According to the January 30 London Sunday Telegraph, a 25-year-old German woman faces cuts to her unemployment benefits after turning down a job as a prostitute at a Berlin brothel. When prostitution was legalised in Germany just two years ago, brothel owners began to pay tax and employee health insurance. They were also granted access to official databases of jobseekers.
The woman who will lose her income support is an unemployed information technology professional. She received a letter from her job centre directing her to contact a potential employer. Only when doing so did she realise that she was calling a brothel.
Unemployment in Germany has risen for 11 consecutive months, and is now officially close to 5 million. Welfare "reforms" specify that any woman under 55 who has been unemployed more than 12 months can be forced to take any available job or lose her unemployment benefit.
The government had considered making brothels an exception on "moral grounds", but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. When the woman wanted to sue the job centre for referring her to a brothel, she found out that the centre had not broken the law. Job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse.
Worse, under the financing arrangements for the German welfare system, job centres must penalise people who turn down a job by cutting their benefits or face legal action from the potential employer.
The Telegraph reported that one job centre is already being pursued for compensation by a pimp after it withdrew advertisements for 12 prostitutes to work in a new brothel in Goerlitz.
Despite the German state's collection of income tax from prostitution, it is not just a job like any other. Prostitution is an expression of the worst elements of both capitalist commodity exchange and sexual oppression, being based on the sale (rental) of a woman's body for a man's sexual gratification.
While there are many and varied ways in which women are treated as mindless sexual objects by the oppressive gender relations in class society, prostitution lies at the extreme of the continuum. This is because a central and specific aspect of the oppression involved in prostitution is the physical invasion, the obliteration of self and the loss of ownership of their own bodies that prostitutes experience in the course of receiving money for the sexual gratification of another.
In self-organisation within the sex-for-money industry, the most progressive "sex-work" collectives require that their staff have left this form of work in order that they be able to assist other women to at the least minimise the harm they are exposed to, and at best to leave the industry altogether.
The women's liberation movement has struggled over many decades to promote the acceptance of the idea that women are independent, self-directed human beings who are capable of making informed choices and acting on them. Not only is the very nature of prostitution the most base of exploitative labour relations, under Germany's new employment regulations even the very limited decision of whether or not to resort to such work has been taken from unemployed women.
Individual women may choose to work in this field and believe they are immune from the psychological consequences of accepting themselves as sexual commodities. But making prostitution a state-enforced employment option removes even this choice.
Lara Pullin
[The author is a member of the Canberra branch of the Socialist Alliance.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, February 9, 2005.
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