Whoring for fun and profit

A Learned Disquisition on the Subject of the Revolting Nature of Commerce and Its Repulsive Handmaiden, Feminism

The permissive age has been an object lesson to many people. How does the particular emphasis of a culture develop? What were the factors fuelling its general direction? What elements produced ours?

When we look at our history and read favourite authors from the fairly recent past, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen, we are fascinated by the differences between them and us. How did they evolve a culture so unlike our own, coming from an earlier period, the 18th century, which had distinct similarities to our own. When one thinks of Addison's purpose in starting The Spectator in 1713, "to recover the Age from the desperate state of vice and folly into which the age has fallen," he could have been speaking about us; but not the Victorians, or the Edwardians of the first decade of this century.

How did we evolve from them, to be so different today? Did people really speak then in such measured and articulate tones to one another? Were the working classes really so respectable and well mannered; frowning on uncouth behaviour and absolutely forbidding strong language in the presence of women?

The answer is, yes they did and they were. I have the most tenuous grasp of the late Victorian period because my husband, having lost his parents during the war, was brought up by his elderly, great aunt. She was the second oldest of thirteen children and a Londoner, born and bred in the last quarter of Victoria's reign. She was unmarried, having lost her young man in the first world war, together with a couple of brothers, and she had worked all her life as a seamstress. She was, by tradition and education, working class and proud of the fact.

When she died, not long after I married the man she had done such a valiant job in rearing, she left him all her possessions and books. We thus inherited a piano and piles of Scarlatti, Chopin and Bach, with her neatly written notes about interpretation written in the margins. Likewise her copies of Tennyson, Longfellow and Browning. Everything was annotated in simple, literate English expressing her comments upon the sentiments expressed in the text. They were like the books of an unusually assiduous University student today and yet she had left the Penny School at 12 years old. Incidentally, these schools, which predated State education, were attended by 100 per cent of children in London, according to recent comment upon the subject. They were run by Trusts and charities mostly, and those who could not pay the penny a day received their education free.

Aunt Grace also left a most interesting collection of local newspapers recording significant historical events such as Queen Victoria's Jubilee; the relief of the siege of Maefeking during the Boer War in 1900, and the popular loathing of the Suffragettes! These were big-circulation, tabloid newspapers and yet the style and, even more, the content was that of, say, the Times and the Daily Telegraph today. Measured and judicious criticism; long and beautifully written descriptions of accidents, incidents and the personalities in the news; it was intelligent prose addressed to intelligent people.

The strange thing is that formal education simply didn't come into it. It was the culture itself that educated people. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was published in a London magazine and, when it came to the last chapter, it was reported that the streets were as deserted as they are today when a major sporting event is on TV. It is difficult to believe now, isn't it? Leo Tolstoy as the "Dallas" and the "Dynasty" of the day; Charles Dickens as the shared reading in millions of ordinary homes.

Our wonderful brass-band tradition started then with the musicians being the real workers in the coal mines and factories whose names the famous bands still have, even though the people playing in them now are very unlikely to be miners or factory workers. Different Trades Unions regularly challenged one another to proper debates on topics of the day and, as D.H. Lawrence recorded, the working men's magazine, John O'Groats Weekly, regularly had a competition involving the best translation of a Goethe or Schiller poem!

Ah, well! Before we get too melancholy about the best-laid plans of Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells to educate us all, one should consider the fact that neither progress nor decadence go in a straight and predictable line. Things can change quite quickly from one period to the next. Jane Austen started off her writing with a little tale about a young girl who has an illegitimate child. It was never published but the very fact that it is so inimical to her later subject matter indicates that the world was changing for her too, into a more restrained mode, leading to the reforming zeal and practical morality which was such a feature of the l9th century.

There are always gains as well as losses however, and the purpose of this long introduction is to give a context in which one can place the calamitous collapse of the status of women in the modern world. It is difficult to know the exact progression which first gave rise to it but certainly its later manifestations were contrived by a fatal combination-the needs of commerce and the philosophy of feminism.

Both of these forces have, of course, been oxygenated and propagated latterly by television, without which they probably would have lost most of the arguments which have dominated our post-war thinking. The crucial advantage of television is that it can, by presenting a more or less consistent point of view, provide an alternative reality to that of the real world which, for a while, beguiles the viewer.

Thus, in the world portrayed by television, women at work are free agents. Beautifully dressed, affluent, sexually liberated, and "in command," they represent at best a mere handful of women in the workplace-including television itself-and, at worst, are figments of the imagination of politically-- correct fiction writers.

By contrast, the real world contains women who are obliged, by the high cost of housing, to work in uninteresting and repetitive jobs where they must follow the rules from clocking-on to going home. Repeated surveys have shown that the overwhelming majority of them do not have a career, they have "a job" which most of them dislike and which they do only from economic necessity.

Why then is this fact of life not part of our cultural consciousness? Why are most women ashamed to say that they are "only a housewife," when most of them say that they would prefer to be at home with their families when their children are young? What prevents them being more assertive of the truth of their own experience?

The answer is the climate of opinion created largely, but not only, by television. It is easily done and the technique is by means of the "parallel universe" syndrome. When every "Soap" shows people for whom religion is a dead duck, it is easy to think that you, watching at home with your family, are isolated extremists if you all go to church. If every homosexual you ever see on the box is a handsome, generous paragon, your own feelings and judgement are called into question. Even when the programme makers do not actually control the script entirely, they still have ample scope for propaganda by means of "selective exposure." A studio discussion on a topic like "racism" or capital punishment can have weak speakers for the media-- abhorred opinion and show business personalities putting the "correct" view.

The audience is equally significant. In my experience they are all selected by means of the places where the programme-maker advertises for them-- gay clubs and bars for homosexual debates; Guardian readers for women's matters; University "Anti-Nazi-League" societies for anything to do with crime and punishment.

The purpose of this vetting of the audience is pure propaganda. They can be relied on to bay and howl in a parody of normal political expression. They give an impression that is both subconsciously threatening to anyone who doesn't agree with them, and powerfully demonstrative of moral certainty. Anyone not sharing their opinion is thereby made to feel in the wrong and, even more importantly, in a minority.

The portrayal of women is even more propagandist. Women with small children are never, just never, able to control them. Nor do they ever educate them except in the most mundane sense, with pointless nagging and stereotypical expressions of a limited, put-upon housewife. It is made quite clear to them that their job is to wait on and placate their children, just as if they were the most menial of servants. A traditional handmaiden is at least expected to deploy some of her womanly qualities, her charm, latent sex-- appeal, wit, etc. Today's mothers are supposed to be women without will or personality. They are mistresses of nothing. No job description of their duties would be tolerated in the world of work, for even five minutes. Drudgery combined with the tyranny of their children is the fashionable view of the mother's role. It goes beyond the definite rules and disciplines of being a servant and into the realm of slavery.

This aspect is, of course, emphasised by radical feminists, who like to insist that the female partner in a marriage receives no proper income from her role and is oppressed by the man to whom she is married. They see her as a slave, and fashionable child-care practices carelessly underwrite this interpretation by the maternal powerlessness they advocate.

The irony-though not surprise-is that the women who advocate this demeaning role for women never do it themselves. By definition, almost any woman with the time and opportunity to be up there instructing others how to manage children, is not in her own home gaining hand-on experience of the job. This too is typical of those women who, as a class, have the least experience of actual child-rearing. They are professionals who, at the end of the day, go home and ask the nanny how their own child (if they have one!) has fared that day.

In fact, this unreality and the warped advice which is so widely disseminated by people who are media-made authority figures, is going ever downstream. Nowhere, so far, has it encountered a barrier, or cultural resistance, to its ever-lower portrayal of women.

The latest manifestation of this dismal phenomenon is the media celebration of women as prostitutes. The idea of the Tart with a Heart is, naturally, long dead since kindness is seen as a sign of weakness. But the tart with an education is an absolute turn-on for journalists and programme-makers at present. Whether this indicates a dissatisfaction with the women who inhabit their own world, it is impossible to say, but there has been a plethora of programmes and features in the press about female University students who turn to prostitution to subsidise their studies. You see, for the first time since University education became widespread, middle-class parents with a good income are not eligible for grants for their children. Quel catastrophe!

This must, no doubt, strike Americans as risible since they would see no reason why those who earn a lot, should have their children's education paid for by taxes levied on those who earn far less. As a matter of fact, most of Europe thinks the same and none of our European partners have ever had grants which not only paid the fees of University students, but also provided a full living-away-from-home allowance to the student. Until last year, in fact, other European students who came to study in England were able to claim this grant too if they could satisfy loose residence requirements, and get accepted by a college even though, in their own country, no such money was available to them. One positive advantage of the introduction of this new policy is that more than a thousand of what are called "Mickey Mouse" courses are to be axed because the people for whom they were designed, are not prepared to pay for them.

With that all gone now, media people, in common with the rest of the affluent middle-class, are feeling the effect of educating their children beyond the age of eighteen for the first time. In consequence of this, they are casting around in their minds for another group on whom to pin their protest. After all, it seems kind of impertinent to argue for hardship on their own behalf, when it plainly does not deserve that description, so they agonise instead over how ordinary people are going to manage. In fact, in a society awash with jobs for those willing to do them, students have taken to working for their keep extremely well. They have always worked in the holidays anyway and it is no big deal to have to work weekends or some evenings so as to offset the amount they need to borrow.

However, from the media person's point of view, discussing this sensible and character-forming solution puts ordinary people in a good light and, what is more, defeats the object of shaming the government into reversing its policy. The English middle-classes are extraordinarily bossy, as our empire indicates, and there is nothing they like more than a daily fix of telling people what they should be doing. That they should already, and unaided, know what to do, is pretty well insupportable, as well as being unlikely to help in their personal crusade for more taxpayers' money.

Bereft of the experience of washing-up in a restaurant, or cleaning offices, they fasten upon the supposed big money of prostitution instead. Prostitution also appeals to their egalitarian fantasies since any damn fool can do it, and their ignorance of its downside is total. As like as not, some of them have also heard that one strand of feminism is objecting to the so-called "victim culture," which places too much emphasis on women as life's victims. So, by showing prostitutes as "in control," they can feel that they are striking a blow for that as well. Two birds with one stone!

So they fill the studio with a gaggle of very young, unusually pretty prostitutes, all done up to the nines, and as "feisty" as can be. There is usually some story-line attached to them, such as that they all have University degrees, for example; or that their fathers are doctors or rich lawyers. Judging by their accents and general demeanor, this is seldom true and in the last programme I did on the subject, the prostitute who was shown taking part in the rather prestigious "Mastermind" competition on the subject of art history, had not done so; the clip was pure fabrication.

Another poor creature I was with on a programme claimed to be an ex-- nun but, in conversation with her afterwards, it appeared that she had once wanted to be a nun, which, of course she had told the researcher. She had also been severely beaten-up twice but this fact was not mentioned; only the "Harrods" Gold Card which, she said, made it all worth while. Her "Madam" accompanied her to the studio but did not appear, which was just as well since she was a fearsome battle-axe who looked as though she could suck the corners off a house-brick, and wore a lot of gold. It was not at all obvious that her "girl" shopped at Harrods.

Time and again I have been assured that the content of programmes on prostitution would address the subject seriously, or at least truthfully. Before the last one, they told me the programme would include a criminologist who had studied prostitution, a social worker whose job was to rescue the wrecked and beached girls once their useful life was at an end-usually because of addiction, ill-health or injury. A mother whose daughter had been murdered after a foray into prostitution (which, she told me afterwards, had been embarked upon after seeing a programme about its easy money) and an "older" prostitute who looked fifty and was actually thirty-two. Altogether, it seemed a reasonable line-up for a forty-five minute discussion.

In the event, the criminologist got less than a minute to say that there was no job on earth that had such a high rate of death and injury, before he was howled down by the cat-calling girls. The mother was allowed to gasp out how awful the life was and that the audience had no idea, before she was cut off to allow some phony sympathy to be expressed by one of the girls who said that she was just unlucky. And the social worker was not asked to give an account of her twenty years experience at all. The poor little "older" prostitute was humiliated by being peremptorily asked if she enjoyed the work and when she replied with incomprehension, was left behind as the bandwagon rolled on.

Why does the media do it? Of course they are lied to by the prostitutes, who spin them a yarn which they know will make a sensational programme and will do their professional image good. The researchers too know that they are being lied to, but pretend otherwise-also to make a good, sensational programme. They are parasitic upon one another and, as such, have a lot in common.

And yet, they believe the stories about 500 pounds per client and repeat, with shining eyes, what the girls tell them about earning 2,000 pounds a night, "no problem." "Do they look to you like women who earn 10,000 pounds a week?" I asked my researcher; who looked at me blankly and said, "Why not?" "Because a punter could get another prostitute for far less money on the next corner; why would he want to pay so much?" Silence.

What puzzles me is why any group of comfortable, reasonably well-- educated people should want to believe that prostitution is a pleasant, or at least a neutral, job. Even if they have never thought about the likely composition of most of the clients, and the circumstances surrounding most of their encounters, these media people are the very ones who are so obsessive about what goes into their own bodies that they spend hours examining tins of food, lest there are any unhealthy additives in them. Yet they are prepared to support a way of life that invades the body far more comprehensively and is, in some ways, worse than slavery. At least slave owers had a financial interest in the continued health of their slaves, whilst men who use prostitutes have no such consideration and will use them regardless of whether or not they are rotten with disease themselves.

Here again, the word "slave" arises, almost unbidden, in considering the way our culture regards women. It is as if there is some subconscious process of thought going on, where we acknowledge that women are physically the weaker sex and, because of that, are highly exploitable. It is "Open Season" on using them in whatever way they can be persuaded to allow themselves to be used; the only trick is to turn it round so that it seems they are being exalted rather than set-up.

Who seriously thinks that women combat soldiers will ever be used? It would be like asking men to run into the ferocity of battle carrying a toddler. So why do we set up this charade which, at best, can only result in their eventual humiliation. Why do we endlessly rehearse how well women are doing in comparison with men, when all that has happened is that women have been induced to take over an ever-larger share of life's most boring jobs. If we looked at many primitive societies around the world, we should see a mirror image of what we think we are aiming for, but at a lower level. Women do all the work, with their babies strapped to their backs, whilst men do "other things"!

However, in our case, the need is not women to do work instead of men, it is that we are actually short of "manpower" so women are being primed, dosed and directed towards the work force. The shortfall in the birth-rate in Europe is now sufficiently worrying for even governments to take notice-- Who is going to pay for pensions in the future? Meanwhile, the short-term necessity of women joining the work force is exacerbating the long-term problem of insufficient children being born to replace their parents.

In return for being allowed the privilege of taking on the tedium of a job, women have been persuaded to hand over their bodies and their long-term health to the care of an almost uniquely greedy and unprincipled drugs industry. The makers of the various contraceptive and abortifacient pills which render women fit for the workplace, will probably only admit on judgement day that their products are not the panacea they are sold as. Testing them on the Third World poor and deploying them amongst the young and the ignorant, the barons of chemical sterility have a history of obfuscation and denial of their ill effects that make the cigarette manufacturers appear paragons of virtue in comparison.

Ranged against them should be the relentless investigators of public health issues in the media. Instead, they are, for the most part, complicitly silent, and the reason for this is yet another symbiotic relationship. Our culture's intelligentsia support the aims and arguments of feminism, and that means that women must be "freed" from their own biology. They simply cannot face the implications of uncovering the possibly malign effects of long-term use of artificial steroid hormones. It has given them everything they wanted; the ability of women to function as men, through suppressing their biology as women, and for men to disclaim any responsibility for their health and well-being.

It would be funny if it were not so serious. The BBC had a cautious discussion of the growing realisation that women in their thirties and forties are beginning to go down like flies with breast cancer. Very many studies world-wide have predicted this as a result of giving powerful steroid drugs to women on a daily basis; either too young or for too long. This possibility has always been flatly denied by the industry and its cohorts, and I have never seen a programme that looked at the evidence dispassionately. On this occasion, it was simply not mentioned as a factor. Instead, the dutiful medical expert attributed the fact that we have a rate of breast cancer that is vastly greater than that of the Japanese, as being possibly caused by their eating fish oil!

Funny that not eating raw fish never gave us so much cancer before, isn't it? The interviewer didn't say that. What he didn't say either-probably because he didn't know-was that the Pill is illegal in Japan.

Anyhow, it gives one an idea of how seriously we take the well-being of women, that fear of having one's favourite philosophy invalidated is enough to silence all rigorous enquiry. Quite a lot hangs on it of course, and not the least thing-though certainly the most buried and subconscious-is that, if women are to be lured back into accepting their responsibility for the family and the community, they must first find out the hard way that there is no alternative.

As it is, when the chips are down, it is women we blame for the dysfunctional family and neglected children; and that is largely true. Unless women are at their post as guardians of the family and the community, nothing works. Feminists may know little about families since so many of them are spinsters, but most people know who to blame when the family fails, because they know who to praise when it flourishes. We know these things and yet we act as if we did not.

We have taken rather the same line with homosexuals; of toleration rather than confrontation. Briefly, the raison d'etre is "Give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves" or, put more kindly, "let them do what they want, and, if they are wrong, let them take the consequences." It's hard and it's weak and it's unprincipled, but it's where we are at the moment. It saves bruising argument which, in the psychological state engendered by feeling that we have climbed to the end of a turbulent century we do not feel equal to.

Come the new century, probably the wellsprings of energy and boldness will be replenished. We are old now, and we feel like it. In two years time we shall be young again and far more prepared to face the various realities that can no longer be evaded. It is an old cliche to say that once we have hit the bottom, there is nowhere else to go but up, but it is probably true.

Certainly once a lethargic and morally confused society has allowed its media to commend the degradation of prostitution to its young women, as a profitable alternative to working, there is nowhere lower they can go. If that is where sexual liberation has taken them, then so much the worse for them. Sooner or later, the rampant promotion of promiscuous sexual activity, and all its attendant ills, is going to be seen as an enormity of unprecedented proportions.

Commerce is the driving force behind this aberration in our cultural behaviour at present, with feminism as its "useful idiot," giving a gloss of approval to that which, above all, hurts women. I am afraid that there is more chance that a combination of reality and our own survival instinct will come to our aid, than there is of feminism coming to its senses. They will be remembered, if at all, for this fact. That, and an awful lot of dead, born and unborn, will be their monument.

Lynette Burrows is an English journalist and broadcaster (her book Good Children was described by the London Financial Times as "so old-fashioned it is positively radical").

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