by Sara Pascoe
Later in the conversation Elliot gives a defensive speech about going to brothels:
ELLIOT
… it’s definitely sleazy, it’s definitely – but I think if you’re respectful, I think if you’re nice, if you go, you know, they’re sex workers – you’re cool about it, then it’s fine, you know, it’s – I think in that job if you get a bunch of coked-up lads at five in the morning who’ve come in from Yates who are all fucking demanding … I think like, you know, you’ve gotta be respectful cos it’s a human being at the end of the day. Saying that, I got another prozzie story from last week—
The men who use sex workers do not think THEY are the bad people. They know that some other men are, but they do not identify that their own behaviour might be disgusting or gross to the sex workers. That is why the users of PunterNet are so hung up on women smiling or putting effort in, because otherwise they cannot keep pretending that the women ‘want’ to do this.
Jamali does not admit to buying sex, but he adds this to the conversation:
JAMALI
Well the thing is, there is that – I mean, prostitution gets put into this category where we think – STREETWALKER and ON HEROIN, when that’s not the case. I mean, there’s many levels to it – there’s, you know, there is obviously a sex slave industry in the way people have been shipped over here and kept, but then there’s also people who charge ridiculous amounts of money, do you know what I’m saying? So there is – I think categorising them all as one thing is probably wrong of us.
The class hierarchy that exists in all areas of our society is particularly damaging to the people at the bottom of it. In sex work that means those who work outside, those who are addicted to drugs. The beginning of the film Pretty Woman is quite shocking now. I don’t know how recently you may have seen it? It opens with police around a bin. A woman has been found amongst the rubbish and bin bags. Julia Roberts is sad but her best friend tells her not to worry, ‘She was just a crack whore.’ The film is carefully constructed to reinforce that some hookers deserve $3,000 and, eventually, love, whereas when others are MURDERED, they deserve it because they had a drug dependency. How many sex buyers also use this kind of reasoning to dehumanise?
Pretty Woman was originally called 3,000 and was about a sex worker paid by a man to stay off crack for a week ($3,000 was the amount offered by the Richard Gere character for a week of sex work). She manages it, gets paid, he drives off at the end and she goes to get high. That was the first draft, and there are echoes of it still. But now the film reinforces that Julia Roberts’s hooker is one of the good guys because she is ‘clever’ and flosses her teeth and doesn’t take drugs. In a pivotal scene, Richard Gere’s lawyer attempts to rape the sex worker. She is saved by Richard Gere, who punches him and chucks him out of the apartment. No one discusses calling the police or reporting his crime. It is treated so flippantly, like people who sell sex are less affected by attacks. As if raping someone who sells sex is a theft rather than an assault.
The power–money dynamic is vitally important within sex work, because those with no money have fewer choices. Consider Jane, the sex worker I interviewed earlier. She has a disability that makes work difficult for her. She chooses to undertake sex work rather than sit in agony at her old job in a bank. From two or three sessions a month she can make the same as her old full-time wage. She performs as a dominatrix, which gives her the power to refuse things she doesn’t want to do, and is adamant that she enjoys her job sometimes. It’s the best option for her – she gets to express her sexuality and she isn’t claiming benefits, ‘isn’t a drain on society’ (her words).
When I excitedly tell her about an exit strategy scheme I’ve heard of, where sex workers in northern Europe are given jobs in old people’s homes and they’re ‘really good at it because they are not grossed out by the human body’, Jane replies, ‘I find that very patronising.’ She says, ‘I earn £200 an hour – I don’t want to earn minimum wage in an old people’s home.’
When I started writing this book I assumed that anyone in sex work or prostitution would want to get out of it at any cost. And that is not true. There are people who have options and choices, who opt and choose to sell sex. It is possible to be well-meaning and wrong. This is where feminism has not supported sex workers properly. When some of them have told us, ‘This is my choice – please help me to earn my money safely,’ our own feelings get in the way – ‘I don’t want you to do that’; ‘you will always be a victim to me.’ Kind feelings can create more problems.
Returning to unrealistic media portrayals:
KAI
I like watching that Diary of a Call Girl with Billie Piper. Cos there was something she said in that, like, ‘I like sex and I like money – so why would I not do both?’ – and it’s like, ah, she’s actually just doing something she enjoys. When you see it from that side it’s like, oh that’s alright, but when it’s like fucking trafficking, like a fucking girl in a window that’s fucking misled, that’s when it’s like, ah, nah.
The Secret Diary of a Call Girl is the epitome of sex-work positive, a TV show that very much cartoonifies the work of an escort but has glimmers of the truth. As Belle goes through her ‘rules’ at the beginning, she stresses calling Madam when you arrive and making sure people know where you are, but doesn’t add ‘in case he tries to kill me – I’m eight times more likely to be murdered than you’. There’s an episode where Belle and another sex worker are attacked at an orgy, but they escape. The danger is dealt with comedically. I am not judging – I’m not saying every person who made the show is irresponsible. The writer of the ‘Belle de Jour’ books and blog on which The Secret Diary of a Call Girl series was based is Dr Brooke Magnanti. She gets a lot of flak – she writes brilliantly about working in the sex industry and especially hates it when people say she is responsible for glamorising the work.
But one of my friends tried escorting because of that show. She thought she could do it. It made her feel it would be an easy way to earn money. She called a number in the paper and went to a hotel in Basildon, and there were a number of girls who had dressed up like they were going clubbing. The fee was for the whole day, as many customers as asked you – she was the buffet. She had a drink at a table and then a man asked her to his room. They did it once. It was not what she expected at all – he wasn’t particularly nasty to her, wasn’t spitting in her face or pulling her hair, he was just fucking her from behind and it didn’t feel like she thought it was going to, it was much more upsetting, and she left and didn’t get paid. What happened there? What if I tell you that she tried to stop, asked to stop? Do you now think it was rape? Or a grey area? What do you think of a man who is asked to stop by someone he thinks is a ‘prostitute’ and he doesn’t stop because he is ‘nearly there’?
A survivor of prostitution (her term), Alice Glass, writes, ‘One doesn’t consent, simply, to prostitution, it is rather an impoverished form of bargaining.’ I am not saying that that is all women’s experience, but it is for some. And when we allow the successful, the victorious to dictate how we consider the entire industry, we are doing a great disservice to the majority. Glass defines it like this: ‘Prostitution, if it is anything, is a choice between homelessness and having men we don’t like, do things we hate.’ While ‘sex work is work’ aims to reduce stigma and disrespect for people who sell sex, is anything being done to educate sex buyers as to how some people who sell sex feel about them?
I was listening to a podcast about ethical altruism recently and they were talking about modern slavery. The clothing industry in developing countries pays workers far less than a living wage; there are no days off, no breaks; there are women sitting in nappies because they are not ‘allowed’ to go to the toilet. Just so Gap and H&M can sell flimsy, shitty clothes. This podcast claimed that boycotting the high street stores who use these factories is no good, as ‘for most of these women, the only other option is sex work’.
The idea that treating female worke
rs in this way is in fact RESCUING THEM from much worse indicates that we think sex slavery is less justifiable than the other kinds.
By contrast there is so-called ‘high-class’ escorting. The money at the ‘high end’ is sometimes used to legitimise the treatment of the women at the lower end, as if they’re all footballers playing the same sport and those in lower divisions are simply less talented. Perhaps sex buyers imagine that these women are rising up the ranks, that there is career progression? The truth is that the richest, most privileged sex workers, the people with the most freedom to set their own rules, can also set a high value on their services. But all people selling sex willingly are being punished by legislation supposedly targeting criminals who imprison, kidnap and sell sexual access to adults and children. This has been most recently demonstrated by the FOSTA-SESTA legislation brought in by the Trump administration in the US. Laws aiming to prevent trafficking have endangered the lives of thousands of sex workers by removing their ability to advertise to customers. (I’ve included resources to find out more about this in the bibliography.)
There is a difference between people who choose and people who are forced, a distinction that must be more widely understood and appreciated. Trafficking is not one extreme of sex work, it is as separate and opposed as rape is from sex. The same laws should apply to transactional sex as to non-transactional. Without the appropriate consent, any sex act is rape and the perpetrator should be culpable. The onus of responsibility has to be on the sex buyers. It should be the Johns/Jills/Geoffs worrying about whether a worker is over age and selling sex willingly, because it is them who could go to prison.
Money and power ensure a person has choices. The person paying for sex is always in the superior position. The cash that changes hands should not diminish their accountability, it should increase it. While what we feel about people who sell sex might be unhelpfully built on evolved prejudice or antiquated misogyny, how we advocate for them as a society needs to be freed from that old morality. For that to happen, perhaps it’s useful to be aware of the illogical biology that has inspired it.
* This analogy was created by the lovely Emmeline May, who kindly gave her permission for me to quote it.
† It’s called Sloss and Humphries on the Road. You can find it on iTunes.
Apocalypse Now
How do you conclude something when you do not feel qualified to proffer ANSWERS?
Another non-quiz, of course.
Reading back over what I’ve written, my first thought is that I seem much more open-minded about porn than selling sex. Which is odd, because porn is a form of selling sex. I guess the difference for me is that with porn all of the performers are being paid to do things to each other, rather than a customer-paying-sex-worker scenario. This is an idyllic view of porn production, where all people are equally enfranchised and there is rolling consent and much discussion of boundaries. While some is like that, some is not. There are awful people who film themselves having abusive sex with women, who do exploit and push boundaries. People who prey on first-time performers and enjoy hurting them.
I believe that people who watch porn should be more discerning, that as consumers they have the power to influence the future, but this will not happen while they remain ashamed and secretive about what arouses them. And it won’t happen unless they put their money in. The easiest solution is that people should pay for porn. If the Netflix model of a few quid a month works for blockbuster films and TV shows, then it can definitely work for tiny-budget poolhouse fuck-fests. Would that system be more sophisticated? Could there then be industry standards ensuring that all performers are well looked after and remunerated? There would be an organisation to complain to about any exploitation. There would be legitimacy if someone had a criminal complaint. Driving things underground makes people vulnerable.
Even as I imagine this I remember how difficult fifty-four years’ worth of footage would be to police. Then I wonder – maybe instead we could create a sexual democracy? No one is allowed to have private sex any more, we must all share; all bedrooms have compulsory cameras and we can all wank to each other when we need to. We’ll just search the addresses that have our favoured kink and … what do you mean my political career is over?
I had planned to watch extreme porn. I had a Post-it on my computer saying ‘Watch the worst ten porn videos’, but I chickened out. Perhaps that undermines any argument I make. But I did download feminist and ‘artful’ stuff, I watched the work of Cindy Gallop on ‘Make Love Not Porn’, and I watched about two hundred videos on Pornhub and YouPorn. I got used to watching people have sex pretty quickly. I suddenly understood how watching hardcore sex speeds up the masturbation process – there is no room for the jumbly, interrupted digressions of the mind. They are drowned out by the visceral unsubtlety of the acts. ‘I have to watch the anal-tearing and young-sluts-punished videos,’ I thought, ‘or I am not doing justice to the people who make them.’ But the fact remained … I do not want to see them. I do not want those things seared in my memory. Same as how I am a vegan without watching abattoir videos. I do not know what to do with that anger. I am not the king, I cannot stop people hurting animals and I cannot stop them hurting people either. Especially people who have voluntarily turned up at the slaughterhouse.
I also planned to go and watch women stripping. I wanted to write about the environment of a quotidian club, I wanted to understand the atmosphere – how men behaved – and to compare it to the Dream Boys I saw on my sister’s hen do. Women watching men is a scream-fest, it is giggling and silly and a pretence. No one is turned on, it is a satire. The male performers are very tall and muscly, much larger than the women they are dancing for. And the women dance and shout at the men from a crowd, not in individual booths. The ‘fun’ is in the reversal of a power dynamic. This is play, men gyrating for women, men imitating feminine compliance, while women pretend for an hour that they can objectify as well as men. All of this undermined by the physical reality that if these strippers needed to protect themselves, they wouldn’t need a bouncer,* they could crush a skull with their biceps.
I planned to go and watch strippers as a customer. I would take twenties and my notepad and … I realised I could not do it. I couldn’t pretend I just got off on paying for dances. I realised a safari trip was deeply unfair. Like someone sitting on the front row of one of my gigs not because they enjoyed comedy but to judge my life decisions. I appreciated that I was uncomfortable with paying someone to talk to me in a strip club, that even that transaction was patronising. So I went the other way, and I contacted strippers about observing them at work – and quickly realised that they get writers wanting to shadow them as much as I get journalists asking about ‘being a woman in comedy’. ‘WHY?’ people asked. ‘What do you want to say about us?’ The friends of friends were very sceptical about my motives, which is utterly understandable. And the ones that weren’t said the places the strippers worked would not appreciate my being there in an observational capacity. I asked my stripper friend Carla, and her incredibly reasonable point was that if I was following her around, she would make less money.
So I studied stripping academically. I read some books and articles and found that the industry is a perfect illustration of economics anywhere. When there are many customers and few dancers, then the performers hold the power. They make a lot of money and set their own boundaries for what they are willing to do. When there are slow nights with more dancers than customers, or when a club sees a decline and slump in visitors, then there is pressure on strippers to show more or do more to compete with each other. In these situations the people holding the cash have the power, a power that increases in proportion to how much the strippers want the money.
I did a radio show called My Teenage Diary and was asked to read excerpts from my own diary for the year 2001, when I was nineteen. There was a period where I was booking in auditions for stripping, and then not going. The Stage newspaper had these adverts in the back, for clubs like
the Windmill in central London. All you had to do was dance in a thong and then you’d have hundreds of pounds. Hundreds. Of. Pounds. Like a millionaire! The difficulty I had, as documented in my diary, was that nobody would want to watch me dance because I had no tits. I was caught in a vicious circle – I wanted the money from stripping but I couldn’t get it until I had a boob job, which would cost a lot of money, which I didn’t have. I imagine I would have written a very different book if I had stripped. I would have personal insights into certain male behaviours, I’d have anecdotes. I wonder if I would have been negatively affected by the experience – as many have been. If I’d now consider it demeaning and regrettable. Or if I would be proud, strong. I would know first-hand how to sell erotic capital. How to manipulate men. Perhaps I would be very furious with people like me who want to discuss things they have no first-hand experience of?
I thought about money much more than sex writing this book. It is not as simple as ‘some people have bigger houses than others’. Money means that some people have choices and some people survive. I have been poor and in debt, and I have reflected on how differently my mind worked then. Here is an example – something that I only remembered while researching this year. When I was eighteen years old a British woman called Lucie Blackman went missing in Japan. It was all over the news; she was white and very attractive, which is how the news likes its victims. Lucie had been hostessing at a club. Hostessing like at the Presidents Club, drinking and flirting with patrons. The more your customers drank, the more expensive their rounds – the more you earned. As the story played out, Lucie’s body was found – she had been raped and drugged and her body cut up. This terrible story inspired me to go to Japan and do hostessing as I thought that was the only way to get out of debt.
