Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

by Natasha Walter

  Stripping in various styles is not the only element of the sex industry that has become far more acceptable in recent years. Prostitution has also moved from the margins to the mainstream of our culture in a development that one can track in the popularity of bestselling memoirs of prostitutes. Although people have been intrigued by fictional and factual memoirs of prostitution for centuries, there is a new and hugely popular genre dealing with prostitution, which presents a striking shift in the way this work is perceived. The genre includes Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, by Tracy Quan, The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl by Belle de Jour and Miss S’s Confessions of a Working Girl.13 Although we have always had glossy accounts of prostitution in popular culture, the difference between the Pretty Woman-style fairytale and current tales is that today we are asked to believe that these are genuinely honest accounts of what it is to sell sex. They have a matter-of-fact tone, and tend to emphasise how very normal the occupation is and how close to any liberated woman’s sex life.

  These books show how the image of the prostitute has changed radically over the last two hundred years, and how this change has been driven by women as much as by men. Look at the difference between fictional nineteenth-century prostitutes, as described by men, and the prostitutes who now describe their own lives in these bestselling memoirs. Those prostitutes of the past might be either glamorised or degraded, but their experiences were definitively separate from those of other women. There were glorious femmes fatales such as Nana in Emile Zola’s eponymous novel, a ‘force of nature, a ferment of destruction, unwittingly corrupting and disorganising Paris between her snow-white thighs … She alone was left standing, amid the accumulated riches of her mansion, while a host of men lay stricken at her feet … her sex arose in a halo of glory and blazed down on her prostrate victims like a rising sun shining down on a field of carnage.’14 Or there were tragic fallen women, such as Nancy in Oliver Twist, who is agonised by the sense of her utter degradation when a virtuous woman tries to save her: ‘“Lady,” cried the girl, sinking on her knees, “dear, sweet, angel lady, you are the first that ever blessed me with such words as these, and if I had heard them years ago, they might have turned me from a life of sin and sorrow; but it is too late, it is too late!”’15

  The tone of these recent writers’ work, in contrast, is utterly nonchalant. For instance, as Miss S, a young woman who worked in a brothel while she was a student, says of her choice of work: ‘At least I wasn’t getting blind drunk like the rest of the student girls in the dorms and going off with strangers, waking up in strange places, not knowing where they were or how they got there! Hell, I could have just as much fun. I didn’t need to get plastered to lose my inhibitions – and I got paid.’16 While prostitution has always been with us, this casualness about what it means to work in the sex industry is an unexpected development. When a television series was created out of one of the most popular books in this genre, Belle de Jour’s The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, the series and its promotion showed how prostitution has become so normalised in the last few years. One of the most striking aspects of this series was how little it differed from every other television drama about the lives of young women. Here was a young woman who was smartly dressed, with a circle of chic friends, drinking lattes in cafes and cocktails in hotel bars, having sex with strangers – sometimes good, sometimes weird, sometimes bad – without much emotional engagement. There was little to distinguish it from the groundbreaking American drama about promiscuous single women, Sex and the City, or the lesbian equivalent The L-Word, or the male equivalent, Californication. Rather than being seen as shameful, prostitution can now be seen as an aspirational occupation for a woman. ‘My body is a big deal’ ran the advertising caption for the television series based on Belle de Jour’s book over huge images of the actor, Billie Piper, in underwear.

  It would be naive to assume that the promotion of such a view of prostitution in the mainstream media does not have an effect on the real-life behaviour of men and women. One day in 2007 I went to visit a woman I’ll call Angela, who has been working as a prostitute for four years. Although in some ways Angela was quite formal, and uneasy about sharing the details of her life, from time to time her rage would burst out in a torrent of words. In the sitting room of her chilly, scrupulously clean flat in Middlesex, where there were no comfortable chairs, but where there was a metal pole running floor to ceiling with a pair of patent high heels next to it, she explained to me how she had come to this point.

  She first began to think about charging for sex when her marriage broke down. As a woman in her thirties who had not dated for a long time, she was eager to look for new experiences. ‘When we separated I needed to find my way again,’ she said, frowning a little. She realised that finding one’s way as a single woman, in our society, seemed to be associated with having a lot of sex. Her friends said to her that she should go out, have a good time, find a man and have sex, and she began to use internet chatrooms to meet men. When she met up with them, she found that the norm was that ‘they would expect me to just get on with it, in the name of sexual liberation and fun’. These experiences in the new world of unemotional sex surprised Angela, as things had changed so much since before her marriage. ‘When I had had relationships with men in the past, I have to say that they were usually equal and pleasurable experiences. There wasn’t the surround sound, the cultural imperative that it was all about sex, only about sex. What men expect you to do has really changed – anal sex, threesomes, even when you’ve just met them.’ But at first Angela did not question what she was experiencing. ‘I believed what everyone said, that all this promiscuous sex was so empowering.’

  Angela was intrigued by this new view of feminine sexuality, and how it intersected with the values of the sex industry. ‘I was interested in pole-dancing. I went to a class. At the school, the teacher would say, we’ll keep the sleaze out of it, but then she’d say, this is what a stripper would do, this is how she would do it. I was thinking of becoming a dancer myself. A male friend of mine went quite often to a pole-dancing club and told me he thought I’d enjoy it. I was still thinking along the lines that it’s hot shit that I’m such a woman that I can do all this.’

  As she went on having sex with men without much emotional engagement, Angela thought at first that it would not be a huge step to begin charging for sex. Since none of the men she met wanted a relationship, she felt that they could give her something in exchange. She was on her own, and needed the money. Although she is well educated, with a degree from an American university, she had married young and had relied financially on her husband for years. Because she had been out of the job market for so long, she found it difficult to get back into work that was decently paid, and on top of that she was experiencing health problems that made it hard for her to hold down a fulltime job. ‘I was pretty desperate to find a way to survive, to be honest. It dawned on me that I could get paid for this. I thought that it would be fun – I remember seeing a documentary on television about kids of rich Hollywood stars and there was one girl who said sometimes she went down to the Sunset Strip and got paid for sex as a bit of fun. I thought, OK, there’s no harm in it. When I went into it, I thought it would be easy. That’s what you’re asked to believe, isn’t it? I thought, OK, if this is empowering, let’s suck it and see.’

  The matter-of-fact way that some women enter prostitution is also connected to the way that many men are now much more open about buying sex. Many men in the public eye talk easily about their decisions to visit prostitutes. For instance, in his autobiography the comedian and television presenter Russell Brand described how he saw buying sex from prostitutes as a sign of normal sexual maturing. He was taken to Thailand by his father when he was seventeen. ‘In the course of that holiday, I fucked loads more prostitutes, always got a hard-on, never wore a condom, and never fell in love. In Bangkok when bar girls in Pat-Pong left their posts to follow me down the street, cooing and touching my hair, I
felt that I had my dad’s unequivocal approval. When I came back from Thailand, I was much more comfortable around women – sure in the knowledge that I had “come back a man”. Some of the attributes of a man included, “I have now had a prostitute stick her finger up my arse while sucking my cock” … After that, I started to get a bit more confident about sex.’17 Brand visits a Greek strip bar which is a ‘misogynistic den of iniquity’ and encourages his friends to join him. ‘I was wanking and drinking and touching, it was disgusting … I jostled a few of the others into giving it a go.’ For him, there is nothing degrading or secret about buying sex; quite the opposite, it is a straightforward part of his holiday activities. And although this may have always been the case for a certain number of men, what is new is the casual way that he puts this view into the public domain, without fear of censure.

  Although the tabloid media still tend to write in a disapproving tone about men who visit lap-dancing clubs or buy sex from prostitutes, their constant return to this theme makes it seem an almost inescapable part of young male behaviour. These activities are associated with celebrities; men such as the footballer Wayne Rooney, and the television presenters Jamie Theakston and Angus Deayton. These men had to go through a process of being shamed and repenting when they were found to have visited prostitutes, but the reports of their behaviour often suggested that it was seen as normal in their circles to buy sex. This behaviour is also seen as an accepted part of life among men who are not celebrities, who are just like their readers. For instance, in one recent report in the Sun, a prostitute talked about how she had felt used and abused by the men who came into the brothel, but alongside her words ran an interview with a man who had bought sex himself on a stag night. ‘Mutual friends had been to Riga in Latvia months previously and loved it. They said it was cheap and more importantly that the girls, including the prostitutes, were gorgeous…. No one said it but we were planning on having sex when we got over there…. I reasoned it was no different to a one-night stand – except I was paying her. The sex was protected and she seemed to be enjoying herself…. I read about sex trafficking in the papers but it didn’t cross my mind when we were over there. We were out to have a good time and didn’t force the girls into anything they didn’t want to do.’18

  The internet has been particularly useful in allowing men to believe they need not feel ashamed about buying sex from prostitutes. There are places on the internet where reviewing sex for sale is taken as naturally as reviewing books on Amazon. On these sites, men can discuss without hesitation how to satisfy their various tastes for larger, or older, or younger, or smaller women and where to find, say, a ‘girlfriend experience’ – a prostitute who will kiss and give oral sex without a condom.

  Some research suggests that this casual attitude to shopping for sex has now become very widespread. One man recently told researchers in London, ‘It’s just like going to Tesco’s,’ and another said, ‘I just think it’s like we live in a consumer society. And I think that’s become a bit of a commodity now, really … just the whole sex thing. Because the internet’s there and magazines are there and you’ve got images all the time.’19 Statistics suggest that such developments are part of a wider cultural shift. A survey of 11,000 British adults carried out in 1990 and 2000 found that the number of men who admitted paying for sex rose in that period from one in twenty to nearly one in ten men. The men most likely to pay for sex were single, living in London and aged between twenty-five and thirty-four.20 The author of the report, Dr Helen Ward, linked the phenomenon to the general mainstreaming of the sex industry, saying that among the reasons why more men admitted paying for sex was that, ‘There has been a more liberal attitude towards commercial sex and increasing commercialisation of sex. Lads magazines are bombarded with images.’21 It’s easy to see her point. When I accessed the report on this on the Guardian website, I found that under ‘related links’ I was directed to a site called ‘They have to pay for it’, which turned out to be advertising ‘hardcore videos’ and ‘free porn’.22

  This cultural shift which has made prostitution more acceptable has, in some places, been seen as an advance for women. This is understandable. There are sex workers who insist that they have chosen the work they do and that they would like to be given the rights and protections that any other workers enjoy. Many people, listening to those arguments, shy away from sounding too judgemental about prostitution in case they are seen as condemning women’s choices. But the casual attitude towards prostitution that suggests it can be an aspirational occupation for women glosses over much of the reality of this work.

  One thing that the currently fashionable vision of prostitution has to forget is the fact that, to her clients, Belle de Jour is not ‘a big deal’. If we were really moving into a strange new world in which men and women had decided they wanted to buy and sell sex rather than give it freely, then we would expect that men who make a habit of buying sex would speak with ordinary respect about the women who sell it to them. One study carried out in Middlesbrough among men arrested for kerb-crawling found that more than three-quarters saw women who sell sex as dirty and inferior.23 Those internet spaces where prostitutes are discussed may seem welcoming to the men who participate in them, but any woman who eavesdrops on them is likely to form a very different view.

  The misogyny in those spaces is ugly, as this selection of reviews – reviews that include contact details for the prostitutes in question – from Punternet will show: ‘Tired old haggard whore. Must have been in her 40s and had saggy tits and a saggy gut. Hairy minge as well … Shite punt. She was not into being fucked hard. Finished with her wanking me as she said I hurt her too much … waste of money.’ ‘Chose Jessica, and soon as there was some movement with the pecker on went the condom, still quite limp but she carried on with the oral until he was up. Very little words spoken started to suck her nipples and then she let out a shriek: “That hurt – don’t like it.” Just seemed to go downhill from then, she lay flat on her back, eyes shut, no sound or movement, until I shot my load, then cleaned me up and off she went. She could not even come to say ta ta when I went. Once again another crap Eastern European shag.’ ‘Small petite blonde. Size 8 32a tits. 18 years. Very good looking with hair extensions. A poor punt indeed! Wouldn’t open her legs to give full penetration. I just drilled her until I finished, cleaned up and left.’ ‘Pretty poor all round, … not very talkative and seemed she did not really want to be there. Onto mish – she just lay on her back staring at the ceiling with a blank expression which was very offputting, eventually filling the raincoat I departed.’ From the point of view of the men who write these reviews there may be nothing shaming about seeing women’s bodies in this way. But if you read their words from the point of view of the women, whose reluctance, pain and unhappiness is being observed from the outside, the effect is traumatic. ‘She said I hurt her too much,’ says the man. ‘She did not really want to be there.’ ‘That hurt, I don’t like it,’ cries the woman, but he never stops, he ‘drills her’ till he finishes.24

  Beside this sort of casual misogyny, there is the actual violence and abuse that runs, like a forgotten nightmare, through every survey carried out among women who actually sell sex. One study found that two-thirds of prostitutes had been assaulted by clients, but that fewer than a third of these crimes were reported to the police.25 Other researchers have looked at the violence that forms the backgrounds of many prostitutes, with one study finding that as many as 85 per cent of prostitutes in their samples reported physical abuse in the family, with 45 per cent reporting familial sexual abuse.26 Yet others have looked at how women become pulled into prostitution at an early age – too early to make any kind of informed choice – with one researcher finding that a majority of prostitutes interviewed had become involved with prostitution before the age of sixteen27 and another that a majority started before they were seventeen.28 Researchers have found that all young women in their samples who were involved in prostitution had a problem with alcohol
misuse,29 and that a majority used hard drugs – one study in Merseyside found that 96 per cent of the women working in street prostitution were using heroin and 81 per cent crack cocaine, and that 84 per cent said that their reason for going into prostitution was to get money for drugs.30

  When apologists for prostitution mention this strand of violence, abuse and addiction that runs through the lives of women who sell sex, they try very hard to separate it from the rest of the industry. At the moment there is great interest in trafficked women; women who are tricked or forced into working in prostitution and who come from abroad. I wouldn’t for a moment want to dismiss the exploitation of women who are crossing borders to sell sex, whether from eastern Europe to western Europe, or from any other part of the globe. It is vital that charities and campaigners continue their work to highlight their situations and to assist women who are experiencing such abuse. But we should be careful that the attention we currently pay to trafficked women does not prevent us from seeing the violence experienced by women who have, apparently, chosen the work – who know that when they go and stand on a street corner or turn up to work in a massage parlour they will be expected to sell the use of their mouths and vaginas and hands for men to reach orgasm. Despite the fact that they have not necessarily been forced into this work, these women are not exempt from levels of abuse that make a mockery of the normalisation of prostitution. About six prostitutes are murdered every year in the UK, and the standardised mortality rates for sex workers are six times those seen in the general population.31

  In 2006, this constant threat of violence was brought home by the news that a serial killer had murdered five women in Ipswich. His victims were all prostitutes aged between nineteen and twenty-nine, women such as Tania Nicol, a teenage heroin addict whose mother had no idea she was working as a prostitute. This story hit the newspapers with a splash because the killer murdered more than one woman. But such reports of serial killers can make us forget that even when there is no serial killer on the streets where they work, women are at risk of violence when they sell sex. The first time I spent time talking with prostitutes about their lives was in 1998, when I went to Hull for the Observer to investigate the story that there might be a serial killer on the loose after three prostitutes were found dead in the city within ten months. ‘New Ripper fear’ and ‘Talk on the streets has been of a serial killer’ ran the headlines and stories in newspapers for a few weeks.