Kajsa Ekis Ekman: I lived in Barcelona, and shared an apartment with a woman who prostituted herself at a highway rest stop. I was there when she came home at night with her so-called boyfriend, that is, her pimp, all drunk. I had experienced it quite differently, and wanted to get involved.
Suddenly, it was: Prostitution is liberated sexuality, and whoever is against it, is a puritanical moralist. That had something to do with the strengthening of the queer movement, which defined prostitution as hip and cool. The problem is, this movement may have called norms into question, but not power relationships. In this discourse, the prostitute is not a human being, but a symbol of sexual transgression, with which one can adorn oneself, like an earring.
So I decided to write a book, in order to bring some facts into the debate. For example, opponents of the anti-john law have always claimed that the law was just the doing of social workers and radical feminists, and that no one had ever listened to the prostitutes. But when I looked at the studies, I realized that this was not true.
In the s, there had been a complete change of perspective among researchers. Whereas before, people used to look on prostitutes as criminals and not a part of society, later they began to go into their milieu, and ask questions of them. Ever since then, studies about prostitution have drawn their conclusions from the world of prostitution: from prostitutes themselves, but also from pimps and johns. Their testimony forms the basis of our law.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the human traffickers, pimps, and the high rape and murder rates, and just looking at the two people who meet in prostitution, you see that one of them wants sex, and the other does not.
