Selling sex is bad. But a few A-levels don't make it worse
From Jennifer Thompson to Belle de Jour, attitudes about breeding and education have polluted the prostitution debate
o Zoe Williams
o The Guardian, Thursday 9 September 2010
So what turns a middle-class public schoolgirl into a £1,200-a-night escort? That's what the Daily Mail wanted to know when Jennifer Thompson made her large claims about Wayne Rooney. I couldn't at first work out the question … what's a public school education supposed to inoculate one against? Escorting people for money? Fraternising with Rooney? Or charging such a lame amount? (You should charge in round thousands if you want to look classy. That's what they taught us in home economics.)
Of course this is a rhetorical question: a private education isn't meant to teach you specifically how not to be a prostitute. Rather, it is supposed to confer a set of values that would make prostitution an unthinkable proposition. In the very act of paying for something they could get for free (I'm still on the private schools; though nobody's suggesting that Rooney couldn't get laid for free), your parents demonstrate how much they love you. So you should be chock-full of self-esteem, too refined to be an attention-seeker, intelligent enough to know that sex doesn't pay.
Indeed, a private education is held to be a paradox for any woman sleeping with any footballer, getting paid or not. (Rebecca Loos was the daughter of a diplomat: oh the intoxicating irony, that a woman of breeding should do such an ill-bred thing.) Furthermore, an education, fee-paying or not, should alone be enough to keep you out of the sex industries, so long as it's advanced enough. (A GCSE won't do, ladies, not even an A*.)
Well, it isn't enough. Last week it emerged that one in four lapdancers has a degree. This is only news because of an assumption that all sex for money – indeed, all objectification – is abuse. You get into it via ignorance and poverty. Nobody would do it without profound problems of self-worth, and a warped relationship with their own sexuality. Team that with the inescapable idea that anyone selling sex undervalues their own identity in the process, swapping the lived experience for the role of service provider. It's accepted that there's no financial context to selling your body, no sliding scale. It is what it is.
And I always found the opposite view really irritating: the Belle de Jour trope of a high-class hooker, shagging for money but with a great 'do and a Prada bag at the end of it, so what's not to like? This epitomised everything airheaded about "postfeminism", with its coy, tacit, relativist assertion that it's sad when it happens to poor ladies, but emotionally neutral, even a little bit fun, for someone rich and pretty.
Nevertheless, we know instinctively that all types of prostitution are not created equal. Use your own offspring as a test. The idea of your daughter turning tricks in King's Cross is viscerally horrifying: a Belle de Jour type of arrangement doesn't stir the same feelings – terribly upsetting, but a Ralph Miliband-ish "It's against everything I stand for, but at least they're enjoying themselves".
Money changes everything. Something that would be degrading for a tenner isn't for £1,200, just as pickpocketing is tawdry while a jewel heist has a certain panache. Morality, as perceived by society, is indivisible from status, since only in the act of judging do we invest an act with moral weight, and we don't judge from a standing start. Sexual morality is particularly elastic. The cornerstones of the conversation are self-respect and dignity: an act that would be debasing if undertaken in desperation is empowering if you're the winner.
This is not the standard feminist line: the women's movement would have all women selling sex presented as victims of the violent irrepressibility of the male appetite. Yet the endpoint of this argument is that women, certainly in respect of their sexuality, are expected to operate under a bell jar, untainted by market forces, unmoved by money's charisma, heedless of its significance – when it is a given that these things beset and often define the rest of their lives.
And frankly, it is not just prostitutes but all women – particularly young, attractive ones – who are expected to move through the world in a bubble of purity, as though allergic to atavistic urges like competition. We talk about top-end prostitution in the same way as we talk about raunch culture: how could a nice girl consider it? Surely it represents a failure of female empowerment, to see young women measuring their bodies out by the pound, like they're at a car boot sale? But you'd be asking a lot of anybody that they imbibe the cultural values of competitiveness and capitalism yet keep their bodies sacrosanct, for reasons that are opaque and aren't even religious.
I am against sex for money. I think it reinforces the idea that women do sex as a favour to men; and for as long as we think this, the act will always be polluted by coercion of one sort or another. The slag/stud double standard will always hold. But whether or not a young woman with some good A-levels is selling her body couldn't be less relevant: we should be pulling this tree up by the roots, not hassling one of the apples.
Selling sex is bad. But a few A-levels don't make it worse| Zoe Williams | Comment is free | The Guardian
One in four lap dancers has a degree, study finds
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