Sex Work: the Political Potential of Prostitution.

suppose you were enrolling at a
university to study the chinese language and somebody takes you aside to have a private conversation about the professor in charge of the program and they tell you he's a good man not that he's a nice guy not that they like him but that he's morally ethically a good man i don't know how you'd feel having that conversation but i would be wondering why are you telling me this is there something else that's wrong with this university or wrong with this program is there some reason why you would forewarn me or claim that this professor is a good man now one of the reasons for this being hey i came here to learn chinese this professor may be a completely despicable unethical character but i'm really fundamentally interested in whether or not he can guide me through the steps and stages hold my hand as we go through the language exercises to take me from being unable to speak the chinese language to being fluent in the chinese language in four years right like that's that's what i'm here for you go to a mechanic trying to fix your car and you're not in this way interested in the moral character of the mechanic you're interested in whether or not he is a good mechanic not whether or not he's a good man and if someone took you aside and told you that this was a very moral or even a very politically correct garage where you were getting your car repaired i don't know how you feel about that but i would raise an eyebrow and start to wonder what's going on here why am i being in this way forewarned about the moral character of the people involved now there could be other reasons it could be that someone was telling you this but a university professor because there's recently been a scandal at the university because there's recently been some problem because there were some other professors you should really watch out for maybe there are other professors who are engaged in bribery and corruption scandals maybe there are other professors who are molesting or sexual exploiting their students or something maybe there is some particular reason why you're being told this but i for one respond to that kind of statement with apprehension now why is it that so many of our political discourses in the 21st century about sex and sex workers begin with precisely these sorts of moral declinations moral moral depositions moral moral apologetics for the character of the prostitutes themselves all right i'm very apprehensive about the whole political discourse and of course it very often comes from people who themselves have spent no time with who don't know personally on a face-to-face basis prostitutes and if you do happen to meet one prostitute is of an upstanding moral character they are very likely to have a conversation with you in which they complain about how immoral many of their colleagues are and they may regale you with stories and anecdotes about how terrible other people in the industry are and that's why i opened this video with the parallelism to the strange demi-monde of professors and people with phds if you get to know those people even if the particular person you're talking to is not an incredibly immoral person very likely the first topic of conversation is going to be them complaining about their colleagues complaining about their own superiors about other professors complaining about the moral turpitude of the field that they're they're a part of all right now i think there actually are profound reasons as to why in western english-speaking academia you meet such extraordinarily immoral characters right in the universities but it deserves to be asked also what is it we as students or clients for the system of education are demanding um when i take a look even at a professor teaching politics teaching the politics and history of china for example i may really just be interested in whether or not they're a good teacher and it is not unusual to find a professor here in the west who does a good job shall we say of teaching the history and politics of china while themselves personally holding a totally immoral political position while for example being supporters of the communist party of china like they take their duty to teach students about the failures of the community the communist party of china seriously but at the same time they're actually personally morally committed to supporting the communist person you can meet deeply deeply morally compromised characters like that in every field of academic endeavor and research that i've ever been in contact with buddhist studies cambodian studies political science and so many in so many different different fields right so this problem is uh not unique to our political questioning of the future of sex work in the western world right the way we think about the problem is constrained by the solution we're often already committed to right and most people on the moderate left are now committed to legalizing normalizing mainstreaming sex work so that sex work and future will become a job just like any other job or if we can't say it's exactly the same as any other job so that it will become a job that is no more ods than modeling or exotic dancing that it will be at least accepted into mainstream society in that way and they will become tax-paying law-abiding citizens uh in most western countries now i've received email from different people with different perspectives on this uh question including women who had some kind of experience uh as sex workers or as strippers or something like that something adjacent to sex work you know she always say but yesterday for the first time i got an email from a physically disabled man and from his email it seems to me he's quite seriously disabled and he said he related to some things i said in a recent youtube video where i talked about the fact that there are disabled people who are not able to participate in romance dating the competitive culture of finding a partner and ultimately in some cases reproducing and so on and he said he really related to really appreciated what i was saying and reflecting the fact that there are such people for whom their only choice is either to live in celibacy and isolation or to accept the moral compromise of becoming clients in the sex working you know industry and he says that he himself has never done this however two very interesting points one he has met sex workers who do regularly have disabled people as their clients and who became involved with political advocacy for the disabled that's quite interesting so they're they're physically and intellectually able people who because of their repeated experience getting to know physically disabled people stronger than actually get involved with the politics of disability and presumably government programs related disability whatever so that's already interesting and he said he's met some of these sex workers in that political context not that he was a client not that he was having sex with them and so he came to have respect for them and start to ask questions about the political potential of sex workers to transform our society okay interesting and he also says that although he doesn't feel he's uh committed to one side or the other of this argument he is thinking that there are ethical implications for himself and should he one day you know become in the same way a client for sex workers in the presence of our times if he should himself become you know uh a john right now look it would be ludicrous to sit here and generalize about the ethical character of people who become professors in our university system it is also completely necessary and inevitable right that in giving an analysis of what's wrong with the university system and how to reform it how to improve it that we indulge in those kinds of generalizations right of course each of us will at some point have met somebody with a phd who was a good person and who maybe was a good person in some really important ways right you can't design a social system or even a social service around the assumption that the employees will be angels you have to design social service to work with and for the absolute worst aspects of human nature so when i hear these political programs that begin by praising the moral character of prostitutes and again there will be particular prostitutes who are extraordinary intellectuals apparently he's met some who are interested in social and political causes and who have various redeeming qualities right we ask okay are there no prostitutes at all who are drug addicts none are there no prostitutes who become prostitutes because of drug addiction in order to pay for drug addiction are there no prostitutes at all who are vain or who are lazy right again even talking to strippers and people who do only fans and webcam shows and this kind of thing people around the edges people who are sex workers to some extent many of them will talk about the ego trip how it makes them feel how it makes them feel powerful so and so forth right and then beyond this um you know why are university professors evil in the particular way that they are so often of course you have to look at the structure of authority in the university system the type of power those professors feel over students the type of powerlessness they may feel in relation to the institution as a whole and the the process and the product of the service that they're providing right now prostitutes aren't just paid to have sex they're paid to tolerate the company of the clients who want to have sex with them right they're paid to be flattering and of course in the context of bdsm they may be paid to be cruel or to play a character or act out a scenario but in any case they are paid to indulge the desires and fantasies of their clients and it deserves to be said that even people with extraordinary redeeming qualities people who are extraordinarily intellectual intelligent people were extraordinarily ethical and upstanding right they will gain a very different perspective on the world right by being employed as prostitutes for however many years right so he's mentioned i don't even know if it's just one sex worker but he's met obviously didn't meet hundreds of sex workers involved in this kind of political advocacy i don't know if it's one or two or a dozen or whatever right okay so those those female sex workers right they have a certain perspective on the disabled community that you're talking about right but if you just stop and think about it don't you think there are many many aspects of that community and that political problem that they're necessarily blinded to right there's a certain type of interaction they're going to have with their clients in some ways their clients are going to be pretending to be someone they're not right and in some ways the prostitutes themselves for the purposes of that interaction are going to be pretending to be someone they're not and i am not saying this to single out or dehumanize prostitutes in any way because i would say exactly the same thing about university professors right how many university professors truly know or can relate to or understand what their students are going through right and how many students even ever tell the professors it is extraordinarily rare for a student to even sit down and tell the professor what the problem with the course is and i know i've both been the professor receiving those complaints and i've been the student you know delivering them i've and i've been married to a professor we're now divorced you know i've been involved in different uh aspects and facets of this puzzle for many decades of my my life now um right this kind of professional blindness professional bias right that comes from the position of a professor in society okay i think we have to admit bluntly that for even the most erudite and ethical prostitute there's going to be a type of a type of blindness you know that's much greater and runs much deeper okay now um i think it's a really interesting question to ask what is the political potential of sex workers to transform our society we mostly discuss the potential of our society sort of the fox populi in general collectively to change the status of sex workers right now uh 2021 and the last few months of 2020 the sex workers of thailand got really organized and started demanding new political rights as never before now one of the reasons for that is there's a generalized revolutionary miasma in thailand right now and the prostitutes i think correctly see that there's the potential for the writing of a new constitution or amendments to their current constitution and they are saying look we don't want to operate in a legal loophole anymore we don't want to operate in a gray area like from the constitution forward like in the most basic fundamental law we want clear black and white legal distinctions about what's legal and what isn't and what our profession is how it fits into thai society if you've never been to thailand let me just ask the question is there anywhere in that country where you are not assaulted by prostitutes on a on a daily basis maybe that was a humble brag on my part i mean i'm i'm not hideously ugly but you know when i say assaulted by prostitutes it can include them running up and grabbing your crotch or trying to like you know i've had prostitutes literally assault me in that sense where they're they they want the business and i'm like remember i was like no no i'm a scholar of buddhism or whatever i can admit i never said i'm a scholar of buddhism because i think that wouldn't i think that wouldn't have deterred them maybe they would have tried oh well if you're a scholar of buddhism you really need our services my famous line i would just say uh in la ocean i would say me paul dale which is i have enough already totally untrue but i would never make them break up laughing and they leave them that realize i didn't i wasn't a potential client but anyway i just say the percentage of the economy that is sex workers and related services in thailand is staggeringly high it's ubiquitous it's everywhere and sure there is an interesting question here of them stepping forward and demanding uh their political rights all right now this is also an example of if you like revolution from above the left-wing perspective paradoxically is to insist that the sex workers are the proletariat of our society and they're not they're not the poor they're not the downtrodden i'm going to sketch this out briefly for thailand but what i'm about to say would be equally true of a small town in canada or in most of the united states um you know the typical scenario is you have a small town in isan isan is northeastern thailand and the prettiest girls that everyone went to high school with when they finish high school go away to the big city maybe openly saying that they're going to become prostitutes maybe saying that they're going to try their luck becoming a singer a model an entertainer an actress for some of this like maybe that's what they tell their parents or tell their friends oh and they don't necessarily go away to bangkok they could go to another city like chiang mai they could also go to a small holiday town on the coast where there are foreigners as tourists but they'll go to some place where prostitution is more highly paid than in their hometown there will be plenty of prostitution in their hometown and you know within weeks they've made more money than their parents made in like the last 10 years like they've made so much money in a short period of time they come back at the next major holiday and they buy a new truck for their father you know this is sorry this has been studied this is not merely an anecdotal phenomenon where the amount of money made by these young women and there's a difference in the cost of living too they come from a small town in nissan in the northeast and then they're going to the the big city or to a holiday resort town and the amount of money they're making has prostitutes in a short period of time there compared to the cost of living on their parents rice farm right and as you can imagine in many families not all but most the parents who might at first be apprehensive or horrified that their daughter has become a prostitute they are in their way corrupted because their daughter is suddenly bringing home so much money or so many gifts this seems to open up you know and of course there sometimes are lies involved the daughter may continue lying and say that they're making this money as a singer or dancer or karaoke singer or something that may make up some job but i think in most cases in thai culture it's overt enough uh everybody knows you know what's going on and where the where the money comes from now that pattern doesn't end at that stage i always insist on this when i was doing social science research in southeast asia i would always say you must do full life cycle analysis some of these women were prostitutes for five years you know they were prostitutes from 18 years old until their mid-20s or something they got a stack of money and then what right they go on through a series of other careers they eventually have children and eventually retire and become elderly the very geography of these towns in northeastern thailand could see this in southern laos too in some places i remember talking about this you had this phenomenon of very good-looking middle-aged women who owned the local hotels who owned the local restaurants and sometimes like hardware stores right and you know like you go into a hardware store you think oh that's not the kind of woman i expected to own the hardware store you know and she's a woman who's wearing high heels and stuff she's just not saying no woman would ever want her hardware but she's like oh you don't this seems like a woman who reads vogue magazine or something like you don't see and this is the next stage of that pattern that they built up a lot of money and again it may be that they bought the hardware store for their brother or for their father or for their uncle right there's there's so much money that comes in you get a pattern that plays out and you you do get this phenomenon of prostitutes becoming almost lords of the land you know throughout thailand so the discourse about the prostitutes being the poor and downtrodden in the earth stands in stark contrast to the young women who see this happen with a sort of talented tenth of their classmates it's a uniquely american political expression you know some percentage of the prettiest girls are swept into a life of uh infamy and fortune you know and of course some of them go on to marry wealthy men or marry white guys from america and australia they're all these other aspects you know to the phenomenon and there are the girls who are not pretty enough or are exceedingly moral enough that they stayed in that small town and worked on that rice farm and continued earning you know pennies per month while this person was making you know hundreds of dollars per month and there is intense resentment and intense hatred um you know it creates a very interesting set of conflicts at every level of society now i would say i think currently this pattern isn't so widespread in canada but i remember i knew a guy who was from uh the small town of prince george and he said for prince george for this particular small town's belief enough he said in his whole high school there was one uh good-looking girl there was really only one very beautiful girl in the high school and everyone was kind of watching wondering what's going to happen with her and she went away to become a stripper in the big city and then likewise i mean strippers if you're in a high-end club can make ludicrous amounts of money here and you know so this pattern can play out uh in the decking and west i also mentioned this to my girlfriend in totally different conversation a few weeks ago but i remember once saw an interview with a particular stripper who typical she was an american american citizen she had she finished university with over a hundred thousand dollars in debt which is typical united states a huge amount of debt at the end of university and she earned all of that money back by stripping she started stripping the day she finished university i forget it was six months or eight months or something she'd pay off her student it was just ridiculous how much money she made how quickly uh as a stripper when she when she switched lanes and went into that trade so you know if you're asking seriously about the potential of sex workers to transform society you are talking about a very peculiar privileged money money delete okay in thailand and laos i can tell you there are strippers who own there are prostitutes there are former prostitutes who own hotels who own businesses who kept that money there is a constituency of people uh with serious amounts of money and serious amounts of privilege to put into political lobbying and transforming society uh here and now and the young women who've just started still the amount of money they make you know month by month may be enough that they can change the world and these are people with a very different perspective on society i can say well then university professors right these are women who will know firsthand for example the damage that's being done to our society by drugs and drug addiction now that doesn't lend itself to just one political conclusion probably there are some sex workers who feel that drugs should be decriminalized because it seems to them that everyone's doing cocaine anyway so why don't they agree with cocaine and there will probably be some sex workers who will be able to say that they've seen the damage done by drugs like cocaine and heroin and that we need to be much more serious about eradicating it from sight it's not there's not one simple set of political conclusions to cover this but yes i mean this question points to a future in which the normalization and mainstreaming of prostitutes will at least lead to prostitutes being patrons for the political class that are more than ever guiding and informing and lobbying on political outcomes right and there is the possibility of what we see in thailand right now that prostitutes could be you know dissident radicals really fundamentally trying to transform and change society and here's the most interesting part of it when you look at the young men who've gotten rich in the oil industry i mean here in canada it's probably true around the world but i'll just use canada for the example when you look at or talk to young men who got rich pumping oil out of the ground to make it into gasoline i don't mean olive oil i don't mean other kinds of cooking oil right um almost universally they get involved in politics trying to justify the evils of their own industry and trying to perpetuate their industry and with the implicit or explicit conclusion that the world would be a better place if only more young men could be like them and go straight out of high school straight out of college to get into oil industry and make their fortune and pump gas to keep that keep the trucks and trains running any of those guys would be happy to answer the question look would you want your own son would you want your own grandson would you want your own brother to quit their job and go get a degree in mineral mineral oil studies and start working this they say yes i'd be proud to be happy if my own son or grandstand starts hauling chain or a laying pipe on an all side they have no problem with that okay the thing is about prostitution right we can all put on this song and dance we can all pretend that ethically it's no different from being a university professor or pumping oil on an oil rig we can keep on pretending for as long as it's convenient for us but when you talk to these prostitutes if you ask them would you want your own daughter to follow in your footsteps okay would you want your own cousin would you want your own sister would you want your own mother you know some of them probably have mothers who could come out of retirement and go would you want your own mother to start doing this the same thing you're doing okay for the vast majority of sex workers if they can be honest with you i think it is safe to say for the vast majority the answer is no and if you look at the places in your society whether this is thailand or amsterdam or paris or berlin many of the places where prostitution is flourishing legally or illegally or you look at uh you know nevada las vegas nevada right if you ask prostitutes you know if you have a kid in the future would you want to raise your kid here would you want to raise your kid in this neighborhood in this part of society that's dominated by prostitution or prostitution is a visible open industry the vast majority are gonna say no and they're probably gonna follow up i explain to you that they're exactly saving up their money right now or they've already bought a house somewhere else that's not not in that kind of neighborhood for that reason that even though they work there and earn their money there and and then if you say okay how much of the map how much of our society in this way should be dominated by prostitution do you think society is becoming a better and better place if we become more and more like thailand where you know increasingly every inch of every city is dominated by or tainted by her in the shadow of the sex industry this way right would you want more and more of america to look like the brothels of las vegas it's not a perfect image frankly because the way prostitution is you know the way prostitution is regulated in las vegas is kind of another complicated story to get into okay how much of our society do you want to look like the prostitution districts of bangkok thailand or for that matter tokyo japan you know where the whole neighborhood is is it good for our society for this to be occupying more and more of the plug space more and more of the the economy and more and more of the horizon of future possibilities for each and every young woman who at the time she finishes high school is good looking enough to make a living by doing nothing more and nothing less you know than selling her ass different people are going to come to different conclusions about this but it's not the case that all sex workers are going to be committed to lying on behalf of their industry in the same way that we're accustomed to seeing oil and gas workers or executives in the cigarette industry lying on behalf of that industry the question of how really our society can progress with a balance between short-term selfish private personal gain and what is in the larger scale long-term interest of society as a whole that's a problem that's never going to go away all right but i say this whether you are this young man who is disabled and wondering whether or not he could or should make this moral compromise to start sleeping with sex workers or whether you're a young woman who's thinking about the easy money and in some ways more exciting lifestyle of becoming a prostitute yourself right step one of becoming a politically sophisticated person is to admit to yourself and really reckon with that what is in your personal self-interest what is for your advantage is not necessarily for the benefit of society and that on the contrary most of the time or often enough you're going to have to recognize that what is good for you is bad for other people that even if you personally could benefit through prostitution either as a customer or as a purveyor right whether you personally could benefit from gambling or many other things right well you have to recognize turning our whole society into a brothel turning our whole society into a casino okay this would not be for the benefit of society as a whole