Nussbaum on Spitzer April 2, 2008

(With thanks to Calypso for pointing me to the story)

Martha Nussbaum’s comments on Spitzer’s legal problems contain two main claims:  Prostitution should not be illegal, and Spitzer didn’t commit any crimes that are really against the state.  The second is roundly debated, both in the comments on it and in the New Yorker.  After all, Spitzer was having people arrested for an involvement  he shared in, he was laundering money, and so on.

The first claim is worth discussion here.  Is prostitution just comparable to lots of other jobs that involve taking money for the use of one’s body? 

To give you an idea of her view:

Why are there laws against prostitution? All of us, with the exception of the independently wealthy and the unemployed, take money for the use of our body. Professors, factory workers, opera singers, sex workers, doctors, legislators – all do things with parts of their bodies for which others offer them a fee….However, the difference between the sex worker and the professor, who takes money for the use of a particularly intimate part of her body, namely her mind, is not the difference between a “good woman” and a “bad woman.” It is, usually, the difference between a prosperous well-educated woman and a poor woman with few employment options.

Many types of bodily wage labor used to be socially stigmatized. … Now they are respectable, but women who take money for sexual services are still thought to be doing something that is not only non-respectable but so bad that it should remain illegal.

What should really trouble us about sex work? That it is sex that these women do, with many customers, should not in and of itself trouble us, from the point of view of legality, even if we personally don’t share the woman’s values. Nonetheless, it is this one fact that still-Puritan America finds utterly intolerable.

What do you think?  Perhaps one way to approach the question is to ask whether we also think that other very intimate uses of one’s body, such as wet nursing and surrogate motherhood, should be viewed as goods and services that should have a fair market value, for instance.

Women in Kosovo March 15, 2008

Women in newly independent Kosovo face serious problems, despite having some excellent laws apparently on the books.

A United Nations study in 2000 estimated that one-fourth of the female population of Kosovo suffered physical or psychological abuse; Kosovo police last year recorded 1,077 cases of domestic violence…Like much of the surrounding, rugged Balkans, Kosovo has long served as a notorious transit point for the international trafficking of women, mostly from Eastern Europe, who are forced into prostitution or slavery.

After a brutal crackdown by Slobodan Milosevic in 1999, Kosovo came under the stewardship of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations. During the years since, Kosovo evolved from a transit point into both a source of and destination for trafficked women. Often, Kosovo officials and former guerrilla commanders were complicit in the lucrative trade — and the resident international community, including peacekeepers and civilian consultants, its market.

Problems have been exacerbated by the violence and dislocations of war:

Roughly half of Kosovo’s generally young population is out of work; the World Bank and other experts believe it could take a decade to dramatically reduce unemployment. Poverty strains Kosovo’s families, which tend to be large. Add to that the dislocations of war: Thousands of people were killed and entire villages razed, their residents forced to move to urban areas. There, many live in cramped conditions, disoriented, unsettled in an unfamiliar environment.

The article draws attention to an interesting contrast between pre-war and post-war conditions for women:

Women used to be relegated to restrictive lives at home, guarded behind the high-walled compounds that traditionally housed extended ethnic Albanian families, or clans. It wasn’t freedom, but it was out of the reach of outside exploitation. Traffickers brought women from elsewhere, such as Moldova and Romania, initially to be shuttled to Italy or other parts of Europe and, after the war, to remain in Kosovo to “service” a growing international population.

Eventually, more and more Kosovo women, ripped from their traditional home life, also fell prey to traffickers and found themselves lured by promises of work, marriage or their own cellphone, only to end up in seedy bars, strip joints and brothels.

This, taken on its own, may seem like the article is minimising the problems faced by women within their own households. But it isn’t– significant attention is devoted to domestic violence (rather than “outside exploitation”), and one victim in particularly is profiled with depressing vividness.

Still, at least some advocates are hopeful of change:

Igballe Rogova, head of the Kosova Women’s Network, an umbrella coalition of about 40 groups, said she was hopeful the government, with the independence issue more or less settled, could put into practice laws that exist on paper.

“Today we have really incredibly good mechanisms on gender equality,” she told a European Parliament committee on women’s issues in Brussels late last month. “We have a law on gender equality, we have an office on gender equality at the prime minister level and, in every ministry, gender equality officers. We are not happy with the implementation of these mechanisms, but we are very optimistic.”

Sherifa said laws grant women the rights to own and inherit property on the same terms as men. But it often does not happen that way.

For the full article, go here. If you’d like to learn more about the Kosova Women’s Network, go here. (Thanks, Shelley, for alerting us to this important story.)

not a moral issue? February 29, 2008

There’s been much in the media, in the UK, recently about prostitution and proposed changes in the law (mostly prompted by the high profile case in which Steve Wright was convicted of the murder of five women working as prostitutes).

(Proposed revisions to the law, however, have been jettisoned for the moment, in an attempt to get the Criminal Justice Bill through Parliament as smoothly as possible. More here)

Radio 4 had a discussion about whether selling sex simpliciter is morally problematic - you can listen to the programme here (though programme may only be online until next wed. scroll down to ‘the moral maze and click listen.)

Its actually a pretty frustrating listen: many of the discussants don’t focus on the matter that is supposedly under discussion, namely of whether or not selling sex itself is morally problematic. So often they seem to be talking at cross purposes. Rather, there is discussion of the often horrific conditions that surround those working in prostitution.

Whilst this meant there was little clarity over the moral issue …

(only Michael Portillo seemed focused on this question; his claim being that when it somes to selling sex simpliciter, if both buyer and seller were informed and consenting, there was no moral issue, nor should there be a law against this (he seemed to suggest this was a thought that could generalise. But there are cases where this does not, in current law, hold: he would surely want to say (I think?) that selling and buying drugs (non-addictive ones, to remove complications about autonomy on the part of the buyer), for example, should not be legal))

… what the discussion DID seem to show, was that the moral issues surrounding selling sex should be of little relevance when considering what the legal position should be  - not least because even if it is morally wrong, this does not mean it should be illegal.

More relevant are the realities of the conditions in which many women work in prostitution, and what leads them into it. This  interesting article in today’s guardian (G2) which discusses prostitution without raising the moral issue at all.

Students and sex work February 21, 2008

Research conducted by Kingston University, London shows that more students are turning to sex work to pay their fees and meet the costs of student living. The study claims that the figure has risen by 50% in the past seven years, coinciding with the introduction of tuition fees. The article (and the reader comments that follow it) assume that it is only female students who are working in the sex industry. I’m not sure if the study also looked at male students. If it didn’t, it should have done. (For what it’s worth, I reckon uncovering that kind of data would be harder, since working as a male prostitute is surely even more taboo than being a female sex worker.) Read more here.

A New Carnival January 28, 2008

And by ‘new’, I mean it’s the first ever Carnival Against Pornography and Prostitution.  We here at Feminist Philosophers have a diverse range of views on these issues, and we know our readers do, too.  So, some of you will be fans of this carnival and others not so much.  But we thought we’d let you know about it, not least because our very own Monkey has something in it.  Congratulations, Monkey!

Sex Wars VS Farm Wars December 8, 2007

Brownfemipower has a powerful post comparing the feminist energy devoted to the porn industry with the lack of feminist energy devoted to the farm industry.   

I know that there’s more than one way to get fucked.And I only hope there will be a time when feminists fight for thirty years about the best way to end violence against farmworkers.