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By Laurie Penny
For feminists, arguments about sex work have become an ugly, obstructive shibboleth. The debate about whether feminism can ever tolerate the sale of sex has raged for over five decades, and in recent years the question has opened old wounds in the fabric of feminist unity, leading to such embarrassing flashpoints as the verbal abuse and police intimidation of sex workers and their allies at the Reclaim the Night march in 2009.
Many feminists, like Finn MacKay of the Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution, feel that the purchase of sex from women is always and only misogyny: “Equality for women is a farce in a society where it is considered normal for men to buy our bodies.
“We can't be free while so many of us are literally for sale. As long as I believe prostitution is a form of violence against women, then how can I work alongside anyone who promotes it as a job like any other?”
A Moral Quarrel
Furious debate about sex work and pornography dominated the discussion at the recent Women’s Question Time event in London, organised by the charity Eaves, where feminists were invited to put questions to prospective Women's ministers in the run-up to the General Election.
Pandora Blake, a feminist sex worker, attended the event. “I hadn't realised quite how aggressively hostile most of my sisters are to my ideals,” she said. “It’s worrying that so many of the best female politicians seem unable to see nuance when it comes to the sex industry".
At this event, like so many others, issues such as abortion rights and the pay gap were elbowed out in favour of monolithic tub-thumping about sex work that played out a worrying tendency on the part of contemporary feminists to moralise rather than strategise.
On the other side of the debate, many pro-sex work feminists believe that the protection of sex workers should be the only consideration.
“Criminalisation of kerb-crawling, to take one example, is harmful to sex workers because ultimately they are the ones who suffer,” said Nine, a former support worker for Edinburgh prostitutes. “Sex workers who still need to make their money are faced with doing business with clients they would ordinarily have rejected. It concerns me greatly that the mainstream feminist movement refuses to look at the harmful effect of laws like these, which they support simply in the name of sending a message to men.”
Giving space to abusers
Unfortunately, tolerant attitudes such as Nine’s are too often manipulated by patriarchal apologists concerned with maintaining a status quo that constrains and commodifies female sexuality. Easy examples of such apologism can be found on the popular networking site for johns, Punternet, which rates and reviews prostitutes as ‘pieces of meat’. Worryingly, the International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW) recently recruited on the site, encouraging punters to write to their MPs to safeguard their favourite hobby.
 If the exclusionary tactics of abolitionist feminists are unsound, the unscrupulous attitudes of organisations like the IUSW are hardly more laudable. The attitude that abusive punters are an inevitability, and the related reasoning that one cannot fight the misogynist meat market, hardly offers an answer to people like Rebecca Mott, a former prostitute:
“The torment of being prostituted has never left me. On the first night, when I was fourteen, I was gang-raped for many hours. That was the test to see if I was suitable material for prostitution. You learn that your body is there to be damaged. That you have no right to say no. That your purpose is to service men in any and every way they can think of. It is so much easier to speak only of women who appear in charge of their own working environment, rather than the reality.”
Too often, the pro-prostitution lobby is guilty of silencing the voices of women like Mott – just as the abolitionist lobby refuses to acknowledge sex workers whose experiences differ. The sex work debate is a sea of unheard voices, private tragedy and misinformation in which moral squabbling obscures the real-life concerns of many vulnerable women.
A legal no man’s land
The net result of all this wrangling is that the legal status of sex work remains an unworkable, precarious Jenga tower of muddled laws and moral equivocation. Recent changes to the law in Britain have altered that situation very little. Welcome efforts to focus police attention on those who buy the sexual services of abused women, such as Clause 14, which makes it a criminal offence to buy sex from ‘a woman controlled for gain’, has been balanced by more regressive and punitive sanctions against soliciting.
In Britain, as in many other developed countries, women who work as prostitutes are stranded in a socio-economic no man’s land, their work just about legal enough to offer a seedy but acceptable outlet for restrained bourgeois sexual mores and an economic option for women in desperate financial circumstances, and just about illegal enough that the market for commercial sex remains illicit and underground, depriving sex workers of public dignity and of the full protection of the justice system, and satisfying the prudish public drive to punish those who sell sex.
Amongst all of this moralising, misogynist apologism and equivocation, it is stupendously difficult to have a productive conversation about sex work. “There are very few spaces in which feminists with different perspectives on this issue get together and talk about it and find points to agree on,” said Nine. “There frequently isn't even room for debate at all, just point-scoring and shouting over people.”
The stagnation of the sex work debate around a brutal moral binary can be seen as the greatest extant danger to the future of feminism, particularly if one believes, as I do, that if we all stopped shouting at each other for a while we could hold the revolution tomorrow.
Belle De Jour: a misleading cipher
The keenest example of this unimaginative binary thinking is the Belle de Jour problem. Dr Brooke Magnanti of Bristol was recently forced to out herself as the former PhD student and prostitute behind the blog which turned into the book which turned into the lucrative, trashily unchallenging ITV adaptation, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, in which Billie Piper wears a variety of rump-revealing latex dresses and does a lot of heavy breathing.
 The show, now in its third series, has become the dominant vehicle for the Belle Dde Jour meme, stripping out everything that was realistic and challenging about Dr Magnanti's blog and leaving a deodorised husk of middle-class male fantasy in which a massively undercast Piper perkily advises the audience to “'work out what the client wants, and give it to him as quickly as possible”.'
Feminists have justly denounced the show as duplicitous, portraying sex work as entirely safe, glamorous and lucrative for all those prepared to devote themselves entirely to the sexual service of rich men. However, commentators from Kira Cochrane to India Knight have failed to notice that Secret Diary of a Call Girl is ITV's convenient fiction, and not Dr Magnanti's reality.
Dr Magnanti herself was working in the elite eschelons of the sex trade, with no pimp or drug habit to worry about, but even so, critics have failed to notice that the show bears about as much resemblance to the blog as Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves might bear to the life of a medieval peasant.
Poor Dr Magnanti. All she wanted was to develop her writing and discuss her experiences. Instead, she has been distorted, idolised, victimised and vilified by anyone and everyone with a barrel to beat about prostitution. From glamorous courtesan to tragic victim, it’s not just Belle's body that can be bent into any position you fancy.
The one thing that almost no-one has asked is why a PhD student might find herself selling sexual intercourse to fund her studies in the first place. Commentators are slow to connect Belle with a bankrupt higher education system in which indebted students routinely live well below the poverty line to afford the degrees their future employers increasingly demand. Just last week, a report by Kingston University suggested that since the abolition of the student grant, the number of students funding their degrees by working as prostitutes and strippers has increased fivefold. Basic socio-economic analysis of this kind is what is missing from both sides of the contemporary conversation about prostitution.
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Comment and Analysis 
There is no real difference between anti-sex feminists and anti-sex neo-cons. When you're using the same arguments as Sarah Palin, it's maybe time to re-think them.
The main problems are violence against women, rape, slavery, trafficking and children. We should be forcing governments around the world to do more to prevent those problems. Instead sexphobic feminists have hijacked the debate and made it about stopping all consenting sex between adults where money is exchanged because unexploited women are too stupid too make up their own minds. And they still call themselves feminists.
Some of us see feminism as about choice, others want a dictatorship where women and men are told what to do for their own good.
Nope, it doesn't. If you take the trouble to read the Act, Clause 14 makes it a criminal offence to pay for sexual services of "a prostitute subjected to force". Not the same thing at all.
Further evidence of the growth of the Eaves empire was heard at the launch of UK Feminista http://stroppyblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/feminista.html, a strangely bland but determinedly media friendly concoction of young but single minded career feminists.
Apparently at an earlier, not so public meeting, it had become clear that this new happy clappy band of feminists would not be open to all. Specifically ECP / GWN or any who presumed to use the phrase "sex workers". To the extent that information about the women on hunger strike at Yarl's Wood would not be given a aproval for the eager band of grass roots activists waiting for directions from central command, because it would be via GWS of which ECP is a part (or one and the same).
At the launch of feminista when this was raised in response to a question about how could there be feminism without socialism (a question brushed to one side as alienating participants as it was a bit political for what is to be nice gentle gender politics suitably parcelled up into easy media sound bites) one of the leading stars of this kindergarten feminism said it was possible to exclude ECP and other sex worker projects because their views conflicted with those of one of their sponsors, Eaves.
And even more surprising was the other justification, which is apparently that the ECP sex worker position is in contravention of CEDAW and so the feministas can discriminate against other women because CEDAW allows, even directs, them to!
I cant say I am that familiar with every bit of wording of CEDAW but I doubt that was ever one of its intentions.
But there you go, with the growth of the evil empire, who is there to strike back?
I think what this article illustrates more than anything is that inter blog discussions can be immensely entertaining or even stimulating virtually, but more often than not in no way reflect what is actually happening in the real world.
First of all there were no furious discussions at the Eaves Question Time because it was a highly controlled, slick well managed PR event. This meant that apart from a first question tokenly given to one of a group of students bused in for the occasion, the remaining permitted questions were all from the inner circle of Eaves associates, and of course reflected their politics as it's video will no doubt become part of their publicity and lobbying output. ie creating an impression that their evangelical approach to the problem of prostitution is one shared by many other women.
In fact the only occasion when a more genuine voice of women's concerns was heard was in the brief period when questions from the floor were taken. And actually none were in any way connected to prostitution from either stance.
It is not clear how one funded organisation which as a recipient of public money is able to discriminate between which women it should or should not support has been allowed to become a monopoly. Some might think it was political patronage, the losers of which are the many, small front line women's organisations, often BME controlled who cant even get a toe hold in the aggressive commissioning process that favours those in the know and on the hidden networks of Labour acolytes.
1 - that radical feminism can be reduced to 'abolitionist feminism'.
2 - that anti prostitution feminism is focussed on 'choice', or lack of it, rather than on 'socio economic conditions'.
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Sod it. I would go on through the whole article listing the mistakes the author has made but the focus on how prostitution affects PhD education students has given me a really bad taste in my mouth.
It's so easy to paint yourself as morally superior to two differing sides of an issue when you avoid the actual differences in favor of hollow and trite "can't we all get along" pronouncements. The real issue, the one the author strenuously avoids, is whether johns have rights to purchase sex or not. The undue focus on all manners of women in the article is horizontal hostility, but kudos to the author for tossing mud out in all directions leading away from 1. men 2. her above-it-all objective self. The worst things about prostitution are not how feminists opinions on it differ, FFS.