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Comment by mgaunard | Hacker News Reader

a red-light district is a "public space for women"?

Isn't it all sex trafficking and generally a pretty dangerous place for any woman?

A red light district is for sex work. Sex trafficking and sex work can be distinguished (i.e. one can have sex work without sex trafficking).

> Sex trafficking and sex work can be distinguished (i.e. one can have sex work without sex trafficking).

Note that this contradicts nearly all official usage of the term "sex trafficking", which just refers to sex work. Far and away the most common kind of sex trafficking is a woman working independently trafficking herself.

Despite any official misuse the term, actual "trafficking" is involuntary. One cannot traffick themselves.

Traficking has nothing to do with it being involuntary. Many trafficked people did so voluntarily and of their own initiative.

Sorry, but if they weren't forced, coerced, or tricked/otherwise manipulated into into it, then they're not being "trafficked." There has been an attempt over the past several years, at least in the US, to redefined the meaning of the word to encompass all forms of sex work. To say that someone, working alone and of their own free will, is "being trafficked", is absolutely absurd and is what we were discussing.

https://humantraffickinghotline.org/what-human-trafficking/m...

The idea that a woman can traffick herself if she is interested in doing sex work is nonsense. Sex work and sex exploitation are not the same thing. (Though I do not deny there exists exploitation in much of sex work.)

Exploitation by politicians?

Sex exploitation happens from politicians, yes, but also cops, johns, pimps, traffickers, etc etc.

The less legal sex work is, the more underground it needs to be. The more underground it is, the less recourse women have to address exploitation.

And this contradicts nearly all colloquial usage of the term "sex trafficking" which most understand to mean coercive.

I think the logic behind calling it a "public space for women" is that women weren't allowed in public life before that, so it was better than nothing. Not for all women of course.

And no, not all sex work is the result of sex trafficking.

My reading is that you have it backwards. Women had much less presence in public life after it was demolished.

I know a handful of women, they do sex work out of there free will. Some work just one day a week, some full time. The only thing they have in common, none of these work on the street. Some even are married for a long time.

In know, this is not the norm, but it does exist.

Sure, but even if dangerous it is a space that is concretely theirs in the sense that in the absence of any women in public it can’t be a red light district. Contrast with a museum, which could ban all women from entry and still be a museum.

But while I get how this space would grant the women inside some freedom they could not otherwise have, I wonder how much its existence mattered for the women outside its walls.

Sorry, my b.s. meter rang out here.

Here, on the page 9 of this dissertation, we have a newspaper from before the revolution that describes the area as "cages" for women, most of whom are "caught in mental and/or familial issues and crisis", "some of whom never see daylight". The older ones, who apparently could leave, ended up "becoming child caretakers for younger prostitutes". In the middle of this "women's space", there was an open air "garbage dump", and "mattresses were made from the cotton of discarded sanitary napkins".

So yeah, a "prison" "concretely" belongs to the inmates.

https://open-education-repository.ucl.ac.uk//799/1/Sadaf_Tab...

Yeah, "public space for women" is such bs! Especially when the women were forced there and not allowed to leave:

> Police reports from the Muzaffarī period (1896–1907) show that the most common punishment for women caught selling sex was a practice known as nafie-balad. This was a form of forceful banishment or eviction from the city targeted at sinful, criminal and undesirable subjects and those who defy social and moral conventions of the society ... One day, all the women suspected of selling sex were gathered and moved by military trucks to a nearby caravanserai outside of Tehran’s wall: "the wayward women were all thrown in there like sheep… later, houses were built and a neighbourhood took shape which was named Shahrinaw" ... Eventually, in 1953 the municipality bowed to public pressure and ordered the erection of a two-and-a-half-metre tall brick wall around Shahrinaw ... While the gate was open to men seeking illicit pleasure, women were allowed neither in nor out.

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Perhaps I am being puritanical here, but I've never understood this obsession of some trying to associate women's right with prostitution. Everywhere in the world, even in countries where prostitution is legalised / regulated, it is only the desperate and economically weak women who are pushed into this trade and it invariably gives rise to a parallel and illegal industry of sex trafficking and forced prostitution. Worse, where it is legalised, the administration and police largely ignore such illegal sex trafficking as prostitution is now an "economic activity" (until of course there is a public outcry and / or international outrage - Denmark made child pornography illegal only in 1980's!).

Even where religious sanctions for prostitution are available, the prostitutes are both admired and looked down upon by some and face repeated sexual violence (God’s Wife, Every Man’s Woman: The Lives of 'Joginis' in South India - https://thewire.in/rights/photos-sexual-slavery-ban-telangan... ). I do know that there have been periods in the Islamic empire and in Asia, where courtesans, who also sometimes prostituted themselves (often not out of choice), had some semblance of respect and rights largely because they were also highly talented artists (singers, dancers, musicians etc) but mainly because they had the patronage of the rich and the powerful. But once that patronage was lost, they were often vilified by society despite their talents. (All said, I am really unsure on whether glorification of prostitution in the media is good or bad though).

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