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Feminists and religious conservatives in strange alliance over transactional sex

Opinion: The right to say No is important – and so is the right to say Yes

In The Irish Times, Fionola Meredith comments on one of the most peculiar alliances since 1938…

Feminists and religious fundamentalists shouldn’t mix. If they do find common cause, it’s often a sign that one-dimensional moral or ideological fanaticism – rigid adherence, fuelled by heightened emotion, to absolutist messages and beliefs – has become more important than what happens to real people in the real world.

Take the planned introduction of new laws criminalising the purchase of sex in Ireland, north and south. In the North, the Human Trafficking and Exploitation Bill, proposed by DUP peer and staunch Free Presbyterian Lord Morrow, is now at the committee stage at Stormont. The Bill, which will make it illegal to buy sex, effectively conflates sex workers and targets of human trafficking, treating them not as two distinct and occasionally overlapping categories of people, but as one homogeneous group of oppressed and distressed victims. The apparently unthinkable notion of a woman, or indeed a man, actively choosing to make money from selling sex is entirely absent. Nonetheless, the Bill has been given an enthusiastic welcome by many women’s rights campaigners, especially Women’s Aid, which justifies its position with the claim that “anyone buying sexual services is supporting sexual slavery and the degradation of human rights”. (We don’t know what sex workers themselves think about the proposals, because nobody, it seems, bothered to ask them.)

Free choice

The picture in the South is similar. In June, the Oireachtas justice committee backed the introduction of laws against the buyers of sex. This was claimed as a victory by Turn Off the Red Light, an anti-prostitution campaign largely driven by Ruhama, a project of two of the religious orders associated with the Magdalene laundries, and theImmigrant Council, which was founded by a nun from one of those orders and is now directed by a self-described radical feminist. Here, too, the ramped-up talk is all of exploitation and harm, damage and coercion: the notion of free choice and personal agency is dismissed as an impossibility. It seems that prostitutes only exist if they are wrecked, passive creatures, destroyed by the abhorrent appetites of men, and willing to accept guidance and succour. There is a repeated emphasis on “sending messages”, both negative and positive: Turn Off the Red Light says that “if one woman is for sale this sends the message that potentially all women are for sale”. Criminalising clients, on the other hand, “send[s] a clear message” that in Irish society “it is not acceptable to buy another person like a commodity for personal gratification”.

 

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  • Well put, and not the first to not the first time the Hitler-Stalin pact between anti-porn feminists and religious fanatics backed by conservative politicians. No other cause, including things like equal pay for equal work or reproductive choice, excites Gail Diines and her pals like porn. Dines told me to my face that she was "ready to take on the difficult question of consent to abortion" in her efforts to demonstrate that there is no such thing as consensual sex work. Which is more of a concern to most women, the abstract "harms" of sex work or economic equality and the right to legal and safe abortions? Not much of a question for most women. But for the rad-fem crowd it's all about ideology and no one is quicker to throw women under the bus in the name of that ideology than the demagogues who get themselves on TV and sell their books by howling about the evils of porn, a much sexier sell.

    You'll find pictures of Dines and her friends all over the place, including on this site, grinning idiotically next to grandstanding politicians and misogynist religious cranks all over the web and that's no accident. These joint photo-ops are meant to conceal the anti-woman agenda of the right and to make lunatic fanatics like Dines appear more mainstream. And, of course, conservative groups and religious "charities" have lots of money to pay for travel expenses and honoraria for rad-fem propagandists. Like they late bank robber Willie Sutton, they go where the money is.

    And what do we call people who earn their livings off the labor of sex workers? Hint: the word starts with a "P."

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