I’ve been thinking about prostitution for a while now.
Not becoming one, you understand. My lying isn’t that good. I considered it, a long time ago – as I imagine any unemployed young gay man hungry for work might. But on the fateful day I visited the escort agency to see what the deal was, I happened to meet a future boyfriend, who told me dark stories of his time on the game, how it deadened him inside and, suddenly, it didn’t seem such a good idea any more.
Once, about five years ago, in curiosity more than anything else, I paid for sex. Although his body was beautiful, and he seemed to be very sweet, I found his lies tiresome, his flattering nauseating, and I felt depleted rather than nourished afterwards. It felt wrong for me to pay for it, as a queer man, because men who share a hunger for sex tend to seek each other out, and help each other out, a barter system of sorts. We’re obliging fellows that way. In the main.
The imminent arrival of Stringfellows to Dublin is what prompted these musings. Despite plaintive appeals, the granddaddy of lapdancing is planting his next emporium right in the middle of town, to the dismay of local councillors who rail against the fact that there isn’t a morality clause in the planning laws.
It’s going to be right around the corner from a school and, so it is claimed, will attract all sorts of “undesirables” into the area.
Basically, the country has gone to hell in a handbasket, as was always suspected. It’s “down with that sort of thing” and “We must protest! Protect our young girls from being exploited!” Women should swing down off their poles and cease their pube-waxing and navel-piercing shenanigans, bin those lamé thongs, cover up their front-pillows with sensible Aran sweaters and go back to the East European hovel they were dragged from by those ruthless hirsute gangsters with gold teeth and tobacco breath in white vans with secret compartments. Am I mything something?
Of course, Peter Stringfellow is not involved with prostitution, and I imagine, with all the publicity he gets, he runs a squeaky-clean business. But he uses sexual fantasy to sell alcohol and entertainment, and anything outside the imagined norm of stable family life gets tarred with the same brush of sexual exploitation.
In this fabled world, the passive commodity of female flesh is owned and traded and repackaged and bleached and dyed and shaved and tanned and nipped and tucked; inflated and deflated and poked and leered and ogled at, and made to perform like Pavlov’s dogs, to music, in sequins.
But that norm (and its transgression) is predicated on a domestic bourgeois conceit that no one ever experiences real hunger – a hunger so overwhelming that risks are taken. I’m talking hunger for food, for escape, for flesh, for novelty, for adventure, for connection – for the sacred, for fantasy, for ritual, for pleasure, for love, for release, for meaning, for attention. It is in this maelstrom of hungers that the sex industry operates, and they are often murky waters, with plenty of sharks. But, at its simplest, for every Natacha from Bratislava, starving for a better life in the West, there is a Paddy-Joe from Navan, yearning equally desperately for the taste of a supple young body. In the market economy that is heterosexuality, the two satisfy each other’s hungers, and move on. There is no exploitation, unless it’s mutual.
For there is nothing wrong with sex, per se. Women who are selling sex are not victims, per se, and anyone who says they are is saying that women are passive pawns in their own game, without any will or power or responsibility.
The commercialising of sex may be emotionally numbing, relationship prospects for a sex worker may not be ideal, but it can be a good living and many a student or a single parent has been very grateful for the work. What goes on between consenting adults is nobody’s business but their own. Unless you count the inland revenue.
However, those involved in prostitution are often there for a myriad of chaotic and confusing reasons, often with stories of childhood neglect and hurt and abuse and addiction to tell.
Wherever there are desperately hungry people, who have learned patterns of destruction and self-destruction from an early age, there are those who take advantage of them. As well as those sex workers I’ve listened to as an alcohol counsellor, I’ve seen, plenty of times, in London’s Kings Cross, vicious pimps shoving their needle-thin drug-fucked girls out to work, and witnessed just how low human beings can go in the urban jungle.
On the other hand, while I’ve been in Italy, I’ve heard a completely different tale. In a village in my area, a wife and mother of three has a new spring in her step because she’s started offering personal services to other men in the area, one of whom has an invalid wife.
She’s been telling people how delighted she is with all the sex she’s been having, and how much weight she’s lost. Her husband must know, but it’s presumed their children don’t. Apparently it’s quite a common and acceptable feature of rural Italian life, especially in the South. This seems to be quite a practical and sensible acknowledgement of desire, and how to meet it, without the shame and loathing that seems to accompany such matters in these North-Western isles.
Our society, in particular, has so much to learn from prostitutes. No group is better placed to assess a society and its failings, to know about a people and its faults, than those forced outside. If we protected prostitutes instead of criminalized them, we would be infinitely richer. As in practically all areas of adult victimless behaviour, criminalizing an activity does not make it go away, it just forces it underground, where it operates unseen, festering on society’s underbelly, dominated, as in most criminal worlds, by psychopathic bullies. Prostitution must be decriminalized. In addition, if heroin were legalised but controlled and made available to addicts cheaply, with counselling and support, many of the estimated 600 or so prostitutes in Ireland would not have to whore to feed their habit, freeing them to make less desperate choices.
But not necessarily different ones.