Hadley Freeman
Let's stop pretending prostitution is 'work'
Paying for sex is abuse, and it's revolting to see men casually boast about it
For the past decade, activism on the
progressive left has consisted of
parroting entirely nonsensical slogans:
silence is violence! Trans women are
women! War is peace; freedom is
slavery; ignorance is strength! OK,
those last ones are from George
Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four, but I
expect to see them trending on X né Twitter
any day. One of the best-known recent mantras
is "Sex work is work", which has been so
successful that everyone from the BBC to your
teenagers now uses the term "sex worker", and
the word "prostitute" Is seen as degrading.
I've never understood this, for two reasons.
The first is purely linguistic: the "description of
what job involves + worker" construction does
not strike me as a respectful way to describe a
profession; if it were, dentists would be "tooth
workers" and novelists "word workers".
Second, and hear me out here, maybe the
degrading thing about prostitution isn't the
name but the act of having sex with men — it is
almost entirely men who buy sex — who don't
see you as a human but as a hole, and one they
can buy and do with as they please.
For the past few years it has been verboten
to make this gum-bleedingly obvious statement
about prostitution. Oh no, you'd be told, sex
work is empowering and liberating and all sorts
of other
zeitgeisty words. Sex work Is work!
Strangely, the sex-work-is-work crowd has
been very quiet since The Spectator published
a column last week by its massage parlour
correspondent and occasional theatre critic,
Lloyd Evans, which provides a very different
perspective on prostitution. In this, his — by my
count — second dispatch this year from a
massage parlour, Evans, presumably typing
with one hand, describes a recent trip to
Cambridge to attend a lecture, where he was so
turned on by the "beautiful historian" giving
the talk that he had no choice but to find a
prostitute afterwards. Perhaps you think I'm
exaggerating. In fact I'm playing it down. I
haven't mentioned, for instance, that Evans
refuses to pay the prostitute the price she
asks because it is "the same as the cost of my
overnight hotel", and clearly a woman's body is
worth less than a night in'a Premier Inn. So he
bargains her down by £20.
I used to wonder what men thought when
they bought sex. Did they convince themselves
that the prostitute was enjoying it? Did they get
off on the knowledge that she, or he, clearly
wasn't? But that question is naive: the men
don't think about the prostitute at all. Evans
doesn't care that she doesn't want to see him
again, or whether she might have been
trafficked, any more than he cares that the
prostitute has no desire for him to stick his
penis inside her. But he does it anyway. This is
true of all men who buy sex, and it's why I
think they are no better than rapists.
Am I being too blunt? Well, maybe more
bluntness is needed instead of the euphemisms
too many have used for too long in the deluded
belief they accord dignity to prostitutes, when
all they actually do is give cover to the men
who abuse them. It's because people aren't
honest about how degrading and — most of all
— dangerous prostitution actually is that we get
situations like what happened in 2021 when, in
response to an "emerging trend" of students
selling their bodies for sex, Durham University
offered sex work training to "ensure, students
can be safe and make Informed choices".
And who could blame those students for
seeing prostitution as a great little
moneyspinner on the side? After all, in British
theatres there are at present not one but two
musicals that present prostitution as a great
career path for women:
Pretty Woman, the
ultimate prostitution PR story, and
Moulin
Rouge!, in which the prostitute, Satine, dies
(spoiler!) but at least she finds true love on the
way. When The Guardian reviewed
Moulin
Rouge! in 2022, the reviewer tutted at
the show's "sour portrayal of Satine's life as a sex
worker", noting that she seemed full of "shame
and self-disdain" for her work. "For an
establishment that exudes sexual freedom, this
seems strangely uptight," the reviewer wrote.
Yes, how uptight of that consumptive woman
working as a sex slave in a cabaret brothel to
not revel in her sexual freedom! At least
Les
Misérables down the road has the courage to
tell the truth about prostitution through the
character of Fantine, who sells her hair, then
her teeth, then her body, and then dies. But
come on, Fantine, enjoy your sexual freedom!
People used to call me a "Swerf for saying
things like this, which stands for sex-worker-
exclusionary radical feminist. But I feel only
compassion for prostitutes. It's the men who
abuse them that, I absolutely believe, should
be publicly shamed and imprisoned.
And to all the people out there still bleating
that sex work is empowering, I presume
you'll be encouraging your daughters to pursue
that career path — arguing with dirty old
sociopaths over the price of a blow job. Sex
work is work!
From today's Sunday Times
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