<\/p>\n
The 1997 International Congress on Prostitution<\/strong><\/p>\n The 1997 International Congress on Prostitution, coming up March 13-16 in Van Nuys, promises to be an important milestone in the ongoing movement for prostitutes\u2019 rights.\u00a0 Chaired and organized by James Elias and Vern Bullough of the Center for Sex Research at California State University, Northridge, and by Norma Jean Almodovar, Director of COYOTE-LA, the Los Angeles chapter of the main U.S. organization for prostitute rights, ICOP \u201897 will bring together current and former prostitutes, researchers, academics, law enforcement people, legislators, legal experts, educators, service providers, and prostitution activists from around the world.\u00a0 There will be some 55 concurrent workshops and five plenary presentations at which presenters will talk about a wide variety of prostitution-related issues, as well as an evening of entertainment, an art show and a gala International Hooker\u2019s Masquerade Ball.\u00a0 ICOP will provide a rare, indeed unique, forum in which issues related to prostitution can be discussed from a thoughtful, supportive, primarily non-judgmental, and stereotype-free perspective.\u00a0 Most significantly, prostitutes and other sex workers have important opportunities to speak for themselves about issues relevant to them.<\/p>\n This may not sound like such a big deal.\u00a0 Indeed, if this conference were about almost any other issue, it would have already occurred ten times before this.\u00a0 There are conferences focusing on major social issues every day, and conferences that bring together workers in various fields and industries are just as common.\u00a0 Not so sex work and sex workers.\u00a0 In this culture — indeed, more generally throughout the world — nothing is straightforward about prostitution and prostitution-related issues.\u00a0 The simple existence of a well-organized, \u201cserious academic arena\u201d (as ICOP describes itself) in which prostitutes and prostitution-sensible academics and social workers can speak to each other and to the world about issues related to sex work is simply something that has never happened before.\u00a0 If the conference goes well, it will be an important leap forward for the new and growing movement, both in the U.S. and abroad, for prostitutes\u2019 rights.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n To Finally Have a Voice…<\/strong><\/p>\n While there have been various social movements over the years purporting to express concern for women who work as prostitutes — most notably the disastrous social reform movement in England in the late 19th century led by Josephine Butler — it is only in the last 25 years that prostitutes have begun to organize and to speak for themselves.\u00a0 The first contemporary organization of prostitutes speaking on their own behalf was COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), organized in San Francisco by Margo St. James in 1973.\u00a0 Since 1973, COYOTE\u2019s goal has been to draw attention to abuses against prostitutes by police and the entire legal system, and to raise consciousness nationwide on the real issues and conditions of sex work and sex workers.\u00a0 For many years COYOTE\u2019s lavish Hookers\u2019 Balls raised money to support its efforts, bringing prostitutes and their supporters together in a fun-loving, creative, joyously outrageous context that quickly became a socially-approved part of San Francisco\u2019s cultural landscape.\u00a0 Organizations of prostitutes and other sex workers sprang up in other U.S. cities — most notably New York\u2019s PONY (Prostitutes of New York) and Atlanta\u2019s HIRE (Hooking Is Real Employment) — and in other countries around the world.<\/p>\n In February, 1985, the First World Whores\u2019 Conference was held in Amsterdam.\u00a0 Some 75 prostitutes, ex-prostitutes and invited prostitution rights advocates from the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Germany, England, Sweden, Canada, and the United States produced the World Charter for Prostitutes\u2019 Rights — the first manifesto written by prostitutes to express their concerns and put forth their demands.\u00a0 The conference also created the International Committee for Prostitutes\u2019 Rights, an ongoing organization dedicated to advancing prostitute rights issues.<\/p>\n Among other things, the World Charter seeks to \u201cdecriminalize all aspects of adult prostitution resulting from individual decision,\u201d \u201ceradicate laws that deny freedom of association or freedom to travel to prostitutes,\u201d and \u201cguarantee prostitutes all human rights and civil liberties, including freedom of speech, travel, immigration, work, marriage, and motherhood, and the right to unemployment insurance, health insurance and housing.\u201d\u00a0 It demands that prostitutes be allowed to \u201cprovide their services under conditions that are absolutely determined by themselves,\u201d that \u201cprostitutes must have the same social benefits as all other citizens,\u201d and that \u201ccriminal laws against fraud, coercion, violence, child sexual abuse, child labor, rape, and racism\u201d be enforced independently of whether these acts are related to prostitution.\u00a0 The Charter declares proudly that the International Committee for Prostitutes\u2019 Rights is \u201cin solidarity with all workers in the sex industry.\u201d<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Assuming Prostitute Legitimacy<\/strong><\/p>\n The Second World Whores\u2019 Conference followed shortly thereafter.\u00a0 It was held in the hallowed European Parliament in Brussels, October 1-3, 1986, bringing together prostitutes and prostitutes\u2019 rights activists from around the world in new numbers and in new elegance, including the European Parliament\u2019s facilities for simultaneous translation into several languages.\u00a0 The proceedings of the Second World Whores\u2019 Conference are documented in the wonderful book edited by Gail Pheterson, A Vindication of the Rights of Whores<\/em>, published in 1989.<\/p>\n Through the Second Whores\u2019 Conference, prostitutes and prostitutes\u2019 rights advocates gained a new level of legitimacy and new recognition from the international press.\u00a0 Both the Congress itself and Pheterson\u2019s book, provided an opportunity for prostitutes who had never before had an audible public voice of their own to define their own issues and to speak in their own terms.\u00a0 Sex workers also had the opportunity simply to meet together and to break the numbing isolation so many sex workers experience as a result of their extreme social stigmatization.<\/p>\n As Gail Pheterson notes in the opening chapter of her book, \u201cfor those present the Whores\u2019 Congress felt like a milestone.\u00a0 It is almost unprecedented for prostitutes to speak on their own behalf and on behalf of other oppressed people in a large well-publicized forum.\u00a0 It is also almost unprecedented for non-prostitute women to work as equals with prostitute women in shared struggle.\u201d\u00a0 Judith Walkowitz, the well-known feminist historian of prostitution, pointed to the significance of prostitutes standing up for the legitimacy of their work and for their entitlement to simple human rights.\u00a0 \u201cNever,\u201d she said, \u201chave prostitutes been legitimized as spokespersons or self-determining agents, not by those who defend them against male abuse and not by those who depend upon them for sexual service.\u00a0 It is a radical political stance to assume prostitute legitimacy.\u201d\u00a0 As Margo St. James put it, \u201cit is such a thrill, that\u2019s the only word I can think of, to be here and to finally have a voice…\u00a0 We are here to forge alliances, to list our grievances, and to work for change… in our lifetime, let\u2019s hope….\u00a0 I see this as the beginning of a mass movement that is long overdue.\u201d<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n We Are All Whores<\/strong><\/p>\n The movement for prostitutes\u2019 rights has significance that reaches far beyond those women and men who actually earn their living by providing sexual services to others.\u00a0 Prostitution and the way that prostitution is socially regarded, regulated, and suppressed are social phenomena that lay bare any number of important larger issues — most significantly the way that this and other cultures feel about sex in general, and about the general power relations between women and men.\u00a0 It is because sex itself is so widely feared and suppressed that prostitution is consistently addressed not as a social and economic issue, but as a moral issue.\u00a0 And it is because fundamental male supremacy over women is still — despite the advances of feminism in the last thirty years — such a basic reality at all levels of society, that prostitution is addressed not as a gender power issue but as an issue of legal suppression combined with various forms of condescending concern for the male-defined welfare of presumably fallen and desperate women unable to make sensible choices for themselves about how they wish to conduct their lives.<\/p>\n Ironically, the contemporary feminist movement, which might be expected to champion prostitutes\u2019 rights as part of the struggle to free women from patriarchal control, has largely chosen to define prostitution instead as being exploitative of women by its very nature.\u00a0 Adult women who freely choose to work as prostitutes (or as strippers, sexual entertainers, and lap dancers) are conflated with women and girls who are coerced into sex work against their wills.\u00a0 Protestations by women who affirm that they truly want to do sexual work are dismissed as evidence of these women\u2019s confusion and desperation, since it is assumed that no right-thinking, self-realized woman could ever say any such thing.\u00a0 Never mind that prostitution offered women a way to be economically independent of men long before any other forms of employment were open to them.\u00a0 Never mind that prostitution offered women a way to take control of their own sexuality long before anyone had thought of the phrase \u201cour bodies, our selves.\u201d<\/p>\n The whore stigma is not reserved for those specific individuals who exchange sex for money.\u00a0 Anyone, or certainly any woman, can be called a whore, or thought of as a whore, just for being too sexual, or unconventionally sexual, or by breaking social conventions about sexuality in any way.\u00a0 When Gail Pheterson organized her Bad Girl Rap Groups in 1984, the women who came spoke of being stigmatized as whores for a variety of reasons, most of which had some connection with being sexual beings:<\/p>\n “getting raped, being smart, having an abortion, being a lesbian, sleeping with lots of men, talking too much, running away from home, getting divorced, leaving my children, being an unwanted child, having a child without marrying, hanging out with the wild girls in school, being Jewish, having an affair when I was married, leaving the Catholic church, going to a college that didn\u2019t have a curfew, getting beaten by my husband.”<\/p>\n In this sense we are all whores — or seen as whores — those of us who do not conform to the rigid standards of repressed sexuality that the dominant culture holds up as The One True and Proper Sexual Path.\u00a0 (If you are reading this paper, that means you, bunky.)\u00a0 Actual working prostitutes carry the weight of the whore stigma for the entire society, and the scorn, abuse, and ostracism directed at whores serves the purpose of reminding every woman and man, girl and boy, who might be tempted to express his or her sexuality in some kind of richer, more self-fulfilling way of the punishments that can and will be meted out to those who stray from the sexually conventional fold.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Interfacing Worlds and Perspectives<\/strong><\/p>\n ICOP \u201897 will be a different sort of event from the World Whores\u2019 Conferences in Amsterdam and Brussels.\u00a0 Its purpose is not specifically to bring whores together, but to bring working prostitutes together with academics, service providers, law enforcement personnel, and others so that there can be an interchange of ideas and perspectives.\u00a0 The conference is aptly subtitled \u201can interface of cultural, legal and social issues.\u201d<\/p>\n It is, in this way, significant in its own right as an opportunity for prostitutes and non-prostitutes to begin to talk to each other, to work together, and together to gain better understanding of and work for change around the many issues raised by prostitution and other forms of sex work.\u00a0 The lineup of workshops is overwhelming in its scope, with seven hour-and-a-half sessions running simultaneously, each one offering input from several presenters.\u00a0 There are 55 workshops being offered over two and a half days, with over 200 individual presentations.\u00a0 So many things to say; so little time.\u00a0 The only problem may be that nothing gets said very thoroughly.\u00a0 But just having all the issues out on the table in one gathering, and having prostitutes and prostitution-friendly people from so many disciplines talking to each other with the blessing of a respected university and the interest of the greater press, is a major accomplishment.<\/p>\n This reporter will be there with bells on, and report back in my next column.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Love and Kisses from Annie Sprinkle<\/strong><\/p>\n XXXOOO:\u00a0 Love and Kisses from Annie Sprinkle<\/em> is our favorite pleasure activist\u2019s latest contribution to the world — this one a two-volume collection of sixty postcards embodying some of Annie\u2019s most wonderfully surprising photographs, pontifications, and general support for the free pursuit of pleasure wherever it grows and however across the social grain that pursuit of pleasure may run.<\/p>\n Over the years, as you may well know, Annie Sprinkle has, in her own words, been a porn star, pin-up model, performance artist, sex-positive feminist and new-age sex guru.\u00a0 She is also an imaginative, funny, and crazily wise photographer who enjoys poking fun at the pleasure-fearing world around her, using her images to confront anti-pleasure types with their own confusions, and to offer a way for those who are more pleasurably inclined to laugh their way free from their anti-sexual social training and inhibitions and to revel instead in their straightforwardly erotic, sexy, pleasure-seeking selves.<\/p>\n XXXOOO<\/em> includes sixty different postcard images, accompanied by various levels of commentary, to delight the mind and the spirit.\u00a0 There are a good selection of vulva-adoring photos (including several of Annie\u2019s \u201cMuff of the Month\u201d series), portraits of a dozen or two of Annie\u2019s many incarnations, and tributes to sex radicals and performance artist of all stripes and persuasions.\u00a0 Not to mention collected vintage Annie Sprinkle whimsy, and such didactic gems as \u201cAnnie Sprinkle\u2019s 101 Uses for Sex\u201d and \u201c40 Reasons Why Whores are My Heroes.\u201d\u00a0 There is an Aphrodite Award card (\u201cfor sexual service to the community\u201d), Annie\u2019s recent \u201cMrs. and Mrs. Silver-Sprinkle\u201d wedding photo, and two Sex Soup recipes.<\/p>\n And you can even send the postcards to your favorite friends (or to your enemies for that matter) as there are smaller versions of the cards that remain when you tear their larger cousins out.\u00a0 In her opening letter, Annie exhorts all of us to become Pleasure Activists simply by sending the cards out into the world.\u00a0 \u201cSpreading pleasure is what life is all about,\u201d Annie reminds us.\u00a0 \u201cYou can help change the world,\u201d she advises, \u201cby mailing these to your friends and lovers.\u201d\u00a0 Of course, you will also then get to see what happens when you send perfectly legal but extremely outrageous material openly through the mails.\u00a0 \u201cImagine,\u201d Annie says, \u201chow many Postal Workers will get to touch and enjoy them too!\u00a0 Maybe they\u2019ll be offended and refuse to send them.\u00a0 Maybe they will decide that you are sending pornography over state lines and give your name to the FBI.\u00a0 Or maybe they\u2019ll take them home for personal use, possibly relieving some of that workplace stress and preventing future postal worker gun rampages.\u201d<\/p>\n XXXOOO<\/em> is available from Gates of Heck Publishing, 954 Lexington Avenue, #118, New York, NY 10021.\u00a0 Only $11.95 for each set of 30 cards and commentaries.\u00a0 Fun for the whole family.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n March 7, 1997<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 1997 David Steinberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n The 1997 International Congress on Prostitution<\/p>\n The 1997 International Congress on Prostitution, coming up March 13-16 in Van Nuys, promises to be an important milestone in the ongoing movement for prostitutes\u2019 rights. Chaired and organized by James Elias and Vern Bullough of the Center for Sex Research at California State University, Northridge, and by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comes-naturally","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}