Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates.
The study is the first to document the role that both parenting and sexual orientation play in the formation of intense and visceral fear of homosexuals, including self-reported homophobic attitudes, discriminatory bias, implicit hostility towards gays, and endorsement of anti-gay policies. Conducted by a team from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara, the research will be published the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
"Individuals who identify as straight but in psychological tests show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves," explains Netta Weinstein, a lecturer at the University of Essex and the study's lead author."In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward," adds co-author Richard Ryan, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who helped direct the research.
The paper includes four separate experiments, conducted in the United States and Germany, with each study involving an average of 160 college students. The findings provide new empirical evidence to support the psychoanalytic theory that the fear, anxiety, and aversion that some seemingly heterosexual people hold toward gays and lesbians can grow out of their own repressed same-sex desires, Ryan says. The results also support the more modern self-determination theory, developed by Ryan and Edward Deci at the University of Rochester, which links controlling parenting to poorer self-acceptance and difficulty valuing oneself unconditionally.
The findings may help to explain the personal dynamics behind some bullying and hate crimes directed at gays and lesbians, the authors argue. Media coverage of gay-related hate crimes suggests that attackers often perceive some level of threat from homosexuals. People in denial about their sexual orientation may lash out because gay targets threaten and bring this internal conflict to the forefront, the authors write.
The research also sheds light on high profile cases in which anti-gay public figures are caught engaging in same-sex sexual acts. The authors cite such examples as Ted Haggard, the evangelical preacher who opposed gay marriage but was exposed in a gay sex scandal in 2006, and Glenn Murphy, Jr., former chairman of the Young Republican National Federation and vocal opponent of gay marriage, who was accused of sexually assaulting a 22-year-old man in 2007, as potentially reflecting this dynamic.
"We laugh at or make fun of such blatant hypocrisy, but in a real way, these people may often themselves be victims of repression and experience exaggerated feelings of threat," says Ryan. "Homophobia is not a laughing matter. It can sometimes have tragic consequences," Ryan says, pointing to cases such as the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard or the 2011 shooting of Larry King.
To explore participants' explicit and implicit sexual attraction, the researchers measured the discrepancies between what people say about their sexual orientation and how they react during a split-second timed task. Students were shown words and pictures on a computer screen and asked to put these in "gay" or "straight" categories. Before each of the 50 trials, participants were subliminally primed with either the word "me" or "others" flashed on the screen for 35 milliseconds. They were then shown the words "gay," "straight," "homosexual," and "heterosexual" as well as pictures of straight and gay couples, and the computer tracked precisely their response times. A faster association of "me" with "gay" and a slower association of "me" with "straight" indicated an implicit gay orientation.
A second experiment, in which subjects were free to browse same-sex or opposite-sex photos, provided an additional measure of implicit sexual attraction.Through a series of questionnaires, participants also reported on the type of parenting they experienced growing up, from authoritarian to democratic. Students were asked to agree or disagree with statements like: "I felt controlled and pressured in certain ways," and "I felt free to be who I am." For gauging the level of homophobia in a household, subjects responded to items like: "It would be upsetting for my mom to find out she was alone with a lesbian" or "My dad avoids gay men whenever possible."
Finally, the researcher measured participants' level of homophobia -- both overt, as expressed in questionnaires on social policy and beliefs, and implicit, as revealed in word-completion tasks. In the latter, students wrote down the first three words that came to mind, for example for the prompt "k i _ _." The study tracked the increase in the amount of aggressive words elicited after subliminally priming subjects with the word "gay" for 35 milliseconds.
Across all the studies, participants with supportive and accepting parents were more in touch with their implicit sexual orientation, while participants from authoritarian homes revealed the most discrepancy between explicit and implicit attraction."In a predominately heterosexual society, 'know thyself' can be a challenge for many gay individuals. But in controlling and homophobic homes, embracing a minority sexual orientation can be terrifying," explains Weinstein. These individuals risk losing the love and approval of their parents if they admit to same sex attractions, so many people deny or repress that part of themselves, she said.
In addition, participants who reported themselves to be more heterosexual than their performance on the reaction time task indicated were most likely to react with hostility to gay others, the studies showed. That incongruence between implicit and explicit measures of sexual orientation predicted a variety of homophobic behaviors, including self-reported anti-gay attitudes, implicit hostility towards gays, endorsement of anti-gay policies, and discriminatory bias such as the assignment of harsher punishments for homosexuals, the authors conclude.
"This study shows that if you are feeling that kind of visceral reaction to an out-group, ask yourself, 'Why?'" says Ryan. "Those intense emotions should serve as a call to self-reflection."
The study had several limitations, the authors write. All participants were college students, so it may be helpful in future research to test these effects in younger adolescents still living at home and in older adults who have had more time to establish lives independent of their parents and to look at attitudes as they change over time.
Sex With Robots
It is predicted that people could be having it away with sex cyborgs within a few years.
Here’s a question that I’m pretty sure you haven’t been asked before. Is a man cheating on his wife if he has sex with a robot?
Come on now — concentrate please. Before long this could be you. It is predicted that people could be having it away with sex cyborgs within a few years. Now two researchers have written a paper for the journal Futures in which they envision Amsterdam brothels populated entirely by lifelike sexbots.
Well, it’s not that hard to imagine. So many men lusted over the digitalised Lara Croft that a foxy robot is only a next step. And I can certainly see some upsides for a betrayed wife. Hard to have a weeping snot-filled meltdown when your love rival is made of wipe-clean, bacteria-resistant fibre, possibly with a coin-operated slot in the back of her head. Less of an imperative to file for divorce when you realise your husband got it on with an STD-free, serial-numbered mannequin rather than a real, live prostitute, possibly on antibiotics. Yes, it would bruise the ego to be usurped by a pouty version of Wall-E but I’m not sure you could class it as actual adultery. Ask Coleen who she’d rather Wayne had done: R2D2 or Juci Jeni.
Which brings me to Barack Obama’s bodyguards who are currently embroiled in a prostitution scandal. Some apparently decided to pursue some extra-curricular activities during a visit to Colombia, leading to one woman complaining to the police that she hadn’t been paid and all 12 men being sent back to the US. It’s bad enough that the Secret Services’ finest allegedly behaved like Newcastle lads on a stag weekend but the real cock-up was that they exposed themselves to the threat of blackmail.
You see, here’s another way sexbots could help humans run their lives more smoothly. Secret agents, politicians, TV actors: they could all fill their boots without fear of extortion or a kiss-and-tell story appearing in the papers. They need never whisper the word “superinjunction”.
They’d have what the researchers suggest would be a “guilt-free experience” with their low-maintenance mistress requiring little more than — what? The odd squirt of WD-40?
And yet. Remember the woman who left her husband because she believed he had fallen in love with an online avatar in Second Life, the internet game? People, especially men, can get over-fond of their gadgets. Forty years ago scientists noted that some students became unusually attracted to ELIZA, a computer program designed to mimic a psychotherapist.
David Levy, a University of Maastricht robotics researcher, has long predicted that “robots will become so human-like in appearance, function and personality that many people will fall in love with them, have sex with them and even marry them”. What’s more he believes Massachusetts will legalise human-robot marriage by 2050.
No. This is too weird now. Not least because the human race could die out if even women are running home at night to the arms of their Metal Mickey. It’s one thing to not judge a person for having coitus with a robot, quite another to have to attend their wedding clutching His and Hers John Lewis towels.
The Changing Porn Industry
In a grand suburban house on a quiet cul-de-sac in California's San Fernando Valley an actor is having a problem with her moans. Alexa Nicole (her professional name) is playing the role of a Latin beauty in A Love Story, a pornographic film about an author of romance novels suffering from writer's block. They are shooting a fantasy sequence in which Alexa wanders the darkened corridors of the house in a white nightie, carrying a large candlestick. She stumbles into the arms of her forbidden lover, Miguel, played by rising star Xander Corvus, clad in leather trousers, frilly blouse and waistcoat. Helpless in the heat of passion, they make love on the chaise longue.
But there is a small issue. Alexa's rapid high-pitched squeals of pleasure aren't up to the exacting standards of the film's director.
"Less porno," he says. By way of illustration he offers a different read – less urgent, more ladylike. "Yes, yes, yes!" Then he announces his keyword for the day: "Romantico!"
A Love Story is a new title by the high-end adult movie studio Wicked Picture. And for the world of "adult", the emphasis on the moans is a giveaway that it is not a typical sex film.
For years the porn industry was dominated by an anarchic anything-goes attitude to sex. Directors competed to see who could stage the more outrageous stunts, pushing the performers to the limit of what their bodies could take. The scenes could be hard to watch, as I discovered for myself when I visited sets for a book I was writing in 2004. The sex acts seemed to owe more to reality shows where people eat live worms and pig vomit than anything conventionally erotic.
But some time around 2007, the "business of X" started going into a commercial tailspin. The arrival of free YouTube-style porn sites meant that consumers could download pirated scenes from the vast backlog of old content for free. The phenomenon of DIY amateur sex – part-timers uploading their videos on sites such as clips4sale – also put a dent in the professionals' pay cheques.
Suddenly an industry that was a byword for easy money, raking in billions by exploiting the anonymity of point-and-click purchasing, was fighting for its life.
Making the problems of "adult" even worse was that where consumers might feel enough loyalty to, say, Radiohead to buy their latest release rather than download it illegally, porn users don't have the same feelings about the Dirty Debutantes series. In essence, as with every other media evolution of the last 30 years, from VHS to DVDs to the birth of the internet, porn was once again leading the way, only this time into obsolescence.
And as goes the industry, so go the performers. It's well known that many of them come into porn looking for validation, fleeing lives of damage and abuse. They then sign up to a lifestyle that inflicts stress and illness, not to mention embarrassment, on its young foot soldiers, while offering nothing in the way of pensions and health insurance. Now they find themselves out of work, looking for a Plan B, when the only experience on their resumé is having sex for cash.
On the business side, the porn industry has been desperately trying to adapt. Partly this has been a simple case of cutting back massively. In the early 2000s, a typical issue of the industry bible, the monthly Adult Video News, might have contained hundreds of reviews of new releases. One recent example had just 14. Numerous companies have gone out of business.
Those movie companies that remain are focusing increasingly on high-end product, trying to beat the illegal sites by providing something like a cinematic experience. There is a flight into "quality". In an uncanny echo of a recent BBC slogan, they are embracing the idea of "Fewer, Bigger, Better". For some, this means more female-orientated scenes with less angry sex. Hence A Love Story. For others, it means parodies – of popular TV shows and recent blockbusters.
One of the unlikeliest figures in the new reinvented industry – and a one-man indicator of how much it has changed – is Rob Zicari, better known as Rob Black. In the 90s, Black was one of the most notorious provocateurs in porn. He specialised in tastelessness; his films were more like grotesque exercises in taboo-breaking than anything anyone might conceivably watch for sexual pleasure.
In 1997 I interviewed him in his office in LA and visited him on the set of a production entitled Forced Entry, a film about rape. He was only 23 at the time and I was struck by the strange contrast of his being a friendly, intelligent guy – albeit in an over-caffeinated way – while making porn films that specialised in degrading women. Six years later, Black's provocations caught up with him during George Bush's "war on obscenity" (the war's two other casualties were Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson, when she exposed her nipple in a dance routine during the Superbowl).
Black and his wife and business partner Janet Romano (better know as Lizzie Borden) did a year each in federal jail for obscenity. Post-prison, a chastened Black has put his Sadean grotesqueries behind him. Now he directs superhero parodies for a mainstream porn company called Vivid – Captain America XXX, Iron Man XXX – in glossy two-disc sets, some of them in 3D.
"Where the business is going now is it's acceptable to sit down with your wife and girlfriend and introduce her to pornography," he tells me during a visit to his new offices. "But the stuff you're going to introduce them to is the stuff I'm making."
He shows me the suit he had used for his Iron Man parody. I remark that in porn terms, it is an impressive prop. "Dude, the suit cost like four grand!" he says. Then, picking up one of his CD cases, in mock-awe at its resemblance to a "real movie", he says: "Look at that! That's a porno!"
Black is adept at putting a positive spin on the retrenchment that porn had undergone. But he appears somewhat ravaged and looks older than his 38 years. He has the air of someone who has been through something that hasn't killed him, but which hasn't made him stronger either.
If times are hard for the Rob Blacks of porn, they're worse still for the men on screen. Even with the superhero parodies and the couples films, and the lower-paid work doing scenes for pay-sites, there is still nowhere near enough employment for the hordes of performers who hope to make a living getting paid to have sex on camera.
At one of the top LA agencies for performers, LA Direct, the accountant Francine Amidor laments the "devastating" impact of piracy. "There's less work, and there's an abundance – because of the economy – of performers. There aren't enough people shooting to give everybody a day's work."
I put it to Amidor that she owes it to the young aspirants who still make their way to the LA Direct offices to explain the consequences of their decision. She demurs. "Because then I would talk three quarters of the girls out of the business and then we wouldn't be in business."
Fees for scenes, not surprisingly, have taken a hit. "Some girls get $600 [£390] for a scene now," the retired performer JJ Michaels tells me. "It might be $900-$1,000 for a big-name girl. It used to get up to $3,000." For guys, rates can be $150 or lower.
Women supplement their income by stripping and doing live shows over the internet, shot from home on their webcams. One evening I visit one of LA Direct's top performers, Kagney Linn Karter – star of Racktastic and Pound Round – at her house as she prepares for her bi-monthly live show. Her boyfriend and full-time assistant Monte is hanging up her dresses while Kagney bathes and puts on her makeup. Monte and I then retreat to the kitchen where he tidies and wipes down surfaces while Kagney strips on her bed and masturbates in front of the strangers viewing her through her laptop. Forty-five minutes later, she emerges. "Well, I made a hundred dollars," she says brightly.
It's an open secret in the porn world that many female performers are supplementing their income by "hooking on the side". It's also called "doing privates", as in private bookings. The official industry line is that it's dangerous (because clients aren't tested the way performers are) and irresponsible (because the women could then infect the closed community of professional performers). But the women can make far more money having sex behind closed doors than doing it on film and, in fact, the practice is widespread. For many female performers nowadays, the movies are merely a sideline, a kind of advertising for their real business of prostitution.
Male performers do not have the same options. For a tiny subsection of top talent, there is still a regular pay cheque, albeit a shrinking one. But work has dried up for many of the journeyman-performers in the lower ranks and there is a great deal of anxiety across the board.
In the 90s one of the best-known male performers was Jon Dough – birth name Chet Anuszak. He was on contract with Vivid – the only man in the business to be exclusive to a company at that time. He had a reputation for being a dependable "woodsman" and was well liked in adult circles. I interviewed him in 1996 on the set of a remake of Debbie Does Dallas. But when he killed himself in 2006 at the age of 43 it was widely assumed that the woes of the industry – and specifically declining DVD sales – played a role.
Jon Dough's widow is a fellow performer whose stage name is Monique DeMoan. They met on the set of Dr Butts 3: The Anal Asylum and eventually had a daughter together. No one in the world of porn knows Monique's whereabouts but I tracked her down to a conservative state many hundreds of miles – physically, culturally – from Los Angeles.
Standing in the low-ceilinged basement flat in an insalubrious area, she says that her husband killed himself over his cocaine addiction, and the instability and sense of failure that went with it, not because of the pressures of the industry. Still, the perception among Dough's peers that DVD sales were a factor reflects an emotional truth: people in the world of porn were all too ready to believe that a top performer might have killed himself over the decline of a media format.
Still they arrive, the cohorts of aspiring performers, looking for new lives of wealth and stardom in a world that can no longer offer either. If Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian can make sex tapes, they ask, then why shouldn't they? They tour the production companies for meet-and-greets with casting agents and directors, tick boxes on questionnaires about what they are willing to do on camera. They make one or two low-end scenes for the internet, before being chucked back into anonymity.
On a rainy day, back on the same spacious suburban house on the quiet street in the valley where A Love Story was filmed, another production is under way. This time, it is a more modest affair – a few scenes made for an internet site. One of the male performers is a young man on his second shoot, performing under the name Tony Prince.
His partner for the scene is called Stefania. It is her third shoot and she seems excited to have press around. "I'm trying to become one of the big porn stars," she says. She asks to take a picture with me, which she later tweets.
The scene is supposed to look like a real-life boyfriend and girlfriend sex tape. One advantage of this is that there is no need for a cameraman. The performers shoot the action themselves. While they got down to business, to alleviate any possible performance anxiety on Tony's part, the director and I make ourselves scarce in the kitchen. He has been in the business since 1998, and he too is pessimistic about its future. "It's like I tell guys all the time, you better make this your side gig," he says.
A few hours later, the two performers are laughing and showering together, both happy with how the shoot had gone. In a reversal of the usual order of things, they are flirting and becoming friends after sex.
Where the industry will end up is hard to predict. Clearly there is still a market for softcore movies made by companies such as Penthouse and Hustler, available on subscription channels. The parodies may continue for a while, too. But it is difficult to see how a business selling hardcore movies and even internet clips is sustainable when most people simply don't want to pay if they don't have to. To many people, when it comes to porn, not paying for content seems the more moral thing to do.
"The way it is now, within five years I don't see how there could be a professional porn actor," Michaels tells me. It's not easy to sympathise with the porn companies, which made so much money for so long by embracing a tawdry business and a dysfunctional work-pool. But it is worth sparing a thought for the legions of performers, qualified for nothing much more than having sex on camera, who have no money saved, and no future.
And there is also the wider question: do those who use porn not, perhaps, owe it a little something? Should those who download it not be ready to pass on a little cash incentive to the business? And if not, why not? Does the stigma attached to porn make it OK to steal it? These questions underpin a much bigger dilemma being faced by all media: how do you sustain an industry that provides a certain standard of product – be it journalism, music, or mainstream movies, or X-rated movies – when more and more consumers are in the habit of downloading content for free? In the world of porn, the answer is: you can't.
Prostitution
‘In the 21st century, it is odd that we are still confused and panicky about women being paid to have sex’
This week is all about the Olympics prostitutes. This is not, sadly, a new part of Team GB, but a massive crackdown on prostitution in advance of the London Olympics instead.
Sex workers’ pressure group x:talk has drawn attention to the fact that, in the past year, 80 brothels have been closed down in the Olympic borough of Newham, and that these “clean-up” initiatives are putting sex workers at risk – forced out of brothels and familiar soliciting areas and into new and more remote locations, away from the Games.
Firstly, I am surprised that sex workers are being moved away from the Olympic site. If there’s anything I’ve learnt, over the years, about multibillion-pound events – involving thousands of international sponsors and dignitaries, on a massive month-long corporate freebie to a foreign city, away from their wives and children – it’s that a lot of them will definitely be up for a prostitute at the end of the evening.
Frankly, I’m surprised they’re not bussing more prostitutes into Newham – perhaps in those “priority” Games lanes that VIPs can use, but buses and ambulances can’t. Just to make sure the prostitutes get there fast, while they’re still hot. No one wants to take delivery of a cold prostitute. That would be dispiriting.
The whole issue of prostitution in the 21st century is a bemusing one. I’ve sat here for a long time now, with this cup of tea, and in all honesty, I cannot see any logic in prostitution still being, essentially, illegal. In Britain, you recall, it’s legal to sell sex – but illegal either to solicit on a street corner or work in a brothel, essentially making it impossible to earn a living without putting yourself at continual risk, somewhere hidden from police detection/protection.
Why is prostitution treated with such revulsion? Why, in an era of space travel and string theory, do we still have women standing on the side of A-roads at 2am: like sacrifices offered to the bad men out there? When a woman’s murder is announced on the news, there’s often an odd relief that follows the phrase “…and a known sex worker”.
Because those are the girls who kind of… do get murdered, don’t they? We build a certain amount of inevitable death into their statistics. Not like civil servants, or teachers, or nurses. And not like any male profession on Earth. No legal job that men do has an implicit acceptance of being beaten, raped or murdered. That one is solely for the women who get paid for sex.
Of course, I understand why prostitution used to be socially unacceptable – how those girls got so ill-regarded and disposable. In the days before contraception and antibiotics, society needed women who would run the risk of syphilis, abortion and death in childbirth in exchange for cash. For a woman in a pre-medical age, sex was as risky as going to war, and prostitutes were the serving soldiers.We thought of them as expendable because, essentially, they were. Before condoms were disposable, women were, instead.
Plus, on top of that, we can’t forget religion. Oh, religion. So good, for so long, at architecture; so weird, for so long, about sex. Man-made rules, done up to look like ineffable laws of nature. It’s wrong to pay for sex? Why? Because [vaguely] the Moon will not like it.
So, in the 21st century, it is odd that we are still confused and panicky about women being paid to have sex. Banishing them to industrial estates at 4am, out of a medieval strain of fear, or spite. We have contraception and safe sex and antibiotics, now. We know the Moon does not mind us having sex. For the first time in mankind’s history, sex has no overtones of death, disease or pregnancy. Sex is just sex. The health and safety regulations on running a modern brothel are, amusingly, identical to those for running a municipal swimming pool. Being a miner is physically more dangerous; being a personal assistant to Anna Wintour more injurious to your sense of self-worth.
We will pay people to love our newborns and nurse our elderly, even as they die – and yet, of all the daily, normal things humans do, it is sex, and sex alone, we consider to be above legal business. Beyond monetary compensation.
It can’t be because we think women must be forced, by law, only to have sex with someone they love or desire – that women must only ever enjoy sex. We’ve never been either that innocent, or that enlightened. Hundreds of thousands of years have shown us that women cope, effortlessly, with having joyless sex – whether it’s in exchange for money or not. The sex isn’t, and never has been, the problem.
All Men Have Looked At Porn
Researchers were conducting a study comparing the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users.
But their project stumbled at the first hurdle when they failed to find a single man who had not been seen it. “We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography,” said Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse. “We couldn't find any.”
Although hampered in its original aim, the study did examined the habits of those young men who used pornography – which would appear to be all of them. Prof Lajeunesse interviewed 20 heterosexual male university students who consumed pornography, and found on average, they first watched pornography when they were 10 years old.
Prof Lajeunesse said pornography did not have a negative effect on men's sexuality. “Not one subject had a pathological sexuality,” he said. “In fact, all of their sexual practices were quite conventional. “Pornography hasn't changed their perception of women or their relationship, which they all want to be as harmonious and fulfilling as possible,” he added.
Vagina The Word
The cover of the feminist Naomi Wolf’s new book, Vagina: A New Biography, shows a curving black “V” sprouting, from its depths, a tulip. Below runs the word “vagina” in large black type. The book, out in September, will argue that the vagina is far more than just a sex organ, it is integral in myriad ways to a woman’s wellbeing. When I saw its cover, I squirmed. When I showed it to friends, they also squirmed. Or giggled nervously. Or snorted. We’re no prudes, but the sight and sound of that word sent queasy shivers down the spine. Vagina? Nothing to do with us.
In America, things appear to be different. The Los Angeles Times recently decreed the word “vagina” fashionable. The headline read: “‘Vagina’, once unmentionable, has become a fashionable term”. The article discussed the hit HBO comedy series Girls, in which four twentysomethings discuss their genitalia, among other things, very frankly. Undoubtedly the show has helped make bodily bluntness cool for women — well, hipster urban types, anyway. But Girls is not yet airing in Britain, and it’s hard to imagine a homegrown equivalent — imagine the Made in Chelsea or Towie girls talking about their vaginal twinges or starting sentences with: “Today my vagina feels...”
Our continued V-word aversion is curious, though. In the 16 years since Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues was first staged, vaginas, including British ones, have been busier than ever. The green light on casual sex has grown brighter, the internet has spread access to porn at an unprecedented rate and, last year, the National Union of Students expressed concerns about a rise in women turning to prostitution to fund their studies. And when our parts aren’t being viewed or engaged, they’re out and about being waxed or lasered or vajazzled. Saying “vagina” these days should really be no harder than saying “breast” or “ear”.
Yet it is much harder — and less pleasant. Admittedly, vagina is not a great-sounding term — something about the stretched “i”, I think. But is it really so much worse than penis, its more acceptable colleague? It appears so. Unlike penis, vagina is a word with absolutely no friends, reviled and acne-ridden in the corner, only wheeled out — and reluctantly at that — for doctors. Even Oprah, defender of womankind, couldn’t bring herself to say it, famously calling it a vajayjay on air. And in Fifty Shades of Grey, the blockbuster erotic novel packed with kinky sex, “down there” is about as graphic as it gets for the lady nether regions.
An otherwise mature 49-year-old man told me this when I tested the word on him: “Vagina conjures up biology lessons, hospitals, medical things (not in a good way), your mum talking to you about sex, feminists, big bush with little or no topiary, seriousness. I guess like penis, but much worse.” Lucy, 30, explained: “Vagina is a rank word — no idea why, but it is.”
Could it be that, even in these sex-positive times, people also find vaginas themselves rather rank? Plenty of experts say yes. Susan Quilliam, the co-author of the revised Joy of Sex, believes that “people are still afraid of the vagina. There’s a fear, to this day, of being swallowed and bitten. It’s seen as this magical hole, it can swallow things up. If you go in, will you ever go out — that sort of thing”. Erika Christakis, a public health advocate at Harvard, recently wrote in The Huffington Post of the “awkward code of silence around vagina-talk”, which, in the pre-Vagina Monologue days, anyway, “translated into a feeling that it wasn’t only women’s sexual parts, but also women’s sexual feelings that weren’t totally legit”.
These days there’s little shyness about women as sexual beings, but perhaps something has gone wrong with what “sexual” means. More than a decade ago, Germaine Greer wrote in The Whole Woman: “The sanitised, odourised, sterilised, always accessible vagina and womb are more, not less, passive than they ever were.” And in her controversial book Pornland, Gail Dines speaks to young women about their boyfriend’s preferences, only to hear that many of the guys think unwaxed vaginas “looked gross”.
The plot thickens, of course, when you consider the alternatives to the V-word. They range from the appalling (slobbering bulldog, smelly jelly hole, dead-end street), to the completely ridiculous (under-dimple, silk igloo), to the pathetic (flower, la-la), to the unrealistic in a bedroom situation (quim, yoni). As Rowan Pelling, former editor of the Erotic Review, says: “We are 100 years from the suffragettes’ movement. Women have done so many incredible things, we’ve had a female prime minister, but we cannot find a name for our own private parts. And mothers don’t help. They give it these awful words — really weird and naff — like ‘la-la’. It’s as if the vagina is so scary, nobody knows what to call it, so they give it these ridiculous names.” This lack of vocabulary is at best irritating and at worst severely problematic for everything from sexual health to achieving orgasm. A gynaecologist at UCL Hospital, London, tells me that her patients have trouble naming their genitalia at all. “Sometimes they call it things like ‘flower’. But after I refer to it as vagina, they’re usually able to use that word, too.”
Our bits are complicated. Lacking decent terms for them makes them more so. After all, how can you know and enjoy your nethers properly if you can’t describe them comfortably to yourself or a partner? Melissa Tapper Goldman, maker of Subjectified, a documentary about sexual attitudes among young American women, found that even the most sexually experienced women were tongue-tied when it came to naming their genitals. “I think this is about the fact that a lot of women do not identify with their genitals, don’t know what they look like, don’t know the different parts, or functions, or even sensations. Having language for things is extremely important, both functionally and in terms of making us comfortable with the concepts behind the words. What would it be like if we had a good word to scream in the bedroom, or point to, or organise instructions around?”
The mind boggles. But as we continue on our merry, vajazzling, wax-happy way, the “vagina” taboo will undoubtedly persist. Janet Reibstein, a professor of psychology at Exeter University, says: “Sex is portrayed terribly impersonally today, but the word vagina is still incredibly hard to say, because the thing itself remains so inescapably personal.”
Even if Wolf’s book can’t make people shout vagina from the rooftops, or provide us with a better alternative, it will, at least, give a good kick in the ovaries to anyone who underestimates the importance of our silk igloos. And that’s got to be a good thing, especially now.
By any other name
Pooh Bear
Jigglypuff
Foofy bird
Tinkleflower
Fifi
Fala
Daisy
Wild slapping man eater
Kebab
Lady garden
Madame’s secret grotto
Pink taco
Vajayjay
Hoo haa
Flange
Bald man in a boat
What they say
‘After I had done The Vagina Monologues I was feeling pretty good about my vagina. I thought I was kind of home free, and then I looked down one day and discovered my not-so-flat, post-40 stomach and I realised the self-hatred had moved up.’ Eve Ensler.
‘Woman sees a connection to the male, but she understands that her vagina is not the lack of penis, but the source of her Otherness.’ Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex.
‘The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the centre. She is occupied — physically, internally, in her privacy.’ Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse.
‘There are some women who feel their most sexual with their vaginas waxed, their labia trimmed, their breasts enlarged, and their garments flossy and scant. I am happy for them. But there are many other women (and, yes, men) who feel constrained in this environment, who would be happier and feel hotter... if they explored other avenues of expression and entertainment.’ Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs.
Why Men Go To Sleep
It is the excuse men have been looking for. Scientists have discovered that men simply cannot help falling asleep after having sex — because their brains are pre-programmed to switch off.
They have used advanced brain-scanning techniques to watch what happens in men’s brains during and after they have an orgasm.
They saw how, during orgasm itself, almost the entire cerebral cortex, the “thinking” part of the brain, simply shut down. Then, immediately afterwards, two other parts of the brain, the temporal cortex and amygdala, sent a message to the rest of the brain to deactivate all further sexual desire.
All this was accompanied by a surge of brain chemicals such as oxytocin and dopamine. These act like opiates, numbing the brain and inducing a powerful surge of sleepiness.The deactivation of all sexual desire, said Dr Serge Stoléru, the French government scientist behind the research, was hard for any man to resist — even when the men’s partners were keen to carry on.
However, far from being infuriated by such behaviour, Stoléru’s research suggests, women should be tolerant — recognising men cannot help needing a rest. “After men have an orgasm they usually experience a refractory period when they cannot be aroused,” said Stoléru, who leads a group at Inserm (the French medical research council), which specialises in using brain scanning to study the neuroscience of sex. He added: “For women it seems to be different. They don’t seem to have such a strong refractory period and they may well be asking for more when their partners just want a rest.”
Another key researcher in the same field is Janniko Georgiadis, professor of neuroscience at Groningen University in Holland.
He did a series of experiments in which men were fitted with an “erectometer”, a ring-shaped device with pressure sensors that could detect the level of arousal. The men were then placed in a brain scanner and stimulated by their partners. The scientists, who were in another room, observed the changing levels of activation in different parts of the men’s brains — and matched these with the output of the erectometer.
He said: “Some areas like the cortex deactivate just before and during orgasm. We don’t know why but we speculate it has to do with mental and cognitive transitions that happen during orgasm.”
Such events appeared to be similar in both men and women — but what happened afterwards could be very different. Georgiadis has written in a paper that: “The final phase of the sexual response cycle is the satiety phase — or post-ejaculatory refractory period (Pert) as it is known in the field of sexual science.
“Here there may be fundamental gender differences. In men the Pert is a robust biological event. As a consequence, achieving multiple orgasms in a single sexual session is quite rare in men." “The female post-orgasmic period is, however, far less ubiquitous, and women may be able to achieve multiple orgasms in one session.”
Paedoes Everywhere
This new era of draconian prudishness is insane. I pine for the old days when nakedness was neither sinister nor bizarre.
It was Thursday afternoon last week when it happened. I was in the changing rooms of my local sports centre, alone but for another gent of similar age, a stranger to me, but like me, towelling down post-shower.
The door suddenly swung open and in marched two diminutive figures. Children, both boys, no more than 9 or 10 years of age, who immediately began to change into their sports kit before us.
I and my still equally sodden companion gave each other a similar look of sheer stultifying panic before diving beneath the changing benches and scrambling around through shampoo bottles, trainers and trouser belts to cover ourselves up as completely and quickly as possible. I got out of the room first, wearing wet denims and a hoodie with no T-shirt underneath, but sighing with relief all the same.
And the reason? There is a large, conspicuous sign in the changing room warning that, “Children must not be allowed to undress in the men’s changing room. They must use the ‘family room’ instead.” This, of course, is an anti-paedophile thing. But it’s also insane (and mildly sexist too). The implication here, naturally, is that the male changing room is a dark and prurient hive of sinister sexual abandon rather than just a place where most blokes try to have a quick shower while half-hiding their willies.
And the secondary implication, more bizarre still, and the reason for the aforementioned mad dash, is the possibility that one of the little darlings might be traumatised by the sight of two old-looking guys trying to dry their pee-pee men in public without being surrounded by a Swat team, several German shepherds and a couple of cattle prods.
And it’s not just changing rooms, either. It’s bathing ponds in London parks, where attendants will unashamedly approach you and tell you to keep your children fully clothed at all times. Because? Well, you know. The paedos. They’re everywhere.
Or it’s the relatively recent and precautionary installation of CCTV cameras in the toilets of more than 200 UK schools (no, that’s not creepy at all). Or it’s the common airline policy that doesn’t allow unaccompanied minors to sit next to adult males on aircraft journeys. Because? Well, you know. Or it’s that familiar phalanx of angsty mothers with pushchairs who regularly barge their way through to the front of the poolside shower in most sports centres just to make sure that it doesn’t get all, well, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
And yet the greatest irony in this new era of draconian prudishness is that it has been manufactured precisely at a time when our culture has never been more sexualised. Our children, the very ones who have to be shielded from human nakedness at all costs, seem to have the choice between watching people having real sex on the internet, watching people having pretend sex in promos, videos, clips, movies, commercials and so on, then fearfully regarding every other person around them as potential sex maniacs. Well done, modern society. Thank you. That’s a result.
It makes me pine for the old days. Say, the early Eighties. The male changing room at my local swimming pool was, by today’s standards, impossibly evil, or at least a hateful non-consensual gang-bang waiting to happen.
There were men everywhere. No cubicles. All naked. All hairy. And all shapes and sizes. But, equally, there was nothing to report. I was never once felt-up, squeezed, rubbed, prodded or groped. Instead, the changing room was nothing more sinister and nothing more bizarre than a place in which to change and a place, for a limited time only, where the willies hung out.
The Health Benefits of Sex
That common bedroom excuse - a headache - needs to be turned upside down, sexologist Shelley Hiestand says, because headaches can be cured by sex.
It is just one of the many health benefits derived from frequent sexual activity, says Dr Hiestand, formerly from Dunedin.
The 46-year-old Las Vegas resident has made a career out of giving doctor's orders more agreeable than most.
"I definitely encourage people to have more sex."
Dr Hiestand said those aged under 25 should aim for more than once a day and those between 25 and 30 at least once daily.
Accordingly, those between 30 and 40 should have sex at least four times a week, and anyone over 40 at least thrice weekly.
"The anti-ageing benefits are amazing. It basically doubles your life span once you get to your 60s and 70s.
"I'm 46 and my husband is almost 64. We've been married almost 20 years and make sure we have sex at least once a day." Dr Hiestand said research - including her own - showed frequent sexual activity reduced the risk of breast and prostate cancer, helped cardiovascular health and eliminated stress.
"The more sex people have, the more energetic, less depressed and more able to cope with life they are. It is the best stress relief. It helps women go through menopause easier because it balances hormone levels, and it increases libido."
She encouraged women especially to change their attitude to sex, from thinking of it as a chore to focusing on its benefits.
Marital Bliss
Around the world, the search continues for solutions to the top-ranking sex problem facing women - loss of desire.
Drug companies are seeking a pink Viagra, a drug to boost female libido. The stakes are high, with some surveys suggesting more than half of all women experience fading desire in long-term relationships. Marital distress is inevitable when women lie in bed at night dreading the hand creeping towards them.
The latest cabs off the rank are Lybrido and Lybridos, explains Daniel Bergner, whose book What Do Women Want? - Adventures in the Science of Female Desire will be published next week. These new drugs are very sensibly targeting activity not just between women's legs but between their ears.
Writing recently in The New York Times, Bergner described research on the biochemical ingredients governing sexual desire, the balance between the lust-inducing dopamine rush produced by testosterone and the inhibiting effects of serotonin. Lybrido has a testosterone coating that melts in the mouth before the woman swallows a delayed-release tablet containing a Viagra-like substance that increases blood flow in the genitals. In Lybridos, the Viagra-like molecule is replaced by an anti-anxiety medication that suppresses serotonin.
Results of initial trials of both drugs are looking good and are soon to be presented to the US Federal Drug Authority, which is likely to require larger trials. If all goes well, these new drugs will hit the market around 2016, no doubt to be snapped up by huge numbers of women.
An Adelaide professor ran a trial for another libido-enhancing drug and had women contacting him from all over Australia, desperate to get on board. Yet many others won't be interested. For every woman keen for a solution to her lost libido, there are others who wouldn't dream of popping a little pink pill to enhance sexual desire. There are plenty of women happy to shut up shop, simply refusing to have sex - and expecting their husbands to just suck it up.
Controversy surrounds the clinical definition of low libido in women (hypoactive sexual desire disorder), which only includes women who see their diminished drive as a problem - that is, it causes them personal distress. Only 10 to 15 per cent of women meet the criteria for HSSD - while surveys that include women not bothered by their low libido can hit nearly 60per cent. The Sex in Australia survey of nearly 20,000 people found 55 per cent of women reported low desire.
Does it really make sense to dismiss low desire if the woman regards it as no big deal? If a couple visited a therapist because the woman was complaining the man was a premature ejaculator, the fact that it didn't bother him wouldn't be regarded as grounds for ignoring the problem. Surely the impact of any issue detracting from a harmonious sex life deserves proper attention.
This is not to suggest low-sex-drive women are obliged to consider drug treatment. But many regard it as outrageous to even suggest there is any obligation on the woman to consider her partner's needs.
A few years ago, when I published The Sex Diaries, howls of protest greeted my suggestion that women might sometimes ''just do it'' since new Canadian research had shown desire can kick in once lovemaking begins, leading to sexual pleasure for women. ''Bettina Arndt - Rape Cheerleader!'' shrieked one blogger, ignoring the fact that I had always said men too must ''just do it'' if they are the ones rejecting their partners.
The crazy thing is women do so much to please their partners. They cook lavish three-course meals and spend hours searching shopping centres for his favourite Y-fronts when a 10-minute bonk every so often would make their man a lot happier than a lot of the things they do for him. It's not as if making love is such a big ask - it's not like cleaning an oven. A female doctor wrote to me saying she tells her female patients, ''It's not root canal therapy!''
There's a lesson here for young men choosing a long-term partner. They shouldn't just go for the sexiest chick, hoping the tap won't ever turn off. As Bergner explains, there's solid evidence that while most couples in new relationships start off with equal lust for each other, after a few years female drive often goes into a dive, leaving male desire far higher. A man would be far better off finding a woman who sees it as part of her responsibility to keep sex on the agenda, maybe even one who wouldn't baulk at sometimes popping a little pink pill.
The truly lucky man is blessed with a sexually generous woman, one who believes in taking one for the team.
Landscaping
Posing starkers from the waist down for a photographer may not seem like an act of feminism, but when the creative agency Mother London launched Project Bush — a call for women to get their short and curlies snapped for an art exhibition — the sisterhood mobilised. “Most of the 93 participants took part because they care how women are portrayed in porn, film and fashion,” says Alisa Connan, the project photographer. “It’s not very often that you see anything but a Hollywood or a Brazilian.” The point of Project Bush, says the campaign’s (female) creative director, Alex Holder, is to “get a few more pictures of normal fannies out there. We are not saying the Brazilian is bad, we are just pro-choice. We want to shift a few opinions.”
The bush as a feminist symbol is complex: some claim that the unveiled fanny in all its naked glory is a statement of pride (“Why hide it?”), but it’s about what it takes to manicure it into this hairless state. Who can truly say that the monthly task of getting a Brazilian — kneeling on all fours with cheeks held apart so that the beautician can deforest one’s pant-beard, at considerable expense, pain, humiliation and ingrowing hairs — is done for their own satisfaction? Shaving is barely much kinder.
Yet, for women under 35, it’s the mainstream look. According to Holder, this generation claims to do it because it’s cleaner, though, “When you peel back the layers, it comes down to, ‘He won’t sleep with me if I don’t have a Brazilian.’ There was an incensed feeling that hair removal is a bloody hassle, yet it’s something we are absolutely expected to do.” For younger girls, the pressure is less penis, more peers. Bryony Stone, a twentysomething intern at the art gallery Mother, says: “Girls grow up with enormous pressure at school, thinking, ‘I have to do that.’ It’s like shaving your legs.”
The generational aspect is corroborated by the rise of celebrity “gifting”, or fanny flashing. It’s clear to see that Miley Cyrus shaves hers, while Kate Moss, Charlotte Rampling and Vivienne Westwood currently keep it obediently within the pants. Gwyneth talks about her “1970s vibe”, and if Caitlin Moran is not sporting a “big, hairy minge”, as she has called for all other women to do, then the Pope is not a Catholic.
So what did the photographer see? The fact that this is a family newspaper prevents us from showing you the nitty-gritty, but Connan says: “A certain type responded — they were either proud of what they had or wanted to make a statement.” Predictably, the twentysomethings were the most groomed, with conspicuous exceptions. Natasha Lees, 27, is pleased with her pubes. She used to shave them off — “Our generation is very affected by images in the media” — but now sports a neat knicker triangle. Baring all was “more high- maintenance”, she says. “It didn’t feel natural. I felt I was being infantilised.” To her, the bush represents sexuality, and her girlfriend “puts up with whatever”. Lees senses an insecurity among her peers: “There’s a competitiveness to be the most preened, the most sexually attractive and hairless.”
And what of men’s role in all this? “We had mixed reactions from men,” says Katie Mackay, co-director of the project. “Some said, ‘Please don’t bring down the Brazilian’, but, actually, most said, ‘I’m not sure what to say because I don’t want to say the wrong thing.’ ” Another participant, Layla, 26, who has experimented with both extremes, from the Brian Blessed to the Hollywood, noticed that men never commented on her full bush, but thought being shaved was hot. “That’s because of porn,” she says, “But then, it’s more intimate and it makes me feel hotter, too.” Certainly, there are teenage boys who have never seen pubic hair on women other than their mother — no wonder it’s a turn-off for them. But perhaps choice is opening up in the pant department. A fortysomething who asked to remain anonymous believes that since ladyscaping, like tanning, has come to be associated with “lower social orders”, its desirability is waning: “Towie killed the Brazilian — there’s a nostalgia for a purer model.” What’s more, the rise of user-generated porn makes for a much more mixed bag of bushes. Viva la vajungle.
Homophobia
The Principles of the Olympic Movement speak of the joy of effort, social responsibility and fundamental ethical principles. Its Principle Six says that any form of discrimination “on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise” is incompatible with membership.
So if you see the snowboarder Belle Brockhoff, the Australian men’s bobsled team and some two dozen other Olympians sporting red hoodies with a 6, it is a protest against Russia’s stance on homosexuality. It follows the rainbow flag that got Pavel Lebedev arrested at the torch relay and Stephen Fry’s more extreme demand that Russia be stripped of the Winter Olympics because of its refusal to outlaw discrimination and its loosely worded law against “propagandising” — which makes many public gatherings and much writing illegal.
Now we have President Putin protesting that there has been no law against gay sex itself since 1993 but he throws fuel on the fire by talking about “promoting homosexuality and paedophilia”. His sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, adds: “We want to protect our children whose psyches have not formed from the propaganda of drug use, drunkenness and non-traditional sexual relations.”
I am not, today, sticking my tuppenceworth into the question of boycotts, but reflecting on the roots of homophobia. Understanding is important because mindless liberalism is almost as bad as mindless bigotry. Mr Putin, for instance, instinctively links homosexuality with paedophilia: an old chestnut, and a moment’s reflection shows how unfair it is. Glance through court records and observe that the most enthusiastic predators on children are hetero all the way. Then look eastward and notice that the forced marriage of underage girls to middle-aged men — child rape, in effect — is a cultural norm in some countries which are most severe on the “evil” of homosexuality. Or swivel the eye back home to the Pakistani grooming cases. The same absurdity surfaces when Mr Mutko connects gayness with drug abuse and drunkenness: two things that plenty of “traditionally” sexed people display exuberantly. Not least in Russia.
The fear of propaganda corrupting — or, absurdly, recruiting — children is reminiscent of our own Section 28 and the Thatcherite panic about endorsing “pretended family relationships”. That particular fear often flourishes in nations changing faster than their establishments can control: modern Russia, 1980s Britain, or Fifties America cringing about gay Reds under the national bed. Gay people seem different, and thus associated with a general sense of shifting sands, uncertain vistas and infantile clinging to the image of the traditional family. Homophobia usually runs alongside a powerful desire to keep women in their place.
But it is not rational to blame same-sex love for unwelcome social change. Nor is it reasonable to criminalise something for centuries and then get cross when it develops a revolutionary subculture or a defiant flamboyance. Among the many furious letters I get about this, “Why do they have to go on about it?” is the mildest moan. The reason, mate, is that it is not 50 years since falling in love with another man was an imprisonable crime in England. It took the 1980s to legalise it in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In great swaths of the Commonwealth, Africa, the Middle East and India you can be ostracised, sacked, beaten or even hanged for it. In that context you can’t blame Western gays for singing their song of freedom.
That brings us to another source of anti-gay paranoia. When people begin to come out as gay, inevitably the first wave are the most confident: performers, fearless polemicists, show-offs. So, in a nasty parallel with anti-Semitism, you get mutterings about how “that lot look after their own”. Plenty of gay people deplore other gay people’s carryings-on. But the fearful and paranoid still imagine a fifth column, and write mad letters about it.
Of course, one deep and obvious root of homophobia is religion. Even in Russia, President Putin is well aware that being hostile to gays will play well not only with the secular and macho longings of a country that has lost its empire, but with Orthodox Christians and Muslims. He does not share their faith but finds it beautifully convenient: he can court their approval by ridiculing his domestic opponents as mincing decadent queens, while repeatedly removing his own shirt for manly photo-ops. The cynicism is queasy to contemplate.
Religious objections deserve respect, though. Not all believers are as nutty as David Silvester of UKIP, who told readers of the Henley Standard that the floods were caused by gay marriage “in naked breach of the coronation oath”. Religious freedom is as important as any other kind, and it is anyone’s right to disapprove of certain sexual behaviour and say so. But a shudder is more than enough. We do not live in a theocracy, and theocracies are unhappy places. When even a Pope says mildly “Who am I to judge?” there is no excuse for religious teaching on private love to be embedded in punitive law.
Interestingly, a convincing argument against homophobia, and a clue to its eventual demise, is an online table showing the progress of LGBT rights worldwide, with ticks and crosses against the various issues. Across all continents, nations with most ticks correlate almost exactly with democracy, relative prosperity, peace and self-confidence. Which should tell Mr Putin more than any number of rainbow flags.
So much soft porn
The Guardian, now Glenn Greenwald-less, is out with its latest government surveillance scoop: The big takeaway of this one is that British surveillance agency GCHQ—with an assist from the National Security Agency—interceptd and stored digital snapshots of millions of people grabbed from Yahoo webcasts between 2008 and 2010, many of whom were not intelligence targets. The entire story is worth a read, and you can check it out here. But just in case you need a little more motivation, here's the snippet that will get your attention:
Sexually explicit webcam material proved to be a particular problem for GCHQ, as one document delicately put it: "Unfortunately … it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person. Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography."
The document estimates that between 3% and 11% of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains "undesirable nudity". Discussing efforts to make the interface "safer to use", it noted that current "naïve" pornography detectors assessed the amount of flesh in any given shot, and so attracted lots of false positives by incorrectly tagging shots of people's faces as pornography.
According to the report, the agency got so tired of sorting through the world's crotch shots that it eventually tweaked its collection system to ignore those webcasts in which its computers could not detect any faces on screen.
Porn As Education
Pornography is not meant to be sex education. It’s fiction, period.
Nevertheless, with the enforced ignorance of abstinence-only sex “education,” most families’ and couples’ discomfort discussing sex seriously, and mainstream Christianity’s taboos about sexual reality, most people find themselves needing more information about sexuality.
If they’re fortunate, they manage to find a smart book or two, a reliable website or two, and maybe even an enlightened, open-minded, communicative sex partner. Anyone lacking all three who wants sex information inevitably turns to porn, whether intentionally or unconsciously.
Unfortunately, many young people don’t realize that porn is not a documentary. Lacking porn literacy or media literacy, they’re ignorant about editing, off-camera preparation, and other normal features of film-making. While some people assume that sex is—or should be—like what they see in porn, every good sex educator cautions against this. But let’s not forget the helpful things consumers can learn from porn.
This is NOT, NOT, NOT to say that everything people learn from porn is good. Puh-leeze—any 17-year-old who thinks his next girlfriend is dying for anal sex or a chance to blow the pizza delivery guy is in for a shock. And it’s always too bad when men think most women climax from 90 seconds of intercourse (although the antidote is pretty straightforward: simply telling a guy ‘that’s not me,’ no apology necessary).
That said, here’s a reminder of helpful things that porn can teach us about sex.
WAIT, ONE MORE TIME: I know, I know—porn also contains many inaccurate, even egregious lessons. But if we take them seriously—and, fortunately, not every porn consumer believes the fantasies of porn—let’s also take the following positive helpful lessons seriously. Many of these are positive lessons sex educators have been teaching for years:
Men can touch their penises during sex
Women can touch their vulvas during sex
Sex needs lube
Spit works for lube
Some women sometimes desire sex without romance
Telling each other stories can make sex hotter
Men can climax using their own hand
Some women think about sex in advance
Women sometimes insert the penis into their vagina
Men sometimes insert their penis into a vagina
If the penis comes out during intercourse, you can simply put it back in
Some women like fellatio
Some women like cunnilingus
Some men like fellatio
Some men like cunnilingus
Some women like anal sex
Some men like anal sex
Some women use and enjoy vibrators and dildos
Some men like their balls squeezed during squeezed
Pregnant women can be sexual
Whether during intercourse, oral, or manual sex, the clitoris can be important
The volume of ejaculate is not related to penis size (or anything else)
Sex is more than penis-vagina intercourse
Some women have orgasms
Some older women are sexual
Older women can be attractive to younger men (and vice versa)
People can have sex with people of different races
People can smile and talk to each other during sex
People can indicate to each other what they like during sex
Some women shave/wax, others don’t
You can happily ejaculate outside a vagina (onto a leg, chest, butt, belly, lower-back tattoo, or your own hand)
WHATEVER your sexual fantasy, you’re not the only one who has it
Age of Consent
The mad 1970s was also the decade of celebrated underage groupies, children being flashed at on their way to school, family viewing that involved dirty old Benny Hill chasing young women in bikinis and Saturday jobs where you’d have to play Dodge the Perv.
The decade was bookended by Young Girl, a 1968 song performed by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap — “Young girl, get out of my mind/My love for you is way out of line/Better run, girl/You’re much too young, girl” — and Don’t Stand So Close to Me by the Police — “Sometimes it’s not so easy/To be the teacher’s pet/Temptation, frustration/So bad it makes him cry/Wet bus stop, she’s waiting/His car is warm and dry.” The latter was the biggest-selling single of 1980.
The hoopla has made me think about the age of consent more generally. Last year Professor John Ashton, a government adviser, said it should be lowered to 15 — this after official statistics showed that a third of teenagers had had full intercourse before they were 16.
Society, Ashton said, sent out “confused” messages about when sex is permitted. “Because we are so confused about this and we have kept the age of consent at 16, the 15-year-olds don’t have clear routes to getting support,” he said last November. Downing Street briskly rejected his suggestion.
In 2006 Clive Murray, then president of the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents, got into trouble for saying: “Why is there this contradiction with other countries which we regard as similar societies to our own? I think it is of interest that the age of consent in Scotland is 16 and has been since 1885. Society has changed since then and it might be reasonable to ask: why do we still stick to 16?”
He suggested 13 and was shot down in flames.
The heterosexual age of consent varies all over Europe. It’s 14 in Italy, Portugal, Germany and Austria, among others; 15 in France, Denmark and Sweden; 16 in the UK, Norway, Finland, Holland and Russia. Last year Spain raised its age of consent from 13 to 16. In Africa it ranges from 12 (Angola) to 20 (Tunisia). In American states it varies from 16 to 18.
What I feel about the age of consent is that it’s broadly in the right neck of the woods: I wouldn’t want it to be 12 and I wouldn’t want it to be 25 (unlike every single father of young daughters I know, who wouldn’t mind it being 30. Or never).
But it’s a strange business. Any parent of teenagers, of either gender, comes across the problem at some point: if your child is in a relationship with someone and hasn’t yet turned 16, what are you meant to do?
Are you supposed to become the sex police, rapping on doors and banning sleepovers? Given that such action would achieve precisely nothing — where there’s a will there’s a way, especially if you’re 15 — do you turn a blind eye? Because you’re now helping your child to break the law and that’s not good — in this context it’s positively creepy.
What are you supposed to do if your 15-year-old daughter is sexually active and has no intention of getting pregnant, and would like to rely on female contraceptives rather than condoms? Where, and at what stage, do you start clamping down? Do you say: “You’d better not have sex, because I’ll have to shop you to the police”?
According to the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, half of all UK teenagers have had their first sexual experience by the age of 14. This includes “sexual touching”.
They are technically all sex offenders, like rapists or paedophiles. If “caught”, they get a conviction and an entry on the national sex offenders’ register. This is a bit nuts, isn’t it?
I was going to write that this is tricky ground, but actually it isn’t tricky at all, just slightly uncomfortable to think about — but we should think about it, if we value young people’s sexual health and emotional wellbeing. Is it not, in fact, really straightforward and obvious?
Some 14-year-olds have zero interest in the opposite sex, and good for them, but some are very curious indeed. I’m talking here about consenting teenagers having consensual sex with other teenagers. Interestingly, in Israel there’s an age-difference clause, so you’re not prosecuted for “underage” sex with someone if they’re less than three years younger.
Subjecting 21st-century teenagers to a Victorian law is pretty bizarre. Lowering the age of consent to 15 seems sensible to me, as does a dash of Israeli common sense.
It wouldn’t mean girls and boys were suddenly compelled to start having sex even though they’d rather be alone in their room reading Gormenghast. But it would protect and decriminalise half of the country’s teenagers, and I don’t see how that would be a bad thing.
Sex Work Caitlin Moran
‘I can’t see why women being sex workers is such a big thing. Caring for the dying is far more intimate’
I get why women having sex is a problem – I really do. Back in, say, 1400 – before contraceptives, prophylactics and antibiotics – women who had sex were, basically, a potential danger. If they whooped it up around the village, they could pass on incurable diseases that would make hands, or penises, fall off. And as for themselves, sex could equal pregnancy – with all its chances of maternal injury or death.
You can see why, as scared human beings in a pre-medical era, we came up with those brutal emergency social categorisations of “virgin” “mother” and “whore”. The main three “types” of women – all solely predicated on their sexual activity. We made “sex ladies” and “not-sex ladies” – good virgins who were kept safe from diseases in order to later become disease-free mothers, and then the bad women, who were for having sex with.
If I’m being honest, had I been the ruler of a country in medieval times where syphilis and gonorrhoea were rampant, and I had no antibiotics or condoms, there’s every chance that even I – a massively bad-ass strident feminist – would have come up with the same arrangement. I, too, would have overseen a system where sex work is seen as one of the most awful things a woman can do.
However. It’s 2014. And the big question you have to ask yourself about the stigma around sex work in the 21st century is: would we invent this system now? Forget everything that has gone before. If – in some mad, sci-fi world – sex had only been invented yesterday, in an era where women are legally equal to men, with contraceptives and condoms, where married couples are encouraged to do it at least twice a week, and there’s dating, Tindr and Girls – would we outlaw sex work? If there was a man who wanted to have sex with a woman, and a woman said, for the first time, “Okey-dokey – I’ll do that, with a condom, for £100,” would we prosecute him? Would we say she could only do this business transaction with him if she stood on the outskirts of town at 2am, picking up customers blind?
In the otherwise sexy old 21st century, it seems so many of our prejudices about sex work run on attitudes we haven’t updated since 1400. I can’t see why women wanting to be sex workers is such a big thing. There are far more intimate, legal business exchanges going on every day. Can we really say putting our elderly and dying in the care of others is less intimate than someone having sex with someone for 20 minutes? Or leaving our children at nurseries, in the protection of others?
It is perfectly societally acceptable – indeed, desirable – for a woman to walk into a beautician’s and have her anus waxed by someone she’s never met before. During that exchange, you’re supposed to keep up a flow of polite chitchat about the weather – a far weirder idea, to me, than having sex with someone who wants to keep the conversation to a more honest and basic “Yes, yes, more.”
We pay therapists to listen to our most intimate secrets, women to host our surrogate pregnancies, men to donate sperm to make our future children. Is having consensual sex for cash really in a radically different physical and emotional dimension to all these legitimate human exchanges? Only if you believe that all sex should be done purely and solely from deep and loving motivations. And quick conversation with all your married/dating friends should remind you that most people in this country have transgressed that unsaid rule on a fairly regular basis, yet continue not to be socially shunned.
One of the biggest sticking points in the sex work debate is, understandably, the issue of sex trafficking. The last estimate suggested 2,600 women working as prostitutes in the UK had been trafficked for sex work.
But trafficking isn’t inherent to prostitution. That’s an abhorrent and illegal practice of the current sex work industry – not sex work itself. By the same chalk, parts of the fashion industry are reliant on trafficking and slave work. But no one would suggest we criminalise the fashion industry – we lobby for human rights instead. What’s one of the main things that keeps the sex trafficking industry in rude health, with each woman earning an estimated £48,000 per annum for their kidnapper? Trafficked women knowing they cannot approach the police, because their work is criminalised.
Make sex work legal – create a world where women can run their own secure and regulated brothels, pay tax on that respectable, middle-class £48k a year, and be seen to be doing a job no more socially unacceptable than the person who is, even now, putting a clean nightshirt on your grandmother – and it would be very difficult to continue keeping these women hidden and imprisoned.
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I really don’t think we would criminalise sex work if it had been invented yesterday. And so today, we must look at it again, as 21st-century people – and not scared, sex-fearing medieval peasants.
Social Attitudes
As a society we tend to believe that sexuality is such a personal and private aspect of human life that it shouldn’t be commoditized, and as such many governments have established the act as illegal or at least heavily regulated. In Europe, prostitution is largely legalised, but with heavy restrictions on the circumstances around the transaction. In the U.S., it’s illegal in every state save for the noteable exception of Nevada. As is demonstrated in the very varied and complicated laws that exist around the act, the whole thing is far from being established as unambiguously right or wrong. Indeed, as well-loved American comedian George Carlin once famously asked, ‘why should it be illegal to sell something that’s perfectly legal to give away?’ The many possible answers to that question are deeply complex and undeniably personal. Whether or not we agree with the act of selling sexuality, though, the fact is that it happens – it always has, and probably always will. And now, with the internet serving to remove taboos as well as logistical and spatial restrictions, it happens in more creative, diverse and sometimes disturbing ways than ever before.
Prostitution and Trafficking
WITH a sensational story of surviving child sex slavery in Cambodia, Somaly Mam became a worldwide icon, the best-selling author of a memoir and the head of a foundation raising millions in the name of saving girls and women from the sex trade, victims she recounted rescuing in dramatic brothel raids. Last year, introducing the State Department’s annual “Trafficking in Persons” report, Secretary of State John Kerry called Ms. Mam “a hero every single day.”
But all this wasn’t true. A Newsweek cover story last week found inconsistencies and flat-out fraud in Ms. Mam’s story of being abducted and forced to work in a brothel as a child — instead, former neighbors said she came to their village with her parents and graduated from high school, later sitting for a teacher’s exam — and in the stories of women she said she had rescued by the thousands. Ms. Mam even said traffickers had kidnapped her teenage daughter — but the girl’s father said she ran away with her boyfriend.
On Wednesday, Somaly Mam resigned from her own foundation.
The consequences of her fables will prove harder to correct. Ms. Mam and her foundation banked on Western feel-good demands for intervention, culminating in abusive crackdowns on the people she claimed to save.
The International Labor Organization estimates that more than three times as many people are trafficked into work like domestic, garment and agricultural labor than those trafficked for sex. I’ve interviewed human-rights advocates in Phnom Penh since 2007, and they raised concerns about Ms. Mam’s distortion of this reality. Her portrayal of all sex workers as victims in need of saving encouraged raids and rescue operations that only hurt the sex workers themselves.
In 2008, Cambodia enacted new prohibitions on commercial sex, after the country was placed on a watch list by the State Department. In brutal raids on brothels and in parks, as reported by the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers in a 2008 documentary, women were chased down, detained and assaulted. The State Department commended Cambodia for its law and removed the country from the watch list.
Human Rights Watch later conducted interviews with 94 sex workers in Cambodia for a 2010 report. “Two days after my arrival, I was caught when I tried to escape,” one woman said. “Five guards beat me up. When I used my arms to shield my face and head from their blows, they beat my arms. The guard threatened to slit our throats if we tried to escape a second time, and said our bodies would be cremated there.”
She was describing a “rescue” and detention at the Prey Speu Social Affairs center near Phnom Penh. Human Rights Watch urged the Cambodian government “to suspend provisions in the 2008 Law on Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation that facilitate police harassment and abuses.”
These are the women whose stories are not told in an anti-trafficking fund-raising pitch. Some of the “victims” whom Ms. Mam said she saved then attempted to escape from her shelters, only to have her claim to the press that they had been “kidnapped.” She later apologized for a 2012 speech before the United Nations General Assembly in which she asserted that the Cambodian Army had killed eight girls after a raid on her shelters.
Ms. Mam’s stories were told in interviews with journalists including Nicholas Kristof, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. She attracted high-profile supporters: There were benefits thrown by Susan Sarandon; Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook chief operating officer, is on the advisory board of her foundation. Ms. Mam’s target audience of well-off Westerners, eager to do good, often knows little about the sex trade. It doesn’t require much for them to imagine all women who sell sex as victims in need of rescue.
Much of the cited data on trafficking is based on shaky estimates, and many conflate all sex work with trafficking. A 2003 study funded by the Agency for International Development used actual counts to estimate that 88 percent of female sex workers in Cambodia had not experienced coercion. A 2009 analysis of suspected trafficking cases reported by nongovernmental organizations in Cambodia concluded that 76 percent “had a prior knowledge that they would engage in prostitution-related activities.”
When Mira Sorvino arrived with CNN last year to film sex workers undercover in Phnom Penh, Ros Sokunthy of the Women’s Network for Unity told the Asian Correspondent news site that this approach was part of the problem: “You show the face of the mother, who is so poor that she has to sell her daughter for money? How does this help the daughter or mother? It doesn’t. It helps the NGO to make money.”
Ending abuse in the sex trade requires action that is less telegenic than a photo op or a gala. Last week, the International Labor Organization issued a new report on forced labor and recommendations to combat it with the collection of accurate data, effective protection of victims, and the support of workers in their own organizing. It’s a broader fight against poverty, inequality and vulnerability that goes far beyond a brothel’s walls.
A “hero” like Ms. Mam lets those who lift her up feel that they are heroes, too. They can be saviors simply by repeating her stories and swiping their cards. Now Ms. Mam has been exposed before her donors and the Western media who anointed her and made fighting sex trafficking a kind of industry in itself, while sex workers suffered the consequences. Will Ms. Mam’s supporters consider the price of what they’ve been sold?
Prostitution and GDP
Did you know that the average price of a prostitute in the UK is £67? It’s a shame for the sake of humorous synchronicity that it’s not a couple of quid higher, but there we are. I had not known this fact, and I am grateful to the government for furnishing me with the information. We will all be able to haggle on firmer ground now.
A week or two back there was a study done that suggested the average cost of taking a babe out on a date in London was £72 — so now you know how to save yourself a fiver and avoid having to listen for hours to how she hates UKIP, or what a great time she had last year on holiday in Cuba, or how she really objects to Michael Gove taking Maya Angelou off the national curriculum, especially since the poor woman’s just died.
I suppose you could pay a prostitute to tell you that stuff if you really wanted it — if you were really weird, a glutton for the sort of punishment that even Count Sacher-Masoch would have thought a bit rum. They can be very open-minded, whores, I understand, and I’m sure they’d oblige if the price was right.
Anyway, now we have the average cost, it is only a matter of time before there’s a Which? — or maybe Michelin — guide to Britain’s sex workers, as The Guardian likes to call them. And maybe they will start appearing on TripAdvisor with slighting and desultory reviews. “Brandy was cheaper than a family day out at Legoland but not, if I’m honest, much more pleasurable. Also, her pimp looked at me funny. **”
That figure of £67 comes from the Office for National Statistics, which has decided to include the proceeds of both prostitution and drug dealing when calculating Britain’s gross domestic product. Yay.
So henceforth, instead of looking furtive and shame-faced as you procure your bit of topless relief behind the railway station, you can tell yourself that it is your national duty and that with every such agreeable transaction you are nudging the UK ever closer to France in the GDP world league table.
There are more than 60,000 prostitutes in the country to facilitate your new-found patriotism and they bring in a remarkable £5.3bn to the economy. That means, if I’ve got my maths right, that at an average cost of £67 there were more than 79m such transactions last year, and they can’t all have involved Hugh Grant.
Also drugs — don’t forget the drugs. They bring in £4.4bn to the country, according to the ONS, so you can feel similarly patriotic every time you shovel a kilo of gak up your nostrils. An absent septum is a small price to pay for boosting the economy and making the chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne happy.
Obviously, Osborne would be appalled beyond reason that you would use cocaine — that goes without saying — but he’d be pleased as punch when the figures started adding up.
Apparently, according to another survey, London is now the cocaine capital of Europe. Every time you turn on a tap in the Great Wen, a not terribly dilute solution of the Colombian GDP pours out, transforming the locals into arrogant, red-eyed, gobby bores.
The drugs-in-the-water map of Europe also shows that the Swedes and the Dutch like nothing more than a bit of speed, while those clinging to the eastern rim of our continent are perpetually out of their skulls on crystal meth, which according to medical research may lead to Parkinson’s disease, and so rather handily explains the way Belarus is.
I suppose it is old-fashioned and even pointless of me to object to this rather roguish £10bn being appended to our GDP. But it somehow bestows drug-taking and prostitution with an official moral neutrality — treating it like estate agencies and lawyers as simply something that boosts the national coffers and therefore one should not carp at too much.
Soccer World Cup and Prostitution
"You hear this 30,000 figure," a member of the team, Gregory Mitchell, a professor at Williams in Massachusetts and an expert in the gay sex trade, explains when we meet. "30,000 people will be trafficked for the World Cup! They first said it about Germany [in 2006], then they said it about South Africa [in 2010]. There were four [documented sex trafficking cases] in Germany. Fewer than eight in South Africa. For the Super Bowl in Texas [in 2011] they said 100,000 Mexican girls would be trafficked. That would have been enough for every man and woman and child in the stadium to have their own underage prostitute!"
The "they" are anti-trafficking NGOs. Folks like Ruvolo and Blanchette and Williams believe that certain NGOs — specifically, many of the ones associated with the hardline Coalition Against Trafficking in Women — are dangerously focused on shaping policy around the truly horrible, but rare and unrepresentative, stories of exploited minors and enslaved women. In the Blanchette group's point of view, rather than actually engage with sex workers, a whole, well-funded infrastructure exists to try and theoretically save their lives. But as the revenue the girls at Balcony generate shows, more likely than not, sex work is not about teeth-gnashingly awful tales of modern slavery. Murder, theft, the selling of your body — every day, extreme acts are committed for the simple enough reason of cash.
"Policy decisions get made because NGOs scream about shocking violations of human rights. And there's nothing more shocking than raped kiddies. I mean, fuck the facts!" Blanchette scoffs, enraged at the thought of moneyed NGOs that he believes can't be bothered to do the kind of field-work he and his team are now engaging in daily — that is, engaging directly with sex workers — then pushing out misinformation that leads directly to oppressive government behavior. "We've already thought of the subtitle of our paper: 'The World Cup and the Slutshaming of Brazil.'" It's good, I admit. He laughs. "You can't use it!"
One afternoon, at a cozy espresso bar dug into a spiffy bookstore in Botafogo, Thaddeus introduces me to Giovana. A very pretty brunette in a plaid shirt and simple black sandals, Giovana is both a doctoral student in anthropology specializing in sex work and a garota de programa herself. She practices an aggressive participant-observation form of anthropology: while doing her masters in the drug trade, she ended up dating a dealer in one of the city's major factions. When she started her doctoral work, she again got directly involved. Giovana is her work name.
She now plies her trade in a high-end termas in the Zona Sul analogous to, if not exactly as highly regarded as, Centaurus. Twenty-eight years old, she's been working on-and-off for three years. She stopped for a year when she got married. After her divorce, she got back into prostitution. Her income now ranges from 4,000 to 12,000 reais per month.
"I need a lot of emotional stability and calm in order to do this," she explains. "I might do four days of work and four clients each day. Then I stop until I spend all my money and get calm and get my head together again." She outlines her motivations: "One, obviously, for my field work. Two, for the money. I'm making way more than I could anywhere else. Finally, I wanted as a woman to investigate how men are able to disconnect sex from affection."
Giovana's mother knows she does the work, but others in her life are unaware. Do she ever worry someone might walk into a brothel and see her? "It's interesting," she replies, "in every place I've ever worked there's a woman that says 'I have a friend' — it's never the woman herself — who says she opened the door and there was her dad. Everyone believes this legend."
Prostitution 2
STREET-WALKERS; kerb-crawlers; phone booths plastered with pictures of breasts and buttocks: the sheer seediness of prostitution is just one reason governments have long sought to outlaw it, or corral it in licensed brothels or “tolerance zones”. NIMBYs make common cause with puritans, who think that women selling sex are sinners, and do-gooders, who think they are victims. The reality is more nuanced. Some prostitutes do indeed suffer from trafficking, exploitation or violence; their abusers ought to end up in jail for their crimes. But for many, both male and female, sex work is just that: work.
This newspaper has never found it plausible that all prostitutes are victims. That fiction is becoming harder to sustain as much of the buying and selling of sex moves online. Personal websites mean prostitutes can market themselves and build their brands. Review sites bring trustworthy customer feedback to the commercial-sex trade for the first time. The shift makes it look more and more like a normal service industry.
It can also be analysed like one. We have dissected data on prices, services and personal characteristics from one big international site that hosts 190,000 profiles of female prostitutes (see article). The results show that gentlemen really do prefer blondes, who charge 11% more than brunettes. The scrawny look beloved of fashion magazines is more marketable than flab—but less so than a healthy weight. Prostitutes themselves behave like freelancers in other labour markets. They arrange tours and take bookings online, like gigging musicians. They choose which services to offer, and whether to specialise. They temp, go part-time and fit their work around child care. There is even a graduate premium that is close to that in the wider economy.
The invisible hand-job
Moralisers will lament the shift online because it will cause the sex trade to grow strongly. Buyers and sellers will find it easier to meet and make deals. New suppliers will enter a trade that is becoming safer and less tawdry. New customers will find their way to prostitutes, since they can more easily find exactly the services they desire and confirm their quality. Pimps and madams should shudder, too. The internet will undermine their market-making power.
But everyone else should cheer. Sex arranged online and sold from an apartment or hotel room is less bothersome for third parties than are brothels or red-light districts. Above all, the web will do more to make prostitution safer than any law has ever done. Pimps are less likely to be abusive if prostitutes have an alternative route to market. Specialist sites will enable buyers and sellers to assess risks more accurately. Apps and sites are springing up that will let them confirm each other’s identities and swap verified results from sexual-health tests. Schemes such as Britain’s Ugly Mugs allow prostitutes to circulate online details of clients to avoid.
Governments should seize the moment to rethink their policies. Prohibition, whether partial or total, has been a predictable dud. It has singularly failed to stamp out the sex trade. Although prostitution is illegal everywhere in America except Nevada, old figures put its value at $14 billion annually nationwide; surely an underestimate. More recent calculations in Britain, where prostitution is legal but pimping and brothels are not, suggest that including it would boost GDP figures by at least £5.3 billion ($8.9 billion). And prohibition has ugly results. Violence against prostitutes goes unpunished because victims who live on society’s margins are unlikely to seek justice, or to get it. The problem of sex tourism plagues countries, like the Netherlands and Germany, where the legal part of the industry is both tightly circumscribed and highly visible.
The failure of prohibition is pushing governments across the rich world to try a new tack: criminalising the purchase of sex instead of its sale. Sweden was first, in 1999, followed by Norway, Iceland and France; Canada is rewriting its laws along similar lines. The European Parliament wants the “Swedish model” to be adopted right across the EU. Campaigners in America are calling for the same approach.
Sex sells, and always will
This new consensus is misguided, as a matter of both principle and practice. Banning the purchase of sex is as illiberal as banning its sale. Criminalisation of clients perpetuates the idea of all prostitutes as victims forced into the trade. Some certainly are—by violent partners, people-traffickers or drug addiction. But there are already harsh laws against assault and trafficking. Addicts need treatment, not a jail sentence for their clients.
Sweden’s avowed aim is to wipe out prostitution by eliminating demand. But the sex trade will always exist—and the new approach has done nothing to cut the harms associated with it. Street prostitution declined after the law was introduced but soon increased again. Prostitutes’ understandable desire not to see clients arrested means they strike deals faster and do less risk assessment. Canada’s planned laws would make not only the purchase of sex illegal, but its advertisement, too. That will slow down the development of review sites and identity- and health-verification apps.
The prospect of being pressed to mend their ways makes prostitutes less willing to seek care from health or social services. Men who risk arrest will not tell the police about women they fear were coerced into prostitution. When Rhode Island unintentionally decriminalised indoor prostitution between 2003 and 2009 the state saw a steep decline in reported rapes and cases of gonorrhoea.
Prostitution is moving online whether governments like it or not. If they try to get in the way of the shift they will do harm. Indeed, the unrealistic goal of ending the sex trade distracts the authorities from the genuine horrors of modern-day slavery (which many activists conflate with illegal immigration for the aim of selling sex) and child prostitution (better described as money changing hands to facilitate the rape of a child). Governments should focus on deterring and punishing such crimes—and leave consenting adults who wish to buy and sell sex to do so safely and privately online.
Prostitution: The Ethical Debate
Many people find it impossible to imagine how anyone could actively choose to sell their bodies, such is the deep-lying stigma attached to the ‘oldest profession’.
News stories often tell of individuals that have been forced into prostitution by traffickers or pimps, or by drug addiction or desperate poverty. But there are also stories of people like Brooke Magnanti, the research scientist who blogged positively about her experience as a London call girl under the pen name Belle de Jour.
The idea that human beings could be for sale is ethically controversial. However, sex workers often say they don’t sell their bodies but, like other workers, simply put a price on their talents and skills. They argue that, if sex work was decriminalised and destigmatised, the associated problems would mostly disappear. But there’s more to consider when debating the rights and wrongs of prostitution.
Prostitution is both a sexual and an economic activity that can be organised in very different ways, and people from all walks of life can be found in the sex industry.
Suppressing prostitution completely could seem a viable way to ensure that nobody is forced into it, but this approach also impacts on those who choose to sell sexual services. There is also another consequence: anti-prostitution laws, in effect, interfere in private arrangements between consenting adults. Allowing politicians to establish what people can and cannot do with their own bodies is to some a major breach of personal freedom.
Freedom is a hot topic in the prostitution debate: the personal freedom of those who want to be in the industry; the freedom of the buyer to be able to get sex on demand; the lack of freedom of the trafficked and exploited and of those who don't have any other alternatives. All this makes prostitution extremely complicated to address in law.
Questions about criminalisation, decriminalisation, and regulation of prostitution are widely debated. Prostitution, however, is also affected by other areas of the law, for example welfare and immigration laws, which constrain the alternatives open to those who can't get other paid work.
Rapidly Changing Mores
The young wouldn’t see the Brooks Newmark story as a scandal. The older generation needs to reset its moral compass
The time has come to recalibrate the expression sex scandal, because if the Brooks Newmark story teaches anything, it is how old and silly and out of touch it makes half of society look. Age, suddenly, and sharply, defines us.
The political and managerial classes of this country, in the broadest sense, grew up in a pre-internet age. Whereas a significant and ever-growing percentage of the people they oversee know of no other way to exist than online. Between the two is a chasm almost too vast to describe, which gets bigger every day.
Ask young people whether they think two adults exchanging sexy pictures by smartphone is in any way remarkable, even if one of them is married, and you would get a look of bewilderment. It’s no big deal. Is it a resignation issue? Are you kidding? they reply. It’s what people do. Bit sad if he’s married, but hey.
Few of us, even the technically savvy ones, have a clue what life online now means. It is a place where anything goes, especially in matters of sex. In a realm where sexual images constitute wallpaper, you can be heterosexual, gay, transgender, bisexual, cisexual and nobody turns a hair. Nobody even asks. The young, especially the educated young, accept people for who they are and their right to express themselves, without judging. In my limited experience, through observing my offspring’s generation of early twentysomethings, this spills out into a rather beautiful tolerance in real life.
This is absolutely not to say they lack morality. Arguably, they are more moral than us: they care about hurting each other’s feelings, bullying, animal welfare, child abuse, the environment and women’s rights. Political correctness, for all it makes older generations chew their fillings, has shaped nicer people.
But when it comes to sexual morality, things have changed. The internet has opened up sex to the extent that young people think very differently from us. Sex happens. All the time. Openly. It’s what people do. This is not to say their view is right or wrong, just that it is different. And we need to understand that, because one day it will be the norm.
The internet has left the old morality way behind and frankly, in order to be credible, we need to find new rules of engagement. New bench marks. Newmarks, we might even dub them, though it would be kinder to let the daft old fool hide below the parapet for while.
Say sex scandal to me and I think of Giles cartoon albums at Christmas, because like many children in the 1960s I grew up imprinted with the artist’s images of Christine Keeler and John Profumo. I didn’t understand the jokes but that was how I learnt the names, and sensed the resonance of something very grave — shocking, sordid, threatening, that rocked grown-up life to its foundations. Parents didn’t talk about matters like that, or certainly not to us.
Yet, with hindsight, what was it all about? A cabinet minister had a fling with a 19-year-old girl, who was friendly with a gay guy who also knew a Soviet diplomat who just might have slept with the girl as well. Whatever, says the unimpressed teenager, raised online on sex tapes of Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, on Miley Cyrus twerking and Kanye West’s crotch. What’s the story, dude? They had sex? The guy was gay? Someone might have met a Russian?
Yet the minister was broken for life, the prime minister tumbled, the gay man was persecuted, prosecuted and took his own life, the girl’s reputation was destroyed, and Britain endured a spasm of Cold War paranoia, sexual suspicion and establishment conspiracy that lingered for two decades. From today’s perspective, how desperately cruel it all was. How to explain to today’s youth that sex was in those days still regarded as the dark underbelly of human behaviour, to be hidden at all costs.
Look back at events designated sex scandals, and how prim and painfully innocent they were by today’s standards. How the protagonists suffered unnecessarily. The misdemeanour of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite cabinet minister, Cecil Parkinson, was to father a child with his mistress while maintaining the deceit of the respectably married man. Not clever, no. And nobody hates hypocrisy more than a nation of hypocrites. But did it justify the opprobrium? Hardly.
Look through modern eyes at the politicians diminished for simple human sexual fallibility. David Mellor, Mark Oaten, John Prescott, Ron Davies, David Blunkett — all decent men ridiculed for relationships at which today’s youth would not turn a hair.
Unless we adopt less old-fashioned attitudes to sexual behaviour in public life, we will increasingly struggle in a world where sexual inclination is unremarked and everyone may store personal sexual images on iCloud. Perhaps now’s the time to reserve “sex scandal” for the non-consensual exploitation of fellow humans: paedophilia, trafficking and abuse.
Sex Every Night
One busy wife wondered what would happen if she put sex back at the top of her “to do” list. Her findings are revealing
There’s a statistic about marriage that has been depressing me. Sixty per cent of people in long-term relationships have sex less than twice a month (according to the mental health charity Mind). And yup, that includes me. Two children and a decade in, the days that my husband and I would jump each other a few times a week have long fizzled away. We talk, we collaborate, we’re committed. But most nights the nearest we get to sex is a murmur of “love you darling” and a tender spoon.
How this has happened is a familiar lament of most married women I know. By bedtime we’re knackered. Now in our mid-forties, our libido is about as raging as a duck pond. We do feel bad that we are not more up for it, but with all the pressures, from family life to our careers, putting out at bedtime comes a long way down the “to do” list. For many, it appears to have fallen off the list altogether. According to recent research, two thirds of adults now believe a happy relationship is possible without sex. I never wish to find myself in that group. Aside from surely increasing the odds that my husband — or I — might be tempted elsewhere, I want to have sex in my life, in our lives. Sex is what sets you apart as a couple. Otherwise you are just friends, flatmates, co-parents.
I turn to advice from two experts. First is leading sexologist Utta Demontis. The problem, she says, is that women like me in long-term relationships, especially mothers, cease to identify themselves as “lovers”. “With all the other demands on you, you lose your sexual self,” she says. “Then it’s a vicious cycIe, you stop having sex, your sexual energy diminishes, you stop needing it.” Thus it is key to be proactive, she says. “The more we cultivate our sexual energy, the more it stays alive.”
The ebbing away of sex is something that Jan Day, a therapist who specialises in intimacy, sees all the time, too. “A lot of women vacate their bodies, they are just not there,” Day says. “We numb ourselves out thinking about other things — stress at work, children, that we’re out of shape.” Couples should not make the mistake of feeling that they cannot make love if they’ve had a stressful or tiring day, she says. “You don’t have to be perfectly resolved, or in a good mood. In fact it can be deeply intimate to make love when you are sad, tired or anxious.
“Sex is like yoga,” she adds. “The most difficult thing is getting the mat out and standing on it. Then you remember how good it makes you feel and you’ll start to crave it again.”
So with this advice, I put it to my husband that it’s time to put sex right back at the top of the “to do list”. That, according to the experts, the more I have sex, the more I’ll want. I pledged to have sex every night for a month, no excuses. My husband, who at 48 is still up for it at pretty much any moment, was delighted by the suggestion, even if it did carry the whiff of “research”. Sex every night? He was hardly going to say no.
Week one
It’s Sunday night, the day we are supposed to start, but my husband’s flight home from a business trip has been delayed. When he tromps in at midnight I’m almost asleep. Monday morning is looming and getting revved up for sex is the last thing I feel like. As I hear his footsteps on the stairs I decide to adjourn the project until tomorrow and pretend to be out cold. But as he kisses me hello, it’s clear that he hasn’t forgotten the plan. To fail on the first night would be pathetic, I tell myself. So I gamely pull him under the duvet as he sheds his clothes. Actually, it’s pretty romantic, reuniting in this way. It reminds me of the excitement we had in each other when we first met.
Bolstered by this enjoyable start, the next five days are surprisingly easy. We conscientiously turn off the TV at the end of the 10 o’clock news, get into bed and begin kissing before my “can I really be bothered?” thoughts have time to surface. An American sex expert, Dr Ian Kerner, once told me that even when women don’t think they are in the mood, their underlying “receptive sexual desire” will kick in as soon as their arousal systems are targeted. And he’s right. I’ve forgotten how fun sex is once you’ve dragged yourself over the precipice of horniness; and also how relaxed it leaves you afterwards. I’m also pleased to note that it is taking a very manageable 20 minutes, so as long as we are prompt to bed I’m not losing sleep time.
It’s also immediately noticeable how much less tension there is between us in the mornings. Those 20 minutes of pleasure we’ve shared are like credits with each other that linger when we wake. We cuddle by the kettle and tag-team the pre-school/work mayhem without bickering or blaming. I don’t feel my usual rage the day my husband announces he wants to nip out for a run, leaving me to do the breakfast and school drop-off alone.
However, on day six we hit a problem. As we reach for each other in bed, this suddenly feels like a chore. Although he would never admit to it, I suspect my husband is now just going through the motions too. We’ve made love in almost the same way every night. Now that the thrill that we are actually having sex is wearing off, it feels, well, just a bit samey. Frankly, my nether regions need a break. We agree that oral sex counts, both glad of a change.
Week two
My husband is unexpectedly called to San Francisco for a six-day work trip to Silicon Valley. I tell him this is extremely inconvenient — and, frankly, typical. If we are to stick to the experiment, the only option is phone sex. The problem is I have never had phone sex — not even in my twenties. The prospect of swapping dirty talk down the phone with the man to whom I’d usually be relaying the details of our daughters’ homework feels beyond excruciating. I decide to try to get into the mood first. My husband once gave me a book of erotica published by Agent Provocateur. I flick to my favourite story: a woman dressed up for the opera is stood up by her boyfriend. Outside the theatre she spots a roguish doorman who beckons her into a heaving nightclub full of beautiful, half-naked people dancing. As she stands at the packed bar his strong body is pushed into her from behind. Suddenly she feels his hands sliding under her cocktail dress... I dial my husband’s mobile. “Hi,” I say, before I get self-conscious. “I am imagining us pressed together in a hot, sweaty club.”
“Er, any chance we could do this in half an hour? I’m about to walk into a meeting with our backers,” he replies. It may be 11pm in London, but in San Francisco it is only 3pm.
I’ll come clean now. The rest of the week is a write-off. One night he calls and I am already asleep. Another, he tries one sentence: “I want you to touch yourself.” To which I can only exclaim, “No, sorry, I can’t do this, I just can’t.” After that the content of our phone calls returns to drama club and hockey practice.
Week three
We have homecoming sex, which is fantastic. As my husband travels a lot, I realise I have been really missing a trick here. But in the days that follow we are back to the sameness problem. My husband confesses that he had anticipated that we’d find ourselves branching out more by this point. But if I am honest, I have no more desire for role play, bondage or S&M than I did when we started this experiment. I would have to be blind drunk to get over the self-consciousness of kinky sex with a man I have now been with for ten years. If I do get blind drunk these days, I pass out. Ever hopeful, my husband produces some porn on his phone one evening, but all I can think about is what would happen if my daughters saw something like this. It’s a complete mood killer.
Week four
This begins badly as our daughters have nits. An evening of dousing the household hair with Hedrin is not the best foreplay. We get into bed stinking of chemicals, with towels on our pillows — and give ourselves a night off. The smell aside, it feels wonderful to lie next to each other reading. As intimate as anything we’ve done in the past three weeks.
But as it is our last week we do finally branch out. After supper one evening we have sex on the sofa. I confess, for me, this is a bit about getting it out of the way early while I’m buzzing off a glass of chablis. Another night we make love on the stairs — mainly because my husband has to get back to a conference call with the States.
On the final night of week four, we make love with the triumph of long-distance runners finishing a marathon. I’ll admit that what I feel most is relief — the pressure is finally off.
So what have we gained from our sex marathon? On the disappointing side, I am sceptical that “exercising my sexual energy” has improved my libido. I don’t spontaneously crave sex any more than I did a month ago. On the up side, I have been reminded of its virtues. Just as being disciplined enough to eat healthy food and take regular exercise pays massive dividends so, clearly, does sex. My husband and I were always close, but now we are a lot less cross with each other. Some might term this the healing power of intimacy. I think it is simply because sex is an easy and instant way of having a good time together. When you first become a couple, most of your time is spent revelling in each other’s company. Over time, that fades into an onslaught of arrangements, obligations, irritations and resentments. Just 20 minutes a day of having joyful one-to-one togetherness helps counteract all the negatives that creep into a working marriage. Put simply, it keeps us liking each other. It makes us more forgiving.
But just like eating healthy food and exercising, it’s sticking to the programme that’s an issue. You swerve the gym a few times, or give in to a sausage roll, and you’re back to square one. A few nights off and my husband and I are already slipping back into the bad habit of staying up way too late to feel like sex, or going to bed at different times. The truth is that keeping sex in a marriage takes discipline. And I am not even talking Fifty Shades of Grey.
American Prudery - George RR Martin
We can go to the beach and I can take off my shirt, and a female can't, except in New York, where a woman can walk topless down Broadway. Except for commercial gain. You can't have a topless hot-dog seller. 'Wieners! Get your wieners!' [Laughs.] But elsewhere, if a woman decided to go shopping on a hot day and she wanted to take off her shirt? A man might run into some trouble with no shirt, no shoes, no service kinds of places, but he wouldn’t be arrested on the street. I remember I was in Barcelona a couple years ago, and I noticed there were a bunch of beaches. I asked, 'So, are any of those topless beaches?' 'They're all topless beaches.' Like, Yeah, why would you have it otherwise? Which seems to me a much saner attitude than ours, you know? Why does America go hysterical when there's a wardrobe malfunction during the Super Bowl or they get a glimpse of a woman's nipple on our show? It's crazy, you know? Half of the population has them! Sure, men get excited when they see the female breast, but that's partly because it's hidden. It’s the concealing it that sexualizes it."
Prostitution Survey
Ninety-one per cent of sex workers describe their work as rewarding and flexible, while two thirds find the job “fun” a study has found.
Of the 240 people questioned, more than half (52 per cent) said that they felt able to stop sex work if they wanted to, compared with just under a quarter of respondents who said they would not.
The survey was carried out by the University of Leeds, working with National Ugly Mugs, a charity that provides access to justice and protection for sex workers.
The research found that sex workers used mainly positive or neutral words when asked about their work.
The study is the first of its kind to focus, with such a large sample, on working conditions and job satisfaction in sex work.
Alex Feis-Bryce, from National Ugly Mugs, said: “Many people, particularly politicians, fall into the trap of seeing sex work as inherently bad without actually asking sex workers what their experiences are and what challenges they face. This research challenges this perspective.
“It is clear from this research that recognising sex work as work and acknowledging its diversity is crucial. Policy makers fall into the trap of assuming that they know better and introducing sweeping proposals intended to ‘save’ sex workers.”
He said that more sex workers cited stigma as a negative aspect of their work than exploitation.
Teela Sanders, the principal researcher for the study, said: “We would recommend that sex workers be allowed to legally work together, as this is the main way in which they believe their safety will be enhanced.
“Societal attitudes need to change, in order to minimise the stigma underpinning sex work and consequently reduce the harm that prejudice and judgment has on sex workers.”
National Ugly Mugs has previously released research highlighting London as having the highest number of reported crimes against sex workers.
The group collected and circulated data on potentially dangerous clients during research collated in August last year. Researchers found there were 970 reported crimes committed against sex workers in the UK over the previous two years, of which about 20 per cent were rapes.
According to the charity, men who murder sex workers frequently have a history of violence against sex workers and others.
Penis Size
A medical study has answered the question that has long worried many men: how long is the average penis? Researchers at King’s College Hospital, London studied the length of more than 15,000 penises in the most complete study to date.
The review, which gathered data from 17 studies, was published in the urology journal BJU International, and showed that the average penis was 3.6in (9.14cm) when flaccid and 5.2in when erect.
The study also showed that 2 per cent of men suffered from some form of penis dysmorphia, where their fears over penis size are severe enough to be considered a psychological condition.
In an internet study involving 55,000 respondents, included in the review, just over half of men said that they were satisfied with the size of their genitalia, while 85 per cent of women said that they were satisfied with that of their partner.
David Veale, the consultant psychiatrist who led the study, and who specialises in body dysmorphic disorder, said that he hoped the study, whose data was formatted into graphs, would allow men to realise that their penis size was within a normal range.
Sex and Alzheimer’s
Can an Alzheimer’s patient with dementia so severe she can’t remember her daughters’ names or how to eat a hamburger consent to have sex with her husband? That’s the stark question raised by the case of Henry Rayhons, the former Iowa state legislator who, as the New York Times reported yesterday, has been charged with third-degree felony sexual assault for allegedly raping his wife, Donna Lou Rayhons, in her nursing home.
Rayhons says the sex was consensual. Clinicians at the nursing home where she resided — she has since died — say that they had determined she didn’t have the capacity to consent, and that they had informed Rayhons of this. Charges of this sort are “possibly unprecedented,” as the Times put it, but the underlying questions “will become only more pressing as the population ages and rates of dementia rise.”
At first, the idea of a patient with dementia agreeing to engage in sex would seem to run counter to established notions of consent. If someone no longer even has legal control over their own care or certain aspects of their day-to-day life, how can they make a decision that requires two fully consenting partners?
But a growing number of advocates for the elderly and the cognitively impaired argue that the only humane approach is to have guidelines that do allow for intimate and sexual relationships involving members of these populations, at least in certain cases. “There’s nothing about being cognitively impaired that means that you wouldn’t necessarily appreciate being connected with other people through both nonsexual means and sexual means,” said Dr. Tia Powell, who directs the Montefiore Einstein Center for Bioethics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. It’s a view that’s gaining traction, even among larger organizations like the U.K.’s Alzheimer’s Society and the U.S.-based Alzheimer’s Association.
To John Portmann, a religious studies professor at the University of Virginia and the author of The Ethics of Sex and Alzheimer’s, this debate is part of a much broader array of difficult conversations society is going to have to have now that reaching old age — and, as a result, possibly developing dementia — is a normal occurrence in a large swath of the world.
“Alzheimer’s is really forcing us to think about sex and fidelity in a very new way,” said Portmann. “People didn’t live very long in the ancient world, so this problem never arose. And now people are living longer and longer, and until we find a cure for Alzheimer's this problem is just going to get more and more urgent.” He raised the example of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s husband, an Alzheimer’s sufferer who became close with another woman, who also had Alzheimer’s, in the nursing home where he resided. “Do we want to call that adultery?” asked Portmann.
“Everybody is talking about the gays and the lesbians and how they’re changing the morals in America,” he said. “I think actually a more profound kind of rebellion against traditional values is happening in the Alzheimer’s community.”
So what does this strange new landscape mean for the concept of consent? Everyone agrees that people with dementia need to be protected from predators, of course. But Powell said that outside these cases, she’d use a few criteria to determine whether a given activity is acceptable: She’d encourage facility administrators to allow any activity that doesn’t raise any flags for abuse, that seems to bring comfort or enjoyment to the individual with dementia, and that isn’t causing significant harm to others.
In theory, it sounds almost straightforward — a utilitarian approach to Alzheimer’s sex. But in practice, say Powell and others, a great deal of stigma and institutional lead-footedness are making this issue more complicated than it needs to be. “People don’t like to think of impaired people having sex or wanting sex,” said Powell — especially when the impaired person in question is their mom or dad. So when a nurse calls a resident’s daughter and says, “Hey, your mom has a new boyfriend in the nursing home. They seem to want to spend the night together — what do you think?’” as Powell put it, the daughter might blanch — and not as a result of a clear weighing of the pros and cons, but because she’s simply weirded out by the idea.
On top of that, many institutions might take a more conservative, or even punitive, approach to these issues simply as an excuse to not venture into such a fraught landscape. “The institution may be worried in some cases more about its own liability than promoting the autonomy and values and preferences of the person in their care,” said Powell.
As a result of all this messiness, there’s “mass confusion” about what should and shouldn’t be seen as acceptable behavior among facility administrators, said Daniel Kuhn, a licensed clinical social worker who has conducted trainings on dementia and sex for nursing homes.“Very, very few nursing homes have delved into this topic because it is so darn complicated,” he said. “It touches on the ethical and moral and legal areas, and there’s no hard and fast tools available to make a determination.”
Part of the problem in developing clearer guidelines, he said, is that no one has data on whether and to what extent workers in these settings agree with Powell (and Kuhn) that Alzheimer’s patients should be granted some level of agency with regard to sex. “I proposed doing a large scale survey of attitudes along ago but it got shot down,” he said in a follow-up email. Instead, he administers his survey — it asks participants to rank their level of agreement with questions like “Residents who have dementia are not capable of making sound decisions regarding participation in sexual relationships” — to staff at the nursing homes where he does his trainings.
“I've been talking and writing about these issues for 20-plus years,” he said, “and nothing has been done by any professional organization or government entity to offer any help to people at the local level who are involved in this difficult work.” Powell concurred: while she said she saw encouraging signs of some facilities taking these issues more seriously, “There’s a lot of work to be done.”
Kuhn said he saw the rape charges, whatever the outcome of the trial, as a tragic outcome, and clear evidence that society needs to overcome its squeamishness on this issue. “Most [facilities] have just sort of turned a blind eye until there is some kind of a crisis, and then they scurry around figuring out what to do, hoping it all goes away,” he said. “Except in this case it didn’t go away — it blew up.”
"Rape by Surprise"
A short, ageing French man faces prosecution on rape allegations after masquerading as a 37-year-old male model on the internet to lure women into Fifty Shades of Grey- style sex encounters.
Police suspect that dozens of women accepted dates with the man, 68, after seeing his fake online profile featuring a photo of a young man with blue eyes and brown hair.
The man, who called himself Anthony Laroche, exchanged messages with his victims before arranging an encounter with them in his flat in Nice, where the lights were dimmed. One of his victims, named as Leila in the French press, said she followed the instructions he had given her by text message, entering his flat through an unlocked door, getting undressed in his bathroom and blindfolding herself before joining him in the bedroom.
After they had sex, she turned on the light, removed her blindfold and discovered him to be “small, old and nothing like the photograph,” she told the Nice-Matin newspaper.
Police arrested the 68-year old man, known only as Michel, on March 17, placing him under formal investigation for "rape by surprise". During questioning, he reportedly admitted to having found a photo of a male model "on Google" as a "way of maintaining my anonymity".
Asked whether he had committed rape, he reportedly said: "For me, when she entered the bedroom naked, she was consenting. At that moment, she couldn't care less what I looked like.
"If she had asked just once if I was really the man in the photo, I would have told her the truth," he is cited as saying.
LT Editorial Recognizing Prostitution Inevitable
Making it illegal to pay for a prostitute won’t stop the oldest profession. It will go underground and put more women at risk.
Humans like sex and some like to pay for it. We have to live with it Prohibition does not help or protect anyone, least of all the women.
It doesn’t take long to find a prostitute. Ninety seconds on the internet, and I find a list of 19 women who live within one mile of my suburban house, offering everything from fetish work to adult mothering, whatever that is.
Helpfully, previous punters have left reviews. These are reminiscent of the old brothel guides of the 18th century, but without the wit and charm. Most seem to concentrate on the woman’s ability to provide the Full Girlfriend Experience, or GFE as it seems to be known in this peculiar corner of cyberspace. Many insist that the worker in question enjoyed the sex. Of course she did, dear.
It is a depressing foray. Beautiful young things offer acronyms and pictures of isolated body parts to deluded male and female punters. Yes, women too. The same website provided me details of ten straight male prostitutes within a one-mile radius. Aaron, “a young black stallion”, charges £40 for 15 minutes with the lucky ladies. But if I opted to invite Aaron around for a £40 frolic, should that be a criminal offence? In France, it may soon be illegal to pay for prostitutes. Punters face fines of up to £1,200 and up to six months in jail after an anti-vice bill was revived this week following attempts to kill it off. The Labour MP Fiona Mactaggart proposed an amendment to the Modern Slavery Bill last year, which would have made paying for sex illegal in this country. It didn’t pass.
The stated aim of the French minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem is to “see prostitution disappear”. A laudable aim; as hard to argue against as world peace and kissing kittens. There is a hardening of attitudes to the sex trade in Europe, driven by three factors. The first is a utopian impulse that insists we can eradicate prostitution. The second is a moral crusade. The third is concern for those coerced into selling their bodies.
It is a truism to say prostitution is as old as human history; the temples of early civilisations doubled as brothels and Jesus was forgiving of working girls. But Ms VallaudBelkacem hypothesises that if, millennia later, you remove demand, you will destroy supply.
If we’re taking history as a template, can anyone think of an instance in which legal prohibition of something naughty removed, rather than displaced, demand? Humans like sex, and some like to pay for it. I do not have to understand, or condone this, to recognise it as something we have to live with.
But my mild distaste for The Game is another woman’s moral crusade. Ms Vallaud-Belkacem belongs to a tradition that insists all sex workers are victims. This is the feminist paradox: the central tenet of the movement is that women must have the right to make their own decisions. Yet women have an awkward propensity to choose complicity in the exploitation of their bodies. The examples of liberated women behaving in an unliberated way are endless: Page 3, porn, the ambition to marry a footballer, the bikini-clad wife of the tycoon who lets him walk her on a leash like a dog.
My feminist sisters tie themselves in theoretical knots over the paradox. The easiest way to undo this part of the knot is to insist that all female prostitutes are victims — either directly or through the limiting of their life choices by poverty or drug abuse. Never mind that the women themselves, speaking through prostitutes’ collectives, deny they are all victims. Can you successfully ignore all facts that muddy a sexy theory? Welcome to the club of leftwing feminism.
Many women choose to be sex workers. It may be a choice between a low-paid job with long hours, or sex work, but this is still a choice and not an irrational one. Researchers at Leeds University found earlier this year that more than 70 per cent of those who had chosen to do sex work had previously worked in healthcare, childcare or the charity sector — and 38 per cent had university degrees.
Nonetheless, sex work is more dangerous than other jobs. A 2005 study showed that prostitutes were 12 times more likely to be murdered than other women their age. Rape is an occupational hazard.
A proportion of prostitutes are coerced into the game. But how do you differentiate between those who choose the life and those brutalised into it? When does economic migration by a woman who chooses sex work from limited options become trafficked sex slavery? Boundaries are blurred; insisting that they are straight-edged can only lead to poor law-making.
Prostitutes’ rights groups claim that criminalising punters forces sex work underground and makes it more dangerous. Sweden made it illegal to buy sex in 1999, and its government has claimed this has led to a decline in prostitution. Critics say that sex work in Sweden has moved into darker alleys, without declining in any significant way.
Recent figures suggest that 4.2 per cent of British men use prostitutes. In Greater London the figure rises to 8.9 per cent. Depressing statistics. But would we really want scant resources wasted on chasing these punters? What good would it do — and, more to the point, what harm?
We must resist moral crusades against prostitution and attempts to criminalise the profession further. The preoccupation of any legal framework surrounding prostitution must be the safety, health and welfare of the women involved. Prohibition does not help or protect anyone, least of all the women offering a Full Girlfriend Experience and more to 8.9 per cent of the nice, family men in my London nook.
Paedophiles
Three quarters of a million men may have a sexual interest in children, according to one of the bosses of Britain’s National Crime Agency. An estimated 250,000 of them are “true paedophiles” with a sexual desire for pre-pubescent children.
Phil Gormley, deputy director of the NCA, warned that every day a new group of young men arrive at puberty and develop an interest in sexual activity with children. He said a fresh approach to tackling the issue was needed as people will not come forward if all the authorities do is arrest and jail perpetrators. “Like most people I am shocked by the estimated number who have this interest. It tells us some unhealthy things about human nature,” he added.
The NCA figures, based on academic and other sources, suggested that between 1 and 3 per cent of men had paedophile tendencies, with Mr Gormley telling The Mail On Sunday: “Whatever the exact figure, it is big.”
Separate figures released by the NSPCC last week showed police are recording sex crimes against children at the rate of 85 a day. The charity said the number of sexual crimes recorded by police rose by a third to 31,000 between 2012-13 and 2013-14.
The Revolution
This debate is a saddening bore, ’cause we’ve had it ten times before. Still it’s about to be had again, so I ask you to focus on saaailors, fighting in the dance hall.
Or, better still, focus on David Bowie singing about them. Screwed-down hairdo. Face as white as the backdrop, which is as white as you get. Powder-blue suit, which matches the blue of his eye-shadow. What does he want to do to those sailors, and what does he want those sailors to do to him? And what, in 1973, does his audience think about that?
It seems neat — if that’s not too crass a word — that on the day that David Bowie dies, the Church of England should be in turmoil, again, over its approach to homosexuality. Ahead of a meeting of 39 primates from the global Anglican Communion, a hundred senior Anglicans have written to the archbishops of Canterbury and York. They call on the church to acknowledge that it has “failed in our duty of care to LGBTI members of the Body of Christ around the world”. Such people, the letter goes on, have been treated as “a problem to be solved” and “second-class citizens . . . abandoned and alone”.
LGBTI stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex”. Bowie, at times, appeared to be at least three of those things, and arguably four. I have my doubts about him achieving all five, although I’m aware that it’s fighting talk these days to suggest that a man who fathered two kids probably wasn’t a lesbian, so I’ll leave that one parked. Still, that which the church failed to do, we might argue Bowie did. Those whom the church left “abandoned and alone”, he championed and made his own.
The neat — and crass — temptation might be to argue that the church’s big problem, these past 50 years, was that it wasn’t more like David Bowie. That, if it had been, its attendances would not have plummeted, and its relevance would not have waned, and a generation or three would have shunned rock’n’roll and eyeliner, and picked up the Church Hymnary instead. But that, I think, would be pushing it.
On sexuality, Bowie, like Ziggy Stardust, was a leper messiah. The Starman’s spaceship was powered by oddities. Or, to put it another way, if mainstream society — including the church — had been a bit more relaxed about sexual orientation, then I doubt Bowie would have been much interested in it, either.
Pop bristled with sexual pioneers in the 1970s and 80s, but few of them were quite like him. Sir Elton John, today a formidable gay rights pioneer, seemed cantankerous about his sexuality for decades, perhaps rightly perceiving media speculation as aggressive and not really coming out until after his divorce from Renate Blauel in 1988. Even Freddie Mercury — in a vest and a moustache and a band called Queen, for God’s sake — considered his orientation wholly private, pretty much right until the end.
Bowie, meanwhile, seems to have been noisily doing the reverse. In 1983, after more than a decade of innuendo, he described himself as “a closet heterosexual”. Smirking, perhaps, as he said it. Still, you always got the sense that he stretched sexual mores not because he had to but because he really wanted to. Difference and marginalisation were never his burden, but his muse. He breathed them in, and breathed them out. And the papers wanted to know whose shirts he wore.
I’m no more of an authority on the CofE than I am on Bowie but I’ve always loved its tunes. Moreover, I’m aware that it has its own conflicts about marginalisation. On the one hand, it follows the teaching of a man who preached that the meek would inherit the Earth; on the other it came into its own via a royal power grab (“I, I will be king, and you, you will queen . . .”) and owns a hell of a lot of pretty snazzy real estate. This inherent tension was on display most recently with the church’s conflicted response to the Occupy demonstrations outside St Paul’s Cathedral. Nobody, even if they wore a dog collar, seemed quite sure which side they ought to be on.
The Anglicans’ letter avoids any mention of doctrinal flashpoints such as gay marriage, but the same tensions are there. Neither Justin Welby nor John Sentamu, I suspect, would deny that gay people have for centuries been treated in a manner not terribly Christlike. Simultaneously, with their establishment hats on (big gold pointy things) they presumably also have an eye on trying to keep the worldwide Anglican communion together. Should they, or should they not, turn and face the strange?
Of course they should. Not least because, while Bowie may have celebrated the strange, the strange ain’t that strange any more. Bowie’s sexual revolution was never about what he was doing to anybody, sailors or otherwise. It was more vague and expansive, spawning allies for those who needed them. That was why, when David Cameron led tributes yesterday, it barely even jarred. This, remember, is the prime minister who brought in gay marriage. Once only embraced by a freaky-eye boy from Brixton, the misfits of another age are today embraced by the establishment itself.
Sugar Babes, But It's Totally Not Prostitution
e waiter with the handlebar mustache encourages us to “participate in the small-plate culture.” Geraldine’s, the swank spot in Austin’s Hotel Van Zandt, is brimming with tech guys, some loudly talking about money. The college student at our table recommends the ribs—she’s been here before, on “dates” with her “daddies.” “There are a lot of tech guys,” she says. “They want the girlfriend experience, without having to deal with an actual girlfriend.”
“The girlfriend experience” is the term women in the sex trade use for a service involving more than just sex. “They want the perfect girlfriend—in their eyes,” says Miranda, the young woman at our table.* “She’s well groomed, cultured, classy, able to converse about anything—but not bringing into it any of her real-world problems or feelings.”
Miranda is 22 and has the wavy bobbed hair and clipped mid-Atlantic accent of a 1930s movie star; she grew up in a Texas suburb. “I’ve learned how to look like this, talk like this,” she says. “I work hard at being this,” meaning someone who can charge $700 an hour for sex.
Her adventures in “sugaring” started three years ago when she got hit on by an older guy and rebuffed him, saying, “Look, I’m not interested, so unless you’re offering to pay my student loans,” and he said, “Well . . . ?” After that, “he paid for stuff. He gave me money to help out with my living expenses.”
It ended when she went on a school year abroad and started meeting men on Seeking Arrangement, the Web site and app which match “sugar daddies” with “sugar babies,” whose company the daddies pay for with “allowances.” Now, she says, she has a rotation of three regular “clients”—”a top Austin lawyer, a top architect, and another tech guy,” all of them married. She adds, “Their relationships are not my business.”
She confesses she isn’t physically attracted to any of these men, but “what I’m looking for in this transaction is not sexual satisfaction. Do you like everyone at your job? But you still work with them, right? That’s how it is with sex work—it’s a job. I get paid for it. I do it for the money.”
And not only the money. “I’m networking,” Miranda maintains, “learning things from older men who give me insights into the business world. I’ve learned how to do an elevator pitch. I’ve learned so many soft skills that will help me in my career.
“ALMOST ALL OF MY FRIENDS DO SOME SORT OF SEX WORK . . . . IT’S ALMOST TRENDY TO SAY YOU DO IT—OR THAT YOU WOULD.”
“While in college,” she goes on, “I’ve had the ability to focus on developing myself because I’m not slaving away at a minimum-wage job. I reject it when people say I’m oppressed by the patriarchy. People who make seven dollars an hour are oppressed by the patriarchy.”
“She’s in control of the male gaze,” says another woman at the table, Erin, 22.
“I thought about doing it,” says Kristen, 21, tentatively. “I signed up for Seeking Arrangement when I couldn’t pay my rent. But I was held back because of the stigma if anyone finds out.”
“What right does anyone have to judge you for anything you do with your body?,” Miranda asks.
“JUST ANOTHER JOB”
The most surprising thing about Miranda’s story is how unsurprising it is to many of her peers. “Almost all of my friends do some sort of sex work,” says Katie, 23, a visual artist in New York. “It’s super-common. It’s almost trendy to say you do it—or that you would.”
“It’s become like a thing people say when they can’t make their rent,” says Jenna, 22, a New York video-game designer. “ ‘Well, I could always just get a sugar daddy,’ ‘I guess I could just start camming,’ ” or doing sexual performances in front of a Webcam for money on sites like Chaturbate. “And it’s kind of a joke, but it’s also not because you actually could. It’s not like you need a pimp anymore. You just need a computer.”
“Basically every gay dude I know is on Seeking Arrangement,” says Christopher, 23, a Los Angeles film editor. “And there are so many rent boys,” or young gay men who find sex-work opportunities on sites like RentBoy, which was busted and shut down in 2015 by Homeland Security for facilitating prostitution. “Now people just go on RentMen,” says Christopher.
As the debate over whether the United States should decriminalize sex work intensifies, prostitution has quietly gone mainstream among many young people, seen as a viable option in an impossible economy and legitimized by a wave of feminism that interprets sexualization as empowering. “People don’t call it ‘prostitution’ anymore,” says Caitlin, 20, a college student in Montreal. “That sounds like slut-shaming. Some girls get very rigid about it, like ‘This is a woman’s choice.’ ”
“Is Prostitution Just Another Job?” asked New York magazine in March; it seemed to be a rhetorical question, with accounts of young women who found their self-esteem “soaring” through sex work and whose “stresses seem not too different from any young person freelancing or starting a small business.” “Should Prostitution Be a Crime?” asked the cover of The New York Times Magazine in May—again apparently a rhetorical question, with an argument made for decriminalization that seemed to equate it with having “respect” for sex workers. (In broad terms, the drive for decriminalization says it will make the lives of sex workers safer, while the so-called abolitionist movement to end prostitution contends the opposite.)
The Times Magazine piece elicited an outcry from some feminists, who charged that it minimized the voices of women who have been trafficked, exploited, or abused. Liesl Gerntholtz, an executive director at Human Rights Watch, characterized the prostitution debate as “the most contentious and divisive issue in today’s women’s movement.” “There’s a lot of fear among feminists of being seen on the wrong side of this topic,” says Natasha Walter, the British feminist author. “I don’t understand how women standing up for legalizing sex work can’t see the ripple effect of taking this position will have on our idea of a woman’s place in the world.”
A ripple effect may already be in motion, but it looks more like a wave. A string of feminist-sex-worker narratives have been weaving through pop culture over the last few years, as typified by Secret Diary of a Call Girl (2007–11), the British ITV2 series based on the memoir by the pseudonymous Belle de Jour. Belle, played by the bubbly Billie Piper, is a savvy college grad who hates working at boring, low-paying office jobs, so she becomes a self-described “whore,” a lifestyle choice which always finds her in fashionable clothes. “I love my job,” Belle declares. “I’ve read every feminist book since Simone de Beauvoir and I still do what I do.” And then there is The Girlfriend Experience (2016–), the dramatic series on Starz, a darker take on a similarly glossy world of high-priced hotels and high-end shopping trips financed by wealthy johns. “I like it, O.K.?” snaps the main character, Christine, played by Riley Keough, when her disapproving sister asks why she’s working as an escort. Christine likes sex work so much she leaves law school to do it full-time. Both shows feature graphic sex scenes that sometimes look like porn.
“We talked a lot about agency” when conceiving The Girlfriend Experience, says producer Steven Soderbergh (who directed a movie of the same name in 2009), “and the idea that you have this young woman who is going into the workforce and ends up in the sex-work industry, where she feels she has more control and is respected more than she is at her day job,” at a law firm.
PRETTY WOMAN
“My friend who does it says, ‘I do it for the Chanel,’ ” a young woman told the author.
Since Seeking Arrangement launched in 2006, practically a genre of sugar-baby confessionals has emerged. I WAS A REAL-LIFE “SUGAR BABY” FOR WEALTHY MEN, said a typical headline, in Marie Claire. The anonymous writer made clear, “I’d always had personal agency.”
Meanwhile, sugaring has its own extensive community online—also known as “the sugar bowl”—replete with Web sites and blogs. On Tumblr, babies exchange tips on the best sugaring sites and how much to charge. They post triumphant pictures of wads of cash, designer shoes, and bags. They ask for prayers: “Pray for me, this will be great to have two sugar daddies this summer since I quit my vanilla job! I’m trying to live free lol!”
On Facebook, there are private pages where babies find support for their endeavors as well. On one, members proudly call themselves “hos” (sometimes “heaux”) and post coquettish selfies, dressed up for “dates.” They offer information on how to avoid law enforcement and what they carry to protect themselves (knives, box cutters, pepper spray). They give advice on how to alleviate the pain of bruises from overzealous spanking and what to do when “scammers” refuse to pay. They ask questions: “How do you go about getting started in sex work? I’m honestly so broke.”
In interviews, young women and men involved in sex work—not professionals forced into the life, but amateurs, kids—in Austin, New York, and Los Angeles, talked mostly about needing money. They were squeezed by college tuition, crushed by student loans and the high cost of living. Many of their parents were middle- or upper-middle-class people who had nothing to spare for their children, derailed by the economic downturn themselves. And so they did “cake sitting”—a specialty service for a fetish that craves just what it says—or stripping or Webcamming or sugaring. Some beat people up in professional “dungeons”; others did “scat play,” involving sex with feces. They did what they felt they had to do to pay their bills. But was it feminism? And no, that isn’t a rhetorical question.
LANDING A WHALE
‘It just seemed so normal, like no big deal,” says Alisa, 21, one night at Nobu in Los Angeles, a place she’s been with her daddies. She’s talking about how she started sugaring when she was 18. “People kept telling me and my friends, ‘There are rich daddies who will take care of you.’ ”
She had profiles on Seeking Millionaire and Date Billionaire when she landed a whale on Seeking Arrangement. He was a high-profile venture capitalist in San Francisco and founder of a major tech company—“the real deal.” (Friends confirm their connection.)
“THERE ARE A LOT OF TECH GUYS. THEY WANT THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE, WITHOUT HAVING TO DEAL WITH AN ACTUAL GIRLFRIEND.”
Soon after they met he flew her to New York and installed her in a chic hotel. Alisa says he was busy most of the time, but she and her friends ran up $60,000 in room service and spa services while he worked. To make up for his absence, he took her shopping at Alexander McQueen, “my obsession.”
“Being in the L.A. atmosphere, and at the age of 16 or 17 going out in nightlife—it’s all very based on appearance,” Alisa says. “Out here, as long as you’re wearing Saint Laurent and the newest items, that’s all people care about, so my friends and I were obsessed with fashion. I think with our generation, Instagram also has a lot to do with it—people are constantly posting what they have.” She’s explaining that she became a sugar baby in order to buy luxury goods.
“My friend who does it says, ‘I do it for the Chanel,’ ” Alisa says wryly. “We both come from upper-middle-class families, but we never felt right asking our parents to buy us designer handbags or something, to put that burden on them financially. I was already working full-time,” at a clothing store, “and all my money was going towards helping my parents to pay for school.” So there was nothing left for shopping.
Her assignations with the billionaire went on for two years. “It was purely for financial purposes,” she says. “He was not my type whatsoever.” She’s reluctant at first to say whether they had sex, but finally admits their relationship was physical. “If anyone tells you they’re not sleeping with these guys, they’re lying, even if it’s just a blow job, because no one pays for all that without expecting something in return.”
It ended when he started dating a famous beauty; Alisa read about it on a celebrity blog. She had other daddies, during and after him, but then last year she stopped sugaring. “I haven’t done it in a really long time,” she says, “solely because of how it made me feel. Like it just makes you feel worthless ‘cause they don’t pay attention to your brain, they don’t care what you have to say. They just care that you’re attractive and you’re listening to them. I don’t want to ever have to look back and think, like, I made it to this point just because I used my body to get there.” A friend who got “envious” of her postings on Instagram also told Alisa’s parents what she was doing. She says, “She called me a prostitute.”
“IT’S TRANSACTIONAL”
‘She’s a pro,” murmurs the young guy at the bar at Vandal, the hot new restaurant on New York’s Lower East Side. “And so is she.” He’s cocking his head toward some women in the room who are drinking alone. “How do you know?,” I ask. “You know,” says the guy. “They let you know.”
“The thing is, nowadays,” says his friend (they both work in real estate), “there’s the hidden hos. Like they’re hos, but they pretend to be just some regular girl hitting you up on Tinder.”
“I hate that,” the first guy says. “The hidden hoochies.”
“The ho-ishness,” the second guy says, “is everywhere. I used to take girls out to dinner, but then I’d see they’d eat and bounce—they just want a free meal—so now it’s no more dinner, just drinks.”
“IF ANYONE TELLS YOU THEY’RE NOT SLEEPING WITH THESE GUYS, THEY’RE LYING . . . NO ONE PAYS FOR ALL THAT WITHOUT . . . SOMETHING IN RETURN.”
Their complaints are of a type commonly heard online, on social media and rampant threads: “All women are prostitutes”; women just want to use men to get money and things. The Internet holds a mirror to the misogyny doing a bro dance in the background of this issue.
I ask the guys why they think some men pay for sex, especially when dating apps have made casual hookups more common.
“It’s transactional,” the second guy says. “There’s no one blowing up your phone, demanding shit from you. You have control over what happens.”
I tell them how Seeking Arrangement promotes itself as feminist. (“Seeking Arrangement is modern feminism,” says founder Brandon Wade, 46, an M.I.T.-educated former software engineer, on the phone. His InfoStream Group includes a number of other dating services, such as Miss Travel, where a woman can find a traveling “companion” to “sponsor” her vacation.)
“Oh, come on,” the first guy says. “They call them ‘daddies.’ They call women ‘babies.’ ”
“You can’t tell who the hookers are anymore,” says another guy at the bar, a well-known D.J. in his 30s. “They’re not strippers, they’re not on the corner, there’s no more madam. They look like all the other club girls.”
He tells a story of a young woman he let stay in his hotel room one weekend while he was working in Las Vegas. “She met up with this other girl and all of a sudden they had all these men’s watches and wallets and cash. They were working.” He laughs, still amazed at the memory.
“It’s like hooking has just become like this weird, distorted extension of dating,” the D.J. says. “ ‘He took me to dinner. He throws me money for rent’—it’s just become so casual. I think it’s dating apps—when sex is so disposable, if it doesn’t mean anything, then why not get paid for it? But don’t call it prostitution—no, now it’s liberation.”
Jenna says that a friend of hers was sexually assaulted by a man she met on a sugaring site. “She didn’t want to report it,” she says, “because she didn’t want her parents to know what she was doing.” Women in sex work reportedly experience a high incidence of rape, as well as a “workplace homicide rate” 51 times higher than that of the next most dangerous job, working in a liquor store, ccording to the American Journal of Epidemiology.
“If prostitution is really just physical labor,” says the Canadian feminist writer and prostitution abolitionist, Meghan Murphy, on the phone, “if it’s no different than serving coffee or fixing a car, then why would we see rape as such a traumatic thing? If there’s nothing different about sex, then what’s so bad about rape?”
Jenna, the video-game designer, did Seeking Arrangement for two years, between the ages of 19 and 21. As with other young women I spoke to, the catalyst for her was when she couldn’t pay her rent: “I had like negative $55 in the bank. My mom was guilt-tripping me about asking her for money.”
The night Jenna Googled “sugar daddies,” she says, she’d also just come home from a “very bad date” with “a guy who smelled.” “I was like, I can’t take this anymore, these guys are horrible. I just want someone who’s gonna have some manners, or at least some better hygiene.” It was a refrain I’d heard from others, including Miranda in Austin, who complained, “The dude bros are infantile, they’re rude.” “Wish you could send an invoice” to a “fuck boy that used you,” said a young woman on a sugaring page on Facebook.
“So I was like, If I’m gonna spend my time with some guy and have it be horrible,” Jenna says one night at a dark East Village bar, “then if I get some money at the end of the night, at least I get something.”
The guys she met on Seeking Arrangement weren’t horrible, she says, but some of them were “weird.” “Because I know a lot about video games I tend to attract, like, the nerdier [Brooklyn] tech guys. Like the ones who are looking for someone who can talk to them, like, ‘Oh, you’re into Harmony Korine? You like Trash Humpers?’
“They’re actually profoundly lonely guys,” she says, “and think this is the only way that they can meet women.”
There was the guy who just wanted to brush her hair, for hours, as she sat watching television in a hotel room. He brought his own brush. And there was the guy who was “fat—not like morbidly obese, but big.” He liked to take her out for long dinners.
She usually charged around $400 for an encounter. “The guys don’t like talking about money, so they’ll just like leave money in your purse.” What Holly Golightly called “$50 for the powder room” was discreetly offered, she says, “because then it can feel more like real dating to them.”
But it wasn’t real dating, and after a while it began to bother her, as she realized the men, although “generally nice,” didn’t actually respect her. “I think the sugar daddies just see the sugar babies as whores,” she says. “They would never consider a monogamous relationship with someone who would need to do this to survive. It’s like a class thing. They see you as beneath them, desperate.
“Sometimes I think, Did I really have to resort to this?” she asks. “Or was I being validated in some way?” She was a “late bloomer,” she says, and wonders if part of her felt reassured of her attractiveness by having someone pay to have sex with her. “But that’s crazy.”
She stopped sugaring when she got into a serious relationship; now she lives with her boyfriend in an apartment with four others. “One day, one of our roommates was watching porn, and he says to me—he had no idea what I’d been doing—‘Do you think there are sex workers who are really into it?’ I think it’s, like, a male fantasy.”
WISH LISTS
Interestingly, the young men I talked to who do sex work voiced few qualms about whether what they were doing was empowering or disempowering. One straight guy I spoke to who’s on Seeking Arrangement (the company claims to have more than 400,000 “mommies”) did say that he was sometimes uncomfortable with “not being in control of the situation.”
One night at Macri Park, a gay bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Derek is having a drink with friends. He’s 20 and an art student from New Jersey. “I do RentMen, I do dominating,” he says. “People want to be hit, beat up—mostly older guys. One’s a Broadway actor. I work for dungeons and I have private clients. I don’t have to have sex with them—just whip them with devices, or beat them with my hands. Or I do muscle worship”—where guys ogle and touch his body.
“If I do it two or three times a week,” he says, “I can make my rent, I can eat, I can make my art.”
Once upon a time, young artists and musicians came to New York looking to find a creative community where they could thrive, but now, as David Byrne noted in a piece in The Guardian in 2013, the city has become virtually unaffordable to all but the 1 percent, inhospitable to struggling artists. “One can put up with poverty for a while when one is young, but it will inevitably wear a person down,” wrote Byrne.
“Especially with the intern culture—like New York runs on interns—it’s impossible to get a decent job,” says Katie, the visual artist, at Macri Park. “I was sending out 20 e-mails a day for the first five months I lived here,” looking for jobs, “and I was like, This isn’t working.” Now she does Webcamming. She says she “feels O.K. about it,” and uses it to “fuel my art.” She dresses up as a Disney princess for men to explore “the effects of princess culture on my sexuality.” If a client turns out to be a “creep,” someone whose attitude she can’t abide, she’ll just “nuke them,” or turn the Webcam off.
She and her friend Christopher start talking about the Amazon “Wish Lists” that sex workers set up for their clients. In lieu of money (which is sent through PayPal or Venmo), clients can pay with gifts. “I know guys who’ve gotten iPhones, laptops, a flat-screen TV,” says Christopher.
“A lot of people have the really practical ones—like ‘I want silverware, a blender,’ ” says Katie.
“I’ve seen people put furniture, even like shaving cream and razors,” Christopher says. He pulls up one of his friends’ Wish Lists on his phone. The young man wants a stuffed Pokémon doll.
Travis, 27, a porn actor from Virginia, has been a professional escort for years. He says he bemoans the way social media has made it so easy for anyone to do. “There’s a lot of people with day jobs now who are making good money and doing escorting on the side—you’d be surprised.” Why do they do it?, I ask. “ ‘Cause they’re greedy,” Travis says. “The market is flooded. I’m so over it.”
BENEFACTORS
At the Seeking Arrangement Party 2016, a masquerade ball, babies and daddies crowd into Bardot, a lounge in the Avalon Hollywood nightclub, in Los Angeles. Exotic dancers writhe around on risers. General-admission tickets are $100, the drinks aren’t free, and many babies aren’t drinking. Some seem antsy. Many have spent the day at the Seeking Arrangement Sugar Baby Summit, hearing how they should expect to be “spoiled” and have men pay for things. So they’ve gotten dressed up, put on Eyes Wide Shut-like masks, and come here to meet their potential “benefactors.”
“I’m just looking for someone to pay for my boob job,” says a small blonde woman who flew into town from Utah; she’s a Mormon. “I thought I must be doing something wrong because all the guys I’ve met on the site so far have been sending me dick pics and hairy-butt pics.”
The place is filled with guys who resemble John McCain. “My daughter’s 36,” I hear one saying to two rapt young women. He pulls out pictures from his wallet to show them—actual photo printouts.
There’s another type of guy here, the jumbo-size Danny DeVitos. “I thought they said these girls were gonna be 10s,” I hear one of them telling some other guys. “But this is like a buncha 5s and 6s. Maybe they’ll take an I.O.U.” The other men chuckle.
“Why do men pay for sex?,” I ask a young man, the handsomest in the room. “Sometimes in Vegas if you’re drunk,” he says with a shrug. I ask him why he’s here. “I work all the time, and I don’t have time for a girlfriend.” He says he works in tech. “But I like to flirt and have company, not just sex,” he goes on. So he does Seeking Arrangement. I ask him how much he pays the women. “Depends how much I like them.”
There are a lot of young black women here. “I’m kind of surprised,” says a young black woman named Nicole, 25, “but not really. They’re probably here for the same reason I am, which is there’s a lot of racism on the site, like guys will just openly say, ‘No black women,’ so maybe they thought they’d have a better chance in person.”
Nicole is lovely and has a job as an executive assistant. I ask her why she’s seeking an arrangement. “I want to start a handbag line,” she says. “I have all these great designs and ideas. And I just don’t see how I could ever get together the capital. So an investor would really help.”
She seems to truly believe the Seeking Arrangement marketing, that she might find that supportive, encouraging person here. We look around the room. There’s a John McCain with his hand on the behind of a young black girl. Her smooth skin looks so young and fresh in the lamplight, next to his wizened face.
Sex In Japan
As the population ages, the sex trade is becoming less sexual.
IN THE 17th century Yoshiwara, in north-eastern Tokyo (then known as Edo), was one of a number of red-light districts. Both female and male prostitutes walked the streets, offering a full range of services. Four hundred years later Yoshiwara remains a centre of the sex trade, but customers’ desires are becoming less explicit. Scores of “soaplands” such as “Female Emperor” offer men a scrub by a lingerie-clad woman, for around ¥10,000 yen ($94).
Yoshiwara’s transformation reflects broader changes in Japan’s sex industry. Reliable data are difficult to come by, but softer services seem to be gaining popularity at the expense of harder ones such as vaginal sex (which is illegal but widely available) or oral sex (which is legal). The sex trade in Japan has long been about not only intercourse, but also the yearning for intimacy and romance, says Masahiro Yamada, a sociologist, and these are the services that are growing.
There are, for example, more kyabakura, places where men go to be served drinks and fawned over by women, and “image clubs”, where men act out fantasies (minus the climax, at least in theory) in mock doctor’s surgeries or train carriages. Onakura shops allow men to masturbate, while female employees watch. The pornography industry is in rude health, too.
The shift to less carnal services started after the second world war, when the prudish American occupiers urged the Japanese authorities, against their better judgment, to outlaw payment for vaginal sex in 1958. More recently, however, demographic and economic factors have accelerated the change. Some 28% of the population is over 65, the highest proportion in the world. The old stay healthy for longer, but are after “softer, less explicit services”, says Katsuhito Matsushima of Yano Research Institute in Tokyo.
Elderly, not abstinent
A recent edition of Shukan Post, a weekly magazine, described how some elderly men visit soaplands “just to talk to the babes”. The owner of a “delivery-health” business, which dispatches girls to homes and hotels in Hiroshima, says that older people have replaced those in their 20s as his main customers. Rather than having intercourse, he says, they simply want to spend time in the company of young women.
Akira Ikoma, the editor of My Journey, a sex magazine, says that today his publication is aimed mainly at men in their 50s and 60s. The photos are demure: no genitalia and not many breasts. An elderly man with a walking stick shuffling around an outlet of M’s Pop Life, a chain of adult stores, can find much aimed at him. One example is “silver porn”, starring the likes of Maori Tezuka; she retired last year, at 80, after a nine-year career.
At the same time, the sex industry is adjusting to cater to young Japanese who are also less interested in carnal pleasures. Once it was common for young men to lose their virginity to prostitutes in Yoshiwara, something known as fudeoroshi, meaning writing with a new brush. Now virgins often remain so indefinitely. A recent survey found that 42% of unmarried men and 44% of unmarried women had never had sex by the age of 35 (over 50% of Japanese men and over 60% of Japanese women are married by the time they are 30-34). Many young people see sex as mendokusai, or tiresome, says Mr Yamada. Services for the young are often about “doing it by themselves—quasi-sex”, Mr Matsushima says. Services that make masturbation more enjoyable are booming, such as websites that offer chats with naked girls or video parlours where men can watch adult DVDs in a private booth.
Some see all this as a sign of the decreasing confidence of Japanese men. Local media talk of “herbivores” who are fearful of independent women. Maid cafés, where women in frilly aprons blow on customers’ food before spooning it into their mouths, are packed with men (and tourists). In soineya stores, or cuddle cafés, clients pay to lie next to a girl. If they pay extra they get a pat or the woman stares directly into their eyes. Sociologists reckon the lack of confidence may also account for another trend in the sex industry: the fetishism of young girls. Some businesses, for example, give men the chance to walk or lie with someone dressed as a schoolgirl, which is legal as long as the sex workers involved are not actually of school age.
Economics may be playing a part in the sex industry’s evolution, too. Gone are the bubble years when there was lots of cash to throw around. Sex is expensive, says the owner of the delivery-health service, whereas a visit to a maid café can cost as little as ¥1,000. Yet the decline in the conventional sex industry does not mean a decline in the overall business of adult entertainment. A study by Yano Research Institute found that sex-related facilities and services grew by 2.1% in 2014, and sales in sex shops by just under 1%, despite Japan’s ageing and shrinking population. Pornhub, the world’s largest porn site, says Japan is its fourth-largest source of traffic.
Mr Ikoma, the editor, attributes this in part to the business being more culturally accepted in Japan than elsewhere. Many companies still see fit to entertain clients in the equivalent of strip clubs, while pornographic magazines are sold in most convenience stores. And whether or not Japanese men are losing their taste for penetrative sex, they are not short of creative alternatives.
‘Feminism and capitalism are at odds, if under the one women are people and under the other they are property.’
Since the Toronto bloodbath, a lot of pundits have belatedly awoken to the existence of the “incel” (short for involuntary celibate) online subculture and much has been said about it. Too often, it has been treated as some alien, unfamiliar worldview. It’s really just an extreme version of sex under capitalism we’re all familiar with because it’s all around us in everything, everywhere and has been for a very long time. And maybe the problem with sex is capitalism.
What’s at the bottom of the incel worldview: sex is a commodity, accumulation of this commodity enhances a man’s status, and every man has a right to accumulation, but women are in some mysterious way obstacles to this, and they are therefore the enemy as well as the commodity. They want high-status women, are furious at their own low status, but don’t question the system that allocates status and commodifies us all in ways that are painful and dehumanizing.
Entitlement too plays a role: if you don’t think you’re entitled to sex, you might feel sad or lonely or blue, but not enraged at the people who you think owe you. It’s been noted that some of these men are mentally ill and/or socially marginal, but that seems to make them only more susceptible to online rage and a conventional story taken to extremes. That is, it doesn’t cause this worldview, as this worldview is widespread.
Rather, it makes them vulnerable to it; the worldview gives form or direction to that isolation and incapacity. Many of the rest of us have some degree of immunity, thanks to our access to counter-narratives and to loving contact with other human beings, but we are all impacted by this idea that everyone has a market value and this world in which so many of us are marketed as toys and trophies.
Feminism and capitalism are at odds, if under the one women are people and under the other they are property
If you regard women as people endowed with certain inalienable rights, then heterosexual sex – as distinct from rape – has to be something two people do together because both of them want to, but this notion of women as people is apparently baffling or objectionable to hordes of men – not just incels.
Women-as-bodies are sex waiting to happen – to men – and women-as-people are annoying gatekeepers getting between men and female bodies, which is why there’s a ton of advice about how to trick or overwhelm the gatekeeper. Not just on incel and pick-up-artist online forums but as jokey stuff in movies. You could go back to Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Casanova’s trophy-taking, too.
It goes back before capitalism, really, this dehumanization that makes sex an activity men exact from women who have no say in the situation. The Trojan war begins when Trojan Paris kidnaps Helen and keeps her as a sex slave. During the war to get Helen back, Achilles captures Queen Briseis and keeps her as a sex slave after slaying her husband and brothers (and slaying someone’s whole family is generally pretty anti-aphrodisiac). His comrade in arms Agamemnon has some sex slaves of his own, including the prophetess Cassandra, cursed by Apollo for refusing to have sex with him. Read from the point of view of the women, the Trojan wars resemble Isis among the Yazidi.
Feminism and capitalism are at odds, if under the one women are people and under the other they are property. Despite half a century of feminist reform and revolution, sex is still often understood through the models capitalism provides. Sex is a transaction; men’s status is enhanced by racking up transactions, as though they were poker chips.
Which is why the basketball star Wilt Chamberlain boasted that he’d had sex with 20,000 women in his 1991 memoir (prompting some to do the math: that would be about 1.4 women per day for 40 years). Talk about primitive accumulation! The president of the United States is someone who has regularly attempted to enhance his status by association with commodified women, and his denigration of other women for not fitting the Playmate/Miss Universe template is also well-known. This is not marginal; it’s central to our culture, and now it’s embodied by the president of our country.
Women’s status is ambiguous in relation to sexual experience, or perhaps it’s just wrecked either way: there’s that famous scene in The Breakfast Club in which a female character exclaims, “Well, if you say you haven’t, you’re a prude. If you say you have then you’re a slut. It’s a trap.” Reminiscing about these 1980s teen movies she starred in, Molly Ringwald recently recalled: “It took even longer for me to fully comprehend the scene late in Sixteen Candles, when the dreamboat, Jake, essentially trades his drunk girlfriend, Caroline, to the Geek, to satisfy the latter’s sexual urges, in return for Samantha’s underwear.” The Geek has sex with her while she’s unable to consent, which we now call rape and then called a charming coming-of-age movie.
This idea of sex as something men get, often by bullying, badgering, tricking, assaulting, or drugging women is found everywhere. The same week as the Toronto van rampage, Bill Cosby was belatedly found guilty of one of the more than 60 sexual assaults that women have reported. He was accused of giving them pills to render them unconscious or unable to resist. Who wants to have sex with someone who isn’t there? A lot of men, apparently, since date rape drugs are a thing, and so are fraternity-house techniques to get underage women to drink themselves into oblivion, and Brock Turner, known as the Stanford rapist, assaulted a woman who was blotted out by alcohol, inert and unable to resist.
Under capitalism, sex might as well be with dead objects, not live collaborators. It is not imagined as something two people do that might be affectionate and playful and collaborative – which casual sex can also be, by the way – but that one person gets. The other person is sometimes hardly recognized as a person. It’s a lonely version of sex. Incels are heterosexual men who see this mechanistic, transactional sex from afar and want it at the same time they rage at people who have it.
That women might not want to grow intimate with people who hate them and might want to harm them seems not to have occurred to them as a factor, since they seem bereft of empathy, the capacity to imaginatively enter into what another person is feeling. It hasn’t occurred to a lot of other men either, since shortly after an incel in Toronto was accused of being a mass murderer the sympathy started to pour out for him.
At the New York Times, Ross Douthat credited a libertarian with this notion: “If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?” Part of what’s insane here is that neither the conservative Douthat nor libertarians are at all concerned with the just distribution of property and money, which is often referred to as socialism. Until the property is women, apparently. And then they’re happy to contemplate a redistribution that seems to have no more interest in what women want than the warlords dividing up the sex slaves in the Trojan war.
Happily someone much smarter took this on before Toronto. In late March, at the London Review of Books, Amia Srinivasan wrote: “It is striking, though unsurprising, that while men tend to respond to sexual marginalisation with a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, women who experience sexual marginalisation typically respond with talk not of entitlement but empowerment. Or, insofar as they do speak of entitlement, it is entitlement to respect, not to other people’s bodies.”
That is, these women who are deemed undesirable question the hierarchy that allots status and sexualization to certain kinds of bodies and denies it to others. They ask that we consider redistributing our values and attention and perhaps even desires. They ask everyone to be kinder and less locked into conventional ideas of who makes a good commodity. They ask us to be less capitalistic.
What’s terrifying about incel men is that they seem to think the problem is that they lack sex when, really, what they lack is empathy and compassion and the imagination that goes with those capacities. That’s something money can’t buy and capitalism won’t teach you. The people you love might, but first you have to love them.