Prostitution: Let us apply a bit of logic

Monica Porter appeared on The Late Late Show last week. A 61 year-old woman – a ‘grandmother’ – she has just written a book entitled Raven: My Year of Dating Dangerously.

Monica was obviously nervous at first and a bit coy. But once she got into her stride, she seemed like a decent and likeable type. Over the course of a year, as she explains in her book, Monica had fifteen sexual encounters with different men, most of whom were in their twenties and thirties. She used dating agencies, including Tinder, to find her no strings attached suitors. She applied a modicum of poetic license to her online profile, in claiming to be 54 rather than 60 at the time, but there was never any ambiguity about the fact that she was interested in younger men.

You might accuse her of cynicism: she entered the online dating arena with the intention of writing a book about it. The scope for controversy in a 60 year old showing that she could get off with guys in their twenties was obvious: clearly publicity would not be too hard to come by. If she carried it off well, the book might sell enough to make her a decent chunk of change.

The truth, however, is that none of that matters greatly. People can decide to look for new lovers, new sex partners, or even just new good friends, for all sorts of different reasons at any age or stage in their lives. There is, after all, always an element of trying to understand ourselves better through our interactions with others. And so it was with Monica.

On balance, listening to her tell her story, I admired her chutzpah. She had stepped ut of the comfort zone of conventional relationships. She had embarked on an adventure, with the intention of challenging orthodoxies. And she had carried it off.

Is there anything wrong with a woman – of whatever age – deciding that she wants to enjoy a series of sexual encounters, free of the obligations that attach to most conventional relationships? Of course not: any perceived iniquity is entirely in the eyes of the observer.

Among the glorious, unshakeable realities of the human condition is that one of life’s greatest pleasures can be, and mostly is, free. You want sex? There’s well over 5 billion people over the age of 18 out there. It is a large number from which those who are interested can potentially find a willing co-conspirator.

So why do so many people want to invent rules about what people can or can’t do sexually? Why is there a constant attempt to limit and proscribe? Why not instead honour the fact that it is a free world and let people get on with whatever inspires them, brings them joy, pleasure or satisfaction? It would be absurd, in my view, to disapprove of a woman in her sixties who is sufficiently adventurous, self-confident and resourceful that she can hook up with a bunch of younger men – or men of her own age for that matter – and enjoy the frisson of uncomplicated, one-off sex. Prudes the world over can froth at the mouth all they like. But the open, caring, mutually desired exchange of free sex between consenting adults is a thing to be admired and celebrated.

But then, the moral police are always hard at work. While many feminists will admire the style of a woman who is good at attracting members of the opposite sex (or indeed her own) at an age when women and men alike are frequently assumed to be more or less clapped out, there are areas where what used to be called the Women’s Movement has mistakenly begun to collaborate with religious moralists on issues to do with sex. The most obvious example is in relation to prostitution.

Last week, the results of a survey – originatedin Ireland, and conducted in a number of EU countries, tellingly under the Stop Traffick banner – were published.

The results were presented as if they had some kind of authority. The conclusions reached included the headline statement that 24% of Irish ‘sex buyers’ had come across girls who appeared to be trafficked, controlled or underage.

The first question is: how accurate is a survey likely to be, which has decided on its conclusion before it even starts? The Stop Traffick campaign is clearly looking for statistics to support its ideological position – i.e. that prostitution and so-called sex trafficking are inextricably intertwined. And, surprise, surprise, it got them. The second question is: are the results of the survey reliable? And the answer is: not at all. In Ireland a sample of 1,000, weighted in line with national demographics, is usually taken as the number of respondents required for market researchers to draw anything resembling accurate conclusions (and even at that number, there is a 6% margin of error – 3% in either direction).

So how many ‘sex buyers’ responded to this survey? Fifty-eight (that’s 58). What’s more, it was an online survey carried out, we are told, via social media, websites and chatrooms. In that environment, anyone who responded could have pretended to be a ‘buyer’.

So do the figures tell us anything useful? No. But they do support an agenda that is being enthusiastically promoted at the moment, both by the Immigrant Council of Ireland and by Ruhama – the Catholic Church-funded organisation which has dedicated itself to saving women from prostitution, via the Turn Off The Red Light Campaign.

One of the deliberately misleading tactics used by Turn Off The Red Light has been to conflate trafficking and prostitution. And the myth that the two are inseparable has been bolstered by the fiction that anyone not from Ireland who is engaged in prostitution here is ‘trafficked’.

Sex workers dismiss this as complete nonsense. And they’re right. For reasons that are obvious, women are frequently more likely to engage in sex work abroad: Irish women in England, English women in Spain and Spanish women in Ireland. But that does not mean the women involved are ‘trafficked’.

As anyone who has been paying attention will know, feminism is divided on the issue. There are many radical women who support the rights of sex workers and who do not oppose prostitution, pornography or other activities within the sex industry.

Those who campaign against prostitution, meanwhile, rely on a number of essentially moralistic pillars: they insist that the women who work in the sex trade are being exploited; they deny the possibility that sex workers are consenting partners in whatever sex acts take place; and in general, they refuse to allow sex workers to participate in the debate, unless of course they are former sex workers who have now internalised the conventional, moralistic disapproval of sex work. The Rescue Industry knows best. These women have to be saved.

To this end, Turn Off The Red Light have been promoting the so-called Scandinavian model, which criminalises the purchase rather than the selling of sex.

This is a profoundly condescending approach, which treats women as if they have no ability to choose to consent (or otherwise) in paid-for sex transactions. And it is also sexist, in that it begins with the idea that men are to blame for prostitution.

But none of this makes any kind of philosophical, logical or legal sense. Equality between the sexes comes down to one fundamental thing: women being in a position to earn as much as men and to enjoy the access to positions of power in politics, in business and in the media, which that requires. If and when that happens, it will be interesting to see if women are as inclined to use money as a way of creating sexual opportunity. Perhaps the sexes are more similar than many people think. Maggie Thatcher certainly suggested as much, confirming that to imagine that women are better than men is as ignorant as it is to claim that men are more intelligent than women.

There is an unsympathetic way of looking at Monica Porter’s work over the past year: that she was engaged in sexual activity from which she knew she would earn money arguably makes it a subtle form of prostitution. My own response is: so what? But the lines are often far less clear cut than the Rescue Industry pretends.

The fact is that there are laws in relation to human trafficking which should be applied no matter what kind of work the individual is trafficked and coerced into. And what policy makers need to do is to make it easier for people who have genuinely been trafficked to step forward and alert the authorities.

The same applies to exploitation and rape. The crucial thing is to create a situation where women who work as prostitutes can report any form of violence to the police, without fear. But that is not what the Rescue Industry wants. They are in the business of disapproving of sex for sale. And they want to impose that disapproval on everyone – including women who have chosen to work in the sex industry for a living. Rather than listening to prostitutes, they stereotype them as victims and tell them what is good for them.

Let’s talk philosophy for a minute. You can go to a masseur or a masseuse. He or she can touch, rub, press, push, pull and to one degree or another pleasure virtually any part of your body – from your head in Indian Head Massage to your toes in Reflexology. In wellness centres, and on holidays and weekends away, people pay for massages purely for the relaxation and pleasure they give. So how does it make any kind of philosophical sense to say: all that is fine, but if someone in that kind of situation touches someone else’s genital area, then it is morally wrong and against the law? It is clearly absurd.

That farcical dualism is a product of the notion that there is some kind of fundamental difference between your sexual organs and the rest of your body. But who says so? And why?

This goes back to religious assumptions about morality, about limitations on people’s right to sexual pleasure and about the idea that sex is somehow sacred.

Of course every individual is entitled to believe any and all of these things – and to order their lives accordingly. But not everyone shares those beliefs. So, why should that view of sex and sexuality be imposed on those who don’t? It shouldn’t.

I heard a man with a severe disability, in his early thirties, talking on the radio about the fact that – until recently – he had never experienced sex with another person. He described going away and being taken to a prostitute. He communicated brilliantly the essentially loving and respectful exchange that occurred between him and the female sex worker who provided him with his first ever experience of what was – for both parties – fully consenting sex. It was very moving to listen to him speak – and what he said illustrated why it is so ignorant, narrowminded and wrong to try to make this an area of criminality, on either side. It also underlined the reality that there are very many heterosexual men out there – and this may or may not apply to some women too – for whom prostitution and pornography may well be their only realistic sexual outlets. Who is entitled to stand in judgement and say to these men: sorry buster, for you, sex is verboten?

We are all different. But, in this as in other areas, I am on the side of those who are marginalised and despised. People with serious physical disabilities are entitled to sex, difficult though it may be to access in the normal course of things. Sex workers have rights too – including the right to do the work that they, in the vast majority of cases, freely choose.

The objective of policy-making and in particular of law-making should be to accommodate the huge diversity of attitudes to – and needs in relation to – sex and sexuality to the greatest extent possible. Men who are violent to women should have no hiding place. Paedophiles, traffickers, exploiters and bullies of all kinds should be vigorously opposed. But imposing a stupidly moralistic view of sex on everyone – including on those women (and indeed men) who decide that they have no problem doing sex work – is no way to achieve that.