Sex Power Money

by Sara Pascoe

  I looked into it. You only had to do sex stuff as extras. You got to drink at work. I could earn enough in a few months to afford my rent in London. My stimulus was another woman’s murder. The only detail from the story that drew my attention was that she was earning £500 a week. It was good for me to remember how that felt. The different potatoes on the menu depending on your budget.

  I dedicated this book to another murder victim, Arminda Ventura, because her life encapsulates everything we’ve been thinking about. She met John Perry in her home country, the Philippines, in 1984, when she was twenty years old. He was much older, divorced and drinking in a bar alone. She smiled at him nicely, they got chatting. They drank together every night. She told him she was sad he was leaving. He proposed. They moved into his house in Wales. After several years the relationship became very unstable and probably abusive. Perry became very jealous of younger men taking an interest in his wife. He claimed she was sleeping with men while he was out at work, that she was staying out all night with other men. Arminda filed for divorce and the court granted her a settlement of £15,000 plus £75 a week in subsistence. The week the first payment was due, in February 1991, Arminda disappeared.

  When the police visited John Perry’s home to look for her, he told them that Arminda was a prostitute. That she had been unable to ‘give it up’ and had left. A search of the house found what was left of Arminda’s body. Perry had killed and dismembered her, feeding some of her body to his cat, to avoid paying her divorce settlement. In one report, he was quoted as saying that two years into their marriage he had realised that Arminda may not have loved him but had married him to escape the poverty of the Philippines and for a better life.

  One of the essential problems with the notion of erotic capital arises when that is all a person has. When that is their only currency. The age gap between John Perry and Arminda Ventura is one inequality, not uncommon, and as we have explored through the fertility-for-resources exchange, an evolutionarily sensible one. Young women will need partners who can provide if the world does not offer them opportunities to provide for themselves. The inequality of wealth is a more difficult one to overcome. It may be difficult for those of us raised in the UK to imagine a situation where you would marry a man you didn’t care about as a way of improving your life. But as we explored briefly with Pride and Prejudice earlier, our great-great-grandmothers may well have understood this as being their only option.

  We haven’t explored the sex work known as being a ‘mail order bride’ but it’s a sort of legally binding transactional sex, with added housework. What’s that – sounds like sexual slavery? Yes, I agree, mate. A woman so low on prospects in her home country, so desperate to leave that she will risk the unknown quantity of marrying a man she doesn’t know. A man who, because he has ‘bought’ her, will expect certain behaviours. And obedience. Perry himself said he was fed up of western women’s assertiveness and independence, as if those things were personality flaws and not freedom.

  When we think about the problems of men buying sexual access to women, it’s vital to remember that they are choosing to pay so that the women can’t say no. John Perry was a man who considered equality ‘too free’. His attitude to his wife is explained by the fact he thought he owned her. We have the jealousy we’ve explored, fear of cuckolding, his abusive behaviour as a kind of mate guarding – whether her infidelities were real or imagined – when Arminda gained the resources to leave him via the divorce settlement, Perry would rather she were dead than at liberty.

  In court his defence was provocation by infidelity. I found this shocking. Up until ten years ago, British courts might excuse murder if a man had been driven to it by his wife’s sexual freedom. Although he was found guilty, two of the jurors agreed that Arminda’s behaviour had been provocation. To be killed, cut up and fed to a cat. She drove him to it.

  The reason so many people struggle with sex work and selling sexual services, and with using erotic capital, is that they may be reinforcing ancient behaviours that are much older than sexism. Domineering, gorilla-like oppression of partners was a mating strategy for some male Homo sapiens and we must fight, with all the nurture we have, to socialise men out of it. But this cannot be at the cost of the autonomy of those who choose to sell sex. A conversation about what constitutes choice and what constitutes financial coercion might continue for a long time, and for this we must listen to sex workers themselves. This book is about me and my thoughts and interests; I am not attempting to speak on behalf of others. I’ve included a list of resources and books at the end that might interest you.

  I started my journey into this book seeking answers in biology, and there are many things about which I still want concrete evidence. I want to know what exactly is happening in the brain and bloodstream of a person committing violence. I want to know if/how porn has affected the brains of children now growing up with it. The things I have learned – about bonding, arousal, jealousy and desire – make me hopeful that there are many more glimpses into the human animal to come. The experiments on sperm motility tell us about who we might have been millions of years ago, but we are processing that meaning through who we are now. A contradictory creature. One that can reflect on its mating behaviour, one that recognises another’s ‘rights’.

  Being a human being means caring deeply for the people closest to you and then failing to care enough about the people further away. We were built by our successful tribes to be social and work together. Togetherness within the tribe has involved shutting others out. The oxytocin that facilitates bonding simultaneously stimulates aggressive behaviours (in voles). To love is to protect, to love is to compete to provide. Our vested interest in personal and familial success means making losers of others. A raised social position involves domination.

  That results in massive inequality between humans, and I don’t know how we overcome that. Do we attempt to re-teach ourselves several times a day that sometimes our instincts – who we like, who we want to employ, who we are attracted to, who we are angrily tweeting – are those of an animal? We are underpinned by beastly behaviours and a created narrative of consciousness.

  I began wanting to write a book about sex, but what I kept learning was that everything is connected to money. Alongside the built-in distrust and contempt, the ‘otherness’ towards people who sell sex and sexual behaviours, the rich can’t help but believe they deserve it. By rich I don’t mean castles and diamonds, I mean any of us with food and roofs and choices. We have to believe that the people who don’t have those things have done something wrong, that it is their fault.

  I began from a point of wanting to understand sexual psychopaths, the modern-day Marquis de Sades who are unaffected by compassion. De Sade believed that other people’s pain didn’t matter because he couldn’t feel it. He thought that encroaching on others was freedom. He imprisoned, raped and assaulted girls, then paid their families off to excuse himself. He was a person of supreme privilege, which permitted his transgressions. What I have realised through writing this book is that instincts and basic drives matter a lot less than what society tells us we can get away with. There are millions of sadists alive today who pair up neatly with masochists to enjoy infliction and subjection alike. The Marquis’s legacy is in fact continued by figures like Donald Trump who do not disguise their cruelty and lack of empathy but rather utilise it to seem more powerful. There is an ape in us, which means that many Americans cannot help but respect him and want to be led by him.

  The injustice of the deep-rooted expectations we have of men is that we cannot deal with male victims. They suffer from a stigma and societal blindness just as sex workers do. When I was eighteen, on a night bus home with a group of friends, one of the boys was mugged without any of us seeing. A man on the seat behind him poked a knife in his back and whispered an order to give him his wallet. My friend handed it over, the thief rang the bell and got off the bus. Shane told us, ‘I’ve been mugged.’ And everyone was disbelieving: ‘How?
’ ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ The other boys were telling him, ‘You should have shouted and punched him.’ ‘Why didn’t you stop him getting off the bus?’ The impossibility of the situation was that Shane had not reacted how he thought he would’ve in that situation. Fear takes over the body as an instinctual survival response. Your voice and body will be frozen if your brain has assessed a situation as so dangerous that staying still and quiet will be the most likely way to survive. Many rape victims know this and yet it continues to be misunderstood by juries and the law. My friend Shane suffered terribly after the mugging. Without bruises and a beating nobody understood why he gave up his wallet; he did not understand himself. The emasculation of the crime is what caused his suffering. For all my stuff about being scared of men, all my own demons and bias, I feel our culture doesn’t know how to be kind to men, and many of them don’t know how to be kind to themselves.

  Over 80 per cent of homeless people in the UK are men. The fact that there is anyone living on our streets is unjustifiable. The size of the safety net and the amount of human support needed to provide shelter to the dispossessed is currently considered impossible. We have all drunk the well water. It’s too hard to support people with mental health difficulties, we claim. It’s not too hard, it requires time, resources, investment; the help should be there for those who need it. It’s impossible to help addicts, we say. That is not true. But we have built our society around money, because it represents everything that nature could once give us. It defends us from our ancestral past, the short brutal life of a human who gathered. The power that we evolved to respect and desire has transformed into a literal currency system and now we subconsciously assess ‘worth’, and the tribe sprawls out so widely we find it difficult to care about those at the edges.

  In my fear of men, I have found it hard to be gentle and forgiving of them. I know that you are not a separate species. I know that men are being fed contradictory messages by culture. Toughness but no roughness. A list of expectations with no room for failure. You know the stats on male suicide – something is killing you, and it’s you. It’s time we discussed and supported men without anger, being aware of the influence of biology while knowing it is no instruction manual. We are none of us defined or determined by our sex

  The reason there are fewer homeless women is arguably because they are even more vulnerable than men. Both genders experience sexual assault, physical attacks and verbal abuse, and for obvious reasons women are in even more danger. The reason there are fewer women sleeping rough isn’t because they have more money, it is often because they engage in survival sex, sex for rent. When you consider this, how do you perceive it? Do you feel sorry for men that they have fewer people willing to buy the services of their body? Do you worry about a reality where someone will see a desperate or vulnerable person as a sexual opportunity?

  I watched Apocalypse Now with my ex-boyfriend John and I hated it so much I rowed with him about it and blamed him. In the ‘Redux’ version there is a scene with Playboy Bunnies. They’re flown into an army compound to entertain the soldiers going crazy in Vietnam, and when they come to leave, they find they have run out of helicopter fuel. There is a war going on, a battle ensues around them and the women need to escape. A bargain is made that the soldiers will give them petrol in exchange for sex.

  The scene is obviously constructed to portray depravity, but it also pretends that the Playboy Bunnies ‘choose’ the sex. Over what? Death? Living in the Vietnam jungle? Having their bodies ravaged by the soldiers by force rather than coercion? I’m still too angry with the film. It makes selling sex for petrol look easy for the Bunnies, because they’re already trading on erotic capital. And it makes that situation seem like a fair exchange. I think the monied and powerful who buy sexual services feel that they are entitled, and that it is fair, simply because sex is something they want, whether they are travelling to pay to rape children in other countries under the misnomer of ‘sex tourism’, or Oxfam workers paying victims of a natural disaster for sex in Haiti, or John Perry marrying Arminda Ventura. If sexual transactions are taking place in a context of too great an inequality, then there is no sex work, there is only exploitation. How do we make the Geoffs and the Marquis de Sades care?

  So, who is doing this, who should we punish?

  I don’t know

  I don’t know, do you?

  The exploiters, the traffickers, slave owners, pimps, rapists and even murderers … They were born babies. Fed milk, wrapped in soft blankets. Their brains grew quickly and in response to their environment. People asked, ‘What is it?’ and they weren’t asking about the star sign or whether it was the son of God again. We think that the word ‘boy’ or the word ‘girl’ says something about who a person is, who they will be. But that difference is much less dictated by the body they’re born in than created by what we expect of them, and how we treat each other.

  My money shot is love, all over your face, whoever you are.

  X

  * There was a bouncer, though, and he told me off for trying to take pictures of the sad buffet.

  Cleaning the Money Shot Away with a Flannel

  Wipe it off your eyes …

  This book is in no way exhaustive, something I wanted to say right at the beginning, except it’s a terrible way to start a book: ‘Have a read of this, guys, it’s very incomplete.’ For some further reading I would recommend:

  Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights by Juno Mac and Molly Smith: this book is so clear on labour laws and human rights as well as detailing the overlap between sex work and migration and/or drug use, showing the ramifications of criminalising behaviours and how they increase individuals’ vulnerability. If you want to be informed about the laws around selling sex and if you want to listen to sex workers, please read it.

  A Mind of Its Own by David M. Friedman: a brilliant cultural history of the penis.

  Manhood: The Bare Reality by Laura Dodsworth: photographs and short biographies of people and their genitals.

  Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? by Jesse Bering is brilliant, funny, full of facts and science and, of course, dicks and sperm. I’d really recommend his book Perv too.

  Scars Across Humanity by Elaine Storkey: this book covers a huge range of abuse against women, including child marriage, honour killings, domestic violence and prostitution. The evolutionary, animal aspect of humanity is always considered alongside economic pressures.

  King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes: I folded down every corner of this book because each page had something crucial I wanted to remember and repeat to people. Despentes discusses rape, selling sex, porn, ugliness and anarchy, and it’s like reading lightning. Her experiences and point of view are vital.

  A Natural History of Rape by Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer: this looks at assault and coercion from an evolutionary perspective, with an awareness of how deeply problematic that is.

  The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein: this biography is of an incredible woman, Sandra Pankhurst, and is illuminating in terms of her transition and sex work. Pankhurst was raped and then disbelieved both because she was a sex worker and because the defence argued that as a trans woman, she would have been able to fight off her attacker.

  Paid For: My Journey through Prostitution by Rachel Moran: I’ve mentioned how incredible this book is already. It’s an important piece of feminist literature and an excruciating insight into selling sex.

  Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn: this book explores the nightmare that is sex trafficking, but is also balanced in portraying what a small part of the sex industry this crime is. What I found particularly interesting was not only the role of westerners exploiting people from impoverished countries, but also how ineffective attempts to ‘save’ victims can be, e.g. buying girls from brothels and taking them home, when there is much stigma about what has happened to them and they have no way of supporting themselves.

  Pimp State: Sex, Money
and the Future of Equality by Kat Banyard: this book is so well written and persuasive and wholly anti-sex work. See also Julie Bindel’s The Pimping of Prostitution: Bindel has seen first-hand the ravages of what sex work does to people, the violence of it, the suffering, even within more permissive societies and decriminalised legal frameworks.

  Sex, Lies and Statistics by Dr Brooke Magnanti: Dr Magnanti used to sell sex, writing a blog under the pseudonym Belle de Jour, which became the TV series Secret Diary of a Call Girl, so is probably the best-known pro-sex-work campaigner. This book is her myth-buster and is an important read alongside anti-sex-work polemics like those by Bindel and Banyard, for balance. See also Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant: a brilliant book that will make you question your assumptions.

  White Chrysanthemum by Mary Lynn Bracht: this is FICTIONAL but based on the true stories of girls and women of Korea kidnapped during war and raped in Japanese brothels. With this, as with so much, I can’t understand the men, the faceless men, who queued up to do this to women who were imprisoned.

  On the Front Line with the Women Who Fight Back by Stacey Dooley: through her documentaries Dooley has met and interviewed a variety of people selling sex to survive, from mothers in war zones trying to feed their kids to trans women in tourist hotspots. She also explores child trafficking and sexualisation.

  Slavery Inc by Lydia Cacho: details international sex trafficking and is an important read.

  Coming Out Like a Porn Star, edited by Jiz Lee: a collection of essays that are anarchic and confrontational and the missing voice in debates about porn. See also The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, edited by Tristan Taormino and Mireille Miller-Young.

  Pornography Feminism by Rich Moreland: an extensive analysis of recent sex-positivity and moments within the movement. See also After Pornified by Anne G. Sabo.