Let’s stop pretending that paying for sex is anything but abuse
It’s revolting to see men casually boast about how they treat prostitutes — they should be shamed and jailed
Hadley Freeman
Sunday April 21 2024, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
Stangely, 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. After what he describes as their “brisk workout”, he says they are “like a long-married couple observing the conventions of mutual respect and co-operation”. Mmmm, yes. Albeit a mutually respectful couple in which the husband has to ask the woman to spell her name so he can transfer the money to her — “gallantly” he decides to pay her the full amount, which makes him feel “heroic and magnificent” — and one who knows the woman is speaking “insincerely” when she says she hopes to see him again. But “I meant it”, Evans writes.
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!
