person is rich and promises them a luxurious life. People have sex because the other person is famous or powerful. People have sex because they happen to feel like it at that moment. People have sex out of fear of being alone, to take revenge on their partner for an affair, to do something for their image, out of pity, out of gratitude, on a whim that seems mysterious to them the next day, because they're looking for variety, out of curiosity, out of boredom, because someone gives them money for it, because they pay money for it, because they're in love, or because they let themselves be talked into it through flattery. All of this undoubtedly exists, and about a thousand other reasons besides, both among men and among women. I find some reasons good, others not. But at the thought that the state should decide for what motives sex - voluntary sex between adults, mind you - should be permitted and for what motives it should not, I feel dizzy. Then I thought about professions. Alice Schwarzer says sex is a humiliating profession. There are people who change diapers for the elderly and wash their genitals, others are proctologists who poke around in the anus, still others take care of corpses or massage strangers' feet. All of this is necessary, but very intimate, and not everyone wants to do it. The decision of whether one finds an activity humiliating or too disgusting probably has to be left to the people themselves. And sex, generally speaking, I don't find dirty or disgusting anyway. Without sex, I wouldn't exist at all, not to mention Alice Schwarzer. I actually think, incidentally, that if I had to choose, I'd much rather be a prostitute than a corpse washer or a proctologist. But if I were alone and couldn't find anyone who wanted to do it with me, perhaps because I'm too ugly, smell really bad, or have an illness, then I would probably also pay money for it. I believe the longing for sexuality is not a criminal wish, both for men and for women. Now, Ms. Schwarzer, you may arrest me.
Source: http://www.zeit.de/2013/49/harald-martenstein-prostitution
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All About Alice, or What?
Published on 06 December 2013 by Antje Sievers in "Die Welt"
For the 2006 football World Cup, 40,000 incoming prostitutes were expected in Germany. Whoever already knew back then that this could only be 40,000 forced prostitutes was Alice Schwarzer. Since then she has learned more. Today she knows better: not all of them, only 95 percent of prostitutes dislike their job, she recently announced. These (along with the remaining five percent as well) are, in future, to be spared their unloved fate. Alice Schwarzer's latest campaign aims at the abolition of the oldest profession in the world. Where does the "icon of the women's movement" get her figures from? That remains the secret of Schwarzer's method of establishing truth, and is basically irrelevant anyway. Because she is not concerned with the repugnant human trafficking, in which there are clearly victims who must be protected and perpetrators who must be punished. She is concerned with a carefully cultivated worldview, according to which men are pigs and women are victims.
Against this there is now an outcry of a special kind: the women organized in the Professional Association for Erotic and Sexual Services are protesting against their being co-opted by the professional feminist Schwarzer. They consider her campaign an act of paternalism. "You cannot help people against their will," says association spokeswoman Undine de Rivière. Because the professionals do not see themselves as victims. Men who pay (or have to pay) for sexual services do not, as a rule, exercise power.
It may be that some of them are pigs - poor pigs, such as those clients "who pay once, want it ten times, and can then manage it twice" (de Rivière on flat-rate clients). But a free agreement between two adults over a service is not the oppression of women - unless one holds the view that women are identical with their bodies and their sex. In paternalistic cultures that's how it's seen, which is why women are forced into full-body veils there. Some people here seem to consider that a good idea too.
The new campaign is what Schwarzer's campaigns have always been: self-staging. That she is an icon of the women's movement is based on a misunderstanding. Actually she is the best friend men have. The chief feminist's worldview did men an inestimable favour early on: they get to regard women as poor little things, as victims who must be constantly promoted and protected. The predominantly purely symbolic acts of reparation are a small price for the practiced friend of women, and gender-appropriate language-mangling only hurts a tiny minority that suffers under the disfiguring of language in public space.
In this image of women there is no room for female rivals who are to be respected. Or for female opponents one should fear. Because a woman can be quite fearsome when she exploits her victim bonus and turns the tables. Whoever accuses a man of sexism or rape is nowadays in an unbeatable position of power: one can ruin livelihoods that way.
Schwarzer's feminism, according to which all men are potential rapists, is certainly misanthropic toward men. But she has, as her biographer Bascha Mika says, "above all one problem in the world: women. In almost all the conflicts and quarrels she has fought out, women stood on the opposing side. She has hardly ever personally clashed with men."
Indeed. She deals mercilessly with women who refuse to follow her. They are "wellness feminists" who are only interested in "careers and men." Others in turn, when they come to her critically, are enablers who "talk the way boys want to hear" and engage in their own "self-tarting."
That women rarely defend themselves against such presumptuousness from the self-appointed "icon" is due not only to a lack of courage, but also to a lack of masochism: Schwarzer's counterattacks are always sexist and always aim below the belt. Whoever contradicts her, she claims, is acting as an informer and is an agent of evil, commissioned and paid by men.
That Alice Schwarzer, too, is paid by men, on the other hand, is not a problem, since she so unquestionably stands for good. Her comfortable existence in Cologne's Bayenturm, where she watches over the direction of "Emma" and over a "women's archive" that draws fewer than 300 visitors a year, she owes to men, including patron Jan-Philipp Reemtsma, who supported her with millions. Another one who mistook the women's movement for Alice Schwarzer.
It took a woman, State Premier Hannelore Kraft, to have the courage to radically cut the state subsidy for a private project of rather limited public interest. That it was of all people Kristina Schröder, the Family Minister, who then helped out with federal funds is a special case of female masochism. Schröder was once attacked by Alice Schwarzer in an open letter as a "hopeless case. Simply unsuitable." She was at best suited to being "press spokeswoman for the new, old, so media-savvy, right-conservative men's associations and their sympathizers."
Yet it is precisely they who have long since made peace with Alice Schwarzer. A troublemaker who keeps her fellow women small is decidedly easier to handle than grown women who don't want to be victims. And that already answers the question of why Alice Schwarzer "is bigger than feminism in Germany." This overwhelmingly double-edged compliment from Harald Schmidt says above all one thing: that the "icon of feminism" has succeeded in keeping the women's movement small.
That it is precisely the "service providers" of the horizontal trade who reject the victim bonus being offered to them is true greatness. Others already feel like victims of sexism at clumsy men's remarks. What do we learn from this? In Germany, feminism has become a female problem zone that is supposed to be smoothed over with symbolic speech acts. None of this has anything to do with reality. At most with Alice Schwarzer.
Source: https://www.welt.de/print/die_welt/debatte/article122616641/Alles-Alice-oder-was.html
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