by Sara Pascoe
Everything is really about money, even when we’re discussing sex and power.
The UN says that 99 per cent of land and property in the world is owned by men. This has such huge ramifications for all human relationships, romantic, sexual or otherwise. That’s what Samantha from Sex in the City should be quoting, although I guess stats are more of a Miranda thing. And how can we improve this imbalance if we are absorbing shit that does us harm? On both sides. For every Cinderella story telling little girls they are to be beautiful and helpless and rescued by a man, there is a Cinderella story telling little boys they are supposed to be rich and strong and rescuers.
Some people take the economics of dating and make the implied unambiguous. This may be a student with a sugar daddy, a stripper charging per dance, a masseuse offering a massage with ‘a happy ending’. There are people for whom the notion of erotic capital is made literal. ‘If you pay me this, I will do this.’ There is a huge spectrum of varied ways that people do this. I read adverts from men advertising free rent and board in exchange for sex two or three times a week and one blow job. I read about ‘nude cleaners’, women who charge slightly more than clothed cleaners and then are alone in the house with a strange man who insists on them bending over to dust things. I cried when I read men writing about how easy it was to ‘convince’ these women to have sex ‘because they need the money so badly’. One of these men bragged that he ‘wouldn’t go to a real hooker’, which is interesting, isn’t it? This man doesn’t mind paying for sex, but believes there is something ‘purer’ about coercing and bullying a woman working in his house than a woman offering that service explicitly. I have known people who took on variants of sex work. My friend lived for years in a house with a man who masturbated in her room and ‘massaged’ her, in exchange for a very low rent. It was all she could afford. My aunty had a man who would loan her money and then release her from debt if she posed naked for him.
There is a great variety of sex work, although most people have a clichéd idea of what it comprises. There’s deep-rooted stigma in our society’s treatment of people who sell sex, something those people have to fight against for their rights. There are also people who are exploited, and whom many, including feminists, would like to help – to save – to protect. We have a contradictory set of attitudes and ignorances that mean that most do-gooding is running on the spot, most governmental intervention hurts the wrong people and helps no one, while stigma is reinforced. Why are we all stupid about sex work and prostituted people? Why do we not understand them as separate things? Is it possible to prevent sex slavery and liberate monetised sexuality?
Sex for Money
We talk so much about consent nowadays. ‘My body, my choice,’ my niece says when she doesn’t want to kiss me. ‘#METOO HAS GONE TOO FAR,’ I roar, but she knows I’m joking.
We are teaching and talking about what consent means, what desire feels like, teaching children how to be sexually respectful adults, but this is all swept away with transactional sex. If we agree that sex work is work, then we’re claiming that consent can be bought.
A couple of years ago everyone was sharing this great ‘Cup of Tea’ analogy.* It was a way of clearly explaining consent, even to very young children. It basically went like this:
If you offer someone a cup of tea and they say, ‘Yes I would bloody love some,’ then you know they want a cup of tea.
If they are passed out, don’t make them tea. If they can’t answer the question ‘Do you want tea?’ don’t make them any. They can’t tell you if they want some or not because they’re passed out.
If you offer tea and they say, ‘I’m not sure, errm, I can’t decide,’ then you can make tea if you like but you can’t force them to drink it.
If the person says, ‘No thank you,’ to tea, don’t make it. Don’t get annoyed, they’re just not thirsty. There is also a situation where they might say, ‘Yes please,’ to tea and then, after you’ve made it, change their mind. You can’t make them drink it.
If someone said yes to tea and is now unconscious after you’ve made it, you can’t make them drink the tea. Ditto if they pass out while drinking the tea, you mustn’t keep pouring it down their throat.
Is the tea poisoned or something?
If someone said yes to tea another time, that doesn’t mean they will always want to drink tea with you, and you can’t start turning up and demanding tea. You can’t force someone to drink tea because they liked it before.
It’s a great analogy and it seems to cover all bases of consent, drunkenness, tiredness, changing your mind, being unsure. But it doesn’t cover sex work. Sometimes someone doesn’t want tea but you can PAY them to drink it. Sometimes someone is happy to drink tea as a job and that is a choice, and sometimes someone is incredibly desperate and has to drink tea because they are scared, or forced, or poor, or addicted, and you can make them drink tea any way you want because you have money. You can throw the tea in their damn face if you pay them enough and they’ve agreed first. Sometimes you can pay them to drink tea and then beat them up afterwards, and you feel pretty safe in your violence because no one ever believes people who drink tea for money, because the way our species reproduces, and the inbuilt worth associated with female chastity and lack of worth associated with sexual promiscuity, means people who drink tea for money are simultaneously the most judged, most mistreated and least supported people in our society. In any society.
I could have written a horror story, all the horror stories. I could have told you about the girl murdered on her sixteenth birthday by a ‘customer’. The woman who will never have children after a ‘customer’ repeatedly stabbed her genitals. The teenage boy pimped by the paedophilic father who had abused him. The brothel with bodies buried in the garden of the women who tried to escape or became pregnant. I occasionally get carried away and I’ll want to tell you something, not because it’s particularly relevant, but because I know about it so you should too.
There are realities of buying sex that make being against it a completely reasonable position. If you read Rachel Moran’s book Paid For – and I highly recommend it – there are several of her experiences that will never leave you. Moran wants the sex trade ended so that no other underage girl should go through what she did, so that no men feel justified in treating women as things. Things to batter, rape and spit on, because the act of selling sex makes them – what, dehumanised? Lower than people? Or because the aggressor can get away with it? Many serial rapists start with sex workers. Many of the world’s most sickening serial killers have preyed upon them, partly because they are vulnerable through the logistics of their work, and also because, as we have seen, some men gain sexual pleasure from sadistic acts.
My personal opinion, which is subjective, biased – to some, discriminatory – is that I wish people didn’t have to sell sex. Not because sex is a beautiful, precious thing or any other bullshit, but because I have an inbuilt hatred for the people who buy it. SORRY. Sorry everyone. I am listening to the people who want to sell sex – I think the law should respect their wishes and they should be decriminalised and supported. I think all human beings should be free to use their body however they want … unless that involves buying sexual access to another person. Then I think they should have a wank and shut up.
I have never paid for sex. I have felt horny, I have felt lonely. I have never felt like I would pay someone to pretend to be aroused by me or to hold me. So I guess my adventures in understanding another human’s point of view end here. I found my line. I really want to empathise but paying for intercourse sounds so much like paid rape that you’ve lost me. And that’s not fair. Rapists are getting off on the fact the person they are violating does not want to be raped. With sex work, that might not be true. As we saw on PunterNet, those deluded fools believe that the women are hypersexual, that they ‘enjoy it’.
What I do empathise with is experiencing unwanted sex, and this is what has created the problem for me. Even when the fee is a mi
llion dollars (less 50K for the lawyer) I know what unwanted penetration feels like on my own body and while I absolutely understand it is survivable, I do not think there are any circumstances that excuse it.
My mum once told me she believed sex workers should be paid for by the NHS. She said that sex was a human right, that human beings need affectionate and sexual contact with each other, and that there are so many people who are desperate for physical contact who do not have it in their lives – sometimes because of illness or disability – and for whom it should be provided.
My instant reaction was that my mother was very wrong. ‘Sex is a human right’ seems dangerous to me – surely it’s in conflict with the human right NOT to have sex if you don’t want it? I thought on the way home about how an NHS service would work. It would have to provide a basic wage and accommodation before any sex work was undertaken, so that the sex workers would still have the ability to say no. You couldn’t have a state-supported sex work service unless the basic wage underwrote their survival before they accepted any client. Say £250 a week. And then jobs costed and paid on top of that?
But then none of them would bother having sex with the people?
That would be proof they were only ever doing it for money and would rather not.
That’s any job, that’s all jobs.
Yes, that’s any job. *straight-mouthed emoji*
I asked Jane, the first sex worker I interviewed, about this NHS sex worker scheme. She countered with another question. First she said that what my mum meant by ‘sex is a human right’ was an acceptance and acknowledgement of male sexuality. She told me about a reality TV discussion about sex work and disability. On the front row were a mother and her son. She had been procuring services for him because he ‘couldn’t get a girlfriend’, and now they had set up a brothel in their house. Everyone in the audience laughed and clapped; it was a funny, sex-positive moment. Jane asked me, ‘We’re very comfortable and familiar with teenage boys’ sexual urges, but if fathers were hiring gigolos to finger their quadriplegic daughters, wouldn’t people be outraged?’
She’s absolutely right. But we’ve encountered the mismatch in attitudes to expressions of male and female sexuality throughout this book. One more shouldn’t surprise us.
Brighton University Students’ Union Freshers’ Fair ran into controversy in 2018. I wonder what you’ll think about this? One of the stalls was run by Sex Workers Outreach Project Sussex (SWOP). This is an organisation that offers confidential support to people selling sex, as well as providing condoms and things. Criticism from the mainstream media afterwards was that the Freshers’ Fair was ‘encouraging students to get into sex work’. Which is a bit of a leap. The organisation isn’t called Sex Work Is Fun Take a Condom (SWIFTAC); they are not on a recruitment drive. And in fact, Brighton University made a statement to clarify that ‘the University does not promote sex work as an option to students’. But here is the tricky nature of stigma.
When I first heard about the SWOP stall, I absolutely understood why they were there: so that students selling sex to support themselves would know of a qualified resource that could help them. And just as importantly, as a symbol of acceptance, that what they’re doing is not shameful or wrong, that it is a profession alongside working in a call centre or a shop.
But I guess why people worry is because if you take the stigma away, if you say, ‘Selling sex is a job just like hairdressing,’ then more people might be encouraged to do it. Is that why we are not averse to whorephobia? Do we think it’s doing a useful job, keeping too many people from selling their bodies to make ends meet? Do we think that being judged and maligned works to put people off? We worry about the permission it gives the people buying sex, that the more legitimate it becomes as a profession, the more men will wander the world like John Gage, thinking all women have a ‘price’.
I can comprehend why people get concerned. They imagine a student is walking around the Freshers’ Fair, ‘Ooh, there’s a mixed-gender volleyball team, ooh, there’s a debating society; avoid the performing arts lot, they’re always harmonising – hang on – SEX WORK. I guess if everyone else is doing it, I should do it too.’ And the idea of encouraging or suggesting that people sell sex is abhorrent. There was a worrying instance a few years back of Jobcentres advertising for sex chat line workers. There would be nothing wrong with this EXCEPT people on benefits have to accept any job that will have them. If they do not show sufficient willingness to work, they have their financial support stopped. So what we have here is a shitty situation where a person might be told they HAVE to work on a sex chat line. That’s wrong, not because there is anything wrong with talking a chap through a wank, but because not everyone wants to do it.
Not everyone wants to work in McDonald’s or push trolleys.
I know. But I believe that while certain jobs may be unenjoyable drudgery, they would not impact harmfully on a person’s mental health and wellbeing in a way that enforced sex work would. And I say that with the qualification of having worked in McDonald’s. I hate the system whereby people are made to agree to jobs they don’t want, but this instance does clarify that even while ‘sex work is work’, it cannot be pressed on people. This is why people object to legitimising selling sexual services.
Which is what anti-sex-work campaigners thought about the SWOP stall at Brighton University. What you have on both sides is people wanting to assist students. Anti-sex-work advocates know the dangers that this work entails and want to protect people from it, whereas the support services know the dangers and want to support those who choose to do it, or who feel they have no other choice. And there are a lot more people selling sex while studying than you might think. A study by the University of Swansea of over six thousand students found that one in twenty people had worked in the sex industry, 5 per cent of male respondents and 3.5 per cent of females. Across the country this would add up to tens of thousands of people, people who might need specialised counselling and advice.
What I personally want to know is for how many people the sex industry is the preferred option, and how many feel it is their only option. But even that is too complex. People who sell sex sometimes think differently later about what they felt were free choices at the time. We’ve all experienced that, reflecting on a younger self with an elder’s insight. Seeing coercion and denial years later.
As I stated in my introduction, I fail to understand the people who pay for sex. I also bemoaned that I never get to endure enjoy locker-room chat, but a podcast† with male comedians talking about brothels gave me an insight into both. I have included the quotes below because of their mundanity. I think they represent the derision inherent in mainstream attitudes. These men are being very flippant about sex workers and I was going to change their names, then reminded myself this isn’t a secret podcast, fuck ’em:
ELLIOT
… so I walked back over to this cash machine and this woman comes up to me and sort of grabs me and was sort of like, ‘Oh, shall we go down here?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, dope,’ and then I quickly realised, like – oh this is a prostitute – this doesn’t just happen, like, I’m not Brad Pitt – women don’t come up to me in the street and just grab me cos they wanna sleep with me, that doesn’t just happen, so then—
JAMALI
Nah, they want some financial exchange.
KAI
She actually said, ‘Sucky sucky, ten dollar.’
ALL
Laugh
JAMALI
That should be the giveaway.
ELLIOT
Nah, nah, she was just outside some beach hotel thing, and so I just thought – I’ll enquire, innit, I’ll enquire and I go, ‘How much?’ and fuck, man, it was reasonable, like it was reasonable. So … so I ended up going off with this lovely lady and you know, it’s always good to help someone feed their kids and yeah, we sort of do the deed, you know, and afterwards she goes to me, ‘Ah, would you give me an extra five euro?’ And I said, ‘What
for?’ And she goes, ‘I wanna go buy a slice of pizza.’ And I looked at her and I was like – ‘If this is a date we’re doing it the wrong way round, like …’
JAMALI
Ah mate, Elliot was getting Third World pussy, man – fucking hell.
KAI
Who takes a prostitute for dinner?
Hey, this is Sara again now. I know that the guys are ‘joking’. They are being flippant on purpose to impress and entertain each other. When Kai is racist and says ‘sucky sucky’, that’s because he thinks that is funny. An old stereotype, to be fair to him; it’s the kind of joke you’d have found in an Austin Powers movie two decades ago. Elliot is describing a situation where he was approached as a customer. A woman offers him sex, he doesn’t say what the price was, but it was very low, and then afterwards she asks him for a small amount of money for something to eat. The fact that they find this funny betrays a huge lack of empathy. Everything they say makes me think they do not consider this woman a person. She is ‘Third World pussy’, someone you wouldn’t take for dinner. It’s low-level hatred towards the sex worker; it’s not hammering her in the head, just outright derision.
