Sex Worker Autogestion

Mark Fenn looks at a Thai worker-owned cooperative brothel, in the Asia Sentinel:

When the words “bar” and “sex” are put together in Thailand, one doesn’t usually think about progressive labor relations or stuff like profit sharing. But in at least one small corner of the country’s huge sex industry, a few women are trying to get a better deal for themselves out of giving pleasure for money.

At the small Can Do bar in the northern city of Chiang Mai, sex workers are using their brains as well as their bodies in an experiment aimed at tackling exploitation. The bar is owned and managed by a collective of women from the Empower Foundation, a support group for sex workers known for its “sex positive” stance on prostitution.

The country’s first so called experitainment bar aims to provide working girls with a safe and fair working environment.

The bar, which complies fully with Thai labor laws, has just celebrated its first birthday and is proving successful on both “a political and an economic level,” said Liz Hilton, who works with Empower. The bar has won acceptance, Hilton says, for providing decent working conditions for the women who work there.

Comments

[du'Loque]

This reminds me of John Burdett's "Bangkok Tattoo." Anyone ever read it?

Anyways, from talking to others who actually are involved in these types of issues, it that prostitution itself isn't especially bad, or unhealthy-- it's the environment and causes and atmosphere that can hurt sex workers.

So as long as this works economically, and there's protection for the sex workers... is there really anything wrong with prostitution?

Is there some negative socioeconomic or cultural effect that I'm missing?

[chris]

"Why should prostitution be illegal. Selling is legal. Fucking is legal. Why isn't selling fucking legal? You know, why should it be illegal to sell something that's perfectly legal to give away."

-George Carlin

[JonJ]

Carlin's question is very interesting. I'm not a social scientist, so I can only give a layperson's suggestion, but perhaps it is because men typically feel that it is proof of a terrible lack of manliness if a guy is reduced to paying for sex -- he ought to be attractive enough to women to get laid without resorting to prostitutes. But of course many men do anyway. Making it legal would only bring this conflict into the open where guys would have to think about it. Better to keep it in the shadows.

This, however, raises the question of what is different about places where prostitution is legal. So perhaps I am on the wrong track.

[Dan]

Don't you People know that most of these girls don't have a choice to whether or not they want or don't want to work there... I think they call it slavery... One of the biggest underworld industries on the world. Sex slavery