Sex profiteering – Iceland
Iceland has just banned all strip clubs. Perhaps it’s down to the lesbian prime minister, but this may just be the most female-friendly country on the planet.
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Feral Scholar
Making the Connections
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Curt:
This article is very interesting but also very disturbing to me. It is surprising at how far I have come on this issue. What is disturbing to me is not that I am oppossed to these laws what is disturbing is that I am now in the undecided column.
28 March 2010, 1:03 pmIf you make an activity illegal some of it stops but some of it goes underground.
People who are working in an illegal activity have no recourse to normal courts when they are being abused. Of course if people in the sex industry are slaves in the first place they will not have access to lawyers or the police anyways.
Of course it would be wonderful if no one could make a living in the sex industry.
It would also be wonderful if people were so giving that there would be no need for a government safety net. But no neither is the case now is it.
But what if no one was drug addicted and no one lived in extreme poverty and there were women who still were willing to become prostitutes should they be arrested? What if there were some loser than could not get laid without paying for it should he be arrested?
Well I am being called to set the table I do not think I had anything to add anyways.
Michael Anderson:
I’m applauding Iceland…great! But I wonder if this is working because of the small geographic area, relative physical isolation from Europe and the U.S., and small population of the country.
But that’s no reason to give up, either!
Now if they could just get rid of the U.S./NATO military base @ Keflavik…that might help the strip club problem, too.
28 March 2010, 3:59 pmMichael Anderson:
I stand corrected…base is closed…sorry.
28 March 2010, 4:03 pmJenny:
You realize, however, that Bindel has demeaned transgendered people?
http://nataliaantonova.com/2008/11/09/shorter-julie-bindel-lie-back-and-think-of-england/
28 March 2010, 7:28 pmCurt:
Ok so the strip clubs get closed down but would that not just raise the rate of prositution? Now instead of stripping in a bar won’t women who have been working in this field start to do it privately in motel rooms and the homes of strange men?
29 March 2010, 4:36 pmWould’nt that make them even more vulnerable?
The situation with the sex industry seems to be another one where a society gets screwed no matter what it does to try to correct a moral problem.
I was reading the comments that were made on this subject way back in Febuary of 2005. The one that I thought was the deepest insight is that prostitution exsists to try to help people deal with their alienation. The comment blamed capitalist alienation but I think it should more accurately be labeled industrial alienation.
Once upon a time people did their work together. That might have built a sense of solidarity with other people but the work was long hard and just barely provided enough to live on. There was very little chance for people to devlope themselves when they had to harvest the wheat by hand and thrash it by hand. Sure it might be fun………once.
This does not seem to me to be a damned if you do and a damned if you do not example but more of an example of a continuim and as you move to one side or the other you get very clear set of side effects and when you stay in the middle you have some of the side effects of each end and there is no clear point at which one can say this is where the benifits most clearly outweigh the costs.
The thing about strip clubs and prostitution is they can only be legal or they can be illegal. I can not see how there can be an intermediate position.
DanceDreaming:
Hmm,
I kinda with Curt on this one. Laws against things tend to create a dangerous black market. Sex workers very often report being victimized by the police. Assault, rape and even murder of sex workers often goes uninvestigated. The police used to have a term, NHI. No Humans Involved. Used when the victim was a member of an ‘undesirable’ group, be it racial minorities, known criminals, or sex workers. Never used officially, it does give an idea of the tone that is often still present amongst police forces.
The statement that many strippers get into it due to poverty is telling. Many people get into all sorts of jobs due to poverty, and there are some jobs few would take otherwise. Now there is a difference between being a cashier at a grocery store, and being a sex worker. Physically, emotionally and (in some forms)medically, being a sex worker is more dangerous. But compared to be a coal miner? A tree cutter? A police officer?
Also, some of this danger comes directly from the legal and cultural status of sex work. Even stripping here in the US, though legal, negates some of one’s legal protections. Because strip joints have to go through so many hoops, the owners tend to operate in a realm of gray legality . The business if rife with worker’s rights violations, and dancers rarely have any recourse. San Francisco famously started a union to fight back against this.
What’s missing in this discourse all too often is the fairly central issue. That poverty itself is the problem. Even in the circumstance of sex trafficking. There aren’t enough locals who are willing to do this, at the rates offered, so cartels import cheaper workers, much like garment maker export work to sweatshops in countries where poverty makes horrific conditions acceptable. There are no reliable statistics saying how many of those foreign nationals working the sex trade are kidnapped and enslaved, and how many engage in sex work as the only available work that pays enough for survival. Of course this dichotomy is a false one. As they are illegally present in whatever country, and therefor do not have the right to work, the cartels can control what work is available, at what price. And they cannot afford to go home. But it is an often overlooked fact that many trafficked women beg to not be deported. Regardless of how bad it is, there is nothing better waiting at home.
The central problem is poverty.
Now, there is another issue in this discourse. One that is often decentralized. That is that sex work by it’s nature is dehumanizing to -all- women. And tends to increase the objectification of all women. Which fuels rape culture. The article is incorrect at stating that it is in any way new that anti-sex work laws were put in place on feminist ideals. Prostitution’s illegality was led in large part by the Women’s Temperance League in the US. A pseudo-feminist and decidedly religious group of women. But in the brief time since then, feminism has played a fairly sizable role in fighting against the legality of sex work.
Sexual culture, through most of the world, is hugely focused on male pleasure, male dominance, and female submission, often in coercive manners. This is a problem, and one that needs dealing with on every level. But in a culture where female sexual accessibility and objectification is used to sell -everything-, I feel there is something off about restricting it from being used to sell, well, female sexual accessibility and objectification, frankly.
And laws against it only make it that much worse for those who are poor enough that they will do it anyway.
30 March 2010, 1:20 amDanceDreaming:
Hmm.. On reread, a couple of my points were nonsensical. I wish there was an edit button.
30 March 2010, 1:39 amStan:
The old work=sex meme. “Sex work.”
See how it works? sex-work, construction-work, office-work, restaurant-work.
“Work” is the category, and all these others are subsets. And so “sex” becomes a modifier, less important that the true site of struggle… work.
Here is a quote from Catharine MacKinnon. Those schooled in Marxism will recognize what she is saying, because she uses a Marxist formulation.
“Sex is to feminism what work is to Marxism; that which is most one’s own, and most taken away.”
Making factory parts, being an admin slave, driving a truck… these are always work, some aspect of economic productivity or rent-taking. And we can engage in the tedium of making as many metaphors and comparisons as possible between work and the sex trade, but it doesn’t change the fact that sex is different than these other categories, and has at least as much importance in our lives as work. The sexual dimension of our being is overwhelmingly important. But the category “sex work,” a polemical category by the way, stops sexuality at the discursive gate of “work,” and allows it no further. If we venture past the gate, we will encounter analogies and principles… the liberal refuge from responsibility to human beings.
Sex is not always work. We all know that.
But I will assert that it is never work in that sense (unless you are being deliberately disingenuous), but instead a form of contract slavery (read Pateman) that is all the more cruel for the reason MacKinnon states… most one’s own, and most taken away.
Women used in the sex trade are ruthlessly robbed of their most intimate capacity for trusting human contact. This does not happen in the same way on an admin job, or a construction job. Ignoring this difference is a failure of honesty and good will, and a failure of ethical solidarity with actual people.
Work is also organized as contract slavery (I pay you X dollars between this time and that time to do what I tell you to.), but that does not make work and sex the same any more than saying that dolphins and blue whales are both whales, so they are the same. Sex – in certain situations – can be catagorized as a job, but the reality of sex in our lives goes many miles beyond the subject of work, or contract slavery, and that’s why it deserves special attention in our critiques, as well as the willingness to name what we see in the places and times where “freedom of expression” and-or “labor relations” don’t get to the true bottom of these people’s (mostly women’s) lives. The question is there: Are we our sisters’ keepers?
This little phrase “sex work” is an intentional obfuscation of the manifold differences between sex and work, latched onto by the left (that still does not want to come to terms with a non-liberal account of sex and power) and by the academic pomo establishment. It is sly, sly as a fox, meme-warfare at its most subtle, because once you accept its hidden premise, that sex and work are the same thing, you disappear the sexual power dynamic (or postpone its discussion indefinitely) and put the status of work-and-power back in front of sex-and-power… something the patriarchal left has been working hard at for decades now.
This meme – this term – was forged in a polemic: Sex Work. It abstracts. It moves us further from the stories of these women, stories of cruelty, sex, and power; and it allows us to give more weight to an abstraction – like freedom of expression – than we do to the lived experience of those exploited by the sex trade.
I’ve never encountered a subject more mystified by liberal shibboleths, more bloodstained with evasive fallacies, more provocative of the reassertion of male prerogative (even by supposedly gender-neutral advocates), or that can more quickly turn a living, suffering woman into an abstraction.
30 March 2010, 9:34 am(Boer) Tom:
@DanceDreaming, Curt
I think you might benefit from reading a description of how many (most?) prostitutes end up in prostitution (breaking in and all).
PS Sometimes, it is the father that ‘breaks in’ the child (rape) that leads to more easily becoming a prostitute. Also, I got the link from some white supremacist who was trying to convince me that ‘Africans’ rape more (hmm, I’m not an African? The problem is RSA, not necessarily the continent, and that includes whites in RSA). Well, now you can understand that poverty is at most a greater opportunity to kidnap, the police often being uninterested. Quite often, the police are complicit with the pimps. People who have not been broken in don’t do well as prostitutes; see e.g. Emma Goldman’s description of trying to prostitute herself (Living my Life). Finally, note the use of narcotics to aid the ‘breaking in’ – dagga is marijuana.
30 March 2010, 10:49 amDeAnander:
I’m thinking that “sex=work” is partly obfuscatory and partly revelatory, because… it’s a grimly accurate decription of patriarchal relations, in which “sex” means “women servicing men’s sexual appetites/fantasies”, service work undertaken in exchange for protection, food, shelter, or more sophisticated forms of bribery/payment. Whenever person A offers goods to person B in exchange for a service, with person B being the needier or weaker of the two, I’d call what person B does “work” in the sense of being Bossed. It’s not the same thing as gift exchange.
And this further illuminates our understanding of “work” not as communal effort for a common good (the kind of work that is nearly indistinguishable from play) but as the state of being Bossed: just as most people have a hard time imagining sex without a “bottom” and a “top” (Stupid Question most commonly asked of gay folks by straights: “which one of you is the man?”). In a way the sex=work meme is a moment of radical honesty about the patriarchal sexual paradigm: men are the Boss and women work for them, “putting up with” whatever uses men make of their bodies, or more actively “working” to stimulate men’s arousal and induce orgasm, no matter how boring, distasteful or even painful the activity may be. “Close your eyes and think of England,” the legendary prenuptial advice of Victorian mammas to their daughters, merely transfers the Boss role to the State, and the relationship of feudal loyalty/dependence on the male protector to the “patriotic” loyalty and dependence on the nation-state…
In trad patriarchal culture, “sex” means male physical satisfaction, and for women means something done for an ulterior motive — to curry favour, get a job, keep a provider in the home, earn money, fend off worse violence, get a meal and a roof; in the same way that the enclosure of land forces peasants to work for a Boss, the old patriarchal laws Enclose resources (prohibiting women from owning land, operating a business, having a bank account etc) so that women must submit to sex (or incarcerated chastity, by choosing the nunnery) in order to live in the money/goods economy.
Just as even in the concentration camp, people manage to form genuine connections and express their humanity, even under patriarchy people manage to form relationships of genuine affection, enjoy sexual partnerships that are genuinely tender, loving, playful and mutually delightful. And just as some workplaces are wage-slave hellholes and others are actually quite pleasant and collegial, the terms and conditions of sex-as-work vary from the humane and friendly to the brutal and torturous. But the dominant cultural paradigm is that sex, indeed, is work — for pay or for barter.
And the use of “sex-work” to describe only legally-defined prostitution works very effectively to conceal the work-like nature of “sex” for women outside the expressly commercial nexus…
I was reading an article in the rightwing McLeans (Canadian version of Newsweek or Time, I guess) about sex ed in schools and the outrage that has erupted over the teaching of “sex for health and pleasure” to teenagers. And I’m thinking that at least some of this outrage is aimed at the radical egalitarianism of this form of sex ed: one of the fundamentals being taught is that both women and men are entitled to pleasure in sex, and that girls are not obliged to service boys’ sexual desires and fancies w/o reciprocation. I suspect that this undermining of the rules of patriarchy upsets people at least as much as frank discussions of “unnatural” sexual acts (and are not some of these acts “unnatural” precisely because they contain the possibility of reciprocity?)…
30 March 2010, 12:21 pmStan:
Damn.
The Color Purple comes to mind. I wrote a paper on it in college, so it’s an easy reach.
Stand corrected that the sex=work paradigm has is only mystifying. It does reveal something about work that is rooted deeply in gender, in sex=aggression (the ‘natural’ state).
We see it so often, though, as a dogma. I suspect that the term is a dogmatic one. Even if we can flip the script on it.
At any rate, the possibility of reciprocity – based on what you point out – is a subversive condition? Can possibilites for reciprocity be organized?
Sorry, too little sleep today.
30 March 2010, 2:07 pmRequired:
@ Curt and others worried about making things worse.
You’re making things worse. Sorry, but you are. Many popular arguments against the prohibition of the prostitution industry rely on false dichotomies and assumptions, some of whihc you have articulated.
The first false assumption is that in order to criminilise stripping a society must criminilise the women who do the stripping. This is false. For example, you don’t criminalise and penalise workers who handle asbestos without the proper safety equipment. You criminalise their employers. If that’s not what’s being done in Iceland, it is what’s being done in Sweden with prostitution and it’s working.
Secondly, a false dichotomy which is commonly believed in our society, that is that we as a society have a choice between having an illegal sex industry or a legal sex industry. In reality our choice is between having a an illegal sex industry or that same illegal sex industry (maybe even bigger) coupled with a legal sex industry. The state of Victoria in Australia has been further down the road of legalised sex industry than many first world countries and it has done nothing to elliminate the illegal trade.
People find this perplexing because they often incorrectly compare the legalisation of drugs to the legalisation of prostitution. The arguement that if you legalised drugs you would kill the illegal drug trade is largely true. However, the reason it is true is because a legal drug trade could provide a product which was preferred by the customers (cheaper, safer, less legal risks). A legal sex industry, however, to the degree that it protects women it drives away customers because what a john is buying is the right to use women however he wants. Even simple messures like mandatory condoms drive johns back into the illegal market. So either the legal industry is useless to women becaue it affords them no protection save for the legality of their exploitation, or it is useless as a tool to win customers away from the illegal industry.
What happens when you introduce a legal industry, is that you then permit the industry to use all the tools of demand production that other businesses use. For instance, Casino’s in Melbourne (the capital city of Victoria) now allow you to cash in your chips at legal brothels. The illegal industry has grown in size since the legalisation of prositution.
Perhaps rather than trying satiate patriarchal mysoginistic sexual desires we should try to challenge them as well as any forces that would see us criminilise women in prostitution.
30 March 2010, 9:01 pmxenia:
I think one of the problems with defining prostitution as sex work is this: especially to a person unfamiliar with Marxist categories, “work” is synonymous with “job”.
When the term first occurred, probably it had some beneficial side effects, because it enabled sensitive people with conventional sexual morality to reflect: “I’m doing my job…which I don’t always like…so maybe I shouldn’t be judgmental of those women…They’re just working, doing their job, not always liking it but they have to make a living…just like me.” The moment of empathy was important.
But there are a few catches in this. One of them is that somehow everyone is just trying to do their job. I’ll always remember the whiny Bush in his presidential election debates with Kerry: “I’m just doing my job! It’s a hard job to be the president!” The empathy, the analogy with the self was used within “the little guy’s” mind to justify Bush’s war crimes. This kind of logic enables the system to go on: everyone is just trying to do their best, doing their job, no one is in control, no one is responsible, you can do anything to yourself and other people as long as it counts as a job.
If a prostitute is merely a worker, doing what she’s supposed to do in the grand scheme of things, I’m actually helping her by being her “customer”, I’m contributing to the national economy by circulating more money. As Stan said so often, this kind of thinking encourages abstraction. I’d add the abstraction is all the stronger because there is a false concreteness within it. Everyone is a worker, we all somehow hate our jobs, we just carry on, and that includes the girls. Hence, being raped, abused by the police and the drug dealers, expelled from the country…those are just “occupational hazards.” Shit happens, what can we do about it?
The other big problem is the way that western European and American left, after the struggles of the 1970s, decided to stand for a vague notion of pleasure, and nothing more. As long as it’s pleasure, it can’t be wrong, and that includes consuming coke, consuming people, playing killer video games…There is no firm notion of duty or responsibility among many people who consider themselves leftist, those words sound sour and Stalinist to them.
However, I cannot accept that Che or thousands of leftists from Latin America were tortured and died so that Blair can sell himself as the best leader the world has to offer, or so that a stylish New Yorker can do whatever he wants and buy whatever is on sale in village voice as long as it’s “con-sensual.”
I agree with Stan’s first position: defining prostitution merely as sex work (although it is work) makes it sound harmless.
30 March 2010, 9:08 pmJenny:
One other thing to consider: http://kittywampus.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/against-trafficking-of-whatever-flavor/
31 March 2010, 12:07 amMark:
On the other hand a lot of feminists simply don’t agree that this represents a feminist victory.
http://www.feministing.com/archives/020546.html
While I agree that being a good leftist requires being a good feminist (or at least feminist ally), I have yet to be convinced that the particular sort of feminism espoused here is the only correct one. So, I try to keep an open mind.
1 April 2010, 10:36 amStan:
How about this? We drop the categories altogether. No one is leftist. No one is feminist. That way we won’t get wrapped around the axle with red herrings like ‘which definition’ of feminism…
Let’s take these self-referential categories off the table. But when we do, then let’s agree on a rule: Before we bring up any questions about the “correct” response to the prostitution-porn industry, before we are allowed to discuss the question of legalization versus criminalization or however you want to frame it, let’s have an honest evaluation and description of the industry itself, the women used in it, their lives, histories, etc.
Lets do a power analysis of the industry and see who gets what.
Don’t misread me. This is posted precisely because it raises this legalization-criminalization issue. And not because I am particualry invested in some policy fix for patriarchy. I’ve barely a shred of belief left that policies ever really fix anything. But we raise it again and again because we always hit the same impasse here… this ideological impasse that trumps our having a frank discussion about actual people, actual practices, and actual exploitation. I raise it not because I am for any particular brand-name of feminism. This is not about consumer choice. I raise it because I keep hoping that someday we can come to a shared understanding that in patriarchal society, sex is always inflected with power.
In liberal society, actual social power is concealed and reproduced by abstract equality. Leftists – if I can speak as some kind of leftist – ought to seek out this liberal dynamic and expose it… they do in economics.
DeAnander:
1 April 2010, 11:24 pmDeAnander:
Here’s the — ahem — $64K question. (Just think about the way that that phrase conveys importance and gravity: if a question is “worth” 64 thousand dollars, well gee golly it must be a big one.)
Here’s the article that provokes the question: Would You Outsource Your Womb?
Women in the third world, relatively poor and hungry, are renting out their wombs — literally — to gestate, carry, and bear children via implanted sperm and ova from wealthy first-world customers. Thus reducing childbearing to “labour” indeed — paid labour. Piece-work. The female body — a brown female body, no less — as merely the hired incubator for a white child of the affluent classes…
Just one step further — more technology, more mobility — along the same road as traditional “wet nursing”, nannying, boarding schools: the outsourcing of nurturance and education for children of the wealthy.
A haunting question: Is it possible that this outsourcing of childhood may contribute to the behavioural pathologies of elites, historical and contemporary?
Another haunting question: what does “sacred” mean, if it does not mean “that which should not be subjected to pricing, sale and purchase”? Is the sacred not — by definition — the opposite of the market? Neoliberal ideology has sacralised the market itself, eradicating all other values. What are the implications?
3 April 2010, 2:21 pmDeAnander:
I’m thinking again about the Iceland example and it seems to me the *profiteering* that is the nexus where the State can intervene with laws. Profiteering is raking in money off other people’s labour/bodies, usually by fraud and force. Pimping. Bossing. Extortion. Ransom. Exploitation.
Seems to me that though I may deplore any individual woman’s choice to trade sexual access for money or goods, and any man’s choice to engage in such barter/commerce as a way to get sex, to apply the full weight of the law and the State to such individual transactions gets us into more trouble, perhaps, than it solves. If a woman’s decision to have sex with a man on relatively short acquaintance is strongly influenced by his purchase of theatre tickets, a good dinner, and a dozen roses (or more durable gifts)… well, by my ethical compass that’s a form of prostitution, but should the cops be knocking on the door? Enforcement of laws against individual incidents of sexual barter/trade seems to imply a degree of intrusiveness and micromanagement offering waaaay too much scope for abuse and authoritarianism. But the profiteering of a third party — the pimp, the madam, the entremetteuse, etc — seems like a suitable target for the authority of the community as codified in law; these profiteers are almost always implicated in coercion and extortion.
So much of prostitution would not be happening if it were not orchestrated, enforced, organised by the profiteers (mostly men) who exploit women’s economic and physical disadvantages and men’s “worst selves” for their own private gain. To make this promotion, commercialising, and gain-seeking illegal seems to me harmless to civil society, harmless to the rights of individuals, not excessively intrusive, and quite practical. Besides, it is not an outlier or exception; profiteering/exploitation is named and legislated against in many fields, not just prostitution: the abuse of migrant labour, for example, is and should be illegal. (IMHO many of e.g. Wal*Mart’s labour practises which are presently (if in some cases marginally) legal, should not be).
And this gets us back to the difficulty of pursuing social justice in a culture which has enshrined individualist profit-seeking as a virtuous activity. The two are just not compatible… So, naming “profiteering” as the offence against society seems to me a good start.
5 April 2010, 1:22 amMark:
@ Stan, fine but first we need to make a few things clear. First this lumping together of dancing with prostitution under one roof suffers from the same whale/dolphin problem you mention above. And dancers find the conflation insulting. Now I’m speaking here through second-hand, anecdotal accounts but I have known several dancers and have dated a woman who spent time in the profession. I can tell you from the encounters I’ve had, these women are not fools or dupes of some predatory industry. I can’t speak for immigrants as mentioned in the piece on Iceland, because the women dancing here in the Midwest that I’ve met were mostly small-town locals.
Now, as to who is exploiting whom, at the bottom of the food chain are the ‘losers’ (a term I’ve commonly heard used by dancers) who show up to the clubs day after day and transfer what little disposable income they have over to women who can make them feel liked and desired for a few hours. Sure, there are college guys on a night out and bachelor party groups and that sort of thing, but the real bread and butter of most dancers are overweight, unattractive men who are not particularly successful and have spent years being shunned by women in the real world. And most dancers are completely mercenary in their willingness to squeeze every last possible last dime out of these guys. Now, do the club owners end up taking the lion’s share of the profits? Of course, but no more so than any other capitalist enterprise. And for anyone who doesn’t think the dancers end up with a better percent as their take home than most of us working class schlubs, you’re fooling yourself. As I’ve said, these women are savvy and they’re doing this because it pays a hell of lot better than most of the other jobs available. If they find it’s not to their liking (and many do) then its back to the grind with the rest of us. So yes, club owners are exploiting women, and at the same time women are exploiting men who really shouldn’t be wasting their money on a momentary illusion. There is no doubt that it is a predatory industry, but it’s not as though the participants don’t know that going in.
5 April 2010, 1:35 pmxenia:
mark, some anecdotal evidence to counter yours:
first, most men that i have met in the us who frequent exotic dance establishment are married and have kids. now, i’d suggest that their children are at the bottom of the food chain, if daddy pays for a lap dance on his day off. not to mention it is not very pleasant for his wife either.
most exotic dance establishments in western europe have a heavy contingent of legal to semi legal women from eastern europe. they are much cheaper, easy to import through temp work schemes, and much, much less likely to cause legal problems. in many cases, they barely speak the local language and are hated by local women in the same business for dragging the prices downward. especially in recent years, it’s become easy to get sex without condoms for less than 10 dollars because of romanian, russian and bulgarian women (whereas local women charged at least 50 for something along those lines). i’d say the line between dancing and prostitution establishments in pretty thin in those cases.
in europe, chances are that any woman who freely chooses sex-related work (not out of poverty, drug habits, contact with violent boyfriend) will be independent instead of connected to an organization, which simply skim off too much money.
back to the us: if women were given health care and education money, i think the number of girls who performed exotic dance would significantly drop. i know three women from college who went into exotic dancing and none of them liked to talk about it. in all three cases, their academic performance suffered a lot and they were telling me they did not enjoy dating as much as they did before they started. one of them did not date anyone for 10 years after she finished, because she said she had heard too much nasty talk and she couldn’t stand the thought that some of it was in every man’s head.
there is nothing empowering about plastic boobs and drunken stares.
6 April 2010, 3:33 amxenia:
ps i should mention that since college tuition is still very low in continental europe (between zero and 2000 dollars per semester depending on the country), i’ve never heard of someone going into prostitution or exotic dancing because of college expenses. people tend to tutor kids or work at restaurants (more recently and nefariously, at call centers) for some extra cash.
that particular reasoning — sex-related work for college — simply does not exist culturally, when i first heard of it in the us i laughed. however, in the uk, where tuition is high and medical care shrinking, the situation is similar to the us.
finally, in iceland, most local women are quite strong and aware of their rights because of a vibrant feminist movement and certain historical preconditions (males were often abroad and women had to depend on themselves). the difference between what a man can do with them and what he can do with eastern europeans is immense.
6 April 2010, 3:43 am