Tricked - a documentary about prostitution !

[Doggyluver]

There is a thread opened " Movies about prostitutes" and I was going to post the link to this movie there, that being said I felt it was inappropriate to post a documentary about the ills of prostitution in a thread that seemed to me to glorify being an SP. I also thought that posting this thread might open a discussion (especially from our female contributors ) as to their experiences in the business. I for one had my eyes opened WIDE by this well presented film. I hope some of you will take the time to watch it and comment. Those of you who might have already seen the film, I welcome your views, please let's make this a discussion of some social value.

 

[Siocnarf]

These things are way more common than people think... just like domestic violence, we do not talk about it but these things are happening widely behind closed doors.

There are only very few people that would deny abuse happens. That's the point; it's just like a form of domestic violence. The problem is ''documentaries'' trying to convince people that this is inherent to the job and unavoidable. I didn't see that specific movie, but from what I've heard it's the usual abolitionist propaganda pushing from criminalization.

 

[Siocnarf]

I felt like this movie targeted mostly typical "pimps"... more than clients and the whole business.

It portrays these worse cases as the norm and claim that they import and brainwash thousands of immigrants into the country every year (most of them of course less then 12 years old). It's like doing a movie on the Shafia family and making up fake statistics to make it sound like a documentary on Mariage.

 

[Siocnarf]

In general, I think the best thing to do is to decrease the stigma so that they feel more confident to go get help without being judged. It's bad to have an abusive relationship, but when they are in a life that is seen as shameful and criminal, it's even more difficult for them to escape it. I'm not talking about glorifying sex work, but simply treating it as a neutral with the same rights as any other worker.

Movies like that think they are doing good by bringing more attention to some real problems. But they are really doing a lot more harm that way. A good documentary will present all aspects of the subject, or if they focus on a specific situation they will place it in the proper context.

 

[wxlancer]

As far as how this documentary relates to this MERB community, and what Tina is saying:
We want to tell ourselves that the SPs we contact here aren't in this kind of position. And the pimps and women in the documentary at some point told themselves the same thing. And people will deceive themselves, and emotions can easily blind us to the true nature of any relationship. But mostly as clients we can only hope we're not stepping into that, and appreciate the services we get and the people who provide them.

Also, abusive, coercive or exploitative relationships are not unique to men abusing women, and certainly not to prostitution. For many other industries difficult battles are fought by workers for regulation and protection, and yet exploitation still exists in so many corners...but for this industry, the law and stigma don't seem to even be on the side of helping workers. And I don't feel this documentary did well on that front either, agree with siocnarf there.

 

[Wallon]

Le probleme de la plupart des films ou reportages sur la prostitution c'est qu'ils condamnent de facto la prostitution dans son ensemble au lieu d'essayer de différencier ce qui est correct et acceptable
dans cette activité et ce qui ne l'est pas.
Je donne mon humble avisour moi,aucune prostitution ne devrait etre permise avant l'age de 25 ans de facon a ce que la décision de pratiquer ce métier soit prise de facon réfléchie.C'est évident que toutes personnes mineures ou FORCÉES, de se prostituer est innacceptable mais l'ensemble de l'''industrie'' est tellement opaque que c'est difficile ,dans certains cas,de savoir s'il y a exploitation ou pas.
Par exemple une fille qui travaille dans une agence(ou un salon) respectueux au niveau humain et monétaire,qu'on m'explique ou est le probleme...Et pour avoir parlé avec beaucoup de filles,
beaucoup aiment la job qu'elle font,le seul probleme qu'elles ont,c'est l'image négative que la société leur renvoie de ce métier.Et malheureusement, socialement,on est loins du jour ou ce beau métier sera
accepté.
Mais tant qu'on ne fera pas de distinction entre la ''bonne''(femme(ou homme)mature,responsable,organisée...) et la ''mauvaise''( femmes dépendantes,exploitées,immatures...) prostitution on ne s'en va nulle part avec ce débat.
Pour beaucoup de gens ,vendre et acheter du sexe,sera toujours immoral et innacceptable,mais j'espere qu'un jour,(n'est-ce pas ,dit-on, le plus vieux métier du monde?),la société acceptera qu'il n'y a RIEN de mal avec la prostitution,a condition qu'elle soit pratiquée par des adultes matures,consentants,respectueux et responsables.
On a bien le droit de rever...

 

[Siocnarf]

But mostly as clients we can only hope we're not stepping into that, and appreciate the services we get and the people who provide them.

I would add that for most clients, this is always something we think about on some level. Abolitionist think the law will ''responsibilize'' clients to the problems, but we are already hyper-aware of this. Many client will avoid providers that have the smallest details that can be interpretted in terms of possible abuse. For exemple some people won't see any asians just in case, or anyone who doesn't speak fluent english/french. However, when we buy food we rarely stop to wonder whether people on the farm were trafficked immigrants sexually abused by their employers. This happens just as often, but it's usually put in proper context because there is no anti-food groups.

 

[Siocnarf]

Je donne mon humble avisour moi,aucune prostitution ne devrait etre permise avant l'age de 25 ans de facon a ce que la décision de pratiquer ce métier soit prise de facon réfléchie....

C'est sur que ce n'est pas un métier à commencer trop jeune. Idéalement il faut que la personne soit expérimentée et à l'aise. Mais juste parce que quelque chose n'est pas une bonne idée, ça ne veut pas dire que ça devrait être illégal. Soyons réaliste: si l'age légal était de 25 ans (ou même 21) pensez-vous vraiment que les 18-20 s'abstiendraient? Ce serait le même problème qu'avec la criminalisation. Et selon toute logique il faudrait aussi augmenter l'âge du mariage à 25 pour éviter les jeunes qui se marient de façon irréfléchie.

D'une manière plus générale, je pense que les gens développent de la maturité justement quand ont leur laisse prendre leurs décisions et responsabilités. Il n'y a pas un age magique auquel les jeunes deviennent matures..

 

[chowzilla]

Its on netflix. Rough. I'm glad I'm not on that side of the industry

 

[wolfie7]

Good post, Patron. Agencies have their place in the ecosystem.

 

[marc7]

Et bien j'ai hâté de voir un film sur la prostitution qui en fais une profession plein d'avenir , de bénéfices et d'accomplissement personnelles ! Ce n'est pas toujours la fête pour nos courtisanes. Elles se tapent souvent des mecs touts croches , marginaux baisant d'une façon plus ou moins agréable ( je mis inclus , aucunes sp m'a rappelé pour me dire que j'étais la baise de leurs vie! ) .
C'est une profession encore amorale sinon le gouvernement l'aurais déjà surtaxé !
Et alors ....
Ou est la libertés entre deux adultes qui décident d'échanger un service pour un autre .
Qu'est-ce qu'un , qu'une adulte ... Quand une fille devient adulte et peut décider qu'elle peut faire à 18 ans ... Je ne crois pas qu'une jeune femme qui vient d'avoir 18 ans à minuit à toute l'expérience de vie pour décider de cela ... On devrait plutôt augmenter l'âge d'accès au travail du sexe à 20 ans ou plus ! Elles ont déjà a du vécue et due négocier avec la vie !!!

Il y a des campagnes sur la violence faites aux femmes et elle devrait faites aussi pour sensibiliser les jeunes filles de 14/16 à toutes les violences que peut leurs faire un ado / adulte mâle peuvent leurs faires ! Plutôt on leurs enseignent a se sortir d'une situation abusante le mieux ! Amour n'est pas violence ni physique ni mentale .

Nous en tant que clients, notre argent est notre plus grand pouvoir démocratique ! Alors nous nous devons de choisir ce qui nous parais le plus étique ..... Dans un monde qui nous vend le rêves ça peux paraître impossible mais nous devons quand même d'essayer !

 

[marc7]

In the United States the appearance of justice is more important than the "social justice " ! You get elected because you busted a couple of pimps sp , drug trafficking, blacks and marginals... That's how you stay in your comfortable office ! So nobody questions if it is a good measure to resolve the problem! You put them in jail an that's it ! You get to keep your job because you look good !
Appearances of justice is not justice!

 

[Doggyluver]

A couple of things struck me in this film. One of the most disturbing to me was the fact that currently there are almost 21,000,000 girls,boys and women enslaved worldwide. This total is more than the number of people enslaved at any other time in the history of the world !!! I would hope that in the cases where I see an SP that she is NOT working for a pimp and or giving all of her money to a pimp or boyfriend, that being said I think we convince ourselves of that fact to alleviate any guilt. Let's be honest a majority of these young women would rather be anywhere than in a motel fucking some fat, balding sweaty guy for a hundred bucks. To think that a 20 year old girl is turned on at the thought of that type of client is naive on our part. Are there women in this business for themselves and the income, probably but are they all level headed women trying to build a future through the avails of prostitution, I doubt it. I read Tinamtl's comments with interest as I do feel that only someone on the SP side of this story really knows the truth. We would all like to think we are studs and with us these girls are crazy for us.....not the other sleazy clients they might see during a shift. Yes this movie is about pimps and how they target and enslave young women to do their bidding and yes it is only one view. It disturbed me to see young women telling their stories about how they were treated, a lot ! Should there be another story told from the perspective of the John, yes I do believe that this is only scratching the surface. I believe that it also speaks to how we as men do dehumanize women and objectify them. These are human beings with the same hopes as any other women we know, wifes, daughters mothers and sisters, and we would not nor would we accept someone treating those we love the way some of us treat women in this industry. This is not about whether or not the justice system is doing it's job effectively and using a few examples to remain in office, this is about respect and doing your part to ensure that the respect that is due to another human being is maintained. We all have a social responsibility to respect ALL of our fellow human beings, no matter the gender, race or religion.

 

[sin]

Doggielover, the problem with numbers like that is that they are probably made up. Every year, the abolitionists come up with a set number of sex trafficked children working the Super Bowl. It is complete bullshit. Many scholarly articles point out that there would simply not physically be enough space in the city to accommodate that many transient sex workers, let alone child sex workers. In fact, most police departments that have really studied the issue report that fewer sex workers work in the city during Super Bowl week than any other given week, for the simple and obvious reason that hotel and motel rooms are too expensive for incall. Never underestimate the capacity of the general populace to believe made-up numbers. We are conditioned as children to learn by accepting as truth everything in the textbook, and it carries over to adult life.

Of course, these numbers do not just involve just sex. They love to declare that any worker is enslaved who is unable to leave the workplace at any given time and do exactly what he/she wants to do. A film can be made by workers who can live that way. Most workplaces and jobs simply cannot function like that. If you have a heart attack in the next hour, would you want to find out that no ambulance drivers are available and no one knows where they are, of that no doctors are present at the hospital they might take you to?

If the workers at the Chinese factory, who chose $1 an hour manufacturing work over $0.10 an hour farm work are slaves because they cannot leave the factory at will, are the ambulance drivers and doctors enslaved? I get sick and tired of bullshit documentaries with made-up numbers written and produced by free-spirit kids, probably from rich families, who have never had to work a regular job or given thought to his the world would collapse if everyone were exactly like them.

These numbers are false: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...statistics-on-modern-slavery-and-trafficking/

 

[Siocnarf]

Here's a good review about the unreliability of trafficking ''statistics''.
http://traffickingroundtable.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Issue-Paper-3-Fact-or-Fiction-What-Do-We-Really-Know-About-Human-Trafficking.pdf

 

[hungry101]

You will have to forgive my continued skepticism. We are going through a period of time in the US, Canada, and most of Europe, in which young men who would have previously worked in factories are struggling financially. As a result of the aging population, the decline of marriage rates, the obesity epidemic, and technology such as the internet, cell phones, and the internet, we are in a period of time in which young women can easily earn a hell of a lot of money doing sex work. The close friends (and peer group in general) of those young women include many unemployed and underemployed young men. Some of the money earned by the young women will be transferred to their poorer friends, including young men who will attempt to provide assistance for them. Sex workers need friends, including boyfriends and girlfriends. Isolation is the worst thing that can happen to someone working a hard job that is not accepted by society. It is a mistake to assume that every contact and monetary transfer from a female sex worker to a male in her peer group involves pimping and coercion, but that is the assumption these documentaries always make.

The problem with any analysis of the Chinese is that there are too fucking many of them in China. I used to get concerned about the seemingly inhumane working conditions in the factories until I really focused on the rates of starvation that occurred when China was more of an agricultural economy in the 1950s through the 1990s. Yes they live in dormitories at work, but there are recreational activities, including the very real possibility of getting laid. If I had been born as a poor rural Chinese guy and had a choice in my teens or 20s of farming in a poor village with no infrastructure and maybe starving if a drought happened, or going to work at a factory with a dormitory where I could eat food, and socialize with peers after work in the common areas,and maybe fuck a cute Chinese girl who had the opportunity to shower every day, I think I would take the factory work. Not exactly comparable to life in North America but that wasn't one of my two options.

I think 95 percent of what comes from the liberal portion of the media is bullshit and 99 percent of what comes from the conservative Christian portion of the media is bullshit. When a liberal makes a documentary on "human slavery" and uses principles embraced by conservative Christians, my suspicion is that it is 99.9 percent bullshit.

Patron, you are the best poster on MERB in my opinion. I agree with everything you said completely. I have done business in China. The people were starving until recently. Some companies treat their work force better than others and none of us would probably tolerate those working conditions but it beats the alternative.

I am a lifetime hobbyist and politicos in my home state are running for office on an anti-trafficking platform. They recently held a conference to discuss how woman are trafficked. They are defining trafficking as anytime a woman is recruited to work in the sex industry. Women are trafficked for the pleasure of evil white males (the underlying cause of all problems in the history of the world.) One politico who explained that local girls are being trafficked was quoted in the paper saying that the traffickers don't go after the prettiest girl. They approach the next prettiest girl and they give her compliments (I am paraphrasing). Oh what great insight indeed! No one comes to my state to hobby. This state includes cities that have the highest per-capita murder rates in North America. Instead of protecting the public, the local police are running Backpage stings every weekend. This goes in the local police blotter as an example of how they are fighting crime (by arresting a 40-60 year old man whose only crime was being in a sexless marriage. The guy is fined and loses his job etc.) Meanwhile houses are broken into, drug gangs kill each other, and murderers roam free.

This world can do without such civic-minded people. This is an example of politicos or NGO's creating a problem that doesn't exist or at least exaggerating a problem that doesn't pertain to them so they can protect us from it. Like global warming, Ebola, aids, running out of landfill space, vaccination scares, and the latest - which I personally hope will pick up steam for my entertainment value - contrails on jets.

My wish is that one day we can round up all the do-gooders...maybe lure them to some place by telling them we are all going to join hands and sing Kum Ba Yah. It will be the longest chain of humans ever gathered to sing Kum Ba Yah in the history of the world and after the Kum Ba Yah session we can push whales out to sea or chain ourselves to redwoods Then we could hold a lottery with the winner of the lottery being the person that would be allowed to pull the lever of the Bombay door, and then drop a nuclear bomb on all of them. The world would be a much better place.

This reminds me of the Homeless Advocate in the 80's and 90's Mitch Snyder. Mitch said that there were 3 MM homeless people in the US. He was off by an order of magnitude. Here is a good article about do-gooders and their manipulation of the truch.
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/1994-09-11/how-the-homeless-crisis-was-hyped
The public is constantly bombarded with exaggerated claims not only about the number of homeless but about many other subjects, such as the number of people who will get AIDS, the financial savings from radical changes in the health-care delivery system, the damage to health from various ingredients added to foods, and the size of the world population in the year 2050. It isn't easy to assess the validity of confident assertions on complicated issues, but two common-sense checks often help in gaining perspective. An obvious one is to assess whether persons making the claim gain any advantage from exaggeration. A second, more difficult ene is to look at the basis for the claims, since even a little digging often reveals the shallowness of their foundations.

 

[Siocnarf]

I love the Fact Checker. Here's another good one, although it's already been debunked a long time ago (yet politicians still use it):

The bogus claim that 300,000 U.S. children are ‘at risk’ of sexual exploitation
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2015/05/28/the-bogus-claim-that-300000-u-s-children-are-at-risk-of-sexual-exploitation/

 

[Left Coast]

How to Lie with Statistics

None of these crusaders demonstrate any meaningful grasp of realty, math or logic. Two of my favorites from a grad-school statistics class.

(1) "The FBI said that unreported crime rose 26.2% last year."
(2) "A man drowned in a lake whose average depth was 1.6 feet."

 

[Left Coast]

How to Lie with Statistics

None of these crusaders demonstrate any meaningful grasp of reality, math or logic. Two of my favorites from a grad-school statistics class.

(1) "The FBI said that unreported crime rose 26.2% last year."
(2) "A man drowned in a lake whose average depth was 1.6 feet."

 

[Doggyluver]

Agree or disagree with the statistics I certainly hope that anyone who has an opinion will agree that anyone forced or coerced into the sex trade is one too many. There will always be some who disagree that ANYONE is forced into the sex trade but then there will always be some who will NEVER believe that the holocaust took place as well. There is no right or wrong when it comes to the stats, it is just a question of opening a discussion and ensuring that everyone is aware that, yes it does exist. The next time you see a bust of a prostitution ring here in Montreal and they post the photos of the pimps who are running underage girls, stop and ask yourself, is this the only ring in Montreal running whatever number of girls ? If there are only a few here, how many are there in Toronto, New York, Boston, and on and on. Don't be so close minded to think that it doesn't exist. The next time you go to a motel to see a girl (SP ) agency or indy, have a look in the parking lot and take notice of the guys in cars, waiting . I have seen the girls come out and get into their cars, often. Other girls in the car with them ass well. Do you think they are there picking up their Mom's after a days work as chambermaids ? This is a real problem in society and what, we're arguing about which numbers are real. One young woman being forced to work in this business is one too many !