Why can’t the left accept that prostitution is built on brutal racism?

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It is no secret that the sex trade is riven with misogyny. The liberal left and other so-called “progressives” often take leave of their principles in order to support a global, multibillion-dollar trade built on the pain and oppression of women and girls. This is not surprising bearing in mind the sexism of the left, but the same apologists often also remain silent about the indisputable fact that black, brown and indigenous women and girls all over the world are first in line to be bought and sold into prostitution.

During extensive research for my book on the sex trade, I have met and interviewed women and men that are resisting the normalisation of racism within prostitution.

I met Ne’cole Daniels, an African-American sex trade survivor and member of the abolitionist organisation SPACE International, in 2015 at a conference in the US. Daniels is clear about the racism that upholds systems of prostitution in the US. “The sex trade is like racism. They are saying that some of us are worth less than others.”

Pala Molisa, a Pacific academic and campaigner against male violence from New Zealand, has often been accused of being “whorephobic” since writing about prostitution as a form of oppression. Molisa has been threatened with losing his job, been a target of an online bullying and harassment campaign, and accused by sex work propagandists of being a “sexually repressed creep”.

Molisa says he has learned from his mother and “other indigenous sisters” about the white supremacist and colonial basis of prostitution. “We don’t just want men to be held accountable for reducing women to sexual chattel status – we want the whole institution of prostitution – [which is] the basis of colonial patriarchal rape culture – dismantled,” says Molisa. “The dominant model of masculinity under male supremacy is also shaped by race and class, by capitalism and white supremacy.”

Bridget Perrier is a Native Canadian activist and sex trade survivor. In 2015, Perrier appeared on TV in the UK debating a (white) member of the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP). Perrier, who has raised two children of serial killer Robert Pickton’s murder victims, was told by the ECP spokeswoman that she had “blood on her hands” because Perrier campaigns to criminalise pimps and johns. “This is just colonialist shit,” says Perrier. “I am sick of being told that prostitution is good for me and my indigenous sisters when it is so obviously not good enough for them.”

Courtney, also a Native survivor from Canada, told me: “The sex trade is built on racism and colonialism as well as misogyny. For Native women and African-American women, and all women and girls of colour, it is yet another way in which the white man takes what he wants from our communities, our cultures and our souls.”

A number of sex buyers I have interviewed have told me that they often select specific women on the basis of racist and colonialist stereotypes. Ethnicity itself is eroticised in prostitution. One man said: “I had a mental check list in terms of race; I have tried them all over the last five years but they turned out to be the same.” Another interviewee openly admitted that his use of Chinese women in prostitution was in order to fulfil a fantasy that he held about them. “You can do a lot more with the Oriental girls like blow job without a condom, and you can cum in their mouths… I view them as dirty.”

Advertising of sexual services is often reliant on racist and colonialist stereotypes. During a meeting with the Asian Women for Equality Society in Montreal, I was told about research involving analysis of 1,500 online advertisements for prostitution. Ninety per cent were found to have used racist stereotypes as a selling factor, such as Asian women being described as “submissive”, “exotic”, “newly immigrated”, “fresh off the boat”, and “young and experienced”. “This is what men are looking for in Asian women,” one of the collective said.

In the main red light district in Amsterdam, where the majority of prostituted women displayed like meat in the window brothels are from Romania and West Africa, there are so few Dutch-born women selling sex that pimps put stickers with the Dutch flag or “NL” (Netherlands) in the window for advertising purposes. White Dutch women have become quite a rarity.

The slave trade is alive and well, but has been restructured under neoliberal capitalism. During the act of prostitution the bodies of women and girls are colonised by the men who use them. How the left can ignore this, while claiming to be fighting for an equal society free of oppression, is beyond me. Much of the male left may not care too much about women’s oppression under prostitution, but surely they can at least pay lip service to the fact that the system of prostitution is in part built on brutal racism?

Julie Bindel’s book ‘The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth’ will be published by Palgrave Macmillan on 27 September. Details of the book launch and debate surrounding the topic can be found here​