Why prostitution is coming out of the shadows

Sex is for sale all around, and the oldest profession no longer seems ashamed of itself. This is not the result of greater sexual candour, says DAVE HILL, but a symptom of modern man's sexual selfishness

WHAT do you think about prostitution?

You may not have a ready reply, and not only because most of us think twice before holding forth on controversial issues. It may also be because it can be so difficult to work out what to think about the subject in the first place. In our culture prostitution is depicted in so many different ways, that firm conclusions can be tricky to arrive at. Scores of films and works of literature have portrayed it, and countless television documentaries have explored it, but no sustainable consensus seems in sight. At one end of the spectrum we find the romantic image of prostitution, a cheeky, twilight world full of lusty, busty maidens who will cheerfully drop everything to put a bit of colour into their needy clients' cheeks: this is the prostitution impressed most vividly on the English imagination by Cynthia Payne, "Madame Cyn", whose famous suburban brothel was widely perceived as providing a spot of harmless naughtiness behind the net curtains. Perhaps Madame Cyn should take some of the blame for the apparent erosion of the stigma attached to men using prostitutes. Police still file the matter under Vice, but punters and others may be less inclined to look at it that way. In an age of increasing sexual candour and widening consumer choice, they might ask if there is any real difference between prostitution and other forms of commercial exchange. If a man wants to buy and a woman wants to sell, who is to tell them they shouldn't? At the other end of the spectrum, perceptions could not be darker. It is here we find phone booths full of cards whose meanings we would sooner not explain to our younger children, and outraged citizens organising to drive kerb-crawlers from their neighbourhoods. It is here, too, that we get acquainted with the least deserving victims of the oldest profession, the women themselves. Those whose libertarianism on this issue is underpinned by levity might sharpen up their thinking if they became acquainted with the stinking back alleys where some street prostitutes provide their services on cold winter nights, and with their constant fear of assault, murder and rape. LISTEN to such stories, and those of prostitutes whose conditions of work are less threatening or austere, and the s o m e t i m e s b l i n k e r e d polemics of the American radical feminist Andrea Dworkin become chillingly resonant: "The people who defend prostitution want you to feel a kinky little thrill. I want you to feel the delicate tissues in her body that are being misused. I want you to feel like what it feels like when it happens over and over and over and over and over and over and over again: because that is what prostitution is." Competing perspectives are fiercely held. But amid all the discord there are some things we can be sure of. As the Evening Standard has reported this week, we know for certain that prostitution has now spread far beyond its traditional inner-city zones, enabling men to buy sex with women in the most salubrious parts of the South-East (and, no doubt, elsewhere) by a variety of methods. We can also be grimly confident that this remorseless expansion in the market for such sexual services - specifically the heterosexual kind - tells a very sad story of many men's feelings towards womankind in general, and about the baleful significance of sex in their own lives. Don't take my word for it: seek out the views of prostitutes themselves. Even those who tell academics or docu-soap makers that they are happy enough in their line of work typically express feelings towards their clients which range from, at best, indulgent pity to absolute derision and contempt. They know better than anyone that some clients regard them as dirt, and may be a serious danger to them. But they also know something else, something of profound importance in understanding why men in apparently perfectly normal heterosexual relationships feel such a need to spend cold, hard cash in return for sexual gratification from women they need never see again. For example, in the early Eighties, the American researcher Eileen McLeod interviewed 30 prostitutes and 20 of their clients, all married men, for her book Women Working: Prostitution Now. McLeod found that "a common feature of men's sexual activity with prostitutes is the opportunity it provides to escape conventional male heterosexual roles with their heavy emphasis on masculine prowess and dominance." One prostitute said her services enabled her clients to relax: "They haven't got to put on a performance, be a big stud or produce multiple orgasms or anything like that." One of the clients put it this way: "I go there because I know I can just lie down and leave it to the girls." This desire for passivity, to take the role in a sexual engagement traditionally thought of as feminine, has been a major feature of many similar studies, with as many as three-quarters of male clients classified as desiring to be sexually passive when they visit prostitutes. Some impatient contemporary women might interpret this uncharitably, complaining that too many of the men they have had sex with display plenty of passivity - the sort of passivity associated with brewer's droop or heavy snoring. Perhaps they have a point. But, like the wiser kinds of feminists, I'm inclined to draw a different conclusion. It is that straight men often long to be released from the sexual expectations, real or imagined, they feel they labour under as part of the business of being a heterosexual man; for some of them, a prostitute provides the means. THIS doesn't mean a s s o m e f o o l s believe - that men have somehow become victims of the sexual revolution, and that prostitution is, therefore, basically OK. On the contrary, the growth of prostitution is a depressing symptom of men's continuing inability to see sex as a means of sharing - truly sharing physical pleasure or emotional intimacy with women. The consequences of this do not end with the sorry situation in which men prefer to get their sex by means of a financial exchange, rather than an emotional one. They extend to a whole range of male sexual neuroses and go a long way to explaining why too many men turn far too many women into their sexual victims. And they should tell us that, in a time of turmoil over sexual values in general, those of male heterosexuals are most pressingly in need of modernisation and reform.

Copyright 1999
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