Sex Is A Tricky Subject

In a decade that will be surely known as one of grand feminist success it seems worthwhile mentioning that prostitution is a new feminist issue. According to “Women Have the Rights” many sex workers and feminist activists see the decriminalization of prostitution as a human rights initiative for women to regain control over their bodies. These third wave feminists find sex an issue that should be more widely discussed. Large leaps in pornography such as female filmmakers and feminist porn stars point to an ideal that consensual sex work is just another fore front in the battle for gender equality. Legalization of prostitution leads to more government oversight requiring

It’s important to recognize these biases because there isn’t much press coverage about this industry and it usually errors on the melodramatic side. On the other hand, Barbara Brents the foremost expert on Nevada’s licensed brothels, has come to very different conclusions about the state’s most controversial industry. Brents is a professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) and she, along with her colleagues, has over 15 years of field research studying Nevada’s licensed brothels. Brents, the co-author of The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex, and Sin in the New American Heartland describes those brothels in a very practical and academic style. Brents says, “Sometimes I say I’m shedding light into a dark closet, a place nobody really knows what goes on inside. And then, when you shed the light, you find out that it’s not at all what you thought it was — it’s neither dangerous nor awful, nor is it as titillating.”

Abstract: This paper explores the world’s oldest and most controversial occupation and puts forth a foundational plan for legalizing and regulating sex work in a safe way that satisfies both radical and liberal feminists ideals. To understand how prostitution has evolved to where it’s at today, this proposal travels through the history of prostitution in the United States (heavily focusing on the twentieth century.) Prostitutes were initially accepted and openly sought after. A shift in societal norms and values placed sex work in a heavy degradation. The regulation of prostitution in Nevada began in 1970 and resulted in the first licensed brothel in 1971. Fast forward nearly fifty years and prostitution is outlawed in 49 out of 50 states. Vast amounts of money are being spent annually in failed attempts to stop prostitution all together. Radical feminists are those who would identify as conservative. They are against prostitution on the belief that it victimizes and degrades women in poverty. Liberal feminists strongly agree that the government has no place in a women’s body and that the right to perform sex work is human right. This paper analyzes these different perspectives and incorporates a model that will resemble the current working regulation in Nevada. Stricter stipulations such as health requirements and the legal age should help influence radical feminist to expand their perspective and acceptance.

Society pushing these women into this sex industry is severally impacting how these women daily lives are being lead. For example, the article written by Carmen Logie states "In multivariable analyses, paid sex and transactional sex were both associated with: intrapersonal (depression), interpersonal (lower social support, forced sex, childhood sexual abuse, intimate partner violence, multiple partners/polyamory), and structural (transgender stigma, unemployment) factors. Participants reporting transactional sex also reported increased odds of incarceration perceived to be due to transgender identity, forced sex, homelessness, and lower resilience, in comparison with participants reporting no sex work involvement." This reveals to the readers that sex work extremely affects these women's lives. This sex industry has a major negative impact on these women's lives. The quote reveals that this industry that a large majority of transgender women are exposed to can lead to things like jail, homelessness, and abuse. Yet, no one acknowledges that societies stigma against these women is what is pushing these women into this extremely dangerous industry. Participating in sex work can even affect these women's health they can acquire HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. These diseases are extremely detrimental to these women's health and can even lead to their death. Women in sex work more also likely have mental

The stereotype that society has about strippers, she contradicted. Rose deemed that “it was the best time of her life”. Although she began stripping to take care of her family, she all the while enjoyed it. The slut walk is also for women who are sex workers (prostitutes, escorts, stripper, porn stars) who have been hazed by society yet exploited for their personal leisure’s. There are an amplitude of men and women who have had their share of employing a woman who is a sex worker and that is accepted, though the women who is indeed the worker, she is not, fair?

"Work–Life Management in Legal Prostitution: Stigma and Lockdown in Nevada’s Brothels." Human Relations, vol. 70, no. 6, June 2017, pp. 725-750. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1177/0018726716674262.

With no government control or regulation, work-place violence, harassment, and medical care are not monitored or concerned, even though this line of work is the most vulnerable to all three conditions. In fact, nearly seventy-five percent of sex-workers experience work-place violence. For this, “decriminalization could be the best means to protect the rights of sex workers and ensure that these individuals receive adequate medical care, legal assistance, and police protection” (Amnesty International). Along with Amnesty International, one of the most respected human rights organizations in the world, the World Health Organization, UN Women, Global Commission on HIV and the law, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, Human Rights Watch, and the Open Society Foundations also support the decriminalization of prostitution in the United States. Criminalizing prostitution will not end prostitution. Instead, the only plausible solution is government regulation. With government support, clients can be tracked through credit cards and any violence or harassment will be able to be reported and taken care of, on a legal level. The sex-work industry also has alarming statistics involving STI’s and STD’s. The men who control the women, or the ‘pimps’, force the women to have oral, vaginal, and anal sex without any kind of contraception, if that is what the client prefers. The Porn Industry,

A job can easily become something so much more; it can become your lifestyle, especially when it comes to prostitution. Prostitution molds your life, the judgmental views of society, and the loving relationship one thrives off of. Love Suicides, “The Life of a Sensuous Woman”, and “Du Tenth Sinks the Jewel Box in Anger” displays prostitution significantly and has these women’s decisions, emotions, and endeavors fueled by their line of work. Trying to define and live a life of love (which the main characters seem to be longing for) when your lifestyle is filled with fits of lust, when your lifestyle is your business, and when society frowns up you poses a challenge. From the outside looking in on the lifestyle of prostitution people assume, use stereotypes, and have skewed views on these women.

The first part of Nussbaum’s paper challenges to examine the stigmatization of prostitution by comparing it to six other kinds of jobs/professions in which the individual uses her body in ways that majority of us do not necessary find morally objectionable but are not far off from the ways prostitutes use their bodies in the trade. These range from the domestic servant who “must do what the client wants, or fail at the job” (pg. 375), the nightclub singer who pleasures her customers by her voice to the colonoscopy artist who allows herself to be probed without anesthesia in a “consensual invasion” (pg. 378) of her bodily space for the purpose of medical education. The further we go down the list of the six jobs/professions, we see a closer

Sexual favours in return for money, just the thought of this has people cringing, although laws have deemed to move forward with the idea of prostitution it seems although socially there has not been much progress. The idea of prostitution still scares, or one could even go as far to say it disgusts people. The lack of knowledge and awareness of the details of sex work create this ongoing hate towards sex work, which continues to stigmatize sex workers. Regardless of changing laws, regardless of changing policies, why is it that sex workers are still afraid to proudly announce that their job is in fact the job of a sex worker? Unfortunately, it seems as though the idea of sex work that seems to be such a terrible one is not what bothers sex workers the most, it is the social misconception of what sex work is like that leads these individuals to feel highly stigmatized (Van der Meulen and Redwood, 2013). The primary harm for of prostitution seems to be the stigma against prostitution, women involved in prostitution are considered socially invisible as full human beings (Farley, 2004). Why is it that our changing and progressing laws are still unable to remove this stigma from the lives of sex workers? This paper will argue that prostitution laws continue to produce stigma around sex work. It will argue this through revisiting the historical laws, examining present laws and ongoing laws at this time.

The shame surrounding sex work is immense. Most will say that sex workers are lawless, immoral, home wreckers. In reality, sex workers are just normal, everyday people; but of course, with a more controversial job. “Sex workers are real people. We’ve had complicated experiences and complicated responses to those experiences.” The risks associated with becoming a sex worker are insanely high, including the risk of contracting HIV or AIDS, being raped, being physically or sexually abused, as well as countless others. Female sex workers are thirteen and a half percent more likely to have Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). In Asia that statistic reaches up to almost thirty percent. Sex workers are also exposed to high levels of sexual abuse, sex workers have up to a seventy five percent chance of experiencing sexual violence at some point in their careers as well as up to a fifty five percent chance of sexual violence in a given year. Although it goes against the morals of many, sex work should be decriminalized in order to maintain the health of our nation. Although this may sound counterintuitive, this would be a large step in the right direction. In the “TED Talks” titled “The Laws That Sex Workers Really Want”, Juno Mac speaks about why sex work should be decriminalized. She explains why certain approaches to dealing with sex work have not worked and why they did not work.

Members of the N.Y. Female Moral Reform Society whose important goal was to deal with prostitution believed that a good girl should not engage in activities related to sexual appeal for payment; even though these girls were poor or desperate, there were still alternate means of work for the girls. A good girl should try to get the education to better themselves and get out of the lifestyle that they were in. Hence, in the conversation, they would like to understand why these girls from the Live Nude Girls Unite documentary in the 20th century wanted to be strippers or prostitutes, a job created a very negative path that women fell into because of poverty in the 19th century.

This weeks readings focused on sex work and touched on the sex industry. Weitzer’s article however was the one that caught my attention. He starts by discussing the sex industry itself. I know personally I was raised to see sex work as immoral and frowned upon, and really other than the joke of “I’m quitting school to be a stripper” was it even really talked about. Because of this negative view sex work and sex workers hold by society is why it was crazy, but not so much shocking when I seen Weitzer’s first point about in 2006 alone, Americans spent 13.3 billion dollars on the sex industry. But if we are spending these mass amounts of money on it, why is there this double standard of “it’s okay to pay for it but not sell it”. Another

Prostitution is a profession that has been around for thousands of years despite being a controversial topic in many parts of the world. In the modern world, the ethics of prostitution have been debated with many people viewing the profession as immoral. Prostitution is an exploitative and harmful profession for the sex workers. Since women account for a majority of those who engage in prostitution, these negative impacts affect women more. Also, prostitution is a gendered institution that strengthens and

Some people would admit that porn is great, right? Hare suggests that 70–80% of North America college-aged men and 20–30% of North American college-aged women consume sexually explicit Internet movies (148). This plays a major role for a constant demand for adult film productions. So much so that the adult entertainment industry generated an estimated 10 billion to 14 billion dollars’ worth of revenue in 1998 and 12.9 billion dollars’ worth of revenue in 2006 (Tibbals, 20). But do people consider the actors themselves? Or the dancers and prostitutes that preform for their consumers? What do sex workers (or call girls) have to deal with when it comes to their job? Although there isn’t an exact number of “legal” call girls in the United States Balfour claims that there could be around 50,000 to 80,000 sex workers in the United Kingdoms (3 - 4). Yet women who get drawn into the path of sex working have to deal with women’s equality and safety. The explanation of this is for a few different reasons. For example one of the more common reasons for this is because of how these women are not always supported by non sex workers. Most people agree that call girls are more distant from society and are even considered as criminals to others (Majic 1). Another simple yet overlooked reason is due to the likeliness of the topic of porn being brought up in public. Both communication and participation in sexual interactions are commonly known to be a more private practice rather than a