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Family Groups - Women - Burchill on prostitution
You know that old saying, Never eat at a restaurant
called Mom’s, never play cards with a man called Doc
and never sleep with a woman who has more problems than you
do. Well, you might add, Never sleep with a woman called Honey,
Misty or Fantasie, because chances are she’ll be a prostitute
and you bet she’ll have more troubles than you do. And
never doubt for a minute that, in the long run, you’ll
be adding to them, even as you lighten her load and yours
temporarily.
In these days when even Basher Blunkett is not too illiberal
to countenance it in the shape of licensed brothels, managed
zones where women can work under police surveillance and full
taxation of filthy lucre earned thus to declare oneself against
the legalisation of prostitution is considered as embarrassingly
old-fashioned and inhumane as being in favour of sending children
up chimneys or sterilising the blind on the ground that they
are mentally defective. Even the word prostitute is thought
to be somehow outdated and judgmental when applied to an actual
seller of sex. For the rest of us, as a modish pop group once
had it, We are all prostitutes. Except for hookers themselves,
of course, who are, sickeningly, ?working girls?. Boy, I wish
I could get a job which entailed getting off my face and lying
in bed all day! Oh, hang on, I have.
It’s nothing personal coming from one lazy bitch to
another, how could it be? No, on this issue, I find myself
irreproachably the Christian I always claim to be; love the
sinner, hate the sin. I can honestly say that I have never
met a call girl I didn’t like; curiously, they are,
with a few nasty exceptions, generally nice in an old-fashioned
way that most modern girls are not understandably, seeing
where it gets one. As a rule, when they were young, they trusted
men and believed in romance which sadly left them wide open
to being abused and exploited by every slime-ball they met.
Too late they learnt their lesson, but this quality can still
be seen in what Patrick Hamilton, in the Gorse Trilogy, described
as the almost drivelingly sentimental loyalty and generosity
which is part of the looseness of these loose livers.
There are lots of reasons why prostitution makes me cross,
and this is one of them; even if it is the oldest profession,
and even if it is always going to be with us both of which
are far from proved conclusively it’s just so inefficient
and inappropriate the way it is, mostly because the wrong
women are doing it! The nice, the old-fashioned, the enslaved
foreigner, the pitiably poor, the shamefully young none of
them adds up to a natural sinner, guaranteed to put a grin
on a guy’s face. As we’re always being told that
posh girls are better at sex, might I venture the modest proposal
that the prostitution of working-class women (who are naturally
prudish, have very little desire to take drugs or accumulate
material goods, desire motherhood and wifedom at an early
age and are easily exploitable by pimps because of their trusting
natures) might end, and that upper-middle and upper-class
girls (with their no-nonsense promiscuity, desire for even
more wealth and easy ability to wither upstart, bullying males
with a look) might take it up en masse instead After all,
there are only so many uses you can put a useless art history
2.2 to. These girls also tend to love drugs, too you’ll
find more junkies, proportionally, in Debrett’s than
in Deptford so the mandatory whorish crack habit would be
like mother’s milk to them.
It won’t happen, of course just as even though posh
boys often box at school, no posh boy ever becomes a boxer.
Because the fact remains that no matter how much boxing is
called a noble art and prostitution a worthwhile social service,
NO ONE WOULD DO EITHER IF THEY HAD ANY CHANCE OF MAKING PROPER
MONEY DOING SOMETHING ELSE. And this is the paradox at the
bottom of prostitution, the true hypocrisy ? that though we
talk about virtue as an admirable thing in women, it is vice
which is rewarded every time. An attractive prostitute at
the top of her game can earn in a week what a qualified nurse
will work six months for; heartbreakingly, many call girls
are former nurses whose willingness to help humanity left
them so impoverished that giving succour to the male half
alone seemed a more sensible option. Shockingly, some nurses
moonlight as hookers, selling sex in order to subsidise their
own altruism.
Before the state steps in to cut out the middle man and pimp/tax
prostitutes itself, it might be better employed asking just
why this is one of the very few careers in which uneducated,
good-hearted women can make a decent living, and what it might
do to rectify this surreal situation. For the rest of us,
especially those of you who are cool with prostitution, you
might like to test your own tolerance by asking yourself how
you would feel if you found out that your mother had been
a prostitute and the majority of them ARE mothers or that
your daughter was about to become one. If you don’t
mind, you’re weird. And if you do, you’re a filthy
hypocrite, because they’re all someone’s mother
and/or someone’s daughter.
Or son! Even those who swallow the Happy Hooker myth, I’ve
noticed, back-pedal rapidly when the issue of young men selling
sex to other men comes up; Happy Hooker, but Tragic Rentboy.
Mmm, the idea of state-run Eros Centres don’t seem quite
as acceptable, do they, when we imagine thousands of young
men your son, your brother! bending over for the clammy hand
of the STD doctor weekly, being approved as a nice clean receptacle
for some salaryman to deposit his dirty secret into. And by
the way, when some seat-sniffer is banging on about how civilised
state-approved prostitution is in countries such as the Netherlands
and Germany, they don’t tell you how once a woman is
registered as a prostitute, it stays on her records all her
life, making it well nigh impossible for her to stop selling
herself and get a proper job. Is that really what we want?
It certainly isn’t what the prostitutes themselves want,
which is why so many of them work outside the system in countries
where licensed brothels exist.
The Lord knows I’m not a narrow-minded woman. If people
want to become prostitutes, let them. If people want to use
prostitutes, let them. But it is not the business of a modern,
civilised nation state to oil and facilitate this trade in
human bodies and souls, or to make it easier for a privileged
group of citizens to use an underprivileged group of fellow
citizens as sexual spitoons. In short, if people use prostitutes
of either sex then they actually deserve to be ripped off,
to catch diseases and to be pulled in by the police. If that’s
the price you pay for being a punter, tough; the person whose
humanity you are denying, even as money changes hands, is
paying a far, far higher one.
julie.burchill@thetimes.co.uk
The author of this article has had two
failed marriages and the children live with their fathers,
a failed lesbian relationship and now dates the brother of
the lesbian lover…enough said.
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