Prostitution has been controversially debated in the name of feminism since the beginning of the New Feminist Movement: autonomous feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett, or Alice Schwarzer have criticised the System Prostitution and its treatment of women as commodities as inhumane. They have shown solidarity with prostitutes.
The controversy is still raging today. Prostitutes — even those without an invitation — take part, and a debate on the contrary views about the abolition of prostitution is sparked. This fundamental conflict will pervade the entire debate over the coming decades. It not only declares her subjugation right in the open, with the cash nexus between the sexes announced in currency, rather than through the subtlety of a marriage contract […], but the very act of prostitution is itself a declaration of our value, our reification.
It is not sex the prostitute is really made to sell: it is degradation. And the buyer, the john, is not buying sexuality but power, power over another human being […. In the GDR, prostitution was officially prohibited from ; however, it existed in secret regardless, albeit to a much lesser extent.
Feminists and prostitutes occupy the Church of Saint-Nizier in Lyon. More than participants, among them many prostitutes, pass a resolution in support of decriminalisation and the elimination of police records on prostitutes. The film is the subject of media controversy. Our goal is the recognition of prostitution as a profession and the elimination of social and legal discrimination.
Pieke Biermann publishes Wir sind Frauen wie andere auch. The sociologists interviewed 20 prostitutes in West Berlin in person and in writing. The women were violently forced into prostitution, and their profits were withheld by the pimps. They are successful. The ten defendants are sentenced to between two and ten years in prison and must pay the women a total of , Francs in compensation. Men come across to you as pathetic, ridiculous, little wimps afterwards.
