Does your job include men you don't desire reviewing, touching and penetrating your body plus a daily fear of intimate injury, unwanted pregnancy, STIs, revenge porn, robbery, rape and murder at the hands of your clients? No? Then it's not comparable to #prostitution.
I once did an internship for a film maker and the boss made me cry within 2 days by myself in the bathroom. I guess this experience means I know what it's like to be in prostitution!! Does that make any sense? No it doesn't. Let's not pretend a desk job is remotely comparable.
I've experienced threatening and dangerous situations because of misogynistic men. This might give a little insight into what prostitution is like. But I didn't have to endure them touching me to make rent or eat and that made ALL the difference.
There's such an unwillingness to state that there's anything inherently harmful & dangerous about having to see dozens of often seriously misogynistic physically likely stronger men one usually doesn't know to make ends meet. #Prostitution still cuts lifes short when it's legal.
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Having made terrible experiences with window #prostitution in Amsterdam, the city plans to build a mega-brothel euphemistically called an "erotic center" instead. 100 women in rooms plus social and health service, security, hospitality, entertainment, education & cultural events.
In Germany, we call these places "mega brothels" and we have many of them. The biggest is the Pascha brothel in Cologne with 150 individual rooms. Such places may also include strip clubs, restaurants, spaces for concerts and business meetings. None of this has made women safe.
Not only are mega-brothels dehumanizing to the women in it, presenting them often based on "flavor" as in sorted by race or transgender status, bouncers and cameras have not made them remotely safe. The Pascha in Cologne has seen drug and human trafficking + 1 murder & 2 attempts
I actually go out of my way to not say that #prostitution is paid rape for every woman in the trade. I always say "many" or "countless" or "often". I never point to individual women and say "you were raped". That's not my place and it doesn't help anyone. What I do want is...
...for the many women who felt traumatized by johns including the not overtly violent ones, the seemingly ordinary ones, who stick to agreements to be able to trust that feeling and not be gaslit into "if this upset and haunts you, you were in the wrong profession".
I do think johns should be criminalized cause I think exploitation is the rule not the exception. But additional acts of violence (robbery, strangling, sudden assault etc) should carry additional sentences which is my understanding of the implementation of the abolitonist model.
I know this isn't a scientific study but I just wanna get a vague sense of what sadistic "sex" acts present in the legal German sex trade people think are harmless and what shouldn't be normalized and possibly illegal.
Let's start with hitting to the point of brusing.
Strangulation which btw is never fully safe and always carries a certain level of risk of brain injury and death
Making smn drink urine?
I know I struggle to even see this as a sex act... there's no stimulation of anything but sadism??
Some people are calling me a liar for saying the commercial sexual exploitation of teenagers aged 16-17 was legal in Germany till 2008 & in Switzerland until 2013.
Now some man is defending legal CSA of 16-17 years olds saying it ain't rape. Germanys age of consent is 14 so legally he's correct. Morally however he's just exposing himself as pro nonce. Survivors of this legal child rape are adults now but they can see your comments btw.
Trying to make people have compassion for raped kids is some of the hardest work feminists have done since the first wave. When people won't even acknowledge that paid or unpaid abuse harms children it's heart wrenching even when you're not personally a survivor.
#Prostitution itself is dehumanizing. The societal stigma that blames women and pretends the industry exists because of "nasty greedy nymphos" is just the top layer of hatred. The industry itself hates women. This shows in the way that women have to advertise/are advertised. A 🧵
I'm just going to describe the images I see logging onto a legal #prostitution advertising website in Germany, where supposedly regulation and bureaucracy keep women safe. First the name: "KaufMich" means "BuyMe". Not "BuySex", site owners knows its women for sale, not sex.
Most images are of either women's chests or butts. Some include a face (a powerful blackmailing tool for anyone trying to punish her), but many are just headless shots of (half)naked breasts, butts, crotch. For fetishists there are feet and even pregnant bellies (illegal but nvm)
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.
Mind you literal brothel and escort agency owners can host massive conferences about how to best alter laws in their interests and squeeze women in the trade for every last penny - but the big protests happen when women say: "To me and many more prostitution was paid rape".
Just the act of speaking about surviving prostitution is triggering to most survivors. Now imagine speaking about your most painful experiences while outside people are screaming about how you're the one responsible for women in the sex trade being raped and murdered by men.