One time I was in a recording studio for a debate on prostitution. Of course it was defined as -not me-. sex work, which made everything more acceptable and modern. There was a well-known, beautiful prostitute from Bologna, one who was prostituting herself online, they were talking about 'sexual assistance for the disabled'. They so free and up to date, I was given the task of representing the sad counterpart of the bigoted moralism. It did not come out well at all, I managed to extricate myself from the hypocrisy of the dialectical traps.
At some point I asked the cameramen, the lighting technicians, the electricians if they would be happy that their sister (or daughter, or mother, or friend) was prostituting herself. Of course nobody would be. But they saw nothing so strange in the fact that men had women at the disposal of their desires. Ultimately, were trying to save goats and cabbages: the goat is the supposed male right to dispose of female flesh for payment for discharge sex, or to forget frustrations or to exercise dominance (the three are not necessarily alternatives); cabbages are a other right, that of having one's honour preserved.currency in human exchange.
So your sister yes, mine no.
I would like to ask Roberto Saviano the same question, which wrote in favour of the regularisation of prostitution: what if it was your sister, the prostitute? I'm prepared to bet on an ideological response, along the lines of: if it's your wish... as long as it's a free choice...
When he talks about women, Saviano doesn't get anything right. In 2017 complained that 'selfish' Italian women did not donate egg cells. for the assisted reproduction market. Notwithstanding the fact that it is trading and not of gift, and he should know how to use words, if the male semen is designed to detach itself naturally and pleasantly from the body, the female gametes must remain in the womb, in the dark and at that temperature. To get them out of there - risking creating, as he should know, serious health problems for the eventual unborn child - you need hormonal stimulations that make you feel bad -the woman who undergoes the procedure, in addition to the surgery necessary for the extraction. I don't know if he would be happy if his sister generously offered her egg cells, risking falling ill and ending up in the operating theatre - not to mention the psychological issues, which should be obvious.
He now writes in support of alleged 'free sex work' and calls for the regularisation of prostitution and the reform of the 'old' Merlin law.
Roberto Saviano does not lead a good life, and all is forgiven. But his misogyny is unforgivable.
It should not be difficult to imagine, for him or for any man, the disgust a woman feels for men who pay to rape her; the drugs and substances it throws down to be able to put up with those hands and genitals and mouths 'free' to do anything to her, and the annihilation of her desire, so much so that she is paid; drugs and substances that very often she will continue to take even after she has stopped prostituting herself in order not to go out of her mind.
Will Roberto Saviano have heard of 'our' Adelina? About her terrible life and death? Don't you think it's about time men refrained from doing so much harm to women?
But let's leave it at that, perhaps no man can achieve such levels of empathy. Let's stay on the level of his undeniable competence: will he have heard of the fact that regulating prostitution, as they have done in Germany, and opening the door to the sex slave trade are the same thing? The fact that prostitution is almost all trafficking, where have they regularised it?
It seems in good taste to him to say what he said in at a time when women's associations and humanitarian groups are scrambling to prevent women and children fleeing Ukraine from falling into the hands of pimps?
Do you know or not -you should be quite experienced in this matter- that do mafias all over the world do business with female flesh? And not only to prostitute it, but also to produce children for money? Do you know that there are girls in the world who were kidnapped at the age of 12 and have already been through six pregnancies in exchange for a bed and a meal? And many more are thrown out into the street to be torn to pieces by passing men? Did you know that in German brothels a very popular practice is to urinate on visibly pregnant girls? Where do you see rights here? Where is freedom?
Where the hell does Roberto Saviano live? The only paternalism -of which he complains - are the many, many fathers of families who rape girls picked up at night on the pavements or who go on tours in Thailand to sodomise young boys: does he know or not that Italians are the biggest sex tourists in the world? Her 'sex workers' who would like to decriminalise the exploitation of prostitution - the Constitutional Court has already replied that the Merlin law is perfectly fine as it is - are mostly pimps and pimpers in their turn: does he know that?
Saviano knows the abolitionist model -with punishment of clients- already in force in the Great North, in Canada, in France? All slaves to the "longa manus of the Vatican', as he writes of Italy with extraordinary vulgarity? Have you noticed that thousands and thousands of women are mobilised for the importation of this model, at this moment especially in Spain, where the game has been open for some time? Why do you not see them? Why does he not listen to them? Have you read Ingeborg Kraus on 'trauma of prostitution'? Have you tried looking at The Pretty Woman myth. How the sex industry lobby passes off prostitution to us by Julie Bindel? You have read Rape against payment by Rachel Moran, which gives a first-hand account of what prostitution is? Does he study, does he inform himself, before filling us with his radicaloid chatter?
O the life of women, their toil, their misery -because it is poverty that explains prostitution, I hope there is no doubt about that, and the fact that women are much poorer than men - are they not worth a tenth of the attention he has devoted to his chosen subjects?
In short: why doesn't Roberto Saviano run?
Marina Terragni
