Aqvarvius - Your participation in forums concerning prostitution, sexual molestation and domestic violence continually present you as having intimate and comprehensive knowledge of these spheres.

As has been suggested by other posters, if this is because of your work, then I suggest you are in the wrong occupation. Your lack of comprehensive knowledge (note the qualifying adjective "comprehensive", please), unwillingness to admit fair and balanced viewpoints, lack of human compassion and calumnious generalisations, whether created by work burn-out or by allowing personal experiences to colour all other considerations, inevitably lead one to the above conclusion.

Adopting a nom de plume does not entitle you either to make libellious statements such as "strippers don't draw the line at anything". This is gross defamation.

Do you include the author as one of the "feminists, who conveniently forget many men are sex workers"? If so, please note she specifically introduces her subject as "human" (i.e. not gender specific) trafficking. She also clearly condemns the "sex trafficking of millions of people" (once again, not gender specific) and introduces the fact (unarguable by anyone's standards) that these people are "mainly women and girls". Thus she is not "forgetting" males, merely flagging that her article will concentrate "mainly" on the majority of human traffic.

Once again, other posters have suggested that there is no impediment to you or anyone else posting well-researched, factual articles concerning the male minority in these issues.

Read this article again: there is no colourful or hyperbolic suggestion concerning women chained to lamposts - the coersion and entrapment is characterised in more insidious ways. Neither is the fact, culled in part from The Prostitutes Collective of Victoria, that 7 out of 10 sex workers (no gender specifics here) wanted out supportive of the picture of the happy hooker which your intimate associates appear to have painted for you.

We would also all benefit from empirical data from police statistics or Sex Worker associations substantiating the claim that to-days pimps are "very female".

p.s. - To whoever asked? Googling the words "1999 swedish government legislation prostitution" brings up 332,000 sites to choose from.

The women's rights movement fought against gender discrimination, so I find it interesting, the proposals to criminalize the purchasing of sex and not the selling of sex.

If one wants to fight against prostitution, should both the seller and the buyer be prosecuted?

Or are we on the dawn of a new era of having one law for men and another set of laws for women?

Always surprises me that other women have to frame sex work within poverty to understand how sex workers can (and indeed would choose to) have sex with men for money.

In fact there are many of us who do sex work, of course for the money, but also because we enjoy it. Personally, I have found in sex work the space to experiment sexually in a highly negotiated way that I control. Sometimes my work includes soft, intimate, teasing, tickling and touching and other times it can be playful, active, aerobic.

I think the obsession by anti sex work feminists with controlling and misinterpreting the experiences of sex workers is perverse.

The Swedish model doesn't work. The concept is completely flawed. Only non sex workers could have dreamt up the idea that criminalising the 'buyers' of a service would not have a detrimental impact on the 'sellers' of the services. The real impact of the criminalisation of clients is that clients (in order to avoid detection) dont go to the homes of sex workers (where many of us prefer to work) because a building is easier for police to surveil. So we (the women used to the comfort of our homes) have to go out and meet clients in public spaces, bars etc.

Having spoken to many individual sex workers in Sweden both on line and in person it is clear to me that the Swedish model does not stop the industry but does severley inconvenience the women in the industry and means that we often do jobs in spaces that we have not set up for the purpose and without our own support networks nearby.

Again I think a little less meddling in what is thought to be better for us and a bit more listening to what we are shouting clearly would help.

We want our work and our clients decriminalised! We don't want re-training! We don't want our sisters from South-East-Asian countries labelled as sex slaves! and we don't want your help!

Debbby-doesn't-do-it-for-free

Romany, Why not come onto this thread with something to add to the conversation rather than personal assaults and self-righteousness. Get out and talk to some of the real people for a change rather than holding to the ones you think you can manipulate with your political feminism. There are eight to fourteen women at any one time working the street just down the road from me. I talk with them many a night and always stop in passing to see if all is well and they are safe, give out condoms and other street survival bits. Sometimes safe drug use kits depending whos in the neighbourhood. Not one of them is being forced to work or being battered by a male. They all come from other conventional work forces and have made the decision for themselves and began by inquiring and seeking out other women who knew the ropes. Same for the gay men and the trannies I know that work their own areas and have their own client lists. Prostitution is a multidimensional subculture with in our society and not some basin of victimization or some sick feminist caricature of pseudo-male dominance.
As for your “libellious statements such as "strippers don't draw the line at anything". This is gross defamation.” BS! First little miss self-righteous get your self a dictionary. If your going to use emotive language at least use it in context. Secondly,that comment was made in reference to DavidJS, “Even strippers draw the line at sexual contact.” Which in itself is a grossly misrepresented statement. Secondly, as I have posted. It is not the strippers per-se who draw the lines, rather the law and how they are enforced by individual management. Many strippers both dance and hook. It's a fact. Get over yourself.

A big thank you goes out to Debbie. Good post. And you make some very valid points on working environment and support networks. On my excursions through the streets I spend a lot of time with the drug addicted girls and boys that use prostitution to facilitate their habit.

Control is an interesting word. Money controls the sex of prostitution. The person paying has control. With out the cash the clothes stay on. I am sure a very small minority of men and women do like the work of prostitution but that is not to say that the vast majority are working in the industry because there is no where else they can earn that same money, (and from the working girls I have known it is never as much as you would think given the amount of "rent" paid per “client” for their room in a legal brothel – often classed as “self employed” so the brothel owner has no work place responsibility for them). The fact is that poverty and the associated need for money is why most women and men work in prostitution - if they were able to earn an equivalent income, (often not that much), out side of this field they would. But often due to the effect those previous experiences of violence or a previous criminal conviction have on a person it is difficult to see any other choice than one on offer and that is prostitution.

It is interesting that some still think that men “need” a “woman/girl” or “man/boy” for sexual satisfaction. I think in regard to prostitution what they seek and pay for is sexual control and power. If they need gratification they always have the option of solo sex. The power that cash gives them to have sex with a person they choose who would otherwise not have sex with them what men pay for. They get off on this power being able to pay for sex and then keep going back for more.

I do think that the “sex industry” should be legal as if it were not it would surly be whole lot worse for those women/men who are prostitutes. The industry requires much tougher regulation and enforcement of this regulation including exit programmes.

"On my excursions through the streets I spend a lot of time with the drug addicted girls and boys that use prostitution to facilitate their habit." I think that statement tells you that all is not rosy in the sex industry. However, with prostitution you can earn enough money to feed a drug habit - as opposed to bar work or house cleaning. And prostitution does have more flexible hours than being a bank teller. But all that shows is that those sort of jobs have poor pay and conditions. It doesn't make prostitution any better.

In terms of choice, people choose to gamble and take drugs. They will also say they enjoy taking drugs and blowing their money on the pokies. I'm not one to stop them but it doesn't make these choices healthy or desirable. In fact, I think prostitution should be decriminalised wherever there are laws against it. But I don't think it should be legalised otherwise we'll end up like we have with gambling - where the government becomes dependent on the tax revenue and so has a stake in expanding the industry.

I still think you can't dismiss the elephant in the bedroom (pardon the cliche) of sex work being so gender biased. Do we ignore that fact that men, rather than women, end up in prison? Do we not worry that men, rather than women, become victims of assault? If prostitution is a great career path I reckon at least 50 percent of sex workers would be male.