Excerpts from Sheila Jeffreys Keynote Address

Trafficking in Women versus Prostitution: A false distinction (PDF: JEFFREYS-WINTER.PDF) — By Sheila Jeffreys. Keynote Address, Townsville International Women's Conference,"Poverty, Violence and Women's Rights: Setting a Global Agenda," July 3-7, 2002, James Cook University, Australia.

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…In the 1990s certain interest groups came together to campaign on the international stage for the recognition of prostitution as legitimate work. This idea that prostitution should be seen as work, choice, women's sexual liberation, came from US, Dutch and Australian prostitutes' collectives in the 1980s. These groups received a great impetus from the AIDS epidemic. Cheryl Overs, an Australian prostituted woman who is now a spokeswoman for Network of Sex Work Projects in London, says that as a result of the AIDS epidemic she got a new family in gay men who had a very different view of prostitution from feminists. She credits the rise of Madonna with having helped create the new pro-prostitution family (see interview in Kempadoo and Doezema, Global Sex Workers, 1998). Arguments were made that prostitution needed to be legalised or at least recognised so that harm minimisation could be delivered in the form of needles and condoms. AIDS money flowed into the coffers of national and international pro-prostitution organizations… The lobby is fronted by women from prostitution who say it is fine. I see them as the Marlboro women of the porn industry…

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…I was invited to speak on Women's Hour on BBC radio in London with a 'call girl'. She had a severe eating disorder as prostituted women regularly have, because eating disorders are amongst the sequelae of child and other forms of sexual violation…

Apparently in a Melbourne Brothel… They would come up and touch the men sexually and vie with each other in offering what they would do. Some might offer sex without condoms if they particularly needed the money. Then they went up to the room.

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…Women would often apply lubricant in a bathroom on the way up because the men would be most unhappy if they got the impression the women were not sexually aroused and some would refuse to pay.   The demand for fistfucking suggests that the increasingly violent and degrading practices carried out upon women in pornography are educating men in what they wish to do to women, first in prostitution and then in their relationships. This applies also to anal sex. When women came down from bookings one would shower for 10 minutes in very hot water to get the dirt off her body. Before a booking one woman would come out in goose bumps. Her skin was crawling at the thought of what she would have to endure. Sexual harassment is what the man pays for. The women dissociate to survive the ordeal using psychological techniques or drugs and alcohol.

…It is true that many are seasoned by previous sexual violence in childhood or adulthood. To such women the violence of prostitution can seem less severe.

…It is hard to work out occupational health and safety codes for work in which women are regularly at risk of violence and harassment such as men twisting nipples and shoving fingers up women's anuses. Codes have to deal with diseases which are life-threatening, where women may be required to handle faeces and urine as well as semen, where they have to suffer the psychological damage of dissociation. Codes for other workplaces require the isolation of dangerous substances, wearing gloves etc. Prostituted women are in no position to do these things.