Men of all ages connect on forums in an online community. They approach ‘punting’ as if it’s a hobby. Sometimes they refer to themselves as ‘hobbyists’. Sometimes they refer to the women they pay to have sex with as ‘service providers’. They discuss ‘Who is the best at anal right now?’ and ‘good oral in Kildare’. It’s an online support group for the sick at heart, everyone validating each other’s sickness.
These websites normalise the behaviour that the punters cannot share with anyone else in their life. It’s OK when everyone else is doing it, after all. This online culture helped me to feel that what I was doing was OK too. When we do not have a solid sense of self, it is so much easier to attach ourselves to people and values we don’t necessarily know are good or bad for us.
I look back on my younger self, my accepting, non-judgmental, open way of being, and feel I need to protect her, wrap her in cotton wool and cover it with barbed wire.
At any time, between 800 and 1,000 women are advertised for sex on escort sites in Ireland. This does not include the ‘sugar dating’ phenomenon and social media.
An estimated one in 15 Irish men pay for sexual access, meaning there may be more than 100,000 ‘punters’ in our country, compared to about 1,000 female ‘service providers’.
Why are we not talking about these men? Why are they not talking? In the debates about prostitution, we do not hear from them. They don’t ‘come out’. They don’t create associations or campaign for ‘punters’ rights’. If punting is the legitimate and harmless hobby they claim it to be, why not?
There is a lot of money to be made from operating brothels and running an escort website. Advertising is very expensive – one ‘online directory’ of women in prostitution had a turnover of €6m in 2015. The men pay around a €100 for 30 minutes of sex with a woman, around €200 for an hour. And with more than 100,000 punters, there is obviously no shortage of male demand for women’s bodies.
We know that most women in the sex trade are not there voluntarily, and when we understand sexual consent to be freely given, voluntary and reversible, it is inarguable that when people defend the sex trade in Ireland, they are defending the daily rape of women and girls. The pimps who run the websites become multi-millionaires by serving up a literal rape market.
You visit men in hotel rooms all over Dublin. You are cheerful and caring. A breath of fresh air, says one 50-year-old man.
So obedient, says another, and your stomach shrinks.
Most of them are middle-aged, middle-class, married and wealthy. They live in big houses, have big cars and fat wallets with pictures of their families.
Seeing you is a hobby they feel entitled to indulge. They express no emotion. They like to try new girls. They say they want to ‘try’ you, and you feel grateful that you’ve been selected. You actually feel special that they picked you. And you feel special that you are able to sell sex – that you have the guts and confidence to do it.
You deal with the men with your disarming openness and friendliness, never showing or experiencing any feeling. You accept them exactly as they are. You are in charge and you are empowered. This is what we’ve been told to do, isn’t it? If sex sells, why shouldn’t I profit?
In the media, the men who pay their way inside women are described by many sex-trade advocates as lonely, elderly, disabled or socially isolated. They are described as men wanting to ‘connect’, in need of touching a woman’s body, wanting a hug, a chat.
In the four years I spent ‘servicing’ random men, I never met any man who just wanted to talk, or needed a hug. Not once. The vast majority were in their 40s and 50s, middle-class, self-assured, and entitled.
You take the bus out to a northside suburb to see a punter, and get lost trying to find your way around the wide, silent streets lined with enormous houses. You arrive and he lets you in, and you remember now, as you write this, that your hair is so blonde. He doesn’t say much.
The halls are lined with those studio photos of families where everyone is grinning and wearing black, with their hands on each other’s shoulders. The impeccable kitchen is huge.
He – dark-haired, middle-aged and soft-jawed – leans on the counter drinking coffee, and you stand a little way off, unsure what to do with your bag so you hold it in front of you. He sips and looks you up and down. His lack of engagement makes you babble. He could smile. He could say something to put you at ease. He could make a joke. Some of them make jokes. This one doesn’t give a shit how he is perceived.
He says, “What do you do?”
And you tell him that you’re in art college and you want to do sculpture.
You waffle on about it and he interrupts you. “No, what do you do?”
The air pings and focuses and you stand there with your bag in front of you. You suck it all back in, and give him the list of what you do, but it’s too late. Your presumption that he was asking you about your life was idiotic, and now you are exposed.
Objectification is the loss of bodily autonomy, and it can happen in a moment. It can happen with a look, a comment, or with an order. You are the most objectified you have ever felt. You let you mind shrink and fold so that it is tiny, tiny, tiny, and you leave your body and think about college, the rest of your day, how you will get home.
You’re just a character. You’re acting a part. You’re not really you right now. It’s OK. One of your many personas is not in the room, has not made it up the stairs, but is on her way home. Another has melted out of its body-shell and sits on the windowsill, looking on and laughing at the stupidity of 21-year-old girl thinking she possesses any power, sexual or otherwise, in any part of her life.
It’s over, and he doesn’t say thank you or goodbye. He grimaces an attempt at a smile as you go out the door. You get the bus home. It didn’t seem as if you made him that happy. You didn’t do a good job. You are responsible for the client’s enjoyment of the time he spends with you. If a man isn’t happy, it’s your fault.
You feel the stark reality of having had sex with a man you didn’t want to have sex with. You have betrayed yourself. You need the punters to make you feel valued, and you hate them when you end up feeling used, discarded and violated. Then you need them more. On the bus home, you hold your money, and you feel a little better.
You go to college and make your art and see your friends, and everything is normal. The escorting exists in a separate bubble. You do it when you feel like it, whenever you need some extra money. You like scheduling your ‘clients’. It feels grown-up to have these secret plans. You like getting the cash. It feels powerful and important to be handed €150. It feels important to keep an eye on the time, to make sure you don’t run over the 30 minutes that €150 pays for.
It feels grown-up to throw the cash into a drawer, where very often you forget about it. You tell yourself you ‘need the money’, but looking at it makes you feel uneasy, and you spend it quickly, sometimes on paying bills, more often on insignificant, superficial things like make-up, just to get rid of it. The money is both coercive and compensatory. It cleans it up, makes it OK, gives you a small thrill.
Mia Doring on the “Episode” podcast with Richie Sadlier
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