On Reading about Prostitution

The working title of the next novel in The Splits Archive is Zombies in a Brothel and it spent several months being no more than that. This is because my knowledge of sex work was simply too meagre to write anything convincing.

I needed to research commercial sex. So I began by googling reading lists - I found this cracking one from Leeds University. Then I went to the British Library, which is the second largest in the world and holds every book published in the UK and Ireland.

Mind-blowing

Sitting in the hush of the BL with its high ceilings and rows of leather-topped desks, my mind was completely blown.

I realised that I had only the most basic understanding of sex work, determined by my own anxieties. For example, I’d absorped a famous statistic that around 70% of men visit prostitutes at least once in their life – and promptly suppressed it. That’s just too many men. That could be anyone - my teacher, my doctor, my dad… eek!

As I read I was amazed to discover this figure is completely wrong. More recent research estimates that actually just 6% of men visit a prostitute once in their lives and only 1.5% visit a prostitute more than once.

That’s much more dealable with. Hysteria be gone!

Also, although I knew that there is more than one kind of sex work, I’d taken a similar mental shortcut to many people. I’d condensed it all down into street-level prostitution and trafficking – very poor, coerced, possibly drug-addicted women controlled by violent pimps.

Now I was reading about the middle class sex-worker in the US. I was reading about Spanish road-side brothels where tired truck drivers stop for the company of other drivers as much as for sex. I was reading about women in rural shacks who cook a meal for their clients, iron their clothes and let them sleep the night.

Similarly, men who buy sex are a very mixed bag. Some just have an excess of sexual energy. Some have a fetish for buying sex. Some are unable to meet women in any other way. Some are stuck in a bad marriage. Some have no time for intimate relationships. Few if any of the reasons on this list signal a happy person living a well-rounded life, but nor do they sound that different from the unhappinesses of men who do not buy sex.

Sex and the Self

However, I wasn’t convinced by one of the main feminist defenses of prostitution - namely that it’s patriarchal to insist that women see their sexuality as an intimate part of their identity.

I think this argument confuses the double standard with deeper questions about how the self is constituted through the body.

The patriarchy certainly punishes women more harshly than men for dividing sex and self. But this is different from the question of what sex is. For some people it has nothing to do with their essential self, separating the two is natural, comfortable and productive. But for many women in the sex trade that split is not at all natural - it is forced on them by poverty, trauma and exploitation.

What about love?

Men who buy sex seem to suffer a similar rupture.

When you look at the list of reasons why they buy sex, you can’t help realising that even the coldest and creepiest commercial sex is actually about love. More accurately, it’s about love's absence.

Take the two motivations that seem to have least to do with love. First, men who see commercial sex as a practical solution to give them more time for their career. But if you read the case studies on such men, they all reveal a profound loneliness.

Second, men with a fetish for commercial sex. By definition, they are replacing a thing they want with something they don’t. That’s the meaning of a fetish – a substitute for the thing whose absence makes you anxious. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to suggest the thing these men actually want - but don’t dare ask for - is love.

Two different worlds?

Nor do I buy the argument that marriage is just a socially acceptable form of prostitution.

But I did begin to see that what happen in commercial sex is not in one universe while what happens in ‘normal’ sex is in another.

There can be tenderness in commercial sex, and there can be exploitation and hurt in ‘gift’ sex.

One prostitute I read about said she felt she was drawing love up out of the earth and sending it into her clients. I expect this is not the full story, but neither is it the full story when people say “I do”.

My reading has convinced me that sex work can illuminate our humanity rather than simply disgrace it. Just as well, seeing as I’m about to write a novel set in a brothel.