Before prostitution was legalised, the girlfriend of a friend was asked by a rich businessman to sleep with him for a large sum of money. She refused, but another friend said that he would have accepted, on the basis that he would clean out a cess-pit if offered enough money.
A third friend replied that there was a difference between cleaning out a cess-pit and being one.

"...conscious of smashing patriarchy and capitalism."

I dunno, isn't she supporting both patriarchy by selling sex to men, and supporting capitalism via the commodification of sex?

Kia ora bro,

Perhaps something that would help is reading Wendy-O-Matic's "Redefining Our Relationships", which discusses variations on open relationships, or "The Ethical Slut", or anything by Annie Sprinkle, on feminist perspectives on sex work.

Some of the issues you're having are related to your understnding of your place as the primary relationship with your partner.
Some of it may be more to do with common (mis)conceptions about sex work in general.

Ultimately, the choice to engage in sex work is primarily the responsibility of the person who is engaging in sex work; but partners need understanding and reassurance to cope with the reasonable feelings which occur.

Some libraries may carry the above books, but you may find a radical bookshop to be the best option to get your hands on them.

arohanui ki a taatou,
na Keri

Dear Brother,

Did she ask you how you felt about this before embarking on this career?
If not- then 'ditch the bitch' and find some respect for yourself man. Important decisions like would be discussed in a healthy relationship.

yours,
Agony Uncle

If your female partner is working in the sex industry without your consent than the patriarchy has already been smashed in your world.
Maybe it's time to start looking at doing something about the damage caused by the matriarchy.

Sam is damn right - imagine how horrible it would be if there was unity in action among anti-corporate activists, building a force that could take on the capitalist parties on equal terms. Why, my favourite pasttime of hanging out on Indymedia and slagging people off who differ from me by 2% would be ruined!!! Horrors, I might have to actually ACT on my beliefs rather than just talking tough with my r-r-r-revolutionary mates down the pub!!!

speaking as a sex worker, with several lovers (one i started seeing before i started working,one not) its not something i would ask permission for! its my body, i do what i like with it.
i do talk quite a lot with my lovers about work, but if i felt i always had to defend myself to them i probably wouldn't. as basically i already spend a lot of energy educating people about sex work,and you reach a point where you want some time not being an outreach worker, 24hours a day, and to have some space for yourself. to be able to tell a friend that work was shit today without this statement wiping over all the times you told her work was good (cos it was!)
other than this its hard to comment, since the person who wrote the post didn't say what kind of insecurities hes experiencing. if its fear something bad could happening to his friend, i would say: trust that she can deal with tough situations, i'm sure shes an amazing person. if its worrying about what other people might think of her: be proud! if its insecurities about a non-monogomous sexual relationship, keri#s advice is really good.

to the anonymous comments:
one of the oppressions that patriarchy creates is monogomy, and the idea that women who have multiple lovers or sex with different people are filthy/whatever. that sex work undermines that is
a major plus for me. i like sleeping with married men, and women. so there!
i like sleeping with people i don't know. i like that i can do this, get money for it instead of working 40hours a week in job i hate. i like pissing on cops and getting paid for it, whipping people, holding hands, and listening to all the crazy shit my clients tell me.

re: 'I dunno, isn't she supporting both patriarchy by selling sex to men, and supporting capitalism via the commodification of sex?'

well, i dunno, isn't selling bread the commodification of a basic survival need? but i don't see people working in bakeries getting shit for this.

in a postcapitalist society i'm sure i'll still be having sex with strangers.
until then, i consider my work a redistribution of wealth.

Thank you for clarifying that sex work is principally about money.
What are your feelings about necrophilia, which is another paraphilia involving sleeping with people you don't know?

well, i do have a lot of sex with people i do know, and of course have a lot of clients i see very often. thats also quite great :)

um, well of course sex work is about money, that's where the 'work' part comes in. how did you not get that before?

I'm a man who'se been friends with many sex workers, one of whom I flatted with. I keep in touch with developments in the more public industry, though not the more private male-male sector of sexwork.

Ive also studied sexwork institutions for an honours paper in sociology. I analysed the institutional mechanism formed by the structural relationships between Police, Newspapers, and Parlour owners in the pre-PRA (Prostititution Reform Act) era. This anaysis was based on all the 200 plus submissions made to the Health Select Committee (except a few that were totally embargoed, being too revealing of the submitter's identity).

I think the Prostitutes Collective is the best contact point for genuine researchers and for those who in their personal lives want to know more about the industry in order to offer support to workers. I must emphasise that in my experience workers do not need to be helped, in fact this is usually a disguised form of attempting control by taking control away from the workers themselves. Workers in most situations can exert forms of personal and peer control over their conditions of work, if their methods of so doing are not sabotaged from outside. The Prostitutes Collective is peer-comprised organisation based on the community and personal empowerment and harm reduction principles of health as outlined in the Ottawa Charter.

From my perspective, most forms of work are unhealthy to some degree, as well as adding to the resources and normality of an exploitative, unequal capitalist system of domination. Sex work however, as well as contributing in this way, contains powerful elements of worker control over conditions of work, particularly relationships.

As one might expect, with this greater potential control comes greater accountability, not with a boss necessarily, but to oneself, partners, family and wider social networks. This accountability will be felt as continuous difficulties, and as a need to work, effectively unpaid, on self-social analysis.

But how could it be otherwise, especially with reference to an anarchist society where we could not allow work and play to be neatly commodified and separated because that would hand over the essential control to the market and authoritarian forces that use commodification as a tool for domination via the social unaccountability of market relationships.

Sexwork is clearly enmeshed within a node of capitalist gender and sex relationships. and an (arguably) older node of anti-sex puritanism linked to patriarchal misogyny.

Yet, if we are to take control of everyday work, we must be prepared to do the implicit (and radically active) work required by such control. Sexwork offers a valuable example of this type of ongoing need to carry out the work of mutual support, as opposed to the 'business as normal' work of competition, stigmatisation and an ongoing legacy of mishealth.

One way of approaching sexwork difficulties is to consider that the only healthy form of work in a capitalist society is the struggle to 'make a non-harmful living from deviancy'. Compliance is death! And worse than death ...

Solidarity with sexworkers then?

Steve L

It's interesting that Swedish and Scottish parliaments have recently imposed greater restrictions on prostitution by penalising clients (max. NZ$30,000 fine in Sweden), on the basis that prostitution is a form of violence against women.
NZ has taken a radically different direction, possibly following the pragmatic philosopy that if a crime is widespread and enforcement expensive, it should be legalised. (Lowering the drinking age to 18 is another example.)
On a cynical note, one could observe that legalising prostitution and lowering the drinking age both increase government tax revenue.

Making serious decisions about your career without consulting your partner is wack.

hi
thanks for all the feedback it has been helpful!

Just to make a few points.
My partner DID talk with me about it. Infact its been the hot topic for awhile now, and i did agree that it is okay for her to do this work.
In saying this, it does not mean there is no struggle with myself and my emotions. I knew that I would find it hard but it is a decision I made to challenge myself. And certainly it is challenging.
So to reply to reply to some comment:
"..."...conscious of smashing patriarchy and capitalism."

I dunno, isn't she supporting both patriarchy by selling sex to men, and supporting capitalism via the commodification of sex?"
Thats a good point which I too thought. However, she is teaching these men respect for women. (to a degree). She tells them they are disrespectful if they touch her without consent. She yells at her clients for making generalized comment about women. As for supporting capitalism - well i think capitalism is what we have at the moment. Though I cannot wait for economic and social revolution, it is as much an anthropological experience for her (and me) as when i got jobs in factories assembling furniture and whiteware for export.
But yes - generally i do believe sex work is a blurry line of dismantling ideas of dominant men.

Keri - thank you for the book suggestions. I have read parts of the ethical slut and redefining our relationships. They provide the inspiration to breathe and relax!!!!

thank you steve l and the anonymous sex workers comments !!!

A good few back, when we were students, I found out my mates girlfriend was working in this industry. Rocked me for about 3 days & then I realise she hadn't changed. I had just found out something more about her.
He did think she was having an affair, so she came clean about what she had been doing & that we had often got drunk on the proceeds of her job. She didn't stay in it long after that - clear some debts etc.
It was a bit stressed but they've been together ever since, married, kids, & professional carrees.

Back then the Cops kept a registar of workers in Christchurch & I don't think they've destroyed it yet.

Related topic - I'm concerned about street prostitution.

My concern is one of saftey as once in the car anything can and does happen .

I was thinking Council/Min of Health should provide a motel type complex(s) as an alternative.

It would require the Coucil to licence to run it and I'm not offering an answer to those who don't want to use this type of facilty.

Any ideas/comments would be appreciated.

Well, the cops were supposed to destroy their file of records from those registration books. That was part of the PRA requirement, I understand. But last I heard they had refused to do so.

The information on these files was coerced, since doing sex work wasnt illegal, only soliciting and living of the earnings of sex work. The cops were not investigating any crime, but treated everyday people in a stigmatised job as if part of an ongoing crime situation.

The cops forced workers into giving private information to them because otherwise the workers couldn't be employed in any up-front parlour. Without police approval, private workers couldn't advertise for clients in the Press.

Then the cops kept the information after they were supposed to destroy it. I understand they 'closed' the file, but merged the information into other databases. But who knows what to believe. These are cops after all and not a thing they say is trustworthy.

I believe that under the general ethical codes about private information that float around, the cops would, as a minimal requirement, need to contact the individuals involved and ask if its ok for that info to be kept, or maybe edited and kept. But the nature of cops is to want all information, same as they try every little slimey trick to expand the entries in their DNA database. Cops are an information-maximising transnational corporate, in alliance with the profit-maximising corporate states.

I'm fascinated by the idea of CCC-supported motel setups. Workers in Chch at times have set up safe houses along similar lines to take clients to from the street. Rooms are rented for half hour or hour periods. Is this the sort of thing being considered? Or longer term rental?

Some comments:

I cant imagine CCC wanting to take on the legal and political risk of such a venture. The last CCC official I talked to sev weeks ago said that his advice to CCC had consistently been to ignore the actual sexwork transaction and to concentrate on health/hygiene/disturbance to residents issues. More like a clean up afterwards deal.

Now this proposal of motel units would 'package' the actual transactions in a healthier, or at least more monitorable environment. But CCC would thereby assume a degree of responsibility. What would the more precious of Chch Councillors think of that?

And I wonder what clients would think of it? Although sexworkers control transactions, clients can be timid creatures and easily scared off, particularly, I imagine, by fears of surveillance.

Some aspects of this proposal remind me of the needle exchange dynamics of trust and distrust. Unless the rooms were free and first come first served, any record-keeping would be a way of measuring the more secret, hard to quantify aspects of the industry. Now is that such a good outcome for the people being measured? How much is a degree of safety worth in terms of increased surveillance?

The proposal seems an attempt to regulate the industry (somewhat) from the inside. The last time CCC tried to regulate the industry from the outside, the Prostitutes Collective took them to the cleaners in Court. Expensive. This would be cheaper. It would reduce certain risks. But who knows with CCC. Their decisionmaking can be incredibly flakey.

Another factor lies in local government being seen to be competing with brothels, which are now a completely legit commercial enterprise, and mostly not nearly so profitable as in previous decades. Commercial brothel owners have loathed street workers because of the competition with people who don't pay rent or other overheads, so will spew if CCC gives material support to street workers.

I suspect CCC will want to wait and see whats happening in other cities before making financial and policy committments.

Its a fascinating and engaging proposal though!

Steve L

This proposal was born from involvement/witnessing a serious assult.

Very much a harm reduction thing, like the needle exchange.(I've been told Christchurch's nick name is Needle City).

The hope is to tie it to the new focus on City Living. Make the city nicer/safer by managing this industry so as not to impose on new inner city residence.

A quisling attempt to appease the sensibilities of the chattering classes when what is inteneded is bring a level of basic human dignety and safety to sex workers.

Mike

i think a city council run facility for street workers is quite unrealistic, for different reasons.

in köln a solution has been the creation of drive-in cabins, with emergency alarm buttons. not very pretty, but very functional.

i've seen other (quite inspired ) designs for portable spaces for street workers to use, but I don't know if the designs have been put to use anywhere yet . no doubt they would be quite expensive to make....