All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [212]
6 Our guide into Phnom Penh’s netherworld: To learn more about the amazing Mu Sochua, please see her website, http://musochua.org/. For an American news story on Svay Pak, see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4038249/ns/dateline_nbc/.
7 She founded Khemara: Please see www.khemaracambodia.org.
8 Younger and younger prostituted women: In recent years, it has been standard to call prostituted people “commercial sex workers.” The term, which is used by the UN, WHO, and other agencies, was introduced in an attempt to find nonpejorative language to describe prostitutes. It was also hoped that use of “CSW” might help de-stigmatize prostitutes. Initially I used this phrase, but after extended exposure to prostituted women, I stopped. The term is inadequate, misleading, a hollow euphemism, and it sanitizes horrific realities while helping some users of the term to feel distanced or even absolved (because, after all, it’s just “work” they are talking about). Instead, with the guidance and input of prostituted people worldwide and their advocates, I now use expressions such as “exploitive paid sex,” “women trapped in prostitution,” and “economically forced prostitution,” among others. The reasons are many, the debate about language interesting, and unfortunately, most of it falls outside the scope of this book. Because it is very important, I include a brief overview here and hope readers will pursue this subject in their own hearts and minds.
Three points must be made immediately: One, the preferred terminology in no way diminishes or discounts women trapped in prostitution who seek to find and use their voices, develop agency and self-efficacy, and regard themselves as economic actors. Indeed, such a bold and difficult interpretation of and response to one’s context is often the meaningful basis for improvements that make the difference between life and death and can help protest gross human rights violations, such as forced HIV testing (see, for example, http://plri.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/ugandan-sex-workers-petition-parliament-over-hiv-bill/). Two, of course, every individual has the right to self-name and designate his or her work, and I honor and respect the usage of “CSW” when it is a prostituted woman herself who prefers to be called such and not a label applied to her by a supranational agency, however well-intentioned (this includes PSI, which still uses the expression, to my disappointment, although we are seeking terms that “bridge the language of our funders with the dignity of our beneficiaries” [Karl Hofmann, PSI president]). Three, the term CSW can be appropriate for the tiny minority of people for whom a full spectrum of economic options, job training, and education is available, who genuinely, of their own empowered free will, with a full understanding of the nature of paid sex, wish to sell their bodies. This group, however, is indeed very small and exists largely in the imagination of the patriarchy. See, for example, Helen Benedict, Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes, especially “Rape Myths, Language, and the Portrayal of Women in the Media” (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Stephen J. Schulhofer, Unwanted Sex: The Culture of Intimidation and the Failure of Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
My reasoning includes, and is not limited to, the fact that prostitution is inherently violent,