To The Contrary

Funding for To the Contrary provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the Park Foundation and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation.

Coming up on to the Contrary.

This is not as you point out, a profession that most people would choose to use a term like sex worker.

It implies a kind of normalcy.

As if this were just another occupation.

(MUSIC) Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe' Welcome to To the Contrary.

A weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

This week.

Is it sex, work or prostitution?

And should prostitutes be referred to as sex workers?

Some people may call this debate just a matter of semantics, but this week's woman thought leader says the terminology does matter.

In a recent op ed, New York Times columnist Pamela Paul cites the widespread use of the term and why it's misleading and certainly not empowering.

Welcome, Pamela Paul why don't you tell the audience what was in your New York Times op ed about whether sex worker, the term sex worker really helps people who work in the sex industry or not?

Well, first of all, thank you for having me.

I the impetus for this piece was a press conference that was held in New York City, hosted at the headquarters of the National Organization for Women of New York City.

And at that press conference were a number of former prostituted women and men and people who had been sex trafficked, as well as people who work with those who have been in the sex trade.

And they were there to speak out generally on the subject of a proposed legalization of prostitution, which they opposed.

But while they were there, it really struck me when Melanie Thompson described herself as a black former prostituted woman and victim of sex trafficking, ended her comments with a plea to the media saying, please stop using the term sex work and sex workers.

And some people, of course, use the word prostitute.

Others prefer prostituted women.

But the reason for it is very simple, which is that sex work legitimizes and normalizes what is an inherently dehumanizing and violent form of work, one that most women choose not to partake in.

And it absolves those who are really the perpetrators of the abuse, trafficking and payment for women's bodies while sort of seeming like a way of empowering women.

And the truth is, it's not an empowering position.

But somebody came up with that, that idea who thought that it was.

In 1985, at actually a conference called the The World Whores Congress.

So a little bit tongue in cheek, but also reminiscent of a number of recent movements by activists to kind of own pejorative language.

And there they embrace the term sex workers.

Again, I can understand where it's coming from, which is the desire for these women not to feel like victims.

Unfortunately.

The there are many women who are victims of sex trafficking and of the sex trade.

And nobody really or very few I shouldn't say nobody.

There are always exceptions.

Most people don't choose to be in this particular occupation, even if you can even use that term.

This isn't a matter of choice for most women.

But at the same time, it is understandable that those who are in this situation, whether they want to be or not, don't want to feel, you know, discriminated, is discriminated against.

They don't want it to have a pejorative term.

And that's why, for example, we don't call them any more, generally speaking, you know, terms like whores or hookers, which is why I try not to rely on things like polling polls of people who are in the sex trade because they're simply too unreliable and some of them are outdated.

So, you know, we know that there are obviously it's a huge multibillion dollar industry, the trafficking of women, children, men in the sex trade.

And also it depends on how you define it.

And that's another issue with the term sex workers, is that there's a whole range within their right.

Does that include people who, you know, create pornography for money, whether they're self, you know, employed or working in the industry?

Does it include people who are in, quote unquote, erotic massage parlors?

Does it include people who are, you know, paid escorts?

There's a whole range, obviously, within there.

One of the problems with the term is that it is vague and it I in general, even if a term or phrase to describe something feels good, makes people feel better.

If it's not specific and accurate, then generally it's not useful language.

Have you or anybody else you know who covers these issues and writes about these issues come up with a term that you prefer.

The people who work in the industry?

Obviously, there are some who do prefer the term sex workers.

The women and men who spoke at this particular conference generally prefer survivors of prostitution, prostituted women, formerly prostituted person, the survivor of the sex trade.

And I think, you know, the phrase sex trade is useful in that it can encompass both trafficking and prostitution and, you know, the lines blur.

For example, the woman who I referenced earlier, Melanie Thompson, she was kidnaped when she was 13 and she was in prostitution for many years.

She said that if she had been asked when she was 16 or 17 whether she had chosen a profession or not, she would have said yes.

And she said that's what they had to tell themselves in order to endure.

So, you know, if you are caught up in a situation where you are selling your body, whether you are a survivor of, you know, molestation or rape, and many, many former prostitutes say and this there are some studies on I don't have the exact numbers that they were victimized, abused as children, sexually, or if you have a drug problem or another substance abuse problem, you know, you tell yourself things obviously to make yourself feel better to help survive that situation.

What is there any work being done to try to raise the wages of people who sell their bodies for a living?

There are people there are organizations that focus on very pragmatic issues, like trying to legalize, trying to unionize, tries, trying to, you know, have women work for themselves as opposed to working for pimps or johns or for, you know, organized crime.

And that's one way to approach the problem.

And I don't think, you know, everyone wants to make these women's lives a better.

I think that's something that most people who care about this population can agree on, even if they disagree about what the terminology is.

But there are other ways as well to fight prostitution that depart from, strictly speaking, legalization, which is what a lot of activists in New York want.

So, for example, there is what's referred to as the Nordic model, which I didn't get into in my column specifically, but that's used by a number of countries in Europe and Scandinavia, which is you criminalize the men who pay for sex rather than the women who sell themselves for sex.

So you're really going after the market, the consumer demand, rather than the women who, for whatever reason, have resorted to this in order to get by?

I remember as a teenager visiting Europe and being in Amsterdam and visiting the red light district just to see what it was all about and thinking, how could anybody do this?

How young.

And I just can't imagine.

And I think about stories we've covered about an an Indian woman who would who had an infant as a result of what I would consider rape during prostitution, being forced to have sex with a man, not because she wanted to, not because she enjoyed it, but and then being impregnated by who knows what.

You know, one of those people and having to put the infant under the bed.

Yes.

Because she had nowhere to leave.

Even leave that child.

She had she had nothing.

And how could anybody call that something, you know, sex worker giving dignity to it?

No.

But the shame should be passed on to the people who are creating the demand.

Yes.

On the other hand, those those men and you know, of course, they're there are young men who are prostitutes.

So there are very few women, I would imagine, who solicit sex for money.

But so it's mostly male.

And whether they're going after men or women, I have no idea of the percentages.

I don't think most people do.

But why hasn't that become, you know, sort of the way of the world?

Well, it's interesting.

I mean, a number of points you brought up to go back to Amsterdam, You know, people will point to that model and say, oh, it's legal in the Netherlands.

The Netherlands is so progressive.

And the Netherlands is doing things right.

But even in Amsterdam, it is a problem.

And what a lot of people don't realize is that most of those women who you see in the red light district, in those red lit up windows are not actually Dutch.

Many of them are people who have come from Eastern European countries, from, you know, countries that were in the former Soviet Union.

They're impoverished.

They're often trafficked.

They're often, you know, addicted to drugs.

And this is not, as you point out, a profession that most people would choose to use a term like sex worker to go back to that, you know, it implies a kind of normalcy as if this were just another occupation.

And I think that if you ask the vast majority of men and women if they would want their own daughter to consider this profession alongside any other form of labor, even forms of manual labor that some might say are dehumanizing, whether that's working on a, you know, in a factory, working in a slaughterhouse, doing work that might not be the most prestigious or anyone's dream job, I think most of them would say I would much rather have my child, my daughter, do anything other than have to sell her body because it is a an option of last resort.

And it's not something, again, that we want to normalize.

Another thing, an excuse that you often hear is, oh, the world's oldest profession.

Well, there are many oldest professions, including child labor, including, you know, obviously slavery, unpaid labor leader.

Right.

Servitude.

And we don't turn a blind eye to those things and say, well, it's always been around.

And speaking of child labor, which has become a kind of cause for good reason in this country, again, because there is a lot of illegal labor among youth going on right now.

Most people enter prostitution as teenagers.

You cannot say that this is a you know, this is an occupation that is entered when somebody is making a decision on their own because they have a lot of options.

These are kids who are runaways.

These are kids who have all kinds of other issues going on in their lives and need it to get by.

So it really is child labor in a vast, you know, in a huge number of cases.

And that gets to one of the real ironies and I think a grotesque one with regard to the phrase sex worker, which is that I have come across multiple times in print and online.

The phrase child sex worker, which again, is such a grotesque notion, I think, for most people, and not for religious reasons, although I'm sure there are people who object on those grounds.

But personally I come at this from a humanist perspective, from just this is inhumane to suggest that a child sex worker has somehow chosen to sell their body and what is effectively rape and child abuse, and to pass that off as a legitimate occupation.

We actually have a panelist who ran away from home in Pennsylvania.

She's written about this, but I'm not going to mention her name.

That's up to her.

She's written publicly about it in a book that she published about her life.

And she was running away from home.

But I don't remember the reason why.

But some kind of abuse going on and she came to the Port Authority in New York via bus, she was kidnapped at the Port Authority, taken to some tenement building on the way west side of Manhattan and kept there for several years at knifepoint on drugs.

There was a pimp who was running the place, and I don't know how many girls he had yet and yet servicing his financial needs and she came out of it amazingly well.

She became a women's rights leader.

She ran a pretty major women and political organization, an organization that helped train women to run for office.

She got married.

She had children.

So but how many of them come out of it like that?

Does it completely destroy their lives?

I mean, I think a lot of them do have PTSD.

A lot of them require a good amount of therapy, as I said earlier, generally speaking.

And as your story about this, this other woman attests, generally speaking, this is not the only problem in their lives.

And sometimes it is a symptom of a larger underlying problem.

Whether that has something to do with their childhood, their family circumstances, their financial circumstances, their immigration status, their mental health.

And so it can take a lot for people to escape from the profession.

And that's not even taking into account, of course, situations where people are trafficked or are prostituting themselves or not of their own accord, but because they are in the power of a john or a pimp or some kind of, you know, crime, organized crime.

And so I you know, I think back to well, two things.

One is, I think that when you talk to people who work with this population and they tell the same kinds of stories that you're just told, that these this is a very difficult situation.

The people in it are, again, often in despair to act like this is just another labor rights issue is really misleading.

And when you think about the reality of who is out there writing manifestos and marching about, you know, the phrase sex worker and sex worker.

Right.

A lot of people around the world, not just in this country, are not in a position to be writing manifestos and to be out marching on the streets.

They do not have the means, the wherewithal to do that.

And it's for those people who don't have a voice that I worry about, because if you have an active minority who is advocating for language change when it doesn't really represent the reality of most women's lives who are in this situation, then there's a real disconnect between, you know, what is being proposed in statehouses with regard to legalization and what's actually happening on the streets.

And to go back to one personal experience that I had adjacent to this, which was when I was living in Thailand in the early 1990, So quite a long time ago.

And circumstances may have changed there.

But when I was in a situation where I would go out with a group of people, some of them Thai, some of them expatriate to a bar, and it was not be necessarily a sex bar, you know, there are different kinds of bars, obviously, in the same way.

There are different kinds of places to get a massage where one is a sexual erotic massage and one is an actual therapeutic massage.

But you know, it's not the same in every city or across every part of Thailand or other countries where a prostitution is a rampant problem.

And certainly at that time in the small city where I was living, you could go to a regular bar and be besieged by what were clearly children, clearly underage girls who would be desperately trying to solicit business from the men in the bar, whether they were foreigners or whether they were more Thai.

And it was very difficult to sit there in that situation, no matter who you were, if you were not interested in participating in that kind of trade.

It was uncomfortable for the men, but it was also uncomfortable for the women.

Because when you think about, well, where do men get their expectations about how women are, how women are to be perceived in the society and then you're sitting there in a situation where there are younger women who are clearly debasing themselves and degrading themselves and trying to solicit business through flattery, through provocation.

It was what it was one of the sort of sorriest experiences that I have to go through.

And it happened on multiple occasions.

Everyone left.

That bar would leave that bar feeling really degraded by the situation.

It was insulting to all of us, and we felt terrible for the poor girls who were forced into this situation.

And I've read a lot about young women who are raped by their own family members, and they they pass the teenager around, the uncles, the grandpas, the what have you, the cousins.

And they get her used to being having sex because she has to do it.

Certainly not anything that these teenagers want happening to them.

Why aren't we able to keep to catch people in that situation better?

I don't know what percentage of of people in that trade start out that way, but there are families who do it.

Yes.

Young women.

Yes, there are families, again, in many you know, in in a number of countries where the children are sold into prostitution by their own parents and again, it's a function of poverty.

So in terms of solution, obviously addressing the economic issues, the family issues, the, you know, drug trade issues is a big part of it.

But again, I think what nobody wants who is advocating on behalf of prostituted population, what no one wants is for these women and some and the men to be shamed for their work, for what they are, what they're doing with their lives in the same way that no one would want to or honestly shouldn't want to shame someone who's dealing with substance abuse issue or with any kind of survival of any kind of abuse, because this is not necessarily their fault.

This is not about pointing a finger.

If there is any finger to be pointed, it's at those who would pay for women to do this, to, you know, have this done to them.

And it is in that sense that I think we should focus in terms of prevention.

And, you know, in many countries, too, including a lot of many parts of the United States, this is also just a general sexist notion that men, you know, need to seek sex and, you know, have this physical need in their lives that if it's not being given to them for free, that they need to pay for it or that they have the right to pay for it or deserve it.

And that is a cultural expectation that I think we can obviously educate people against.

So to close, tell me, please, about the reaction to your New York Times piece.

Has it been positive?

Have people gotten angry at you?

All of the above.

All of the above.

I mean, if people don't get angry at you when you say something in an opinion piece, then you probably haven't said anything of consequence at all.

So there are always going to people who disagree with me, and that's fine.

That is what opinion is about.

That's what we're trying to do, journalistically speaking, is be raise issues and opine on them in ways that, you know, people disagree on.

But there is also there has been a lot of support and a lot of the reaction has been, thank you for speaking up about this, because there is such a vocal group of people who are advocating for this, this phrase, other people tend to be afraid to speak out on it.

No one wants to get attacked.

And I think one thing that we can all agree on that will hopefully restrain the conversation a little bit when it gets heated is that we can agree that we all want to help these women lead better lives and to find ways of making money that don't have the huge potential for violence and abuse.

And we didn't talk much about the violent aspect, but this is a highly dangerous occupation, not just in terms of physical violence, emotional, violent violence, sexually transmitted diseases, drug addiction, trafficking.

This is not an easy way to make a living for anyone.

And so those those people, primarily women, deserve better lives.

And this idea of going after the Johns is also not new.

I remember covering when I was in local TV news many years ago in Florida covering that story.

And why has it not changed in all those years?

Well, again, some of it is cultural and a lot of it is is priority.

And it is, however, changing.

As I mentioned, there is the Nordic model that is gaining some traction in Europe.

That's been very effective in France and in other countries.

And I hope that the US looks there as a toward an effective model rather than buying into the idea that legalization and regulation is the best option.

Well, thank you so much, Pamela Paul, columnist for The New York Times, spending this time with us and explaining this very controversial, extremely intricate and difficult issue.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate the opportunity.

Thank you.

That's it for this edition.

And please keep the conversation going with us on all our social media platforms at to the contrary.

Please visit our To the Contrary website.

www.tothecontrary.org And whether you agree or think to the contrary, please join us next time.

Funding for To the Contrary provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation The Park Foundation and the Charles A. Frueauff foundation.

Funding for To the Contrary provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the Park Foundation and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation.

Coming up on to the Contrary.

This is not as you point out, a profession that most people would choose to use a term like sex worker.

It implies a kind of normalcy.

As if this were just another occupation.

(MUSIC) Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe' Welcome to To the Contrary.

A weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

This week.

Is it sex, work or prostitution?

And should prostitutes be referred to as sex workers?

Some people may call this debate just a matter of semantics, but this week's woman thought leader says the terminology does matter.

In a recent op ed, New York Times columnist Pamela Paul cites the widespread use of the term and why it's misleading and certainly not empowering.

Welcome, Pamela Paul why don't you tell the audience what was in your New York Times op ed about whether sex worker, the term sex worker really helps people who work in the sex industry or not?

Well, first of all, thank you for having me.

I the impetus for this piece was a press conference that was held in New York City, hosted at the headquarters of the National Organization for Women of New York City.

And at that press conference were a number of former prostituted women and men and people who had been sex trafficked, as well as people who work with those who have been in the sex trade.

And they were there to speak out generally on the subject of a proposed legalization of prostitution, which they opposed.

But while they were there, it really struck me when Melanie Thompson described herself as a black former prostituted woman and victim of sex trafficking, ended her comments with a plea to the media saying, please stop using the term sex work and sex workers.

And some people, of course, use the word prostitute.

Others prefer prostituted women.

But the reason for it is very simple, which is that sex work legitimizes and normalizes what is an inherently dehumanizing and violent form of work, one that most women choose not to partake in.

And it absolves those who are really the perpetrators of the abuse, trafficking and payment for women's bodies while sort of seeming like a way of empowering women.

And the truth is, it's not an empowering position.

But somebody came up with that, that idea who thought that it was.

In 1985, at actually a conference called the The World Whores Congress.

So a little bit tongue in cheek, but also reminiscent of a number of recent movements by activists to kind of own pejorative language.

And there they embrace the term sex workers.

Again, I can understand where it's coming from, which is the desire for these women not to feel like victims.

Unfortunately.

The there are many women who are victims of sex trafficking and of the sex trade.

And nobody really or very few I shouldn't say nobody.

There are always exceptions.

Most people don't choose to be in this particular occupation, even if you can even use that term.

This isn't a matter of choice for most women.

But at the same time, it is understandable that those who are in this situation, whether they want to be or not, don't want to feel, you know, discriminated, is discriminated against.

They don't want it to have a pejorative term.

And that's why, for example, we don't call them any more, generally speaking, you know, terms like whores or hookers, which is why I try not to rely on things like polling polls of people who are in the sex trade because they're simply too unreliable and some of them are outdated.

So, you know, we know that there are obviously it's a huge multibillion dollar industry, the trafficking of women, children, men in the sex trade.

And also it depends on how you define it.

And that's another issue with the term sex workers, is that there's a whole range within their right.

Does that include people who, you know, create pornography for money, whether they're self, you know, employed or working in the industry?

Does it include people who are in, quote unquote, erotic massage parlors?

Does it include people who are, you know, paid escorts?

There's a whole range, obviously, within there.

One of the problems with the term is that it is vague and it I in general, even if a term or phrase to describe something feels good, makes people feel better.

If it's not specific and accurate, then generally it's not useful language.

Have you or anybody else you know who covers these issues and writes about these issues come up with a term that you prefer.

The people who work in the industry?

Obviously, there are some who do prefer the term sex workers.

The women and men who spoke at this particular conference generally prefer survivors of prostitution, prostituted women, formerly prostituted person, the survivor of the sex trade.

And I think, you know, the phrase sex trade is useful in that it can encompass both trafficking and prostitution and, you know, the lines blur.

For example, the woman who I referenced earlier, Melanie Thompson, she was kidnaped when she was 13 and she was in prostitution for many years.

She said that if she had been asked when she was 16 or 17 whether she had chosen a profession or not, she would have said yes.

And she said that's what they had to tell themselves in order to endure.

So, you know, if you are caught up in a situation where you are selling your body, whether you are a survivor of, you know, molestation or rape, and many, many former prostitutes say and this there are some studies on I don't have the exact numbers that they were victimized, abused as children, sexually, or if you have a drug problem or another substance abuse problem, you know, you tell yourself things obviously to make yourself feel better to help survive that situation.

What is there any work being done to try to raise the wages of people who sell their bodies for a living?

There are people there are organizations that focus on very pragmatic issues, like trying to legalize, trying to unionize, tries, trying to, you know, have women work for themselves as opposed to working for pimps or johns or for, you know, organized crime.

And that's one way to approach the problem.

And I don't think, you know, everyone wants to make these women's lives a better.

I think that's something that most people who care about this population can agree on, even if they disagree about what the terminology is.

But there are other ways as well to fight prostitution that depart from, strictly speaking, legalization, which is what a lot of activists in New York want.

So, for example, there is what's referred to as the Nordic model, which I didn't get into in my column specifically, but that's used by a number of countries in Europe and Scandinavia, which is you criminalize the men who pay for sex rather than the women who sell themselves for sex.

So you're really going after the market, the consumer demand, rather than the women who, for whatever reason, have resorted to this in order to get by?

I remember as a teenager visiting Europe and being in Amsterdam and visiting the red light district just to see what it was all about and thinking, how could anybody do this?

How young.

And I just can't imagine.

And I think about stories we've covered about an an Indian woman who would who had an infant as a result of what I would consider rape during prostitution, being forced to have sex with a man, not because she wanted to, not because she enjoyed it, but and then being impregnated by who knows what.

You know, one of those people and having to put the infant under the bed.

Yes.

Because she had nowhere to leave.

Even leave that child.

She had she had nothing.

And how could anybody call that something, you know, sex worker giving dignity to it?

No.

But the shame should be passed on to the people who are creating the demand.

Yes.

On the other hand, those those men and you know, of course, they're there are young men who are prostitutes.

So there are very few women, I would imagine, who solicit sex for money.

But so it's mostly male.

And whether they're going after men or women, I have no idea of the percentages.

I don't think most people do.

But why hasn't that become, you know, sort of the way of the world?

Well, it's interesting.

I mean, a number of points you brought up to go back to Amsterdam, You know, people will point to that model and say, oh, it's legal in the Netherlands.

The Netherlands is so progressive.

And the Netherlands is doing things right.

But even in Amsterdam, it is a problem.

And what a lot of people don't realize is that most of those women who you see in the red light district, in those red lit up windows are not actually Dutch.

Many of them are people who have come from Eastern European countries, from, you know, countries that were in the former Soviet Union.

They're impoverished.

They're often trafficked.

They're often, you know, addicted to drugs.

And this is not, as you point out, a profession that most people would choose to use a term like sex worker to go back to that, you know, it implies a kind of normalcy as if this were just another occupation.

And I think that if you ask the vast majority of men and women if they would want their own daughter to consider this profession alongside any other form of labor, even forms of manual labor that some might say are dehumanizing, whether that's working on a, you know, in a factory, working in a slaughterhouse, doing work that might not be the most prestigious or anyone's dream job, I think most of them would say I would much rather have my child, my daughter, do anything other than have to sell her body because it is a an option of last resort.

And it's not something, again, that we want to normalize.

Another thing, an excuse that you often hear is, oh, the world's oldest profession.

Well, there are many oldest professions, including child labor, including, you know, obviously slavery, unpaid labor leader.

Right.

Servitude.

And we don't turn a blind eye to those things and say, well, it's always been around.

And speaking of child labor, which has become a kind of cause for good reason in this country, again, because there is a lot of illegal labor among youth going on right now.

Most people enter prostitution as teenagers.

You cannot say that this is a you know, this is an occupation that is entered when somebody is making a decision on their own because they have a lot of options.

These are kids who are runaways.

These are kids who have all kinds of other issues going on in their lives and need it to get by.

So it really is child labor in a vast, you know, in a huge number of cases.

And that gets to one of the real ironies and I think a grotesque one with regard to the phrase sex worker, which is that I have come across multiple times in print and online.

The phrase child sex worker, which again, is such a grotesque notion, I think, for most people, and not for religious reasons, although I'm sure there are people who object on those grounds.

But personally I come at this from a humanist perspective, from just this is inhumane to suggest that a child sex worker has somehow chosen to sell their body and what is effectively rape and child abuse, and to pass that off as a legitimate occupation.

We actually have a panelist who ran away from home in Pennsylvania.

She's written about this, but I'm not going to mention her name.

That's up to her.

She's written publicly about it in a book that she published about her life.

And she was running away from home.

But I don't remember the reason why.

But some kind of abuse going on and she came to the Port Authority in New York via bus, she was kidnapped at the Port Authority, taken to some tenement building on the way west side of Manhattan and kept there for several years at knifepoint on drugs.

There was a pimp who was running the place, and I don't know how many girls he had yet and yet servicing his financial needs and she came out of it amazingly well.

She became a women's rights leader.

She ran a pretty major women and political organization, an organization that helped train women to run for office.

She got married.

She had children.

So but how many of them come out of it like that?

Does it completely destroy their lives?

I mean, I think a lot of them do have PTSD.

A lot of them require a good amount of therapy, as I said earlier, generally speaking.

And as your story about this, this other woman attests, generally speaking, this is not the only problem in their lives.

And sometimes it is a symptom of a larger underlying problem.

Whether that has something to do with their childhood, their family circumstances, their financial circumstances, their immigration status, their mental health.

And so it can take a lot for people to escape from the profession.

And that's not even taking into account, of course, situations where people are trafficked or are prostituting themselves or not of their own accord, but because they are in the power of a john or a pimp or some kind of, you know, crime, organized crime.

And so I you know, I think back to well, two things.

One is, I think that when you talk to people who work with this population and they tell the same kinds of stories that you're just told, that these this is a very difficult situation.

The people in it are, again, often in despair to act like this is just another labor rights issue is really misleading.

And when you think about the reality of who is out there writing manifestos and marching about, you know, the phrase sex worker and sex worker.

Right.

A lot of people around the world, not just in this country, are not in a position to be writing manifestos and to be out marching on the streets.

They do not have the means, the wherewithal to do that.

And it's for those people who don't have a voice that I worry about, because if you have an active minority who is advocating for language change when it doesn't really represent the reality of most women's lives who are in this situation, then there's a real disconnect between, you know, what is being proposed in statehouses with regard to legalization and what's actually happening on the streets.

And to go back to one personal experience that I had adjacent to this, which was when I was living in Thailand in the early 1990, So quite a long time ago.

And circumstances may have changed there.

But when I was in a situation where I would go out with a group of people, some of them Thai, some of them expatriate to a bar, and it was not be necessarily a sex bar, you know, there are different kinds of bars, obviously, in the same way.

There are different kinds of places to get a massage where one is a sexual erotic massage and one is an actual therapeutic massage.

But you know, it's not the same in every city or across every part of Thailand or other countries where a prostitution is a rampant problem.

And certainly at that time in the small city where I was living, you could go to a regular bar and be besieged by what were clearly children, clearly underage girls who would be desperately trying to solicit business from the men in the bar, whether they were foreigners or whether they were more Thai.

And it was very difficult to sit there in that situation, no matter who you were, if you were not interested in participating in that kind of trade.

It was uncomfortable for the men, but it was also uncomfortable for the women.

Because when you think about, well, where do men get their expectations about how women are, how women are to be perceived in the society and then you're sitting there in a situation where there are younger women who are clearly debasing themselves and degrading themselves and trying to solicit business through flattery, through provocation.

It was what it was one of the sort of sorriest experiences that I have to go through.

And it happened on multiple occasions.

Everyone left.

That bar would leave that bar feeling really degraded by the situation.

It was insulting to all of us, and we felt terrible for the poor girls who were forced into this situation.

And I've read a lot about young women who are raped by their own family members, and they they pass the teenager around, the uncles, the grandpas, the what have you, the cousins.

And they get her used to being having sex because she has to do it.

Certainly not anything that these teenagers want happening to them.

Why aren't we able to keep to catch people in that situation better?

I don't know what percentage of of people in that trade start out that way, but there are families who do it.

Yes.

Young women.

Yes, there are families, again, in many you know, in in a number of countries where the children are sold into prostitution by their own parents and again, it's a function of poverty.

So in terms of solution, obviously addressing the economic issues, the family issues, the, you know, drug trade issues is a big part of it.

But again, I think what nobody wants who is advocating on behalf of prostituted population, what no one wants is for these women and some and the men to be shamed for their work, for what they are, what they're doing with their lives in the same way that no one would want to or honestly shouldn't want to shame someone who's dealing with substance abuse issue or with any kind of survival of any kind of abuse, because this is not necessarily their fault.

This is not about pointing a finger.

If there is any finger to be pointed, it's at those who would pay for women to do this, to, you know, have this done to them.

And it is in that sense that I think we should focus in terms of prevention.

And, you know, in many countries, too, including a lot of many parts of the United States, this is also just a general sexist notion that men, you know, need to seek sex and, you know, have this physical need in their lives that if it's not being given to them for free, that they need to pay for it or that they have the right to pay for it or deserve it.

And that is a cultural expectation that I think we can obviously educate people against.

So to close, tell me, please, about the reaction to your New York Times piece.

Has it been positive?

Have people gotten angry at you?

All of the above.

All of the above.

I mean, if people don't get angry at you when you say something in an opinion piece, then you probably haven't said anything of consequence at all.

So there are always going to people who disagree with me, and that's fine.

That is what opinion is about.

That's what we're trying to do, journalistically speaking, is be raise issues and opine on them in ways that, you know, people disagree on.

But there is also there has been a lot of support and a lot of the reaction has been, thank you for speaking up about this, because there is such a vocal group of people who are advocating for this, this phrase, other people tend to be afraid to speak out on it.

No one wants to get attacked.

And I think one thing that we can all agree on that will hopefully restrain the conversation a little bit when it gets heated is that we can agree that we all want to help these women lead better lives and to find ways of making money that don't have the huge potential for violence and abuse.

And we didn't talk much about the violent aspect, but this is a highly dangerous occupation, not just in terms of physical violence, emotional, violent violence, sexually transmitted diseases, drug addiction, trafficking.

This is not an easy way to make a living for anyone.

And so those those people, primarily women, deserve better lives.

And this idea of going after the Johns is also not new.

I remember covering when I was in local TV news many years ago in Florida covering that story.

And why has it not changed in all those years?

Well, again, some of it is cultural and a lot of it is is priority.

And it is, however, changing.

As I mentioned, there is the Nordic model that is gaining some traction in Europe.

That's been very effective in France and in other countries.

And I hope that the US looks there as a toward an effective model rather than buying into the idea that legalization and regulation is the best option.

Well, thank you so much, Pamela Paul, columnist for The New York Times, spending this time with us and explaining this very controversial, extremely intricate and difficult issue.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate the opportunity.

Thank you.

That's it for this edition.

And please keep the conversation going with us on all our social media platforms at to the contrary.

Please visit our To the Contrary website.

www.tothecontrary.org And whether you agree or think to the contrary, please join us next time.

Funding for To the Contrary provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation The Park Foundation and the Charles A. Frueauff foundation.