Hi again Donna and Lena, and thank you for your response.
Firstly, I feel that the most important thing to make absolutely clear is that underage prostitution (in Hong Kong or anywhere else) is a completely separate issue and has nothing whatsoever to do with what we as legal and responsible working adults do for a living. Of course it does exist in the UK, but is mostly confined to the street scene, which as far as I know the vast majority of us on here have little or no experience of. The legitimate non-trafficked indoor sex industry we are part of, either independently or as parlour or agency workers abhors any suggestion of this, and virtually every punter and lady alike would have no hesitation in reporting a suspected underage worker to the proper authorities - it is repugnant to us all (and I remember this vile story coming up on a punting board a few weeks ago).
Therefore, to say that your 'angle' is starting from this is way off the mark. Likewise your story from New York; unlike the UK, prostitution there is illegal and thus the two things cannot possibly be usefully compared. We work within the law, pay tax and National Insurance and are generally fairly dull, I'm afraid (in the nicest possible way
). Few of us swan around London with Gucci handbags full of ?50 notes, although there are some fabulous ladies on here who I do think would fit your bill nicely but whether they will want to be involved is a different matter, I suspect. A few of us have been stung before, thanks to good old editorial control, or the lack of it.
One of the single most irritating things we have to put up with from the people outside the industry is the constant and total inability to compare like with like and therefore tar us all with the same brush; for example, the classic statistical survey figures usually thrown about by the abolitionists and used to refer to sex workers
en masse is a survey taken by Melissa Farley (a notorious anti-prostitution activist with no academic credibility whatsoever) of San Francisco street prostitutes in the 1970s - hardly a surprise that virtually all reported high levels of violence, drug use and so on. You can make statistics show whatever you like provided you are extremely careful about who you ask, and again this tends to make people suspicious of your motives when you arrive with a clearly defined starting point which is of no relevance to your chosen audience.
We are being singled out once again to justify our choices as society undermines our decision to earn our living as we see fit - we would not be subject to the same questioning had we decided to be plumbers or firefighters. Prostitution is a job like any other. Yes, we do our job for the money, but so does everyone else - do you know anyone who would work for free? The question IMO, should not be 'why shouldn't young women at university support themselves with a well paid sideline which gives them freedom to succeed in their studies?', but why we are even asking the question in the first place? In other words, why are a group of people doing a particular job newsworthy purely by virtue of doing that job, and what then does the prurient and pervading interest in anything which involves sex say about us as a nation?
PS. I've been blogging
. Sorry.
Topic: Ladies Only: Tell Us Your Story (Read 12308 times)