Surprising political alliances formed all over the world in the struggle against regulated prostitution. During the 1880s, the women’s organisations, workers’ associations, and humanitarian and Christian organisations all made resolutions, demonstrated, and sent their demands to their respective governments.
The cumulative effect would be the repeal of the system. In the final two or three years of the 1880s, regulated prostitution was done away with in country after country, more abruptly than it had been implemented…
In purely physical terms, the medical examinations [used to check for venereal disease during regulation] were very unpleasant - and plainly hated, even by experienced prostitutes. Many prostitutes said that they felt the doctor was almost “taking revenge” on them. The high tempo of the examinations - up to thirty patients an hour - did nothing to augment the women’s sense of human worth. It soon became a central argument in the propaganda of the abolitionists that the doctors’ examinations were “unnatural,” “voyeuristic,” “brutal” and highly degrading for any woman, whether she was a private patient or a prostitute…
The fall of statutory regulation led to fewer brothels but more hidden prostitution, which in turn weakened contacts between the prostitutes and the health services. The most negative result was a stark increase in venereal disease from the late 1880s. In the 1890s syphilis spread at unprecedented rates. Most of the world’s physicians had daily practical experience that made them consider this a truly ethical dilemma. Very few within the morality movement ever realised that they had caused new problems.
—
Love For Sale: A Global History of Prostitution, by Nils Ringdal, Chapter 20: Moral Crusaders, pg 272-273
Casual reminder that:
1. even though we’re still debating the utility of it now, having a legal, regulated sex industry, even in the eighteen fucking hundreds, helped fight the spread of STDs; and that
2. the very real problem of doctors treating female patients, and particularly sex workers, with disdain and inhumanity during gynaecological exams was a recognised phenomenon over a hundred and thirty years ago.
History: teaching you shit that’s relevant to modern politics since FOREVER.
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