The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (31 page)

The style of argument frequently used by opponents of prostitution was summarised by failed Reagan appointee to the US Supreme Court, Robert Bork. In defending the prosecution of victimless
crimes, he wrote, ‘Knowledge that an activity is taking place is a harm to those who find it profoundly immoral.’
¹⁸³

The problem with such an attitude is this: who gets to decide what is and is not profoundly immoral? How many people need to find something profoundly immoral before the police are compelled to
prosecute the crime? One thousand? One hundred? One? In such a world the objections of a small yet vocal minority could conceivably hold more power than the opinions of a silent majority.

Considering the broad range of religious and cultural backgrounds represented in Britain today, at least one person somewhere takes offence to just about everything you do in your daily life. It
makes no sense to cater to the fear that someone might be morally offended by something they never see and never affects their lives in any real way. A consensus should be reached based on the best
available evidence, not on pandering to the sensibilities of the easily offended.

Some criticisms of the sex industry, such as whether there is a danger in commodifying sexuality, are worth talking about. But most of the opposition is blinkered and supports action that does
not help the people who are at most risk of exploitation. It is tiresome to listen to the same old moral objections being trotted out, when
sex workers are usually more
interested in avoiding harassment from police or finding the safest possible way to earn a living.

There is an enormous difference between helping women trapped in cycles of abuse and attacking women whose experiences are off message. Anytime such voices appear – the educated call girl,
perhaps, or the self-motivated porn star – they are belittled and marginalised by people who label them as ‘rare’ or even ‘lying’.

But it is not lying if your experience contradicts a well-worn stereotype, and it is not rare to want to be involved in a process that affects your livelihood. Groups like the Asia Pacific
Network of Sex Workers (APNSW), or the Desiree Alliance in the US, are made up of sex workers who have much to say about the policies affecting them. They not only include but embrace women whose
backgrounds are not privileged and not middle class: in other words, the same people some think need ‘saving’.

There are many other groups like the APNSW and Desiree. But they are attacked or ignored by opponents outside of prostitution who prefer selective information bolstering their stereotype of
‘broken’ and ‘vulnerable’ women. Opponents who prefer to imply they, not sex workers themselves, know best. Sex workers trying to have a voice in the policy that affects
them must feel rather as early suffragettes did, being talked down to by men.

Prohibiting sex work is not a successful behaviour-changing policy. Prohibition in general tends to backfire. We all know how badly alcohol prohibition in the US went. Instead of addressing the
underlying social issues that might have been leading to unwelcome levels of alcoholism, it simply gave criminals a far greater hold on the industry than they would have had otherwise. It did
little to solve any actual family or societal problems.

The government policy of the last several decades against sex workers has failed. No matter what deterrents are applied, sex work always continues. Even in Sweden, which claims success with its
criminalisation strategy. The Swedish government admits sex work advertising has increased on the internet – in other words, the trade has disappeared from public spaces but has not gone away
at all. What has happened is that sex workers have gone underground. This makes them more vulnerable, not less, to attack and abuse.

If as a society we are serious about protecting women, then we should rethink the current approach. The only country in the world that has put the safety of women and men
in sex work above subjective moral ideals is New Zealand. Its decriminalisation of sex work over ten years ago has been a great success.

In times of financial austerity, throwing more money at unsuccessful policies is against the public interest and out of step with public opinion. Many opinion polls clearly show that people
support protecting the safety of sex workers and support decriminalisation. Criminalising consensual sexual activity between adults is wrong and dangerous.

A lot of the debate owes more to ideology than to reality. Much was made of Iceland’s decision to close its strip clubs and Sweden’s approach to criminalising prostitution. But how
does it make sense to attack particular kinds of physical work, when people make money from their bodies in other ways? Surely, by that logic, fashion modelling and ballet dancing ought to be
banned as well? There is also an element of these arguments that is strongly gendered. Men’s bodies are exploited by war – few people dare endorse putting the Army out of business.
There are vulnerable and exploited people in all kinds of work, not just sex work. Surely it makes more sense to attack the conditions that make them vulnerable, not the work they use to try to
change their situations.

While Sweden’s official figures fail to show that its no-tolerance approach to sex work actually helps anyone, that hasn’t stopped some activists from claiming victory. Because in a
sense, no matter what happens, it is a victory. A victory for a particular point of view. Not a victory for evidence, not a victory for facts. Certainly not a victory for the people the law
actually affects.

The difference between how we imagine prostitutes’ lives to be and how they actually are rarely gets airtime. Why? One reason could be because drawing attention to this difference might
challenge the agenda of government, NGOs, and certain charities.

The few times when a voice is heard that doesn’t fit the stereotype, it is often discounted or ridiculed. Since coming out as a former sex worker, I have been criticised for being too
middle class, too well educated, too independent. As if my very existence in sex work was,
somehow, unique. But data across the spectrum of sex work shows this not to be
true.

It’s bizarre to read articles by people who’ve never met me attempting to dissect this or that bit of my life. Inevitably some lazy commentators ‘blame’ me for the
existence of other call girls, or the idea that smart, driven people might ever consider sex work among their earning options. But, as delightfully flattering as that is, it’s not true.
Prostitution is called ‘the oldest profession’ for a reason.

Now, a little story about what the people who purport to care about the women in sex work, who want so badly to ‘save’ them, actually think.

The online comments following a review in the
Guardian
of the final series of
Secret Diary
were particularly telling. Very quickly the discussion descended not into an assessment
of the show’s content, but a discussion of me as a person. I know – they need to get over it already. And then there was this one comment in particular:

‘The show should end with her dead in a ditch.’

Which had, by the time I saw it, been favourited seventy-four times.

Maybe I was feeling a little oversensitive that day. It wasn’t, after all, clear if the commentator thought I should be dead in a ditch, or whether it should just be the person playing me
who ends up dead. Whatever. You would be bothered too, if death threats had been delivered to your work after coming out. So I complained to the
Guardian
about the comment, which I felt
contravened their website’s posting rules. Dozens of other people complained as well. After all, the paper wouldn’t have let such comments about a survivor of domestic abuse stand, nor
similar jibes about any number of other issues. At the time of writing, the comment had not been removed.

Sex workers are targeted by violent attackers because of an implicit message society as a whole is sending. The comment trivialises murder to the point of implying that someone deserves to die.
Simply because they had been a sex worker. That’s unspeakably wrong. Not least because it bolsters the conviction of people like Gary Ridgway, who murdered prostitutes because he knew he
could get away with it.

I filed a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission, who eventually found in favour of the
Guardian
because, according to
them, sex workers are more likely to
die while working. So I guess they felt that sort of commentary is a-okay

Wow. Victim blaming, much? Being a fireman is a dangerous job; any troll commentator snarking that a show about emergency services ‘should’ end with dead bodies would be beyond the
pale. Sex work is not everyone’s cup of tea, but it is a job and it is – in Britain – legal. Suck on that, haters. You might think raising an eyebrow when people make dead hooker
comments is ‘political correctness gone mad’. I happen to know you’d feel differently if it was someone you knew.

It is 100 per cent par for the course since, after all, I had the gall to prove them and their closed-loop, neat-and-tidy judgements wrong. I am a woman. I was a sex worker. I lived in London. I
said it was all true and I meant – and mean – Every Single Word.

But enough stories. What matters is fact, and I am as tired as everyone else with endless personal attacks masquerading as reasoned debate on this issue. There is a lot of talk in the political
sphere about the need for ‘evidence-based policy’. This means rejecting approaches that are moralistic and manipulative. Sex workers – like Michaela Hague – have suffered
the tragic consequences of prejudicial social attitudes that lead to bad policy. The prohibition approach has not worked. It will never work. The people who endorse a view in which someone
‘should’ end up dead are not the ones who should be guiding public opinion on this any longer.

Disliking sex work is not a good enough argument to justify criminalising it. Is there any public interest served by preventing adults from engaging in a consensual transaction for sexual
services? No, there is not. Bit like the War on Drugs: making the business profitable only to criminals, awaiting the inevitably grim results, then claiming that it’s the drugs themselves,
not the laws, that caused it. Few reasonable people believe that line of argument when it comes to drugs. Why does anyone believe it when it comes to sex?

Moral disapproval is a bad basis for policy making. I don’t find the idea of taking drugs at all appealing, but I don’t assume my own preferences should be the basis for law.

The condescension heaped on people who do sex work is embarrassingly transparent. All this mealy-mouthed ‘Oh, but we want to help them, really.’ How’s that again? By saddling
people with criminal
records and taking away their children? Do me a favour.

As well as the happy, well-paid prostitutes there are unhappy, poor sex workers in need of support. Society should protect the unwilling and underage from sexual exploitation. We already have
laws for that. Maybe they should be more intelligently enforced. But the existence of abuses in some employment sectors does not mean such work should be automatically criminalised. There are
people abused and taken advantage of in the food service industry, in construction, in commercial fishing. Nobody suggests making them illegal. Perhaps it’s time for us to start seeing that
sex work is real work too.

9

‘V
ice trade a disease time bomb,’ yelled one headline.
¹⁸⁴
‘Police send STD info to suspects in prostitution sting,’ advised another.
¹⁸⁵
Even the sports pages were not immune, with ‘AIDS and
HIV warning to South Africa World Cup fans’ featured prominently on the BBC website.
¹⁸⁶
The World Cup warnings, in particular, were widespread in
the run-up to the football tournament in 2010.

Are the headlines accurate? Are prostitutes spreading sexually transmitted infections? Many believe sex workers play the central role in the transmission of STIs to the general public. But a
huge amount of research over the past twenty years counters this belief.

Studies consistently show high rates of condom use in sex work, and low risks of HIV and other STIs for women sex workers.
¹⁸⁷
Cohort studies have
shown a low incidence of HIV infection in sex workers in Europe (0.2 cases per 100 person years in the United Kingdom).
¹⁸⁸
Despite an increase in the
rate of STIs in the general population, sex workers have shown a decline in infections.
¹⁸⁹
In the Netherlands, where prostitution is legal and
workers’ health monitored, sex workers have a lower rate of sexually transmitted infections than swingers.
¹⁹⁰

The real vectors are not sex workers, most of whom use condoms, and are tested regularly for infections. In the UK, the population that is really experiencing a surge in STIs is the
over-fifties. About
13,000 older men and women were diagnosed with STIs in 2009, double the number diagnosed in 2000.
¹⁹¹
Rather
than prostitutes spreading disease, the real vectors seem to be people who assume that their partners are ‘safe’, or people who were perhaps in committed relationships and marriages the
last time public health campaigns about safer sex were saturating the media, but aren’t monogamous any more.

Still the headlines continued. ‘Prostitutes flock to South Africa ahead of World Cup 2010,’ claimed the
Christian Science Monitor,
with similar warnings in the
Washington
Post, New York Times,
and virtually every English-language international paper. According to reports seeded by social work groups and charities, some 40,000 prostitutes were set to arrive in
South Africa – coincidentally, the identical number that had been predicted (but never materialised) for Germany’s World Cup in 2006.