Part about prostitution:
Alex [00:25:25] Exactly. And it's that, again, as I focus on inputs, yes, we are doing something rather than outcomes actionable. What is it that we're actually changing rather than just thinking we're changing. We ask all our guests about a time they have changed their mind. You've told us, Helen, that you've changed your mind about the role of prostitution. What was that shift and why?
Helen [00:25:45] With the proviso that one of the things I've changed my mind about is my is that I've come to accustom myself to an enormous amount of uncertainty around the subject. So apologies if I sound vague or waffling on this. But, you know, in my 20s, my position was the kind of default liberal position, which is other people's sex lives are their own business, you know, the way other people spend their money as their own business. You know, if it's legal, you know, prostitution should be legal and it shouldn't be something in which that the state has a role in it at all. And actually, as I've kind of got older, I worked for a while as the chair of a violence against women charity, which dealt with a lot of what would they have referred to as women exploited into prostitution, particularly from Eastern Europe, that I've also become less liberal and more, I guess, socialist. And one of things that I find really fascinating is that student feminists particularly are very what they would call pro sex worker and into the decriminalization and legalization agenda that is, I think, kind of fundamentally neoliberal, which is again, another other words, it gets massively overused, but it is about, you know, the market's lack of, you know, the market regulates stuff and that actually, you know, there's no such thing as society. And I think that now I think a couple of things, which is first our policy on this should be based around minimizing harm. Now, it might very well be that you need to decriminalization is the way to do that. Certainly, I would say the regime we've got at the moment doesn't seem to be working people, you know, very scared, particularly to report violence if they're working on the street because they're worried about, you know, visa transgressions or about not being believed. All of that stuff. So we're definitely not getting it right at the moment. But what I do also think is it's one thing that everyone else is allowed to have an opinion on, too, which I think is quite a challenging thing now in in progressive politics, because we all live in a society which is shaped by, you know, the fact that quite a lot of men buy sex, almost no women buy sex, and almost all of the men who buy sex, buy it from women. And what does that do when you have women's sexual availability commoditization? You know, I feel the same about porn. We all live in a world that is deeply, deeply shaped by porn. So whether or not you're appearing in porn yourself isn't the only criteria for having an opinion on it. And that's where I've really moved from, the kind of it's none of my business what other people get up to actually there is such a thing as society. And it is it is my business. Obviously, I do not know as much as people who are directly involved, but I am still allowed to have an opinion as a member of society.
Alex [00:28:11] Was there a particular moment or experience that that led to that shift, Helen?
Helen [00:28:16] One of the things that I remember quite distinctly as I wrote a piece about %%% I don't know whether or not it still exists.
Ali [00:28:21] You might need to say what it is.
[00:28:26] %%% is, or was as I said, I haven't looked at it for years, is a TripAdvisor for sex workers. And that is exactly as soul destroying as it kind of sounds. Right. So the idea is that if you're a punter, then what you want to do is obviously write down reviews of particular establishments, particular women at those establishments and stop other men getting ripped off. And I went and I read like an enormous amount of it. And there was a there was a project to try and circulate some of the more distressing ones. And they were only a small minority of them. Actually, a lot more of them were kind of sad in the vein of, you know, she's a lovely girl. She shouldn't be doing this kind of I treated her exceptionally well. I left it in all the tip that this sort of weird faux sort of chivalry about this business. And I thought, actually, you know what? I just don't I don't think this is a way that men and women should relate to each other. I don't think this is particularly healthy, that you get to bypass all of consent and what it means to have a human relationship with someone in this fundamentally intimate level by just injecting cash into it. It's obviously going to result in exploitation and it's obviously going to result in the more economically powerful partner, you know, wielding a huge amount of power over the less economically powerful partner. Yeah. And I think it's one of those things where people don't want to look at it because they don't want to feel that they're being prudish, I guess, or that they hate sex. I had this line for my book, which I nearly put in, which was, you know, I like sex so much, I have it for free. And I felt that this is have been this constant attack on feminists who have raised questions about the sex industry is the idea that you hate sex itself. Right. And it's like saying because I have questions about the working practices at McDonald's, I don't hate burgers or meat or the concept of food. What I question is the environment in which all of that is happening. And I think there's been a huge reluctance on the part of the feminist movement to seem uncool or prudish and therefore to interrogate what the economic transaction does in that situation. But like I say, this one, these opinions, because the gender issue is so much more to the fore in feminism. It doesn't. It talked about so much, but it is very much the same kind of split between the old left and feminism and the new student feminists that there is. You know, that the attitudes to prosecution or sex work, which are how you describe it, and both sides kind of say, well, look, you know, listen. Particularly younger activists say you listen to sex workers. And the problem is you kind of go, well, which ones? Because there are people who are obviously very happy with the job. You know, it puts food on the table, whatever it is. You know, they will point out that there are other jobs that are dirty and dangerous and very badly paid and there isn't a kind of moral outrage about them. And then the anti prostitution side will bring forward women who have worked in it who feel that they were raped repeatedly for money. So it's not one of those ones that can be solved in the way that people try to appeal to authority of lived experience because people have very different experiences within exactly the same job and industry.
