Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Arena Magazine

Making sex work.

Article Excerpt
Making Sex Work: A Failed Experiment with Legalised Prostitution (Spinifex Press, 2007) by Mary Lucille Sullivan; Call Girls: Private Sex Workers in Australia (University of Western Australia Press, 2007) by Roberta Perkins and Frances Lovejoy.

In the mid 1970s, when I was a young sociology student, my acquaintanceship with a number of women introduced me to the world of prostitution, particularly in what were then illegal massage parlours. Prostitutes' conditions of work and experiences with clients, police and parlour management aroused my feminist ire.

As the result of a seminar held at Melbourne University in 1977, attended by feminists and working prostitutes, the Prostitutes Action Group (PAG), which eventually led to the Prostitutes Collective Victoria (PCV), came into being. A direct line can be drawn from that seminar to the inquiry into prostitution in Victoria led by Marcia Neave, and to the legal changes that began in 1984.

Many feminists at the time held the view that prostitution existed because patriarchal society rested on women's exploitation at all levels, including sexually. For the most part then, feminists considered prostitution abhorrent. Yet in a society where women earned less than 60 per cent of male wages, prostitution remained a way of making a living for many women. As a student of sociology I accepted the argument that with legalisation the stigma attached to prostitution would begin to lessen. If prostitution was treated as legal work, then the conditions of employment would eventually improve and the women engaged in it might move on to other less stigmatised jobs. Those of us who argued in this way were mainly socialist feminists, though a sprinkling of liberal feminists and libertarians did too. By contrast, radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin considered...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!