Sadistic Romance

by GAIL DINES

The porn industry must be throwing a fit right now. The adult book Fifty Shades of Grey has sold over twenty million copies in record time, and sales are still going strong. How did E.L. James, a first-time author who was a television executive, manage to pull off a feat that has eluded the porn industry—getting women to see sexual cruelty as hot sex? In my interviews with them, porn producers regularly bemoan the fact that they just can’t seem to make porn that appeals to the majority of women.

I can’t say I am surprised that the normally business-savvy porn industry has been bested by a novice, given the somewhat ridiculous advice Adult Video News (the porn industry’s premier trade) journal offered to pornographers interested in attracting more women to their websites. Arguing that only 15% of Internet porn consumers are women, AVN suggests that to attract women, “adult Webmasters need to create sites where the primary elements are interaction and education.” And what would these sites look like? “Such sites would allow women to obtain advice, perhaps during teleconferences with experts, have elements of cybersex, and should play into women’s relationship fantasies”.

I can’t imagine women flocking to websites where they can get handy hints from experts mid-arousal. But The AVN article did get something right: women are flocking to a book that plays into, and exploits, “women’s relationship fantasies.” The fantasy they recommended, “a story of how a woman got a rich and powerful boyfriend” because she is good in bed, is very close to the formula James followed. But this story line alone isn’t going to sell to women, as the porn industry knows only too well.

While much of the sex in Fifty Shades is as cruel and sadistic as in mainstream porn, it is expertly packaged for women who want a “fairy tale” ending. In male-targeted porn, the woman is interesting only for as long as the sex lasts. Once done with her, the man is onto the next, and the next, and the next.… She is disposable, interchangeable, and easily replaced. No happy ending here for women.

In Fifty Shades, however, the naïve, immature, bland Anastasia is, for some unfathomable reason, the most compelling woman our rich, sadistic, narcissistic hero has ever met, and he not only kisses her during sex (something you rarely see in Internet hardcore porn) but he doesn’t move on to the next conquest once he has had his wicked way with her. In fact, he actually marries her and confesses undying love. As one of the female fans I interviewed said, this is like Pretty Woman all over again.

Indeed, Fifty Shades is about as realistic as Pretty Woman. How many prostitutes do you know who end up living in marital bliss with a former john? I would guess about the same number of women who live happily ever after with a man who dictates, in a written contract, what to eat and wear, and when to exercise, wax, and sleep. In my work, I meet many women who started out like our heroine, only to end up, a few years later, not in luxury homes, but running for their lives to a battered women’s shelter with a couple of equally terrified kids in tow. No happy ending here, either.

In his book on batterers, Lundy Bancroft provides a list of potentially dangerous signs to watch out for from boyfriends. Needless to say, Mr. Grey is the poster boy of the list, not only with his jealous, controlling, stalking, sexually sadistic behavior, but his hypersensitivity to what he perceives as any slight against him, his whirlwind romancing of a younger, less powerful woman, and his Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings. Any one of these is potentially dangerous, but a man who exhibits them all is lethal.

And yet women of all ages are swooning over this guy and misreading his obsessive, cruel behavior as evidence of love and romance. Part of the reason for this is that his wealth acts as a kind of up-market cleansing cream for his abuse, and his pathological attachment to Anastasia is reframed as devotion, since he showers luxury items on her. This is a very retrograde and dangerous world for our daughters to buy into, and speaks to the appalling lack of any public consciousness as to the reality of violence against women.

Fifty Shades also reveals just how pornographic our culture has become over the last decade or so. While the old Harlequin romance novels had narcissistic heroes who toyed, sexually and psychologically, with their much younger prey, however remote and emotionally challenged he was, the hero did not have a torture chamber tucked away in his basement. Fifty Shades of Grey is Harlequin on steroids, a kind of romance novel for the porn age in which overt sexual sadism masquerades as adoration and love. New as this is, the ending remains depressingly the same for real women who end up falling for the Mr. Greys of the world.

GAIL DINES is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston. Her latest book is Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality (Beacon Press). She a founding member of Stop Porn Culture.

Gail Dines is a contributor to Big Porn Inc:Exposing the harms of the global pornography industry (Ed MTR and Dr Abigail Bray, Spinifex Press, 2011).

Whatever Happened to Melissa Harris-Perry?

by GAIL DINES

Last week, midway through a leisurely Saturday afternoon, I got an email from MSNBC asking me to be on the Melissa Harris Perry Show a week later (July 7th). I was delighted to accept, as MHP is not your usual American journalist. A professor of political science at Tulane University, she is an outspoken African American feminist and a progressive voice in a media landscape dominated by right-wing talking heads. MSNBC is a rare media oasis in the U.S. where one gets to hear some actual critical analysis, so I—mistakenly, it turned out—thought this was going to be one of the few positive experiences I’ve had working with corporate-controlled media. In all honesty, after many years of being on talk shows in the U.S., I have come to expect very little in terms of integrity from the media. Their job is to boost ratings by making stories entertaining and light, and God help anyone who gets in their way.

I spent a long time on the phone with MHP’s producer talking about my research on the harms of porn and the ways women in the industry—especially women of color—are financially exploited and physically and emotionally dehumanized and debased. Given MHP’s feminist politics and her scholarly work on the representation of African American women in U.S. history, I was excited to do a show with an interviewer whom I expected would be engaging and thoughtful, in contrast to the usual adolescent sniggering I get from the male journalist who suddenly finds himself in the awkward position of interviewing a feminist who doesn’t think porn is fun. Read full article here.

Big Porn Inc: Exposing the harms of the global porn industry (Spinifex Press, edited by Dr Abigail Bray and me) is now appearing on bookstore shelves in the UK and North America. Host and producer of The F Word radio show and the executive editor of feminisms.org, Meghan Murphy interviewed me recently. It was good to talk to Meghan because I’d re-run her work a few times on my blog but we hadn’t spoken before. (If you want to get a taste of her writing, check out this thoughtful and detailed analysis of Slutwalk ).

You can listen to Meghan’s interview with me here.

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ACT committee misses opportunity to address harms: ‘normalises prostitution, cuts back on regulation, waters down health safeguards’

Caroline Norma

The chair of a committee appointed to review the ACT’s Prostitution Act took the significant step last week of attaching a 9-page appendix to the committee’s final report outlining her ‘dissent’ to its findings.

In this appendix, the Shadow Attorney General Vicki Dunne criticises her colleagues for ‘trying to depict prostitution as normal and inevitable’, and so missing an ‘opportunity to take a fresh look at the harms of prostitution and innovative ways to ameliorate those harms’.

Dunne notes her Committee colleagues held ‘media events’ with respondents to the inquiry who were supportive of the government’s current approach to prostitution, and she is critical of the fact they ‘chose not to seriously consider alternative approaches’ for the ACT.

Dunne’s exasperation with her colleagues’ inability to perceive of prostitution as anything other than ‘work’ for poor women is vividly apparent in her remark that ‘[i]t may come as a surprise to some that it is not a universally held view that prostitution has always been with us and there is nothing we can do as a society to address the apparently insatiable demands of, mainly, men for sex with, mainly, women’.

The ‘alternative approach’ that Dunne wanted Committee members to consider was the ‘Swedish model’ of legislation, which she describes as ‘an innovative, woman-centred approach‘ that is ‘demand’ focused in its criminalising of the purchasers of sex.

Dunne notes that Committee members ‘did not want to engage in…discussion’ about the Swedish model, despite the fact information about its successful implementation in Sweden, Norway, Iceland and South Korea was made available to them.

The Committee, she says, ‘specifically rejected any information campaigns targeting the purchasers of sex’, and instead took the opposite approach of making recommendations that would further ‘normalise prostitution; cut back on regulation; [and] water down health safeguards’.

It looks like members of the Committee approached their task of examining prostitution policy in the ACT with some lack of seriousness. The only recommendation they made on sex trafficking was to suggest posting multi-lingual warning signs in brothels. They heard from ACT Police that no check was done on any brothel in the ACT for a period of five years, but didn’t think to question the government’s ability to oversee the legal sex industry it created in 1992.

Dunne notes that Committee members ‘played down’ the ‘significant human rights problems’ that arise in relation to prostitution. They refused, for example, to recognise any criminality in the ACT sex industry, and were ‘unwilling to support…[an] extension of police powers’, even with the death of a 17-year-old girl in a legal Fyshwick brothel in 2008, and a sex trafficking case involving Thai women before the ACT courts.

Adherence to ideas about ‘harm minimisation’ in relation to prostitution appear to have led Committee members to believe any form of sex industry regulation to be injurious to women’s ‘right’ to become prostitutes. This line of thinking seriously underestimates the threat posed by the sex industry to the status of women and children, especially when government endorses a business sector that makes profits through organising society’s most vulnerable people to sexually serve men with money.

Dunne’s decision to stand up to the ACT government and its continuing legalisation of pimps has earned her international praise. Well-known anti-prostitution campaigner and researcher Melissa Farley has spoken publicly in support of Dunne, and the executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Asia-Pacific, Jean Enriquez, has also endorsed her stand.

On the world stage, Dunne finds herself in good company in opposing legalised prostitution and advocating the Swedish model. A model of the Swedish legislation recently passed a first reading in the Israeli Knesset,  and a similar bill is currently before the French parliament. Boston has also recently implemented a version of the law.

These developments come after successes in Sweden, South Korea, Norway and Iceland in reduced trafficking, and raising public awareness of the harms of prostitution.

Dunne’s dissenting comments represent a rare moment in having endorsement of the Swedish model in a parliamentary report.

Australian governments are generally hostile to any suggestion that prostitution might constitute a human rights problem. Advocates of the Swedish model are currently locked in battle with the Western Australian, South Australian, and Tasmanian governments over proposals to legalise the sex industries of those states. Most other Australian state governments have already given their endorsement to pimps.

This propensity of Australian governments to resign themselves to the ‘inevitability’ of prostitution contrasts starkly with the stance taken by governments in Europe. In December last year all political parties in the French National Assembly signed a resolution reaffirming ‘the abolitionist position of France, the objective of which is ultimately a society without prostitution’.

Different from Australia, France does not recognise prostitution as ‘sex work’, nor does it advocate legalising brothels and pimping. French legislators resolved that legal acceptance of prostitution is incompatible with French policies that promote gender equality.

The example set by Vicki Dunne last week affords the Australian government a similar opportunity to cast aside its former politics of resignation on prostitution, and begin to move towards a human rights-based approach to the world’s oldest oppression.

Dr Caroline Norma is a lecturer in the School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning at RMIT University. 

See also:  ‘Adding Insult to the Injury of Prostitution’, Caroline Norma, Tasmanian Times

A young man taking the lead

Now and then I stumble on a brave man passionate about the issues taken up here on the MTR blog.

Recently I’ve made the acquaintance of  Matthew Holloway. Only 26, Matthew’s written some compelling pieces in recent months on pornography, prostitution and rape-permission giving in men’s magazines. I thought you should get to know him too and in doing so be encouraged that more men seem to be willing to risk criticism and step up to the plate on these issues.

Matthew Holloway is a freelance writer and social justice advocate from Tasmania, where he stood for state and federal parliament and co-founded Tasmanians for Transparency. Matthew now lives in Melbourne where he works as a Counsellor in Aboriginal Health. I asked Matthew what motivated him to engage on these issues. He responded:

To be honest I have had a broad upbringing which included exposure to many of the feminist writings from the old school, specifically Andrea Dworkin.

On a personal level ‘not myself’ but males I have known, I have seen how destructive things like pornography can be and the conflict this can cause for many men. The way it can change their perceptions, the way that their thinking can become so warped, but also the way that their sexual urges have become so perverted that they have also become victims of a society which has normalized the material which has created these attitudes including the sexualisation and commodification of not only women but children.

For a brief period on moving to Victoria I worked for a councillor on Yarra City Council, Stephen Jolly, who worked hard uncovering trafficking in the area.

Aside from this I worked for a few years as a social worker on Grey Street in St Kilda. My client group included sex workers both male and female. I heard the stories of abuse, the way that every one of them felt they had no other options, the way they felt worthless and without skills. The other truly sad aspect was hearing how many had suffered abuse. In so many ways these people had become conditioned to using sex for survival. To hear how many had also suffered physical, verbal and sexual abuse through their work was also tragic and heart breaking.

So although I know that there are many people out there who say that people like you and I have no idea about why people go into sex work. I honestly think they are defenders if the industry and have no idea of the continued psychological damage that the sex industry and those who support it, continue to inflict on people who are truly vulnerable and at risk. Also people who through life circumstances cannot see other options let alone a pathway out of the use and abuse.

Here’s a lengthy, detailed and evidence-based piece Matthew wrote for the Tasmanian Times on the true nature of the prostitution industry.

Working against the global sex industry

…Unfortunately evidence seems to show that legalisation still has many inherent safety risks and has often become an issue of governments wanting to derive profits from the sexual degradation and exploitation of some of society’s most vulnerable people. It should be noted that I am not the only one who is saying that the government is keen to get a slice of the sex industry pie. This claim is even made by the Eros foundation who stated that the sex industry has a combined turnover of over $1 billion and that government agencies were looking at ways to levy a slice of this revenue….

The issue of prostitution and the problems it raises have been addressed by many of the great feminists of our time; Germaine Greer once famously stated “Pornography is simply the advertising of prostitution” and this holds to the fact that there are many problems in our hyper sexualised culture which have promoted the expansion of sexual slavery. Prostitution is still a capitalistic and patriarchal structure and always will be, no matter how much Mr Cox tries to argue against the fact; women are always enslaved to sex work because of male demand for it. This is a key point which the Swedish model recognises and this is the reason for its success…Read full article here

And here’s strong piece on porn and exploitation – including of men – Matthew had published in Eureka Street:

Germaine Greer and Gay Exploitation

It is commonly thought that men represent the main producers and the main consumers of pornography. But earlier this year feminist firebrand Germaine Greer alluded to an important and often forgotten fact: men are also its victims.

‘Pornography’, Greer said on a September episode of ABC1′s Q&A, ‘also exploits boys, men and children, but most of all, it exploits the consumer of pornography.

‘The consumer’, she said, ‘doesn’t realise that because of the stage in your life at which you become aware of pornography, that his sexual responses are being altered by pornography, so that he is expecting a certain kind of mechanical sequence of events, which he’s learnt to manipulate in his own self-gratification. This then gets parked on a relationship, which prevents real intimacy from ever ensuing.

‘That’s pretty grim but it’s much grimmer, the fact that people are moving towards each other in a series of pre-programmed responses.’

Like women, men have fallen prey to the unrealistic expectations of a hyper-sexualised culture….

All elements lead to what Greer described as pornography’s ability to promote the acting out of pre-programmed responses devoid of intimacy. Ultimately we need a movement away from porn, and to re-assert a sexuality that is not based on images of actors from a specifically geared, targeted and manipulative industry.

For years the pro-porn lobby has tried to win the argument and take the ground from the left and right by portraying them as either censorship fascists or religious conservatives. The truth is that you cannot have exploitation in the name of liberalism. Read full article here

And this one in Online Opinion last year  on a British study on men’s magazines and rape apologism.

Re-assessing men’s magazines

A new study to be published in the British journal of Psychology is set to have massive ramifications and has already kick started a re-assessment of soft core pornography.

The study by Psychologists from Middlesex University and the University of Surrey, showed participants quotes from men’s magazines such as FHM, Loaded, and Zoo.

The participants were also shown quotes from convicted sex offenders which were taken from ‘The Rapist Files: Interviews with Convicted Rapists written by Sussman & Bordwell

Participants were not informed which source the quotes came from, they were asked to assess for themselves based on the content.

Most participants were unable to distinguish the source of the quotes; the study also revealed that most male participants identified more strongly with the language expressed by the convicted rapists.

Dr Miranda Horvath from Middlesex University said: “We were surprised that participants identified more with the rapists’ quotes, and we are concerned that the legitimisation strategies that rapists deploy when they talk about women are more familiar to these young men than we had anticipated.”

The study has already had an impact in the UK where retailers have agreed to move all men’s magazines to top shelves and censor front covers.Read full article here.

That’s just a sample. There’s lots more of Matthew’s work online. Have a look. And men, why not join Matthew and add your voices to his?

By Renate Klein and  Susan Hawthorne

Since the publication of Rachael Hills’s article “Who’s Afraid of Melinda Tankard Reist” (and see her reflections two weeks later) at least ten on-line and print media articles have joined in a public dissection and commentary along the lines of, “she’s a conservative religious fundamentalist” and “she’s pro-life and can’t be a feminist.”

The subliminal context of the attempts to bring Melinda Tankard Reist to her knees and destroy her work is of course the elephant in the room: if her considerable impact on educating the public about the harms of the sex industry could be reduced, the pornography and prostitution promoters and profiteers would rejoice.

As her publishers at Spinifex Press, Australia’s only feminist publishing house (and secular), we take issue with these portrayals of Melinda Tankard Reist. It is easy to try to dismiss someone by smacking on a “fundamentalist” (whether Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Jewish) label and thereby dismiss the arguments that a person makes. What is less easy, but more ethical and intellectually rigorous, is to examine Tankard Reist’s views – which are shared by many feminists and other advocates for social justice and human rights – and to see what the factual arguments for those views are.  Read more>

As I read Jennifer Wilson’s article, I couldn’t help thinking that the pro-porn crowd must be producing a list of talking points that they endlessly circulate among themselves. They trot out the same old arguments without a shred of empirical evidence to back them up, and then they suggest that it is the anti-porn feminists who are lacking in rigor and theory.

Let me be more specific. I had the misfortune earlier this month to attend a conference in London called “Pornified: Complicating debates about the ‘sexualisation of culture’,” but it did anything but complicate. On the contrary, the complex, global, maturing porn industry was simplified right down to the point of disappearance: they made the argument that there is in fact no “it” – meaning the porn industry – because there are so many producers of porn and just so many types of much porn on the internet, that it is impossible to locate any actual industry.

It’s like being at a conference on food and the researchers argue that because we have fast food, gourmet food, independently owned restaurants, chain restaurants and even people cooking their own food at home, well there is just so much food that there is no such thing as a food industry.

I want to suggest to those people who make bold statements about what porn people are watching, that they do some basic research on the “it” – the industry, that is. When I was in Australia, the echo chamber from the pro-porners was that because there is just so much amateur porn and free porn, it is a mistake to focus on the hardcore gonzo porn that the industry produces. Read more

See also: Misogynists are under no illusions about what porn says.

MTR on Mamma Mia, Sky News

Interview starts 15 mins, 20 seconds, followed by panel discussion.

What passing bells for those who die as cattle?

By Dr Helen Pringle

Ten years ago, Puangthong Simaplee died at the age of 27. She had been picked up in a police raid on a Surry Hills brothel on 23 September 2001, and was sent to Villawood Detention Centre. Three days later, she died in a pool of her own vomit. When she died, Puangthong weighed 31kg, about the weight of a 10-year-old girl. According to a coronial inquiry held in 2003, she had hepatitis C, an eye infection, possible pneumonia, and was addicted to heroin.

Immigration officials said that Puangthong told them that she had been sold into prostitution. On one account, she said that her parents had sold her into sexual slavery in Thailand when she was 12, and that she had been trafficked into Australia on a false Malaysian passport when she was 15. When Puangthong’s parents were interviewed by an Australian reporter, however, they said that their daughter had left their village in Thailand to find work, and that she had sent them money and smiling pictures of herself from Australia.

When these conflicting accounts came to light, people lined up to slime Puangthong, and to traduce other women who claim to be trafficked to Australia as sex slaves.

The journalist Piers Akerman for example asserted dismissively, ‘The story was a real tearjerker’. He dismissed the fuss around Puangthong’s death as just ‘sensationalistic journalism’. Akerman blamed ‘some zealots’ for inflating the number of ‘sex slaves’ [his scare quotes], and ‘quoted’ [my scare quotes] an unnamed spokesman for the Immigration Department as saying that ‘almost all so-called sex-slaves picked up from brothels reject the notion that they were enslaved, do not want to assist authorities and wish only to leave the country as soon as possible and ply their trade in other First World countries. If they have a complaint about working in Australia, it is that they have not made as much money as they expected’ (‘When Truth Spoils a Good Slavery Story’, The Daily Telegraph, 3 June 2003, p. 16).

In 2008, the president of the Scarlet Alliance, Elena Jeffreys, added her voice to Akerman’s pitiless tirade, asserting that Ms Simaplee was not trafficked, but was simply a ‘sex worker’. According to Jeffreys, the popular picture of women like Ms Simaplee as Asian sex slaves has ‘capture[d] the Australian imagination’, all part of a stereotype ‘of pre-pubescent Asian girls chained to beds in back rooms with barred windows’ (‘Truth and visas will set Asian sex workers free’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 April 2008). Jeffreys concurred that Ms Simaplee’s case was just ‘sensationalism’ and moral hysteria, which has created a ‘government-funded rescue industry’.

Strangely however, the Immigration Minister at that time and his Department were not well-known as compassionate rescue entrepreneurs. It should be a cause of shame for Australians that the former Minister is known rather for the trail of death and deportations left by his term in office than for his rescue efforts.

Puangthong did tell different stories about herself to different people before she died. Prostituted women do not get paid for being themselves, for being authentic. A prostituted woman is paid to ask, ‘What do you want me to be?’, and to act out the answer. But Puangthong was brutally honest with herself, and her body bore the marks of her honesty. After her death, her boyfriend told police, ‘She had two or three scars that were from one side of the wrist to the other. Some scars were a couple of months old and some scars were a couple of years old.’ When the boyfriend asked Puangthong why she harmed herself, she replied, ‘When I do something wrong I mark it with a scar so I remember what I did wrong’ (Elisabeth Wynhausen, ‘Parents deny selling daughter’, The Australian, 7 June 2003).

Like other prostituted women, Puangthong Simaplee had a lot of wrong done to her. Research done by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at UNSW and published in 2006,  found that many of the street sex workers interviewed had higher levels of post-traumatic stress disorder than combat veterans. A majority had been sexually abused as children, and most had been assaulted sexually or physically as adults. These findings are consistent with studies done in other countries of the victimisation of prostituted women, and form part of the basis of the Swedish model approach to prostitution and trafficking,  which criminalises the purchase of sex, but does not criminalise those who are bought and sold.

Puangthong Simaplee’s story is one of vulnerability abused, and of autonomy lost. It is a story of exploitation. It is in so many ways a typical story of a life that was trafficked and prostituted, of a person whose intrinsic worth and dignity received no respect, even after she died.

If we could only listen to Puangthong’s story, in all its tellings, perhaps we would not tell so easily the old lies about the selling of women in our world as a form of pleasure and freedom. For now, let’s ring the passing bells and mourn the memory of a gentle and vulnerable woman.

An earlier version of this was published as ‘Truth and myths of sex slavery’ in On Line Opinion on 11 April 2007.

If the market wants young, petite, fresh Asian women for sexual use then that’s what it’ll get

Caroline Norma

Pimps won’t be surprised that bidding has reached $15,000 for a 19-year-old ‘virgin’ Chinese woman currently up for auction for four days of sex.

Pimps know what men will pay for, and they know the business of prostitution. Everyone in the sex industry knows punters will pay good money for women who are young, petite, ‘fresh’, and available for booking on a ‘no restrictions’ outcall basis, preferably away from their minders. The Australian escort agency manager who put the Chinese woman up for sale exercised good business logic in recruiting her. Her vulnerability just makes it easier. On her own, most likely with little support, in a foreign country, learning a new language, struggling with debt…And after those four days with the stranger who has purchased her, how likely is it she will speak out about her treatment?

There’s hardly any limit on the money that can be made from selling other people for sex in Australia. In most states, prostitution is a business endorsed by government just like car yards and real estate agents. Brothels and escort agencies can legally operate as legitimate businesses. Pimps might have to pay licensing fees to government, but that’s about it. Like any other business owners, they are free to go ahead and run their affairs in any way they choose. The government can’t stop pimps selling women who are on student or working holiday visas, and no-one checks to see whether their recruits speak English, or how they came to end up on the books of a brothel.

Running the business of the sex industry is left largely in the hands of pimps who do the same things other businessmen do—market research, promotions and publicity, and staff recruitment. We expect car yard salesmen to do their market research, and stock vehicles that earn them the most profit at the lowest input cost. We expect them to respond to the market and offer cars that consumers want, and will pay top dollar for. Why would we expect legal pimps to act any differently? Why wouldn’t pimps sell women that fetch a high price on the market? This is how good businesses are run. The more that pimps, like other entrepreneurs, do their homework, the more money they make.

The sex industry does its market research by keeping an eye on pornography sales. The titles that are selling well tell them the types of women, and the types of sex acts, that are likely to also sell well out of the brothel. Five minutes research on Adult Video News tells us that anal penetration of young and petite women is a consumer favourite at the moment. Another five minutes on consumer review sites for Australian brothels tells us that Asian women are hot property in the local sex trade.

We only have to think like pimps to understand why there is currently a young Chinese student up for sexual sale in Australia. Why wouldn’t she be? We’ve got a large and legal sex industry operating in the country, and plenty of men who want to spend money on it. We’ve got Sexpo, the industry’s trade expo, touring the country again this month. The Western Australian government is just about to legalise prostitution in that state now, so they can start having women up on the auction block, too.

Australia is going to have four states with legalised prostitution giving traffickers a nice open market.

We’ve almost reached national consensus among Australian governments that prostitution is a welcome business in our society. We’ve had legalised prostitution for more than twenty years now, so policymakers can’t claim ignorance of the business practices of the industry.

The industry has already given us a clear picture of how it rolls: underage girls in legal brothels, violence against women in brothels, murders of prostituted women by pimps and punters, trafficking into legal brothels, suicides of prostituted women, and a girl who died of a drug overdose in a legal brothel.

Policymakers can’t feign ignorance about all these industry conventions – they’ve been going on for a long time now.

No government official in Australia should dare express any shock that we’ve now got a Chinese woman up for sexual sale. This is exactly what they condoned when they permitted the sex industry to operate legally in this country. There are not two different sex industries—one that we might encourage as nice and respectable, and one that we might shun. There’s only one type of pimp. Like any other entrepreneur, he runs his business according to the cold, hard logic of the market. If the market wants young, petite, Asian women available for sexual use for days on end, then that’s what it’ll get.

The governments of Victoria, NSW, the ACT, and Queensland may live to regret the day they allowed an industry to develop on the basis of capital raised from the sexual trading of women and children. There are large numbers of women from South Korea and China in the Australian sex industry now, their treatment can be seen as Australian government sponsored human rights violations against women from these and other countries.

Australia has a lot to say about human rights violations in China, but while we’ve got one of their nationals up for sexual sale, are we in any position to take the moral high ground?

Caroline Norma is a lecturer in the School of Global Studies, Social Science, and Planning at RMIT University, and a member of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Australia (CATWA).

Recent articles by Caroline Norma: ‘It’s time to get serious about sex trafficking’ , ‘The Koreanisation of Australia’s sex industry’

Sydney escort agency trading in a woman’s vulnerability

The Daily Telegraph reported Wednesday that a Sydney escort agency, My Out Call, was auctioning the virginity of a 19-year-old female Chinese student on line. According to the report, the student was in debt. There were already a number of rival bidders offering up to $15,000 to use the young woman for four days. Her virginity “must be sold” by December 12.

One of the many problems of legalised prostitution is that the government can’t restrict the prostituting of women on student or working holiday visas, despite their vulnerability.

What kind of man would do this? How can the woman’s safety be guaranteed? What will happen to her in those four days? What if the man wants to film what he does to her as some kind of permanent record of his winning bid?

And we like to think we live in a civil society.

This is what I said on Channel 7 Sunrise yesterday morning.

*If anyone has any connection with the student, please contact me.