Maidan

Hi Terry! Been distracted for a while by domestic issues and working long hours this summer, though I've tried to keep abreast of the news in Ukraine. Only just stumbled on your articles, though, including the one about the conditions in the orphanages. There must be a half-decent investigative journalist somewhere (Ukrainska Pravda, Kyiv Post?) who will expose this, as the first step towards getting something done about it.

Slavery by any other name is still slavery, and unacceptable. You put your finger on poverty as the root of all these evils. But I think Arik Diament is conflating two issues here: (1) the morality or otherwise of men (and women) paying for sexual services and (2) the conditions under which women and girls (and men and boys) provide those services.

Let's begin with a fundamental question. Why do men want sex with women in the first place? Can the answer to that question be reduced to a mere physical sensation (lust)? I say, no it can't, since that can be achieved without any assistance from anybody else. There is a wide range of sex toys on the market and no woman can perform at 100 vibrations per second.

Therefore, something else is needed to explain why a man seeks out a real woman made of flesh and blood, as opposed to an inflatable one; and that something else is all about intangibles: intimacy, affection, the chance to feel human again; maybe the cultural imperative that a man is supposed to be incomplete, not a man, or missing out on something, without a woman. Or maybe it boils down to some pseudo-Freudian theory about the regressive drive to re-enter the womb and the therapeutic value of doing so?

Should we be ashamed of possessing these quintessentially human needs, or of paying to have them met if there is no opportunity to do so for free? Hell, we should not. Indeed, why should not those needs count as human rights, too?

That leads immediately to another question: should our legitimate needs be met through the abuse or unacceptable exploitation of another human being? No, of course not. But that is a completely separate question. The consumer of any service, sexual or otherwise, generally has little or no influence over the conditions in which workers provide that service. Therefore, I submit that the moral issue here does not arise at the point of demand in the commercial sex industry, but at the point of supply. I am sick and tired of being hectored by the conservative-feminist lobby, and its male apologistis, about my legitimate needs as a human male being off-limits.

Women in general don't have this problem: though some of them pay for sex, too, most can have sex all day if they want to, and even get paid into the bargain. The snag for them is, the sex would not be satisfactory most of the time; but at least they have free access to the intimacy and all the other intangible benefits, on tap and on demand. Relatively few women will sleep alone in their beds this very night, unless they choose to. For an unattached male, the cost of avoiding that outcome in the UK (for example) is probably somewhere around �1000 for an overnight stay. That's the difference.

Of course, that is no advantage for the women who are held in sexual slavery. There are, broadly, two strategies for tackling it. You could attack the demand side of the equation: go on yet another feminist rampage, demonising men and campaigning to get tougher on their use of commercial sex services. Or you could attack the supply side, with a commitment to wage war on poverty, and the feminisation of poverty, in Europe.

See, I am trying to approach this with intellectual consistency and somewhat in the manner of a trade unionist: there is no such thing as an inherently evil industry, only bad employers who oppress their workers within a given industry. When you attack the consumers, you are, broadly, attacking the working class (the soft target) rather than the capitalist class (the hard target).

Issues such as, the economic and social development of poor countries in Europe, are fundamental to the supply side of this equation. Brussels is refusing significant assistance for Ukraine's progress towards EU membership, on the grounds that there is a limit to the number of new countries the EU can contain. Yet, Montenegro is already being fast-tracked into the EU ahead of Ukraine. To the extent that public-investment assistance for countries like Ukraine, including the means to plug the drain of resources through corruption, is not forthcoming, the social problems of sex slavery and death-camp orphanages will not be solved; or will take longer to solve than the lifetimes of the women and children we are trying to liberate from those conditions.

Anti-poverty campaigners should counter Brussels' anti-EU expansion logic with the fact that we can't afford NOT to do it. The price of the status quo is far higher for all of us, not just the Svetlanas of this world. I recall reading an article by Yulia Tymoshenko in which she argues that poverty is the most expensive economic policy to operate. Any similarity between her and Margaret Thatcher is, at that point, stopped dead in its tracks. Thatcher operated poverty and mass unemployment as deliberate tools of economic policy: they were a "price well worth paying", said her Chancellor, Norman Lamont. A price is always well worth paying when it's paid by somebody else.

Ultimately, however, the poverty and slavery that goes around, comes around in the form of billions of Euros - much of which could otherwise be collected in taxes from legitimate businesses - being lost to organised crime and the cost of policing it; and the costs of the consequences of that, such as, illegal immigrants and asylum seekers being fed, housed / imprisoned and deported on aeroplanes. (The cost of keeping one person on State benefits or in jail in the UK is �20,000-�30,000 a year; then there are huge legal fees involved in court proceedings, interpreters' fees, and so on.)

We need to go out and argue the case for a Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe, rather than wage a witch hunt against the male half of the population. And, how about campaigning to legalise and legitimise the sex industry. Every legitimate industry has its share of cowboys and robber-barons; but they are far fewer in number than they would be if those industries were pushed underground. Ask any American historian about alcohol prohibition in the 1930s. The problem is the pimps, not the punters. Therefore, ease off the blokes and give the geezers a hard time, instead.