The Message

The summer is at an end. This we know because Electric Picnic is over. This morning the rain came. Thankfully, while it had threatened all weekend, the blitz never really got going. But darkness fell symbolically today and the clouds opened. Winter is on the way.

The 2010 model EP was a great gig, with a wonderful, positive, chilled vibe, lots of intellectual high jinks in the Mindfield area and some utterly brilliant music throughout. The Hot Press crew was down in force and everyone had a whale of a time. As the weekend wore on, it became clear that the crowd was big, the attendance good – it wasn’t quite a sell out, but it was near enough for everyone to breathe a sigh of relief. In a country that is permanently on the verge of a nervous breakdown, making an event like this happen at all, never mind successfully, is an achievement in itself.
It is one of the most striking things about where we are at right now that so many people of talent and substance are being brutally damaged in the fall-out from the economic madness inflicted on us by those charged with responsibility for managing the poxy till. I bumped into Philip King, a towering presence on the Irish music scene over many years, and he filled me in on the difficulties getting the budget to make his Other Voices programme this year. But he will plough on, in the face of what seem like insurmountable obstacles, because this is what people of vision and commitment do.
Elsewhere in this issue, Paddy Dunning – a man who might be described as a serial entrepreneur, with a string of ongoing ventures to his name – is interviewed. He talks about the difficulties he has had in getting any kind of support for a huge number of ideas-driven culturally inclined ventures he’s been involved in. The bottom line is that there seems to be very little real appreciation of the incredible value that Irish music has brought to the nation, the positive perception it has created internationally and the potential it has to lift us collectively out of the hole dug with such extraordinary zeal for everyone by the bankers and bureaucrats. We need to change this, and fast.
We really do.
Among the curious sights at the Picnic was a team of mobile masseuses, who were busy doling out massages to tired punters, estranged for a few days from the comforts of home and bed, and stiffened from sleeping in tents. The clients, men and women alike, were getting their heads, their necks and their backs rubbed – and they were clearly taking pleasure in it. I wondered: is this perhaps sinful pleasure? And if not, why not?
The recipients of the massages were clearly being pleasured by strangers – who were being paid for their attentions. Here, the mobile nature of the service meant that the focus was on the upper torso, the neck and head. But all over Ireland, there are more wide-ranging and intimate massages on offer in dozens of establishments, that often involve pretty much every part of the body being rubbed, apart from the sexual organs.
It made me wonder: what is it that leads us to believe that if the masseuses – or indeed masseurs – also touch the genital areas, then this is suddenly potentially, if not actually, criminal?
It is, of course, nothing more or less than that old (and I’d have hoped long discredited) religious obsession with the idea that sexual activity between strangers is in some way morally wrong, degenerate or sinful. In fact it is none of these things. Sex with strangers can be full of love, compassion and beauty.
So, in essence, what is the difference between the work of different massage-givers? In one case, where genitals are off limits, a stranger pleasures someone they have never met before for money. In another, where genitals are not off limits, a stranger pleasures someone they have never met before for money. The only difference has to do with how we interpret the function of sex in human affairs and what is acceptable in relation to it.
The religious view was, and by and large remains, that it is intimately tied to procreation, family and the bond between husband and wife. It is this view which underpins the stoning of women in Iran for adultery. The counter view is that sexual desire is a good thing in itself and that engaging in sexual activity, of whatever kind, is something we are all entitled to do (and from which we may even benefit spiritually and emotionally) as long as we do it with fellow consenting adults.
Ah, but a massage is essentially therapeutic, someone protests. It is to ease pain, relieve stress, improve the flow of blocked energies within the body. Well, some sex workers would say that this is exactly what they do to earn their living too.
Consenting adults are entitled to do what they like sexually together. Clearly it is irresponsible to take risks that put another individual’s life, health or well-being at risk. But those extremes excepted, what two – or indeed more – people do together behind closed doors is their own business. That is the classic liberal position. Why would it be it any different if money changes hands? There is no good reason.
Of course, you can argue that it would be much better if no-one felt the need to get involved on either side of the transaction, where paying for sex is involved. In theory at least, it would be better if men didn’t pay. It would be better also if women didn’t accept payment. And vice versa (for, while far less prevalent, the transactions do take place in reverse on occasion). And it would be better too if ‘rent boys’ didn’t exist. And if the older and generally wealthier clients who patronise them didn’t use their economic clout in that way. Indeed it would. But it is in the nature of money that people exchange it for the things that they want and covet and can’t otherwise get. And it is also in the nature of money that people accept it for the labour that yields them the biggest dividends most readily. And none of that is likely to change.
A campaign on the issue of prostitution is currently being waged by Ruhama, a Roman Catholic organisation. They have been having some success in getting press coverage for their position. Anne Sexton writes about the subject in her sex column in this issue of Hot Press. I seldom disagree with Anne, but this is one instance where I do. My reading of it is that Ruhama are ideologically motivated and that they are far less interested in the truth about why men and women work as prostitutes than in winning the propaganda battle by convincing people that the women who engage in sex work, or the vast majority of them, are coerced into doing so.
They have latched onto the convenient idea that a very significant number of these women are being ‘trafficked’, as this is an issue which quite rightly niggles at the guilt of liberals. But again I suspect that they are consciously blurring the lines here, and that they are referring, for example, to women coming to Ireland willingly for two-month tours from Latvia or other points east, as being ‘trafficked’, when that term should only correctly be used for those who are effectively in captivity. Of course there are bullies in action around the sex trade. But they are everywhere anyway. And so the best response is to create the conditions where male and female sex workers alike can be free to go to the law about anyone who extorts money from them, if that’s what’s going on, and have them dealt with in the normal way that the law deals with other forms of intimidation. It is the fact that prostitution is illegal that facilitates those who would be or are pimps.
In response to Ruham’s propaganda, we have seen male writers bemoaning the fact that these women are so willing to sell their bodies, in effect passing the parcel. It isn’t the fault of the men – it’s the women who offer themselves for sale who are to blame!
Well, they are all equally wrong. What we are seeing is human beings in action, doing one of those things they have always done – and will always do. Seeing sex as something which is often negotiated. And sometimes paid for.
Get over it.