Not that I think someone who engages in sex is worse than someone who just poses for soft porn pics, but I don’t think the alleged statistics you quoted include soft porn photography. I think the sex workers most vulnerable are the prostitutes, as the illegality of their trade makes them particularly vulnerable. Any woman who goes somewhere secluded with a strange man, for business or pleasure, is vulnerable.

I don’t think we are getting rid of sex for money and nude photography anytime soon, I am not clear what solution you propose.

Also, as I mentioned, there has not been any indication yet that this particular woman’s death had anything to do with the Internet porn. She was at a bar, left with some guy (a guy she knew I seem to recall), disappeared, and was found dead. (Some women, of course, are beat or raped or killed without having had any involvement in porn or sex work.)

Any way, pretty intense experiences you have had, I am sorry you went through such hard times, thanks for sharing that.

So, Paul, when I say that pornography is prostitution, I am simply making the logical point that selling sex is selling sex. It’s you who assume that I am putting down women who appear in pornography by making that point. I’m not clear how it is that speaking frankly about the ways that sex work — by its very nature — endangers sex workers makes somebody the equivalent of a bible-thumping, whore-hating prude. Feminists like me aren’t anti-sex or anti-sex worker. What we oppose is the violence inherent in the commodification of bodies and sexuality in the context of patriarchy. What we hate is the violence: the violence that sex work visits on sex workers themselves; the violence done to women and children assaulted by pornography consumers; the violence done to the psyches of girls and boys who grow up in a culture in which violence has been sexualized and sex had been commodified; and the violence that all of this does to everybody’s sexuality.

No young girl grows up thinking “I want to be a prostitute/stripper/porn star when I grow up” unless she is being (or has been) sexually abused. No grown woman chooses sex work unless she is tricked, forced (by poverty, drug addiction, the demands of an abusive partner, etc), or is still acting from within the damage done to her identity by prior sexual assault/abuse. I suppose it is possible for a quasi-grown (i.e. adolescent) woman who is not a survivor of childhood sexual abuse to be so confused by pro-porn rhetoric that she believes she can make easy money without risk by stripping or appearing in pornography but, in my experience, it’s always the girls who are already hurt in some way who fall into that trap.

Do you really care about those girls? Really? Then, first, quit acting like the consumers of their bodies are their friends. Next, quit denying the very grave physical and psychological danger and damage to which sex work invariably exposes them. Rape and murder are occupational hazards of sex work, which is inherently psychologically damaging. A very few sex workers get lucky and get out without damage to body or mind but they are, truly, the exceptions to the rule.

Johnny, I agree that prostitutes are demonised by our culture and I’m sure that such demonisation leads some men to feel more free to violate those particular women. But to attribute all of the violence against sex workers to that one contributing factor is kind of like attributing all drunk driving deaths to vodka. Instead, we need to see that demonisation in context. Demonisation of prostitutes is just one of many ways that our culture uses the bodies of sex workers as receptacles into and onto which forbidden fantasies may be projected and acted out with impunity. Clients gape at, grope, and thrust themselves into the bodies of sex workers as if those bodies were abstract objects rather than the living, breathing embodiments of people with thoughts, feelings, and histories of their own.

Sex workers cope with these violations of their bodies and individuality mostly by feeling numb or feeling nothing at all, in other words, by making their bodies insensate objects. They are generally so used to feeling numb/nothing that this feels normal to them. Having developed the habit of numbness when being touched intimately in the course of childhood sexual abuse, most don’t register the damage that the violations and the numbness itself does to them. Some never stop feeling numb, never recover the fullness of feeling that is every animal’s birthright. Twenty and thirty years later they are still wondering why their relationships feel so empty or their lives so meaningless. They may still be unable to recognize danger or to distinguish affection from abuse and thus may repeatedly find themselves in hazardous relationships or situations. Others are luckier and are able, in the context of safe relationships and stable life circumstances, to begin to perceive and work through the damage that their years “in the life” did to them.

Let’s not compound the violation by abstracting the violence done to sex workers from the context in which it occurs. The violence is made possible by the objectification and commodification of sex workers’ bodies. Objectification of women’s bodies is a key component of patriarchy. Commodification of bodies is a key component of capitalism. The proximate causes of involvement in sex work include, not surprisingly, child sexual abuse (patriarchy) and poverty (capitalism). Of course, we have to do what we can to support sex workers in the current context, including supporting their own efforts to organize and providing educational and occupational opportunities to sex workers who want to get out. But we do them no favors by pretending that the inherent hazards of sex work don’t exist. Certainly, we have an obligation to the girls who are being sexually abused tonight to make sure that prostitution/pornography doesn’t look like a safe profession for them tomorrow.

Just because you blur the line between prostitutes, porn actresses, nude models, and college students who pose nude for websites, doesn’t mean statisticans do.

And as Johnny mentioned, the illegality of prostitution makes it more dangerous. How many prostitutes go missing from or are murdered at brothels? If you make prostitutes feel they can’t go to the police, and push their trade to alleys, side roads, and seedy motels, you make them vulnerable. And it doesn’t help that right-wingers and anti-sex feminists make it seem like sex workers are immoral sinners.

Lastly, there is no proof at this time that her disappearance had anything to do with her posing nude for a website. Let the evidence play out before you jump to conclusions.