The decision by Westpac to pull out of the funding of the world’s biggest brothel, Stiletto in Sydney, has not surprised those in the know in the s-x industry in NSW. According to reports, Westpac had come under pressure when the paper revealed a recentn investor presentation showing Westpac as the senior financier on the deal.
Brothels have been able to operate as legitimate commercial businesses in NSW for nearly 16 years since The Disorderly Houses Amendment Act 1995 abolished the common law offence of keeping a brothel and living off the earnings of prostitution. Before this act, all brothels were “disorderly houses” and could be closed down. Following the enactment of the 1995 legislation, a brothel became a recognised land use that could be regulated by local councils under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979.
So if bonking for money is a legitimate business, why did Westpac make a sudden withdrawal? There is much speculation that many traditional investors took the high moral ground and had a whinge to Westpac because they don’t see the investment in prostitution as a noble pursuit of wealth. The big bank then trembled at the knees and buckled to pressure to discontinue its involvement in the controversial project.
Chris Gardiner is CEO of Police & Community Youth Clubs NSW, one of the largest youth organisations in Australia. He wrote in The Punch earlier in the year:
“There is something dystopian about a society where mum and dad investors and Super Fund bosses could monitor the stock market on their iPhones to see if their CEO has been working prostitutes productively enough. We will know what kind of society we have become if the stock is reported in the market round-up at the end of the 6pm news each night.”
Social stigmas die hard in Australia. Penny Crofts is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Law, UTS Sydney who specialises in the regulation of the sex industry in NSW. She believes brothels continue to be treated differently from other commercial businesses due to an aesthetic of disgust.
In a paper delivered in Melbourne in 2006, Crofts described disgust as:
“Disgust is a moral and social sentiment that conveys a ‘strong sense of aversion to something perceived as dangerous because of its powers to contaminate, infect, or pollute by proximity,contact, or ingestion’. Disgust has a feeling of ‘panic, of varying intensity, that attends the awareness of being defiled’. The idea that brothels are offensive immediately links brothels with a discourse of disgust.”
Crofts said in 2006 that association of brothels with disgust can be transformed and by providing information about good management practices and the cleanliness and tidiness of brothels would undermine the overt association of brothels with disorderliness.
The O’Farrell government came to power this year promising to crack down on the sex industry by strongly regulating the legal industry and a major crackdown on illegal brothels. So why hasn’t the sex industry been able to accomplish what Crofts thought was something achievable?
Over the past few years there have been various stories about illegal brothels, trafficking of sex workers, underage prostitutes, unsafe s-x practices and other nefarious activities of the sex industry in NSW. A recent report in The Sun-Herald on the threat of s-xually transmissible infections from cheap Sydney brothels illustrates just how much stronger regulation can’t come quick enough.
I can also inform Crikey readers that due to the unregulated state of the sex industry, many legal brothels are now providing oral sex without a condom, which is in defiance of NSW Health and Workcover guidelines for brothels.
So what sort of a reaction did we get from the sex workers organisation Scarlet Alliance to all this talk about unsafe sex? It is a key stakeholder in the NSW sex industry and as such has a major influence in the transformation of the aesthetic of disgust. Recently, it hosted a think tank at its Redfern headquarters for all its members to devise a strategy to lobby the proposed changes by the O’Farrell government.
I received two phone calls afterwards from concerned sex workers who told me that the leadership of Scarlet Alliance believe in the right of sex workers to choose whether to partake in unsafe sex practices.
Indeed many of its members are culprits in supplying unsafe sex practices to desperate punters. Melanie Robinson says on the Nothing About Us Without Us website about occupational work and safety: “Workplace conditions are best improved by strengthening workers ability to address OH&S issues …” However, there are several websites that advertise services that are is in contravention of the Workcover and NSW Health guidelines for brothels and sex workers.
No wonder Westpac pulled the plug.
I agree with Chris Seage and Penny Crofts that brothels (and the sex industry) continue to be treated differently from other commercial businesses due to an aesthetic of disgust.
However I cannot agree with anything that follows in his article.
Chris asks the question “Then why hasn’t the sex industry been able to accomplish what Crofts thought was something achievable?” This being a de-stigmatisation of the industry.
My answer to that is because the media and others see the sex industry as an easy touch for making money. They constantly make money off the back of sex-workers by writing salacious, prejudiced and often untrue or half true stories about the industry.
The article quoted by Chris from the Sun Herald on the threat of s-xually transmissible infections from cheap Sydney brothels is a perfect example. It contains not one piece of solid evidence that “cheap brothels” are a source of s-xually transmissible infections. Instead it relies on innuendo and unsubstantiated assertions coupled with hard evidence from the Department of Health on the rise in rates of STI’s in the general population to mount a scare campaign by painting “cheap brothels” as vectors of disease.
Let me tell you my experience as a s-x worker about requests for unsafe sex practises. I often get asked by prospective clients if I do natural sex. When I answer that all my work is safe sex they don’t hang up, they book me because this is the answer they are hoping for. They want to know in advance that their session will be safe sex and that the sessions I have had beforehand were also safe sex. People hire sex workers as professionals in their field and in the expectation of safe sessions.
This however is not a “s-xy” media story. Much better to talk about cheap (read Asian) sex workers in illegal brothels as vectors of disease who are responsible for passing disease on to innocent (women) partners of those who visit them.
No matter that they are not “illegal”, though they may lack correct council planning permission and that there is no evidence that supports the racist and xenophobic prejudice that sex workers of Asian background are either “cheap” or “unsafe”.
The facts that in the past 16 years thousands of people have worked in NSW as sex workers and seen many thousands of clients with no upward impact on general STI rates, that there has been no documented instance of for example HIV transmission worker to client or client to worker ever in Australia, or that sex workers have much lower rates of STI’s than the general population are not a “s-xy” media stories.