The recent scandal regarding NY Governor Eliot Spitzer's patronization of prostitutes while married and in office has created an onslaught of media coverage, starting first with Governor Spitzer's apology and continuing with coverage of the life of Ashley Dupre, the girl turned prostitute who played in the Governor's demise.
While I considered myself a feminist and a fighter for women's rights, I also believe that prostitution can be demeaning to women (I do believe there are a lot of ways to make the sex industry more fair for women and women to use their sexuality to empower themselves, but all that's another blog post). And as a good feminist, I went to National Organization for Women for their stance on prostitution and the sex industry. Surely they would have information on the sex industry in the wake of the Spitzer story, but after an extensive search, I could not find anything more recent than a story on sex trafficking from September 2007.
Where is NOW on the important issue of prostitution and women's rights to use their sexuality as they see fit?
A visit to the NOW website offers quick links to their most popular stories: Love Your Body (a great campaign they have done for many years), the Clinton campaign, and various other actions that affect women and issues that can help women. But there is nothing prominently displayed regarding prostitution and women's rights in the sex industry. A more in-depth search of the website provided quite a bit of information about sex trafficking in the US and NOW's effects to help immigrants who are trafficked and forced to work in brothels. But my search found nothing regarding how NOW felt about high priced prostitutes like Dupre.
My next stop on the road to information was the North American Task Force on Prostitution. This led me to PENet, the Prostitute's Education Network. These sites were really great, and they definitely helped me inform my opinions on prostitution, but these sites are very obviously pro-prostitution and had nothing written in direct response to the Spitzer story.
So my question remains: where is NOW? An organization that claims to "take action for women's equality" seems to remain silent on the issue of prostitution and the sex industry. While the organization does seem to rightly condemn sex trafficking, it says very little about women who choose to enter the sex industry. NOW does tout women's right to choose in regards to reproductive rights, but does to right to choose what we do with our reproductive systems extend into the right to choose what we do with our bodies as a whole? If women choose to use their sexuality to make a living, is prostitution still demeaning to women? And as the leading organization for women's rights, how can NOW remain silent on this issue?