nixsight

I concluded from this that it’s not feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself who are responsible for the idea that all men are potential rapists – it’s sometimes men themselves.
Why men use prostitutes

There’s a lot wrong with that sentence. For a start, the fact that there’s no “just” in between “not” and “feminists” is telling.

It’s a peculiar sort of person who will take the words of obviously confused or disturbed individuals, and draw conclusions that pull in a whole gender. Or even a whole subset of a gender.

One can’t conclude from the words of a suicidal female office worker that all office workers are suicidal, let alone that all women are.

I’m getting a little bit tired of sex-negative writing at the moment. For sure, there is trafficking and abuse in the sex industry, and something should be done about it, but we – and certainly, The Guardian – should be at the point where the discussion is more insightful and specific, and less blunt and general.

Certainly, it may say something about how objective a writer wants to be when they are using data from a very limited survey, and not giving much away about how they came across the responders.

There are many erudite and pragmatic ex and current sex-workers writing on and off the internet. There’s really no excuse any more to use the word “prostitute” as short-hand for “trafficked” or “exploited”. Even if it’s the case that the majority of people in the industry are either one of those things, applying that sort of binary thinking to the issue isn’t moving discussion of it along at all.

I’ve realised today that my relationship with The Guardian is similar to the one I had with the NME – in that I started reading both at around the same point in my life, and allowed myself to identify with them a little – but for some reason I never grew out of the former the way I did the latter. Helpfully, the paper’s online provision is sorting that out.

(Cross-Posted from Tumblr)