The Paternity of Prostitution

published by AMSA (Alternative Mobile Services Association) on February 4, 2025

I moved to Portland in 2001 as a New York liberal. Witnessing prostitution in Portland eventually made me drop the liberal label and accept I was now a radical.

Radicals go upstream to where problems start and do less damage control on the front lines than liberals. Both advocates are essential, and as an upstreamer invited to speak to first responders about prostitution I’d like to explore alternatives outside the liberal bandwidth.

Portland has several neighborhoods where prostitution is a constant and I live in the city’s worst one. The 82nd Avenue rape neighborhood (“red light district”) has more Asian massage parlors than food stores and men drive there to hunt for prostitutes near my Montavilla home.

My neighbors have stories:

A father stopped at a stop sign had a prostitute try to open his passenger door and get into his car while his two small children were in the back seat.

A mother was walking with her 11-year-old daughter and a man in a car slowed down to proposition her in the middle of the day.

A woman waiting on the sidewalk while her car was serviced had a man in a car pull up and motion for her to get inside, then he sped away as she tried to take his photo.

The sheer amount of strip clubs has long been a warped Portland bragging point, a smirk to an overly romanticized Wild West. Studies show 100% of strippers have been solicited for prostitution, confirming one stripper’s observation, “We’re not showgirls, we’re prostitutes pretending to be showgirls.”

I’m here for alternative solutions, so let’s begin at the beginning—men’s choices.

The Nordic model approach (also known as the Equality Model) decriminalizes people who are prostituting and makes buying sex a criminal offense. It has been adopted in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Israel, Canada, France, and Ireland.

The Nordic model is the compromise between legalizing prostitution and not legalizing prostitution. It has been spreading outside Scandinavia because it works marvelously. After only three years, Oslo, Norway saw dramatic drops in all categories of severe violence against prostitutes, and emergency room visits dropped a whopping 79%.

Source

It’s a world-changing idea. Most people understand it should not be a crime to be so desperate that you let someone hurt you, but should be a crime to sexually prey on vulnerable people.

I won’t presume to tell first responders how to incorporate the Nordic model into your daily work, that’s your expertise. Mine is going upstream and relaying what I’ve learned.

1. Decriminalize those who are prostituted

The Nordic model repeals laws targeting those who are prostituted and clears their criminal records of previous convictions for offenses related to their own prostitution.

2. Criminalize those who attempt to purchase sex

Purchasing sex should be an offense punished with public transparency, fines, and the threat of jail. Sweden has a jail sentence of one year, however no one has been sent to jail for buying sex in Sweden. Men who pay for sex are rarely hardened criminals, they’re the ordinary men around us, in our families, our workplaces, our schools. Fines and exposure are more effective at changing the behavior of ordinary sex buyers than jail.

3. Training for service providers

Experience (in Sweden especially) shows the Nordic model is most effective beyond the larger social shift against sex buying when accompanied by in-depth training for police, judiciary, and frontline workers.

Police abuse of prostituted women is a significant problem, with some studies finding as much as 30% of violence can come from police. It’s worth pointing out none of the Oslo violence reported by prostituted women was committed by Norwegian police, not so much as one act of verbal abuse.

4. Exit services for victims

Since a key component is not forcing prostitutes to exit, there must be non-judgmental support (addiction services, education, legal advice, childcare) to meet people where they are and not where others want them to be.

Prostitution can never be made safe and its existence makes women’s human right to equality with men impossible.

Finally, let’s go ALL the way upstream, no bullshit.

If you have never mustered the courage to look at the pornography your husband or sons or other men in your lives masturbate with, I beg you to break the silencing spell pimps have cast over your family. We can no longer continue to ignore the propaganda of prostitution media and how it grooms mainly male consumers to take orgasmic pleasure in violent, life-threatening sex acts.

Brock Turner and porn users share a culture of sexual entitlement

published at Feminist Current  June 13, 2016

Rape culture is porn culture in 2016 — the two are indistinguishable. Since Hustler famously turned Cheryl Araujo’s 1983 gang rape on a pool table as other men watched into pornography, rape culture and porn culture have been increasingly merged. We could place bets on how many days it will be until porn users are offered pornography themed on the recent Stanford rape case.

Consequently, it’s not unfathomable that the average porn user and Stanford rapist Brock Turner share similarities in how they have learned to pursue sexual gratification.

People who masturbate with porn largely think they’re better people than the Stanford rapist, but are they? Let’s examine the possibilities of anti-rape porn users sexually consuming the products of prostitution with integrity.

Both the Stanford rapist and men who use porn believe some women are there for the sexual taking, no questions asked. Like Turner, porn users stumble across drugged up, barely conscious-to-unconscious women and assume consent. Testimony from the porn industry confirms intoxication is ubiquitous during production, and even Hollywood actresses like Jennifer Lawrence often admit to using alcohol or pharmaceuticals to get through simulated sex scenes.

Neither Turner nor porn consumers could possibly get sober consent from the bodies they masturbated themselves with, however that hasn’t stopped them.

Porn users and Turner are similarly confident no one will know precisely how they’re getting off, and if details are made public they’re embarrassed by the loss of privacy and shamed by people’s judgments. Husbands notoriously keep their porn secret from their sex partners, and divorces commonly result after wives find out what their husbands have been doing when they thought no one would see.

Brock’s victim wrote that, while in the hospital, she “had a Nikon pointed right into my spread legs.” Do porn users truly understand what she meant by including that detail? Perhaps some readers thought it “whorephobic” of her to imply there’s something inherently violating about having your genitals photographed.

News reports have revealed Turner took at least one photo of the victim’s breasts after the assault that he shared with friends via text, illustrating again the seamless fusion of rape culture and porn culture. Porn consumers have no way of knowing if the images they’ve seen were captured during rape.

The victim’s letter said no one wants to have sex behind a dumpster, not even with their boyfriend, but why should porn users believe that? There’s plenty of porn showing women agreeing to sex behind dumpsters, bent over dumpsters, inside dumpsters. The term “cum dumpster” is so common in porn that Turner himself has almost surely encountered it in his pornographic viewings, along with “jizz guzzler,” “cum bucket,” and “cocksocket.” Porn users don’t ask themselves if they would accept having sex in the gross places the women they stumble across on the internet are presented as accepting.

Turner said he didn’t know the name of the woman on the ground beneath him. How many porn users do you think know Jenna Jameson’s real last name is Massoli? Most porn users couldn’t even tell you the fake name of the last porn actress they masturbated themselves to while watching her be prostituted. The voyeuristic consumption of anonymous women’s sex is considered completely normal.

The pine needles found inside the victim’s vagina is downright wholesome compared to the things men have shoved inside women to make porn (multiple penises, animal penises, feces, etc), but the same common sense porn users admonish Turner for not employing doesn’t get applied to pornography.

Like Turner’s victim, women in porn will retain no memories of specific users getting themselves off with their bodies. Prostituted women who have had their rapes filmed said it affects their lives to know their suffering is remembered and continually masturbated to by men who have seen what was inflicted upon their naked bodies.

The victim’s statement includes a reference to popular porn series Girls Gone Wild: “To listen to your attorney attempt to paint a picture of me, the face of girls gone wild [sic], as if somehow that would make it so that I had this coming for me.”

Through all my years of anti-prostitution activism, the idea that prostituted women are wild girls who willingly put themselves into dangerous situations remains the most common excuse porn users make. Turner and porn users both insist their belief, “She wanted it” makes the “it” she got the “it” she should have expected to get and, therefore, her fault.

Everyone wants to believe they would be like the Swedish bicyclists in this story, but porn users haven’t shown a willingness to intervene in what they’ve seen so far. Before those Swedes stopped and acted, there were likely a few people who walked along the path, saw what was happening, and found excuses not to intervene. Those of us who choose to interfere with pornographic exploitation no longer watch porn.

If there are any porn users reading this, here’s an experiment for your next pornsturbation session: Ask yourself the question you expected Brock Turner to ask: “How can I know for sure if this woman has genuinely consented to this sexual activity?” If you don’t know more about the women in front of you than the Stanford rapist knew about the woman in front of him, consider how porn culture might be influencing your ostensible anti-rape culture ethics.