The Wisdom of Whores

Writing in the Guardian, Cath Elliot trumpets the unanimously warm reception for a new attempt to lock men up for buying sex. She’s proud of her own contribution to the debate, she says, though the hyperlink she gives for that contribution simply takes us to a remark about the International Union of Sex Workers which hovers between the blatantly inaccurate and the slanderous.

I’ve been following this issue a bit recently — in fact I wrote a little a piece about it for this month’s Prospect — and I was keen to go to the meeting in Parliament which Cath mentions. Sadly, I’m unable to assess her contribution to the debate. I got through parliamentary security with a bottle of wine and a cheese knife (!) but couldn’t get past the feminist bouncers who were turning away anyone who is interested in actually debating the future of prostitution in this country. Also turned away: colleagues from the World Bank, staff from the offices of MPs supportive of rules that will make sex work safer, and (needless to say) anyone who actually chooses to sell sex for a living — the people the meeting organisers don’t believe exist.

“As everyone in the room agreed, it’s time to bring an end to the selling of women and girls: who could possibly disagree with that?” concludes Ms Elliot. The organisers didn’t need to police the crowd to get everyone to agree on that point. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t believe that selling people is wrong. Not anyone outside the Premier League, anyway. Selling sex, on the hand, is not wrong, in the eyes of the hundreds of thousands of women and men who choose it as a profession. Oh but wait, they don’t exist….

The truth is that they do exist, just as the ex-Nevada hooker who left the profession with debts because she hadn’t managed to save any of the $2000 + a week she earned while on the game exists. Some women who sell sex do it because they are forced to. They are trafficked, and we already have laws against that. Some do it for the same reason people work in McDonald’s — because it is the best job they can get for the skills they have (though you tend to earn more selling sex than burgers, and the hours are more flexible). Helping people who hate their jobs (in prostitution or McDonalds) to “exit” is surely a worthwhile thing to do. But some women (and men, of course) sell sex because they want to. Forcing them to stop by criminalising punters would be like promoting welfare in the restaurant industry by outlawing fast food. The distinction between the voluntary and involuntary sale of sex is an important one, and one that the draft policing and crime bill is inching its way towards recognising. Trying to keep willing sex workers out of the room is both undemocratic and unhelpful.

For a larger version, visit Jorge Cham at PhD comics. It’s worth it. Especially if you are killing time not finishing your thesis (Sara…)

This comic came to me by way of Laura (thanks) and Language Log, where the true nerds among you can go for an illuminating discussion of the difference between ρ and p. Really.

Few companies are posting rising profits in these hard times. But hard times are what SSL, maker of Durex condoms and other good-sex products, like best. As more people stay at home use of sex toys, the warming Play O orgasm gloop and condoms have all risen, driving pre-tax profits up by almost a third in 2008/9. Now that the UK government has decided to give free condoms to teenaged boys, the market for other items in the Play range might swell even more.

Inevitably, the goodie-two-shoes family values mob worries that if boys can get condoms easily, they’ll be more likely to have sex. “Josephine Quintavalle, founder of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, a pressure group, warned: “We are just facilitating and encouraging sexuality without any deeper understanding of the emotional side of relationships” The Times reports. (I don’t know what Josephine’s experience is but I carry condoms all the time and I haven’t noticed that it makes it significantly easier to get laid. The few teenagers I drink with say the same.)

More realistically, some doctors worry that the credit card scheme that goes with the free condoms will put some teenagers off. While condoms will be handed out at football grounds and other places where young guys hang out, they’ll have to show a “condom credit card” to get them. The card shows that they’ve sat dutifully through safe sex training sessions. If they sit through extra “what to do about drippy dicks” sessions, they get stamps on their cards, coffee shop style. The government’s notion that boys will want to collect the stamps as a status symbol seems devised by someone who has little memory of being a teenage boy, and doesn’t even drink with them. As NHS doctor John Crippen says, we shouldn’t be putting any barriers at all in the way of young guys being responsible about contraception and STI prevention if and when they get lucky.

If you’re a teen who’s hoping free condoms will help you pleasure women more often, Durex Play’s here to give you pointers on what you’re aiming for. But to keep in line with Nanny’s guidelines on appropriate viewing, please make sure you only watch this ad after 11 pm.

Thanks to Peter Barnett for pointing me to Dr. John.

Off-topic but on memory: 20 years ago today I was in Tiananmen Square, reporting for Reuters on the chaos that was the student movement. It was an odd time — sweaty, rank-smelling but rather jolly. Erica’s photo captures rather well the unbridled hubris and optimism of the students, right up to the last day or two of their protest. It wasn’t until the evening of June 3rd that things got really nasty. By midnight, things were nasty enough that most people, students and foreign journalists alike, had left the square. I stayed there with a colleague, Graham Earnshaw, until the tanks came in at dawn. Or at least I think I did. Graham’s memory of what happened is rather different.

When I first became aware of the difference, I got in touch with several of the old muckers who were in and around the Square with me. What if we all wrote down now what we remember of that night, then compared notes? No-one was up for it. I guess everyone was frightened about the tricks memory can play — and indeed it was that, more than the actual events in Tiananmen Square, that were the subject of the piece I wrote in Granta recently. (pdf) In the last couple of weeks, however, several of my friends and colleagues have sent me their version of events (including this nice piece from Andy Roche.)

In the intervening years, I’ve had the opportunity of working closely with the Chinese government. My colleagues in the Ministry of Health were young, dynamic, well-trained. Though many were from the post-Tiananmen generation, all were aware of what happened, and many were interested in discussing the implications two decades on. Attending mock press conferences to prepare for the release of controversial HIV estimates (inevitably and somewhat ironically, I took the role of the Rotweiler foreign correspondent) I find it hard to believe that the higher-ups could have allowed Tiananmen to happen. And I find it equally baffling that they are trying, still, to suppress discussion of events which were never a real threat to Party rule, and which in the eyes of most of the population belong to a distant past. The student leaders of yesteryear were not terribly coherent in their demands, but the central item of their agenda — corruption within the Communist Party — remains the major threat to that Party’s survival. If the old men sitting sclerotically atop the Politburo were to spend less time blocking web-sites and more time fighting corruption, they’d have little to worry about.

It’s an exciting day in the UK. While you’d be forgiven for thinking that all MPs worry about is their expenses, they’ll in fact spend this afternoon debating the policing and crime bill, which deals with airport security, public drunkenness. Oh, and prostitution. It seems that home secretart Jaqui Smith has been listening to sex workers, and has introduced some sense into the bill at the last minute.

I’ve fretted before about the bill, which criminalises men who buy sex. But a fantastic lobbying effort by UK sex workers (notably the International Union of Sex Workers and the English Collective of Prositutes) has meant that the version of the bill which gets its third reading today is a VAST improvement on earlier versions. Most importantly, only men who buy sex from women who have been “subjected to force, deception or threats” can be nicked. While it’s still a wide net, it’s not one most people in the indsutry object to — no sex worker wants to work alongside colleagues who have been trafficked or forced into the business. The wording is certainly a damned sight better than earlier versions, which made it illegal to buy sex from people who are “controlled for gain”. That includes anyone who gives an agent a cut of their fees for finding clients (or for finding a publisher, a gig at Wembley, a part in the new Stephen Spielberg movie… No, let’s not go down that route).

There are other proposed ammendments worth supporting too. Catherine Stephens, one of IUSW’s most energetic and dedicated campaigners, draws attention to the following:

• new clause 4 which decriminalises anyone under 18 who is selling sex
• new clause 37 which defines a brothel as more than two people selling sex plus a maid
• new clause 38 which decriminalises “associated workers” (e.g., maids) in brothels
• amendment 6 to clause 15 which defines persistently for street sex workers as “twice a week” rather  than the current “twice in three months”
• amendment 7, which removes clause 16 (compulsory rehabilitation for street sex workers as a substitute for fines or jail time)
• new clauses 25 and 26, which, like the government amendments, require that the person selling sex has been coerced and that the client knows this.

Of course the abolitionists are yelping about the changes. If you’re a voter in the UK, you’ve got til 2pm to call your MP and ask them to support the changes, which will make sex work safer and more rewarding for people who want to do it, while helping to protect people who don’t. You can call your MP on +44 20 7219 3000 (and find out who to badger here).

Congratulations to those sex workers who have shown that reasoned, evidence-based engagement in the political process is worthwhile. You’ve brought some wisdom to parliamentarians. Of course one could be forgived for expecting a sympathetic ear from our elected representatives; they know a thing or two about selling themselves to the highest bidder…

Further to yesterday’s post, stats-are-fun superstar Hans Rosling has calculated a coverage-per-death ratio for swine flu and TB. It clearly points to an under-reporting of the boring old pandemics that we’ve grown used to ignoring. But it also begs the question that plagues prevention efforts in health as well as in other areas — terrorism, climate change, conflict. Do we have to wait until we fail to prevent something before it becomes worth covering? How many deaths do we need to justify the media hype?

We need to concede that we might get a more effective response BECAUSE of the media hype. But if the coverage does encourage (or allow) policy-makers to swing into effective action, and tens of thousands of deaths a prevented, analysis such as Roslings will be more problematic than ever. Because you see, despite all the hype, there never were that many deaths after all….

Thanks to Basia for pointing me to the video.

Earlier this week, I gave a talk in Norway called “Panic in Perspective: Science, Media and the Creation of Pandemics”. I chose the title months ago, and had no idea how topical it would turn out to be. The downside was that instead of exploring the beauty of Bergen in a kayak, I had to spend the weekend tracking news coverage of swine flu. Predictably enough, the poets laureate of headline writing on the British tabloid The Sun came up with the best front page to proclaim the impending “pandemic”:

Why do I say “pandemic”? Because my understanding of pandemic influenza is that it involves three things:
a) a virus which is new to humans (and so we have no immunity to)
b) a virus that spreads easily from human to human
c) a virus which makes people very ill, or kills them

Using data up to Sunday, I made this graph:

As you can see, avian flu ticks boxes a) and c) but not b). Swine flu ticks boxes a) and c), but apparently not b) b), but apparently not c). Don’t forget that for both types of flu the death rates are probably overestimates, because this is registered deaths of registered cases. People who get only mildly sick are far less likely to be in contact with the health system and be tested for the flu strain — so they’re far less likely to be registered as a case — than the severe cases who die. The less virulent the infection is, the bigger the overestimate is likely to be. It’s likely that there have been tens of thousands of unregistered cases of swine flu in Mexico, and that only the most severe have made it into the country’s miserably overburdened and inequitable health system.

There has been more coverage of flu in the last two weeks than at any time since George Bush announced the pandemic preparedness plan at the end of 2005 (more than three years after the first person died of bird flu, so not-all-that-prepared plan might be more accurate). It’s all over the blogosphere, too, of course. One very good blog that I track when I’m doing my day job and that rejoices in the uninspired name of H5N1 is visited by about 400 sad, sciency nerds like myself on any given day. At the height of the swine flu scare, it was getting over 8,000 hits in a day.

One of the things that amused me as I tracked the news feeding frenzy around swine flu was how quickly it turned into cannibalism. By week two, news outlets (including my former employers) were running news coverage about the news coverage. I mentioned this in my talk in Bergen. Afterwards, a journalist from Norwegian TV came up rather sheepishly and asked for an interview, because they were doing a story about the media coverage of swine flu….

Thanks to James, who recognises the poetic genius of The Sun and archives their better headlines. And to David, who gave me the key to the other archive.

In belated recognition of May Day, I give you these sensible words from sex workers in India, courtesy of my once-long-ago employers, Reuters. Funnily enough, one of the very first stories I ever wrote for Reuters was about sex workers in a time of economic meltdown. It was also the first to draw a response from a subscriber. A German newspaper editor commented: “Asking a woman to write about the pleasures of Hong Kong’s nightclubs is like asking a man to write about childbirth”. Hmmm….

Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga won’t get laid this week. Or at least not at home — his wife Ida is leading a national sex boycott. And he may not have better luck outside the home; activists have done a deal with sex workers, paying them not to give their men relief in the boycott period.

The idea is to force the country’s squabbling politicians, and most particularly the squabblers-in-chief President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, to behave more sensibly. (Lucy Kibaki hasn’t yet said whether she’ll join in.)

A whole week without sex: imagine! The idea that this would be enough to get Kenya’s politicians to give up a lifetime’s habit of self-interested tribal and party politicking says quite a bit, doesn’t it? When epidemiologists suggest that one reason HIV spreads more rapidly in East and Southern Africa than elsewhere is because the timing, frequency and volume of sexual partnerships support that spread, we’re told we’re racist (as though somehow having lots of sex is a bad thing….). Now we have the women of Kenya planning to change the world by depriving men of sex for a single week. I can’t see the prospect of that bringing many British MPs to their knees.

Actually, I don’t think for a moment that the good womenfolk of Kenya think that their men can’t make it through the week without sex. New research published today (in the wonderful, open-access Public Library of Science) that included 1,161 Kenyan couples found that they had sex four times a month on average. Giving up one of those four times hardly seems like a big sacrifice. I’m interested, though, in how they are going to pay top-up fees to all the striking sex workers — over 7,000 girls would normally be bringing in the cash each night in Nairobi’s central business district alone.

I’m also mildly amused by the “men are pigs, women are saints” ethos that underlies the sex boycott. The annoucement of the boycott itself has drawn fighting words from the leaders of some women’s organisations. In a country where one in 13 adults are infected with sexually transmitted HIV, 60% of them women, some women’s leaders still think it is wicked to talk about sex. This from The Nation:

Maendeleo ya Wanawake [Women's Development Organisation] vice-chair Rahab Muiu criticised the presence of the organisation’s chairperson at a press conference where the strike was announced. “As the largest women’s organisation in the country, we strongly believe in family values and cannot be associated with such foul utterances which can only break families,” Mrs Muiu said.
She said chairperson Rukia Subow supported the sex boycott in her personal capacity. However, Mrs Subow has come out fighting, retorting: “I set the agenda for women in this country.”
The organisation’s assistant national secretary, Mrs Elizabeth Mayieka, said women in Nyanza were beaten by their husbands over the proposed boycott. She condemned the boycott, saying it is taboo to talk about bedroom matters in public and in the presence of children.

Thanks to Lisa McCandless

I’ve been meaning to write a cross-patch piece about Margaret Wente’s front page Globe and Mail story about the wickedness of gay men, but Chris Dupuis at Toronto’s ever-wonderful Xtra has done it for me. Although he doesn’t even get to the bit that most annoys me about her piece, her complete failure to recognise that DISCLOSING that one has HIV is much less important than KNOWING one has HIV.

If you’re a gay man in Canada who knows you’ve got HIV, there is a very high chance indeed that your infection will be monitored, and that you’ll be on treatment if you need it. And that in turn means that your viral load will be kept low, and you’ll be very much less infectious than you might be if you didn’t get regular checks and treatment. While I’d obviously like to see more positive people being able and willing to talk openly about their infection, the truth is that the chances of getting infected by someone with well-managed HIV is very slim, whether or not they tell you. And whether or not you bother to ask (because let’s face it sex does, usually, take at least two, each of whom can choose to take responsibility for themselves). But of course if you don’t KNOW you’re infected, you can’t be prosecuted for not disclosing. The criminalisation laws provide a strong disincentive to get tested. That means there’s more untreated virus around, and that in turn means more HIV transmission.

I could go on about the other logical inconsistencies in the piece — if not disclosing is murder, then are doctors who know a person’s status but don’t tell that person’s partner accessories to murder? etc etc. But I’m not going to, because I’m in Vancouver and have a whole day of good science at the Canadian Conference on HIV/AIDS research to look forward to. In honour of my visit to Canada, though, I thought I’d post for your listening pleasure these priceless phone messages left by the flower of Canadian manhood for some woman who tried to slough off his letching with a business card. Hard to imagine why, instead of calling him back (”I’m practically the only man in this city who has not a single thing wrong with him”), she sent the messages in to a Toronto radio station.

*UPDATE*
Rick Kennedy of the Ontario AIDS Network sent me the following clarification:

According to the 2003 ruling in the William case “Once an individual becomes aware of a risk that he or she has contracted HIV, and hence that his or her partner’s consent has become an issue, but nevertheless persists in unprotected sex that creates a risk of further HIV transmission without disclosure to his or her partner, recklessness is established”.

To date, no one has been charged on the basis of this ruling. If you go to the Ontario AIDS Network website, to the
HIV debate section and download the excellent Powerpoint presentation by Glenn Betteridge you will find a detailed explnation of current status of the Canadain law.

So I did. Glenn’s presentation is here and there’s lots of other useful information about criminalisation on the Ontario AIDS Network site. Thanks, Rick.

And thanks to Javi for the phone number…