BRISTOL, U.K. — The Guardian continued this week its ongoing campaign to stigmatize sex work with a piece on efforts to shut down Bristol, U.K. strip clubs, with the publication outrageously claiming that “evidence suggests that the harassment of women and domestic killings are linked to entertainment venues.”
The article, written by Tom Wall for The Guardian’s The Observer vertical, was published yesterday and illustrated with a Getty stock image of an anonymous stripper with her face obscured by shadows.
“Bristol is set to become the biggest city in the country to ban lap-dancing clubs in a move campaigners claim will help undermine the sexist cultural norms that lead to violence against women,” leading liberal news organization The Guardian reported.
Using activist local politicians and zoning regulations — one of the preferred anti-porn and anti-sex-work strategies besides lobbying governments — advocates are pressuring Bristol to shut down two lap-dancing clubs, the main sources of legitimate employment opportunity for the city’s sex workers.
The city council’s licensing committee last week voted to move forward with a “nil-cap” (aka, zero tolerance) policy for sexual entertainment venues.
The Guardian cited Margaret Hickman, leader of the council’s ruling Labour group, who claimed “evidence suggested sexual entertainment venues [are] linked to violence against women.”
“We can’t ignore the fact that casual street harassment of women and domestic homicide are one of the biggest social issues that Bristol has to deal with,” Hickman said, preposterously connecting sex work and employment to violent crime without citing any actual “evidence.”
The Guardian’s editors then used that dubious claim as a sub-headline, stating it as a fact.
The Guardian's Peculiar Sex Worker Exception
As XBIZ has been reporting, the supposedly liberal transatlantic organization — with offices in New York and London and funded by American and U.K. investors — generally covers marginalized communities sympathetically with one important exception: sex workers.
The Guardian’s coverage of sex work is overwhelmingly biased in favor of abolitionist positions and it is reported through a shadowy “side-project” funded by a social-agenda U.S. foundation called the Omidyar Group.
Almost all of The Guardian’s War on Porn articles are revealed, in the small print, to be part of something called the “Exploitation in Focus” series, produced “under the sponsorship of Humanity United.” The small print describes Humanity United as a “U.S.-based foundation dedicated to bringing new approaches to global problems that have long been considered intractable.” According to the same disclaimer, Humanity United’s content “is editorially independent and covers modern-day slavery.”
By categorizing legal, consensual adult entertainment in their “modern-day slavery” section, however, The Guardian conflates legitimate adult entertainment content with “human trafficking.”
The end result diverts the attention of readers who rely on The Guardian as a go-to news source (including a large part of the U.S. Democratic Party and U.K. Labour Party establishments and donor base) away from labor-related human trafficking (e.g., migrant workers, the agricultural industry, the garment and restaurant industries) and towards sensationalized headlines about “sex trafficking.”
And this is all done by The Guardian under the auspices (and funding) of two publicity-averse nonprofits with vague names and missions, Humanity United and its parent organization the Omidyar Group, which describe themselves as “a diverse collection of organizations, each guided by its own approach, but united by a common desire to catalyze social impact.”
The Omidyar Group is the philanthropic arm of billionaires Pierre and Pam Omidyar. Pierre, who founded eBay and wrote the proprietary code that underlies it, has himself been embroiled in a human trafficking scandal in Hawaii, over the treatment and transportation of Asian laborers.
The Guardian also platforms anti-porn activists like Exodus Cry’s Laila Mickelwait, discredited SWERF crusader Gail Dines and Julie Bindel, NCOSE’s favored advocate for anti-decriminalization of sex work.
An Absolute Anti-Adult-Entertainment Stance
The Guardian’s article on the forthcoming Bristol ban — which is supported by the local police — foregrounds the voices of anti-sex work activists.
The piece prominently quotes Sasha Rakoff, chief executive of anti-sex-work lobby Not Buying It, who claimed that “Bristol is ending the ‘strip clubs on the high street’ phenomenon because they recognize that this breeds and feeds the very attitudes that leads to harassment, abuse and ultimately violence against all women and girls.”
Rakoff’s reference to the “high street” highlights one of the hallmarks of abolitionist thinking: they want adult entertainment to never be integrated to society so it can only thrive on “the margins” of towns and regulation, thus self-fulfilling their prophecy that it is a “marginal” occupation inextricably linked to various crimes.
Rakoff’s extremist view concerning sex work prohibition is absolute. “Even if it’s a perfectly run club with no sexual contact and the punters are all gentleman [sic], it is still harmful,” she told the Guardian, “allowing these clubs to remain open signals women can be objectified and bought.”
Burying Sex Worker Voices
Rakoff also advocates a State-driven social engineering approach to “re-educating” the sex workers she plans to force out of a job, and to whom she grants no self-determination. “There needs to be exit support so lap dancers, who actually have to pay to work in strip clubs, are redeployed into safe, alternative work with full employment rights — including in former strip clubs reimagined as bars, clubs and restaurants.”
The Guardian also quotes Helen Mott — whom they call “an expert in gender equality” but is, in fact, an activist for a lobbying group called Bristol Fawcett Society — who claims that “in our city right now from the age of 18 as a young man you can go down town and pay for a woman to strip for you” is somehow “hampering and undoing the council’s own efforts to advance equality between women and men.”
Two quotes from the strip club owners and a sex worker are buried at the bottom of the article, a placement which stands in stark contrast to the sub-headline about supposed “evidence” of a link between adult entertainment and abuse.
Main Image: Dancers at Bristol's Urban Tiger strip club. (Source: Facebook)
