The Prostitution Conversation – Part One

There comes a time in most women’s lives when you suddenly don’t have enough money. Whatever level you’re at, high-powered or unemployed, and whatever your outgoings are, you realise that there isn’t enough coming in. The situation may also be frog-in-a-pot gradual, and you’ve just been in denial about it.

And then you run into a girlfriend, and you rant at each other for a while, trying to dampen the panic. And then you might have The Conversation. If your friends are all incredibly sorted financially, or terribly disapproving, or you want to hide your situation, you may have The Conversation alone. (You may also had had this conversation with yourself after an abysmal one night stand, or while some grim liaison zombies itself to a close, and you stagger out of there, thinking, ‘I should be getting paid for this.’ Ah, there’s a clue.)

Yes, it’s the Prostitution Conversation. (Or sex work, if you will.) ‘How can I make money quickly?’ you think, desperate, and the thought goes round and round, and you remember all the bad sex you’ve had in your life, (for free!). You’ll discuss it for ages, and talk about people you know who’ve done it, and, if you’re of a middle-class liberal persuasion, guilt-trip yourselves for the awful privilege of being able to make the choice in the first place.

But still, your bank account is at five to midnight on the doomsday clock. And it’s extremely unfashionable to admit poverty nowadays. Newspapers, for the last decade, have been full of stories about how ‘we’ are all rich now. Even now, post-recession, the best most journos can manage is growing your own veg, recycling socks, or not getting your morning coffee from Starbucks any more. Few of the chatterati would dare admit anything tougher than that. But you would think newspapers paid in gold from the way some hacks bang on about their shopping lives, whether buying clothes, holidays, houses, or private health insurance. In fact, all sorts of people are really struggling right now. And some may well decide that the only solution is to sell sex. What money’s that short, considerations like health, personal safety, and the secret getting out to all and sundry, temporarily fall away.

However, talk usually remains just talk. Many are called, but few are chosen. When I was in my late 20s I knew a 19-year-old girl who’d been doing it for a while. ‘It’s the shopping you get addicted to,’ she said. She went on to marry a client, have kids, and did very well for herself. She was always telling me, ‘You could do it. You might not be in the top rank but you’d be fine.’ Around the same time, a lesbian friend went for an ‘audition-with-benefits’. She didn’t pursue it in the end, but the offer of the guy’s number was always there. Aged 29, I so nearly went through with it. But I didn’t. Others did. See, of course, Belle De Jour.

Lots of women also consider becoming dominatrixes, especially because you don’t have to have sex with the client. In fact many dommes dislike being called prostitutes for that very reason. But this is something that takes a certain skill. The pros make it look easy when it’s not. You might have the ‘You could do it, you’d be great,’ conversation with various girlfriends, but you are unlikely to make the grade, and it’s hard work. But many will consider it, as the bills flood in and the cheques bounce, and the fees go up.

The writer Glenda Richards wrote memorably about her date with a pimp when she was a struggling actor. Other women wrote to her and said that they too had stepped over the line. It may be that women are not as fragile as we are supposed to be. Certainly, in my experience, teenage and college sex, and the politics around it, was at times a demeaning and brutalising experience. I sometimes wonder if payment would have been adequate compensation, but it might have helped me get a deposit on a house in later years. It’s nice to get something back for your trouble, no?

And here is the bit of the conversation where, depending on the parties involved, it all splits, and you go through the red channel or the green channel and the two do not intersect. I am not going to rehearse all the arguments right now, as we’d be here all night. But fundamentally, (and there is certainly some fundamentalism here), in one corner there are the anti-sex work feminists who will say that every single woman who works in the adult industry is there by coercion, and that all women who sell sex are either drug addicts or being forced by pimps. I have been at dinner parties of intelligent educated women who will swear blind that this is true.

And then in the other corner there is the uncomfortable (for some) fact that some women work in the adult industry because they have chosen to do so. It insults them to imply that they are victims and need to be ‘saved’. But the two sides simply will not meet. I don’t really understand why it’s so hard to take in the idea that a) there are women in the adult industry who are being abused, and this needs to be stopped, but b) some women work in the adult industry because they want to, and accept that they are both true at the same time. The media doesn’t help, by either glamorising or demonising in equal measure.

Now I’ve got this far, I’ve realised I’ve got a huge amount to say about all this, and it just won’t go in one post. Plus I’d like to namecheck the bloggers, activists, and artists who are working to raise awareness of the issues here.

I am not saying anyone should sell sex. But the thought goes through many women’s minds, whether anyone likes it or not. Stepping over the line and actually doing it, of course, (more’s the point, more than once), is another thing.