All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [213]
“Decent work” includes the opportunity to earn a larger salary with accrued experience and expertise, whereas women in sex earn less as they accrue experience, and as they age, they are disposable and pushed out of the marketplace. Additionally, occupational and workplace safety is included in the Pillars of Decent Work and is minimal to nonexistent for most prostitutes. Standard workplace perils include risk of unintended pregnancy, exposure to lethal diseases, extremely high rates of violence, torture, and murder, and a lower rate of pay for attempting to avert such hazards. There is swift punishment from “management” for attempting to self-advocate and squalid living and working conditions devoid of basic services such as safe drinking water and sanitation. Furthermore, the vast majority of prostitutes lack the ability to bargain collectively and to create social dialogue that advances their rights, security, and dignity, all constructs that help define what decent work is and means. Additionally, trauma, racism, and mental illness are known to inhere in prostitution, and therefore once more such “work” cannot fit the international criteria of “decent.” Please see http://fap.sagepub.com/content/8/4/405.abstract; http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/faq/000008.html; and “Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries: An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” (Melissa Farley, 2003).
(For a discussion of how the Four Pillars of Decent Work relates to public health and achieving the Millennium Development Goals, see http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/pardev/
download/mdg/2010/mdg-dw-1-2010.pdf.)
Many advocates have adopted (with regard to women who “choose” prostitution) more accurate terms such as “economically forced prostitution,” which underscores the choiceless choice nature of the decision as made by men and women who resort to abdicating their sexual autonomy and physical integrity in order to survive. Another term that is more honest than “commercial sex worker” for millions is “exploitative prostitution,” which underscores that the nature of the interaction with a client is intrinsically exploitative, given, inter alia, the asymmetry of the power between the person demanding sex and the person who is unable both to decline and to find an alternative means of generating income for herself (and her children).
Evidence that exploitative sex is not work by all reasonable definitions of work is abundant. Perhaps no research is more compelling, however, than a nine-country survey of prostitutes in which more than 90 percent said they desire to exit prostitution immediately (Farley, 2003). Women and men are in paid sex as a sequel to abuse (http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/factsheet.html; http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/MeetingAbstracts/ma?f=102206974.html; and http://www.prevent-abuse-now.com/stats.htmcite), out of desperation to survive, and/or because a person more powerful than they are has forced them. This, simply put, is not work; it is abuse. Therefore, calling a woman who endures abuse to survive a commercial sex worker cunningly disguises that the transaction was in any other setting a crime. To summarize Catharine MacKinnon, when a rapist pays his victim, society no longer regards him as a criminal, he’s just another john.
For a discussion of prostitution as gender violence, see Sheila Jeffreys, The Idea of Prostitution, especially chapter 9 (North Melbourne, Victoria, AU: Spinifex Press, 1997); Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sex Equality, especially chapter 10 (Eagan, MN: Foundation Press, 2001); and https://member.cmpmedica.com/index.php?referrer=http://member.cmpmedica.com/cga.php?assetID=363&referrer=http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/sexual-offenses/content/article/10168/48311.