French Far-Right Politicians Want To Reopen Brothels as Sex-Worker Cooperatives
The current system, in which paying for sex is illegal, doesn't work, said Jean-Philippe Tanguy, a National Assembly member.
France's far-right political party, known as National Rally, is preparing to introduce legislation to bring back legal brothels, according to French newspaper Le Monde. Under a bill being prepared by French National Assembly member Jean-Philippe Tanguy, these brothels would operate as sex-worker-run cooperatives.
Marine Le Pen, the former National Rally president and current National Assembly member who has run for president three times, also supports the brothel initiative, Tanguy said.
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Tanguy told Le Monde that he got interested in the issue after working with a group that helps sex workers and meeting women who were leading very tough lives and women who were very proud of their work. He said he's come to believe that the current legal framework, in which paying for sex is illegal, does not actually make life better or safer for sex workers, since it drives the industry underground—where violence still takes place, but people ignore it. He called the system "the height of bourgeois hypocrisy."
It was only in 2016 that France made paying for sex acts a crime. But the country officially ended its legal brothel system back in 1946. (Prostitution still remained technically legal, but many activities related to it were criminalized.)
Interestingly, the woman who advocated for the brothel closures—Marthe Richard, a former spy and sex worker whom the law was named after—later seemed to regret it, saying that prostitution couldn't be eradicated and brothels were a "lesser evil," according to the French radio and TV network BFM.
A move to decriminalize clients and allow sex workers to work together would be a step in the right direction for sex worker rights and safety. But any plan that allows this exclusively in brothels would still perpetuate many of the harms of criminalization.
"Brothels yes very well, but it must be an OPTION, not an obligation," suggested French commentator Edouard Hesse on X, urging Tanguy to listen to sex workers. "We need to decriminalize this activity, protect rights, fight against coercion."
Forging an alliance between the far-right party and sex worker rights advocates could prove difficult, no matter the particulars. Parisian sex worker Mylène Juste, a spokesperson for the group STRASS, told Le Monde there was no way they were going to ally with the National Rally, a nationalist and populist party that wants to drastically reduce French immigration.
But National Rally politicians aren't the only ones who want to revise France's prostitution laws. Philippe Juvin, a Republican member of the National Assembly who last year introduced a bill aimed at securing sex worker rights, said this is also an issue he intends to revisit.
Juvin complained to Le Monde about the current situation, in which both social stigma and the law prohibit sex workers from working safely and normally. He cited Belgium—where sex work was decriminalized in 2022 and further moved to secure sex worker rights and autonomy last year—as a good model to follow.
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