News Beat | July 13th, 2016 |
Worryingly, almost half say they feel ‘very uncomfortable’ going to the police to report theft, violence or sexual violence at the hands of clients
Students in the UK are being driven to work in the sex industry in order to cope with the rising cost of living and university tuition fees.
More than half of those already in the industry – 67 per cent – have turned to sex work to be able to pay for living expenses, such as food and bills, followed by 53 per cent who need the money to pay for rent.
Another 35 per cent say their earnings are used to pay for university fees, while around a quarter use money earned to reduce post-graduation debt, or to avoid getting into debt.
The startling findings have come from the National Union of Students (NUS) which worked with the Sex Workers Open University and the English Collective of Prostitutes to survey young people working in the industry to shed more light on their lives and experiences.
The majority of respondents surveyed were aged between 20 to 25, and also mainly LGBT+, something NUS said provides a valuable insight into the experiences of those workers who do not define as straight.
Other key findings show just over half of student sex workers – 55 per cent – consider themselves to have a specific learning disability, other disability, impairment, or long-term health condition.
While sex work in England and Wales is not illegal, there are a number of laws which criminalise activities around it. Under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, it is an offence to cause or incite ‘prostitution’ or control it for personal gain.
When asked about what legal changes they would support, the vast majority of respondents – at 75 per cent – said they would support the decriminalisation of sex work, followed by legalisation (27 per cent), and criminalisation of clients paying for sex (18 per cent).
In 2014, NUS passed a motion to support decriminalisation of sex work so that workers could have access to full labour rights, including the right to unionise. NUS has said it believes the decriminalisation of sex work would provide a “range of protections” against labour exploitation, discrimination, and violence.
One of the more worrying findings is that almost half of respondents say they would feel “very uncomfortable” going to the police if they had experienced property theft, violence, or sexual violence at the hands of clients or management.
Susuana Amoah, NUS women’s officer, described how students working in the industry is often treated as “a hot topic,” yet the dialogue of what workers want and need is “overshadowed by sex work abolitionists” and “does not centre on the voices of current or former sex workers.”
One of the report’s recommendations urges students’ unions and universities to do more after less than 15 per cent thought their institution or students’ union was providing sufficient support.
The support students would like to see includes information on the industry to raise awareness about student sex workers in their institution, information on student sex workers’ rights, details about campaigns and activism around rights, and advice on how to reduce stigma.
Amoah continued: “We believe it’s important the support offered to student sex workers is based on what they identify as their requirements. A clear majority of student sex workers want sex work to be decriminalised, and more support from their students’ unions. Therefore, this is what NUS also supports.”
The report has come in the same month an academic from Swansea University revealed the findings of a similar three-year long studywhich found one in 20 UK students have worked in the sex industry to fund their studies.
Criminologist, Professor Tracey Sagar, said: “With increased calls for decriminalisation, the industry is receiving growing attention. Our research aims to promote dialogue, challenge stereotypes, and raise safety awareness around students and sex work.”
Echoing the warnings from NUS and Amoah, the professor said it must be kept in mind that not all students engaged in the industry are, or feel, safe. She added: “It is vital universities arm themselves with knowledge to better understand student sex work issues, and that university services are able to support students where it’s needed.”
News Beat | November 18th, 2013 |
Machines have already changed the face of manufacturing industries, but what happens when prostitutes find themselves replaced by robots? Will machines populate our brothels instead of flesh and blood people? Will the social stigma of paying for sex fade? And how will the availability of robotic sex partners impact countries whose economies depend, in part, on sex tourism?
In their paper “Robots, men and sex tourism,” which appears in the current issue of the journal Futures, Ian Yeoman and Michelle Mars of the University of Wellington’s Victoria Management School explore how robotic prostitutes could provide a solution to many of the problems associated with the sex trade, namely human trafficking and the spread of sexually transmitting infections. Taking a cue from predictions by European Robotics Research Network chairman Henrik Christensen — who claims folks will be having sex with robots in five years — and University of Maastricht robotics researcher David Levy, who predicts that Massachusetts will legalize human-robot marriage by 2050 — Yeoman and Mars try to envision what Amsterdam’s red-light district would look like in 2050:
The Yub-Yum is Amsterdam’s top sex club for business travellers located beside a 17th century canal house on the Singel. It is modern and gleaming with about 100 scantily clad blonde and brunettes parading around in exotic G-strings and lingerie. Entry costs s10,000 for an all inclusive service. The club offers a full range of sexual services from massages, lap dancing and intercourse in plush surroundings. The Yub-Yum is a unique bordello licensed by the city council, staffed not by humans but by androids. This situation came about due to an increase in human trafficking in the sex industry in the 2040s which was becoming unsustainable, combined with an increase in incurable STI’s in the city especially HIV which over the last decade has mutated and is resistant to many vaccines and preventive medicines. Amsterdam’s tourist industry is built on an image of sex and drugs. The council was worried that if the red light district were to close, it would have a detrimental effect on the city’s brand and tourism industry, as it seemed unimaginable for the city not to have a sex industry. Sex tourism is a key driver for stag parties and the convention industry. The Yub-Yum offers a range of sexual gods and goddesses of different ethnicities, body shapes, ages, languages and sexual features. The club is often rated highly by punters on www.punternet.com and for the fifth year in a row, in 2049 was voted the world’s best massage parlour by the UN World Tourism Organisation. The club has won numerous technology and innovation awards including the prestigious ISO iRobotSEX award. The most popular model is Irina, a tall, blonde, Russian exotic species who is popular with Middle Eastern businessmen. The tourists who use the services of Yub-Yum are guaranteed a wonderful and thrilling experience, as all the androids are programmed to perform every service and satisfy every desire. All androids are made of bacteria resistant fibre and are flushed for human fluids, therefore guaranteeing no Sexual Transmitted Disease’s are transferred between consumers. The impact of Yub-Yum club and similar establishments in Amsterdam has transformed the sex industry alleviating all health and human trafficking problems. The only social issues surrounding the club is the resistance from human sex workers who say they can’t compete on price and quality, therefore forcing many of them to close their shop windows. All in all, the regeneration of Amsterdam’s sex industry has been about the success of the new breed of sex worker. Even clients feel guilt free as they actually haven’t had sex with a real person and therefore don’t have to lie to their partner.
Yeoman and Mars make these predictions based on the growth of the continued growth of the sex industry, the human fascination with physical beauty, and predicted social reforms to combat human trafficking. They also wonder whether sexual mores might be different where robotic prostitutes are concerned. For example, would spouses view sex with a robotic partner as cheating, or as a form of masturbation akin to using a vibrator? Would people be more open and honest about paying for sex with robots than they are about paying for sex with humans? If robotic prostitutes could be program specifically for female pleasure, would we see equality between men and women patronizing these automated brothels?
Brothels for robotic sex workers make sense, especially if sexbots would prove expensive to own — or perhaps, eventually, sentient — but why limit these brothels to traditional red light regions like Amsterdam or Nevada? The paper notes that, even if we’re getting down with robots instead of humans, mechanical prostitution might not be legal everywhere. Just in 2009, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld a ban on the sale of sex toys, although similar statutes have been struck down by courts in other states. Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court Case that struck down anti-sodomy laws on the grounds that the state had no legitimate state interests that could intrude on the right to liberty and privacy in consensual sexual acts. Prostitution comes with the added wrinkle that sex workers may be coerced — physically or financially — into sex, but there’s no such issue with non-sentient robotic sex workers. Would US courts find that the rights to sexual privacy and liberty change once our sex toys look and — to some extent — act like humans? Will our perceptions of prostitution change if we make a gradual slide from non-sentient to sentient robotic sex workers?
Yeoman and Mars say they centered their paper around the Amsterdam sex trade because of the city’s long history as a sex tourist destination, but sex tourism is a global issue, and it would be interesting to speculate on the impact sex robots might have on the economies of countries, as well as on global sex trafficking and the exploitation of sex workers. From Las Vegas to Thailand to Kenya, sex tourism has enjoyed (if that’s the word) an enormous boom. Some regions are specific destinations for sex tourists; others attract a large number of business and entertainment travelers who consequently support a secondary sex industry. To some extent, travelers utilize these sex industries out of convenience or freedom of fear from legal repercussions, but it’s impossible to ignore that some tourists are looking for very specific sexual experiences, including experiences with minors. Perhaps sex robots could become sufficiently lifelike and varied to mitigate the demand for the coercive sex trade (although given that comics depicting sex with children have been classified as child pornography, I wonder if child-shaped sex robots would be legal in many countries), but chances are that some people will still want the human experience.
Would sex robots, I wonder, diminish the demand for human sex tourism enough to negatively impact the economies of certain regions? Or would human sex tourism in those regions explode as robotic prostitutes came to displace human ones in places that could afford the robots? If human sex tourism did somehow become an economic impossibility, how might the economies of those regions shift and change? Hopefully, the advent of convincing robotic prostitutes would result in a decrease in human exploitation and sex trafficking (not to mention a decrease in the spread of STIs), but there are many ways these dominoes could fall.
News Beat | November 18th, 2013 |
A few years ago in Los Angeles I went to an event held at the back of a comic book store called Porn Star Karaoke. It’s not as sexy as it sounds. About half a dozen porn actors from the “golden age” of the industry got together to sing Eighties power ballads dressed up as superheroes – the sort of thing that would cause a big stir in any other city but is just another wet Tuesday night in LA. The audience comprised about half a dozen specially invited “fans” and me and a pal sat in a corner eating pizza and drinking beers. The singing wasn’t very good – although I recall a rendition of Take My Breath Away by a near naked Wonder Woman that made a couple of heavy breathers stand to attention.
The whole thing was a sad coda for the “mainstream” division of the porn industry that pretty much collapsed eight years ago, its former stars now reduced to cabaret and special appearances (do they do children’s parties? Probably, this is California we’re talking about). Now Fox News reports that the business is being kept afloat by celebrity sex tapes – the equivalent of a TV network relying on the novelty value of Dancing With the Stars to keep ratings up. Why are things so bad? Two reasons: the internet and disease.
It’s often presumed that the internet is porn’s best friend – and filth certainly accounts for about 12 per cent of all websites curently available. But while the internet has undoubtedly increased supply it hasn’t lifted the profits of production. On the contrary, it’s killed off the dirty cinemas and naughty DVDs that generated hard cash. The performers at the Porn Star Karaoke were all 30-somethings who rode the wave of the late-90s, early-Noughties DVD boom which was often centred on personality: actors would build up fan bases and could demand high fees if it was known that their face/genitalia could push up the price of a DVD. With the arrival of the internet and the ability to speedily download cheap trash from all corners of the globe, their bargaining power collapsed and they found themselves either doing low-grade stuff for scraps or forced to retrain. As Gloria Swanson put it, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small!”
Salon explains the business crisis thus:
Most commentators identify five factors contributing to the predicament now facing the commercial porn industry: (i) the widescale pirating of copyrighted porn and its illegal resale and posting by opportunistic websites; (ii) the ease of producing do-it-yourself (DIY) amateur porn videos; (iii) the enormous increase of “free” porn sites; (iv) the resulting change in business economics; and (v) the ongoing recession with cuts discretionary spending, especially among a certain sector of the male audience.
This restructuring has led to the closing of many commerical porn companies and cuts in jobs and fees to porn workers. Not unlike other once-analog media industries – e.g., newpaper, magazine and book publishing – porn is struggling to make the transition to digital online publishing.
So the wages of sin are falling. Of course, the old “porn houses” would insist that they’ll be missed – that they operated some degree of quality control that benefit their workers and society as a whole. The producers, financiers and actors all knew each other and something akin to a “community” existed, offering support and a certain degree of care to those who worked within it. By contrast, the amateurs who are taking over the internet are probably more likely to be exposed to sexual abuse, poverty and disease. They’re also more likely to engage in barnyard action and other assorted depravities, the kind of thing that the old industry avoided. As with any drug, the greater availability and variety of online content has created a new breed of addicts who require a bigger and more plentiful fix every time they turn on. Recall Randy Marsh in South Park explaining to a friend that he can’t relieve himself without access to the internet because its shocking content has left him deadened to ordinary stimuli: “I need the internet to jack off. I… got used to being able to see anything at the click of a button, you know? Once you jack off to Japanese girls puking in each other’s mouths you can’t exactly go back to Playboy!”
But let’s not get too sentimental about the old production houses. All aspects of the sex industry are innately dangerous – for while we would love to imagine that we live in an age of consequence-free pleasure, the reality is very different.
A shocking outbreak of HIV has caused the adult film industry’s trade association to try to impose a moratorium. The stories about what went wrong are tragic and graphic, and reveal a business that actually cares little about its employees. I’m not exaggerating: it doesn’t give a damn. We are repeatedly told porn is something that people choose to engage in – that it’s a safe and pressure-free environment. Cameron Bay’s account of how she contracted HIV from a fellow performer who was actually bleeding on set says different. Filming at a public bar, she describes a scene out of the last days of Rome:
There were up to 50 people in the room with us. And we were laying on top of them. And they were touching inappropriately. It all happened so fast. I didn’t realize how unsafe it was until I saw the pictures … You’re on a whole other level when you’re doing something so extreme.
Performer Derrick Buts told how he worked in porn for just four months and still managed to contract chlamydia, gonorrhea and herpes – before finally succumbing to HIV. Patrick Stone told reporters that he’d been tested positive for HIV and advised his employer, yet he was still asked to do filming. Most of these people had surprisingly brief careers in porn before disaster struck. It’s not unreasonable to conclude that they were lied to about conditions and consequences.
Rather than facing up to the truth about human nature, Western society prefers to replace old lies with new ones. We used to lie to ourselves that no one looks at porn and that if you do your eyes will fall out. Now we lie that everyone looks at online porn (they don’t, and of those who do some 80 per cent are men), that it has no side-effects, that it’s 100 per cent safe to perform in, and that it’s really just a business like any other. In some senses, that last proposition is right: it’s subject to the whims of market forces and changing technology that affect newspapers and book publishers. But in so many ways it is something uniquely dangerous and potentially lethal. It desperately needs far tighter regulation and a more healthy degree of public shunning. Things like filth are usually taboos for a reason.
