How can Maggie Chapman be so wrong about everything?

From gender ideology, to prostitution, this muppet politician is neither use nor ornament

Is Maggie Chapman a fool, ambitious, or both? Well, if she is idiotic enough to think that carrying on the way she has this past few years, shaming even the shameful Scottish Greens, will result in her rising in the ranks, she’s even more stupid than she appears.

The politician who, if she had any fewer brain cells, would have to be watered twice daily, has argued that eight-year-old children should be allowed to decide on their own “gender identity”, and be eligible to undergo a legal ‘sex change’; is enthralled with the most extreme trans ideology imaginable, and has shilled for hulking, male rapists (there are no other sort, because the crime of rape requires a penis) to be locked up in prison with vulnerable, terrified women.

Chapman appears to have joined the Andrew Tate school of feminism, and is a fully fledged men’s rights activist.

After all, you have to be a pretty sick puppy to celebrate ‘sex work’ as a job like any other, which Chapman does.

Currently, Ash Regan , a Scottish politician, is making a valiant attempt to overhaul Scotland’s prostitution laws. Regan, along with any feminist concerned with the abuse of women and girls, believes that selling sex should not be criminalised, because prostitutted people are victims of sexual exploitation, but that buying sex should be a criminal offence. The punters, almost ALWAYS men, create the demand, are doing the exploiting, and need to be deterred.

Ash Regan

This approach, known as the Nordic Model, was first introduced in Sweden in 1999, as part of its end violence against women strategy. It has since been debated and implemented in countries around the world. It works, because it takes the stigma and responsibility off the women, and places it firmly on the men.

It is a human rights approach, and the only way that men will be persuaded that paying for sex carries a risk for them.

Of course Chapman is against it because “sex work is work”, and you will know, that if somebody trots out the mantra “trans women are women”, they will also believe that men have the right to purchase access to the inside of an actual living, breathing human being, for one-sided sexual pleasure.

‘Sex workers are experts on their own safety,’ posted Chapman on X. ‘Ash Regan's Prostitution Bill claims to protect them, while completely ignoring their voices.’ Regan has done nothing of the sort. I know for a fact that she has widely consulted women who know of what they speak, when it comes to why we should challenge the ‘right’ of men to pay for sex. One of those Regan spoke to is the amazing feminist activist and sex trade survivor, Fiona Broadfoot, who has done more for women and girls in her time Chapman could even dream of.

Nobly going along with the woke shock troops, Chapman supports the type of faux-feminism that that benefits men, or at the very least poses no challenge to them. She argues, therefore, that prostitution is merely a form of labour, and that the only harm that comes to the women is if they are arrested by the police.

I have interviewed dozens of women who have managed to escape prostitution. They speak of the pain of a dry, bruised vagina being penetrated by multiple men. The horror of having his semen or other bodily fluids anywhere near her face. His beard rubbing her cheek until she bleeds. They tell me about how their necks get sore from whipping their head away from his tongue as he tries to kiss her. About being unable to eat or drink or kiss her children, because of what she has had to do with her mouth. This is not the sanitised version of “sex work” we hear about so often.

Arrogant as hell, thick as a brick, and a misogynistic piece of work, Chapman is a disgrace to politics. Obviously, the Scottish Parliament is not fit for purpose, and full of cranks, but Maggie Chapman actually manages to discredit it.

She declared at a protest in Edinburgh, shortly after the Supreme Court ruling on “what is a woman?” that the Supreme Court judges were motivated by ‘bigotry, prejudice, and hatred”.

Prior to that, we know that she was a massive supporter of disgraced former Edinburgh Crisis CEO, Mridul Wadhwa, despite him being a man in the most senior position in a woman only sexual assault service, and being found, by an Employment Tribunal, that he had led a ‘heresy hunt’ against a fine, hardworking member of staff for her views on biological sex.

Chapman and Wadhwa, a double headed monster

History does not have a ‘side’, but if it did, then Chapman would be as far on the wrong side of it as humanly possible. In attempting to trash Ash Regan’s bill, she is siding with the pimps and punters that profit from the world’s oldest oppression.

During the campaign by Amnesty International to adopt a policy of blanket decriminalisation of the sex trade, the highly paid CEO of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, tweeted in response to kickback from abolitionists (human rights activists that wish to see an end to the global sex trade): ‘All want to end poverty, but in meantime why deny poor women the option of voluntary sex work?’ Sex-trade survivor, Rachel Moran, a sex trade survivor and author of Paid For, the finest book on the issue ever written, responded with: ‘Ken Roth, wouldn’t you say, if a person cannot afford to feed themselves, the appropriate thing to put in their mouth is food, not your cock?’

Maggie Chapman’s foot has been in her mouth so many times it’s a wonder she can open it wide enough to spout her rubbish.

Below is a piece I wrote in 2017, on the way the ‘progressive left’ postures about ‘sex work’, without any understanding as to what it actually is.

The first time I heard the slur ‘whorephobia’ - which is meant to mean hatred towards or stigmatising of prostituted women - was at a conference in 2005 where I was taking about the harms to women in the sex trade. During the Q&A session a young feminist told me my ‘whorephobia’ was a big problem. ‘Second wave feminists hate sex workers’ she told me, ‘Your politics are redundant’.

Accusations of ‘whorephobia’, are increasingly used to silence and deter any criticism of the sex trade whatsoever. This viewpoint is enshrined in university safe space policies, and has led to a number of students who are lesbian or gay being diverted into adopting a ‘Queer’ identity^, and attempting to pigeonhole prostitution into a sexual identity, rather than something which is done to the poorest, most disenfranchised females on the planet, bar a few high-profile exceptions of the ‘happy hooker’ variety.

Prostitution is not a sexuality. There is a clear difference between a sexual preference or identity and prostitution (a form of men's abuse). Radical feminists recognise this, but to fourth-wavers, it is all part of one big Queer melting pot.

The notion that I, or any other feminist who critiques the sex trade is suffering from an ‘irrational fear’ of prostituted women is staggering. The use of the term ‘whore’ as some twisted badge of honour to describe a prostituted woman is nothing short of grotesque. Men get to define who is a ‘whore’, and women cannot reclaim a word that has never been ours in the first place.

Prostitution has been described to me time and time again by the women who survive it as paid rape. The men who pay for sex are buying sexual subordination. If ‘consent’ has to be bought, it is not consent. Not one of the hundreds of survivors I have met escaped serious violence, abuse and degradation during her time in prostitution. The dozens of punters I have interviewed all displayed attitudes of contempt towards women - why would they not? To treat a woman as a commodity, it is necessary to first dehumanise her.

When did feminists begin to support the very structures and practices that are both a cause and a consequence of women’s oppression? Younger, forth-wave feminists are today more likely to be offended by abolitionists campaigning to end the sex trade than by pimping and sex buying. Countless academics, all of whom would describe themselves as progressive, insist that ‘sex work’ is ‘empowering’ and nothing other than a choice.

While radical feminists understand women as a sex class and seek to dismantle the structural oppression of male supremacy, forth wave, or liberal feminists view women as unconnected individuals with individual choices. Liberals tend also to focus on the choices available to women, rather than the choices denied them. It is a sophisticated political argument bereft of sophistication and politics. Although interestingly, whether they accept this or not, men are enabled to band together: few things bring men closer than the violence they commit against women.

It is no wonder that feminists who learn their politics in University have become steeped in a culture of neoliberal ‘choice’ politics. There is open hostility from pro-prostitution academics to those scholars who deviate from the pro-prostitution line. Those academics advocating on behalf of the sex trade are hardly harmless ineffectual individuals in ivory towers publishing papers nobody reads; rather they are powerful activists using their academic positions and credentials to exert influence on prostitution policy as members of national and international research bodies. It is concerning that ‘research’ deferring to sex trade ideology and not academically sound evidence is informing this discussion with detrimental consequences for women and girls, albeit positive consequences for those profiting from this regime of violence.

When researching my book, The Pimping of Prostitution (2017) on the global sex trade, I travelled around the world, interviewing almost 250 people including survivors of the sex trade, ‘sex workers’ rights’ activists, pimps, sex buyers, and women and men who sell sex.

The survivor-led abolitionist movement is on the rise, and a number of countries are responding to calls to criminalise those who create the demand for prostitution, rather than those caught up in it. In a world where the bodies of women and girls are being viewed as products to be bought and sold, it is more important than ever to resist this market trade in misery, and to challenge those who fight for the ‘right’ of women to be abused.