The terminology of abuse
Inasmuch as both women and men use ‘whore’ as a term of abuse, they may have different reasons. The female perspective is that prostitutes are undercutting the union rates for carnal relations, namely a minimum of sex for lifetime support. This is why women call other women ‘whores’ even when these are demonstrably not getting paid or accepting all comers, but have merely taken one lover more than their accusers: such behaviour is still an underbidding of the tariff, and still a threat to the closed shop. All female preaching against fornication is a strategy for thinning competition and raising prices.
Men can hardly be using the same term in the same sense for the same reason, as a lower price is in their interests. Their reasons are perhaps more complicated: a defence against temptation and unacknowledged desire, plus protective colouration to protect them against respectable female reproach. A third reason may be that men are as likely to fall in love with prostitutes, or at any rate the less ravaged sector of the market, as they are with anyone else; but if they do, they are considerably more likely to get their hearts broken, for their chances of the exclusive possession that most men desire fall from slim to fat. This is why men also call women ‘whores’ even when they are demonstrably not getting paid or accepting all comers. In women’s mouths ‘whore’ means scab labour; in men’s mouths the term means any faithless woman with whom a man’s heart is not safe.
Miscalibration
There is another reason why the respectable woman hates the prostitutes, and in fact hates the escort or courtesan even more than the streetwalker. This concerns not undercutting on price, but calibration of judgment.
Women appraise men not only directly, via overt characteristics, but indirectly, via the women that the men have succeeded in attracting. Other women’s choices are thus a lazy way of homing in on quality. Men do the same thing too. This is why there is a bandwagon effect – as indeed has been demonstrated in species other than our own – whereby everyone wants what everyone else wants. It is what explains the discovery of the cheating husband in ‘Sex, Lies and Videotape’, that almost nothing attracts women like a wedding ring; for a man who has obtained a wife must have something going for him, and the prettier the wife, the greater that something must be.
Now, any kind of paid companion upsets this calculus completely; for when the respectable woman sees a man with a pretty girl, it makes a big difference to her assessment of him as a potential partner whether he has succeeded in attracting the girl by his intrinsic merits – including long-term financial capacity – or has merely hired her by the hour. Even if the courtesan is expensive, this proves nothing about his long-range fitness, as she might represent merely a victory at cards, or a friend’s birthday present. How then can the woman who sells herself on the long-term market calibrate her value relative to the man’s, when the price signals are so distorted by such short-term operators?
No to non-union labour
It may have been his dinner companion’s professed willingness to sleep with him for a thousand pounds and her indignation at the prospect of doing so for ten pounds that led Bernard Shaw to define conventional sexual morality as ‘the trade unionism of married women’. For what is the essence of trade unionism? Answer, collective wage bargaining and the picketing of scab labour. The respectable married woman hated the prostitute for offering the same goods for a cheaper price: that is, the working girl was offering sex at piecework rates instead of on a lifetime contract.
Moreover, the prostitute offered her goods on a pay-as-you-go basis, with no penalties for switching providers; whereas the respectable woman is, or at any rate was in Shaw’s day, demanding lifetime maintenance for a very uncertain quantity of sex, while at the same time opposing rescission of the contract. (The notion that divorce was liberating for women had yet to be invented, and indeed the early feminists campaigned against it.) It is very clear, therefore, how the prostitute was undercutting the organised labour; to which any trade union worth its salt must respond ferociously.
It is true that in those days a man could enforce the marital contract in the courts, with an action for ‘restitution of conjugal rights’ – which is not to say that this was necessarily a good idea in practice. Was the prostitute also underselling the wife on quality of sex? That would depend on the market level; were the knee-trembler in the dark alley preferable to wifely sex, it would be no recommendation for the craftsmanship of the union labour. Bespoke services were almost certainly superior to what could be provided by a spouse who was afraid that sexual enthusiasm and expertise would get her stigmatised.
It may be objected that the prostitute and the respectable married woman were operating in two separate markets, one for sex and one for affection, loyalty, support and so forth. If that were indeed so, then the prostitute’s activities would be no concern of the trade union; but the pickets attempting to prevent the scab labour entering the factory – that is, the disapproval, harassment, moral campaigns and so forth – were in themselves a declaration that the union labour did in fact perceive the non-union labour as blacklegs. That is, if the respectable married woman felt threatened by the prostitute, this suggested either that she regarded the provision of sex, rather than the love and so forth stated in the foregoing job description, as her core business; or alternatively that she was afraid that her husband took this attitude. In either case, she could in theory respond with various kinds of product development; but then again, some economic players will always prefer to protect their business by cartelisation or by persuading government to tilt the playing-field.
So much for Shaw’s day; could we say that in our own time, ‘sexual morality is the trade-unionism of married women’? At first sight, we no longer have much that Shaw’s contemporaries would have recognised as sexual morality. Polite or progressive society now forbids any man to criticise whatever any woman chooses to do with her body, up to and including hanging the horns on him, and so we are well on the way to a new double standard, the mirror-image of the previous one. And yet the great concern over prostitution remains, albeit the prime directive of Not Blaming The Victim has shifted the opprobrium from the seller to the buyer. In both epochs, indignation at the evil of the ‘white slavers’ and purchasers of sex serves to distract from the less personalised evils of how our economy and society treats underpaid workers, students, single mothers and so on, not to mention the populations of entire continents.
In an age in which everyone can supposedly have all the unpaid sex they like, an age in which so-called newspapers are full of advice for enhancing couples’ sex lives, in what way is the prostitute still undercutting the union labour? First of all, a session with the hooker may cost less than the white goods or new dress that some wives extort in return for sex. When sexual morality is considered in the Shavian fashion as the trade-unionism of married women, we immediately see that the less sex that a woman provides per unit of support received, the greater is the threat of competition from the prostitute. It follows that the greatest anxiety, and therefore the greatest rage, must come from such wives as are chiselling on their contract.
Of course, the male side can chisel too. The prostitute is rightly indignant if a man succeeds in having sex with her and escaping without payment; the respectable woman’s indignation at being seduced and dumped is similar, in that the man has failed to pay her price, namely lifetime remuneration.
Secondly, there is a challenge about which the wife can do nothing, namely the variety of womankind. Thirdly, there may still be things that many modern wives don’t do, such as anal sex, although contrary to popular belief many prostitutes won’t do this either, it is reserved to specialists. Fourthly, there may be a mismatch of the amount of sex that is desired, whether because the woman is tired from double work, needs more attention per unit or is imposing the generally self-defeating ‘punishment’ of withholding sexual access.
Fifthly, the modern politically correct woman despises the adage that ‘more flies are caught with honey than vinegar’; she considers it retrograde, beneath her and generally fit only for Southern Belles to keep her man by being pleasant. And so, like every other shared activity, sex may be followed by an exhaustive analysis of the man’s incorrect attitudes and his inability to sustain an equal relationship. The man wants sex; the woman wants to lecture interminably from a great height, and so we have a potential exchange of goods. The contract of ‘I’ll fuck you if I get to improve your mind afterwards, and for the rest of your life’ may in fact be called a ‘moralistic prostitution’; and then it becomes a head-to-head contest, which the working girl wins with her highly competitive tender of ‘For cash down, I’ll fuck you and not nag you afterwards’.
Shaw’s Indecent Proposal
George Bernard Shaw is said to have made a debating-point – for Shaw himself was virtually sexless and would probably not in fact have taken her up on it – by asking a ‘respectable’ woman whether she would sleep with him for a thousand pounds, probably several million in our money. She said, light-heartedly, that she would. He then asked whether she would sleep with him for ten pounds. She was indignant and asked, ‘What do you think I am?’ He replied, ‘We have already established what you are, madam, now we are merely haggling over the price’.
Modern women who hear that story become incandescent with rage, because their S.O.P. is to ‘hear’ the story as a condemnation of ‘all’ women. But Shaw’s dinner-table companion was not ‘all women’; she was under no compulsion to agree to the indecent proposal with the thousand-pound price-tag. That was her own free decision, and so Shaw was quite correct to demonstrate that her favours were, in principle, available for hard cash. Her indignation seems, therefore, to have been grounded in the widespread perception that prostitution means selling sexual services cheaply. Her ‘virtue’ was not about resistance to sexual temptation but about the extraction of a higher price.
And this is, indeed, the name of the game. The modern woman is furious at being told that all women have their price; but so they do. For some, that price will be nothing less than saving their child from starvation, in which case their prostituting themselves would be an ethically meritorious act. For others, it is a million pounds. For others again, it is considerably less. All this applies to men as well; it is just that we men are less frequently faced with this kind of calculus. Another part of the world’s injustice is that some women do have to sell themselves every day to save their child from starvation. When the woman who would put out for a million pounds despises the woman who must sell herself for less in order to feed her child, and is furious at being in any way equated with her, the indignation is not at her morals, but solely at her pricing.
A linguistic misunderstanding
The Sixties and Seventies, with their infinitely expanding economy, redistributionist social policies and idealised promiscuity, probably saw the proportion of women doing sex work reach an all time low. This epoch was therefore apt to misunderstand the moral discourse of an earlier age, when almost every woman was either already on the game or else terrified of being forced onto it. No one is harder on the prostitute than the woman clinging to her respectability by her fingernails. So when, in our dim and distant youth, we heard our elders refer to someone as No Better Than She Should Be, or read this phrase in a book, we assumed this to be a lemon-sucking condemnation of some free spirit; we thought it meant that they were complaining that she wore lipstick or slept over at her boyfriend’s. In fact it meant that she was selling it.
Going and coming
It may be doubted whether any escort or brothel worker has ever claimed that she enjoyed the sex all the time. And no one would believe her if she did. Some confide to trusted customers how much they actually dislike the job; but here they have a problem, in that they must make the particular client believe that they nevertheless like being with him, for – despite what the misandrists are constantly asserting – very few customers enjoy feeling that they are making the woman suffer. Sometimes such protestations are all-too transparent and the customer can see that there are no real exceptions after all.
The real question concerns the middle ground, whether a woman selling sexual services can enjoy the experience with a considerate partner. The answer to that depends on one’s prior view of sexual female nature in general. The woman who herself can only enjoy sex in a secure monogamous relationship, or cannot enjoy it at all, will indignantly disbelieve it, as will the woman who resents the very existence of men; but then they both need to explain away the behaviour of their sisters at parties and discos, on Greek islands and so forth. This problem is often solved through denial, and by the customary overgeneralisation from herself, yielding dogmatic assertions that ‘women’ as such never enjoy sex purely for its own sake. In fact, some do and some don’t, end of story.
The naturally monogamous, frigid or misandric woman forced into prostitution is bound to have a different experience and a different view of the matter than the promiscuous party girl, who makes no bones about simply liking to fuck and who by no means requires a deep, emotional, meaningful interpersonal relationship and all the rest of the psychobabble. How much ‘Chicklit’ is about joyous sexual encounters with perfect strangers, and how different is that from sex with a congenial customer? For such a party girl, the relevant choice may be between paid recreational sex with anonymous men and unpaid recreational sex with anonymous men. There will surely be more complicated patterns and personalities in between these two extremes, for example women who respond very well to certain customers but not others.
One service provider reports that she did not really start to discover her sexuality until her mid-thirties, as a divorcée with kids, when she went to work in the licensed sauna; she would finish up a shift, having taken on clients at a pace that astonished her colleagues, and then go clubbing to pick up a man. She could only climax at about four in the morning, she said, after a day of pleasant but unorgasmic intercourse at the brothel. In this way her workplace represented eight hours of foreplay. (Our informant here does not remember whether he was invited to witness the payoff for his earlier efforts, and not being a nightbird or a smoker would in any case have declined.) This ‘foreplay’ approach is also taken by those girls who hold back through the shift and then let themselves have an orgasm with the last customer; these tend particularly to be women who find it uncomfortable to have intercourse shortly after an orgasm and can only have one a day. If a client causes them to have that single orgasm before the last session, they can be quite annoyed with him.
It might be noted here that some women are like most men in that they do not, after all, need love and commitment and romance and flowers merely to have an orgasm; the body has its own rules and procedures. Some women, much to their consternation, get wet while being raped; this does not mean that they consented or ‘wanted it really’, it is a mere matter of friction and physiology. It is not, therefore, necessary to posit that the sex worker who arranges her working day to climax with her last customer has to be particularly fond of him. He may be flattering himself that he is a little special to her, while in fact she is using his body to get herself off in precisely the way that he is using hers.
That sex workers fake loud orgasms during intercourse with clients is an almost universal trope. In point of fact, it is by no means the rule that the worker writhes and moans and so on. Non-orgasmic prostitutes appear rather to fall into two groups: the smaller contingent does act, and very badly too; meanwhile, women in the larger category do not fake orgasms, not because they have real ones, but because they do not purport to have them at all. The former act so badly that it is hard to believe that a client will be taken in, but the word is that most are in fact deceived, mundus vult decipi. Much more typical is, however, the girl who behaves in an encouraging and affectionate manner and gives the impression that she is mildly enjoying the proceedings. It might even be that she has an orgasm, but for reasons of her own keeps quiet about it; in the nature of things this is undiscoverable. A related trope is that all service providers tell all the men what wonderful lovers they are; this is false to the same degree, in that a minority does precisely that, in a most unconvincing manner, while the majority offer no testimonials at all.
One major reason for this reticence is that for a man who wishes to please a sex worker, intercourse is not really the name of the game. The proportion of Northern women who cannot climax from intercourse is fairly high, inspiring the misandrist ideologues to claim that no one ever does so; the woman who cannot come from competent cunnilingus is much more unusual, and the sexually sophisticated woman who dislikes being eaten out is rarer still. Now, anyone who claims that escorts, call-girls and brothel workers do not permit, or do not get, cunnilingus, has convicted herself of not having the faintest idea about what actually goes on at these levels of the market. The rules of the house may occasionally forbid cunnilingus, but without much effect, for the experienced punter knows that most working girls regard intercourse as their job but cunnilingus as their treat, and who’s watching? Many immigrant sex workers come from macho cultures where the men demand to be sucked off but would never dream of returning the favour; when they discover that their customer has a quite different attitude, they are delighted.
Such a customer is not epistemologically dependent on moaning and groaning; having his face soaked in her juices is much more persuasive. So too is when he can feel, by the subtleties of skin and muscle and breathing, that something has happened, a switch has been thrown; or when the girl goes into fugue or falls asleep. Pretence here would demand astonishing acting skills, and what would be the point? When providers fake, they generally fake it quickly, so as to get you out of there; the woman who takes a very long time to have what appears to be a genuine, deep and apparently unexpected orgasm is acting against her own financial interests, and probably house rules too. Also persuasive is when she drastically overruns the allotted time and doesn’t charge extra or appear to care. Yet another pattern is when the worker apologises to the customer for having had an orgasm; this makes no sense to me, but why should anyone do this if they have not actually had one?
A female fantasy writer who has imagined a very sophisticated and non-abusive system of sacred prostitution, involving both sexes as both ‘patrons’ and ‘artists’, suggests that sexual desire can result from placing oneself in the hand of the goddess – or of chance, if we do not believe in goddesses. It would be interesting to discuss this with real prostitutes working in civilised milieus, to see whether this is indeed their experience. At any rate it would seem intuitively obvious that the contrary attitude, of grudging every word and action as if playing a strictly zero-sum game, would not be conducive to sexual desire.
This is well illustrated by Scandinavian service providers. Not only do these absolutely refuse to be eaten out, but they often forbid the customer to touch their breasts, flanks, or indeed anything at all. Under such rules of engagement there can be no question whatever of their deriving any physical pleasure from their job; as for the social aspect, they make it very clear that they hate and despise the customer, sight unseen and in principle. But these rules are what they themselves have chosen, and likewise their attitudes, which suggests that job satisfaction or lack thereof is partly in the woman’s own hands. Providers from more hedonistic, less moralistic cultures than the Scandinavian – which is to say, all of them – who work with Scandinavians or hear about their approach find them utterly bizarre. The opposite pole is probably the Brazilians, whose philosophy appears to be always to extract as much pleasure out of life as you possibly can. They might prefer not to be prostitutes; but, given that they have in fact ended up that way, why not relax, be nice to the customer, and maybe get their own rocks off too?
Mints and girls on the pillow
We read that in olden days Polynesian girls were ‘given’ by their king to guests, and many other cultures had the same custom. What did the girls think of this? One possibility is that they felt the same way as would any educated modern woman who was ordered to a stranger’s bed. To this might be objected that it generalises our own culture as the only possible human nature. Another possibility is that they thought it a chance for some hot sex with a handsome visitor, a minor chore with an ugly one. To this might be objected that it condescendingly treats the self-determination of a Polynesian girl as less important than our own. But what are the facts? I myself do not know, and I do not know who, if anyone, does know. Perhaps the information died with the last woman to remember the old Polynesian kingdoms. Of one thing, however, I am entirely confident: were the second possibility known to be the truth, then no scholar writing today would dare to tell it.
Of course, it might also be the case that some Polynesian women thought it was oppression and others thought it was fun. But if there is one thing that no dogmatic victim-feminist can ever stand to hear, it is that different women’s mileages may vary.
The myth of the passive listener
One of the great clichés about prostitution is that many clients go to the girl to talk, and that she does essentially the same job as the psychotherapist, listening to them without judgment. Maybe she gives them good advice too, from her wealth of human experience. After all, a favourite recruiting ground is the nursing profession. Some working girls are very proud of being able to help men, and indirectly their wives, in this way. So far, all of this cliché happens to be entirely true.
The usual corollary, however, is entirely false; namely that working girls never talk about themselves. Some individuals do indeed play their cards very close to their chests, whereas others tell at any rate the more sympathetic clients all about their lives. Of these, some seem driven by a compulsion to justify their choices, while others kvetch about their colleagues, landlady, bureaucrat, boyfriend or whoever else is bugging them this week; it may even happen that on a given day the prostitute is too upset to function, and so the roles of comforter and consoled are reversed.
Another and related stereotype is the old ‘You can’t buy my thoughts’ cliché. No doubt, but they are often given away for free. The moralist assumes that whenever a working girl tells a client something specific about herself, as for instance where she comes from, how old she is, whether she has a child or a cat, what music she likes to listen to, or what her real name is, this is all invariably a lie. But has this thesis ever been tested in any systematic manner, or is it merely an a priori axiom, motivated by the desire to see the girl as a pathological liar or the customer as infinitely gullible, or both?
A courteous client will often be given information that is verifiable: if a ‘real’ name and age is given, it can be compared with a passport; if a home address is given, it can be written to and a reply received; if a university degree is invoked, the discipline can be discussed; if she has a day job, she will display competence in the field. And so forth. Any experienced and considerate punter can cite examples of being trusted with information that would be disastrous in the hands of a stalker or blackmailer. I know of a punter who on his first encounter with a street girl in Rome was not allowed to bring her into his hotel, so she took him home, not to a working flat, but to her real apartment; and on a return visit she cooked him dinner. I know of another punter who was given the real name of a girl who worked in the capital but came from a very conservative small community. He later visited nearby and found her mother’s name in the phone book. He is, of course, taking her secret to the grave. According to the mythology of wall-to-wall deceit and hostility, such a thing would be impossible.
So how about respect?
If we regard the various human relationships as rungs on a ladder, we might begin with respect. Can a prostitute and her client respect one another? There is no a priori reason why they should not. The next rung on the ladder might be affection. Can a punter and a prostitute feel affection for one another? If they are regulars, or even like one another in the first session, it would not seem too improbable. The third rung might be friendship. Can a prostitute and her client be friends? That is a lot harder, but not, perhaps, impossible in the long run. Although they cannot, by definition, meet on her own time without the interaction ceasing to be commercial, some of the offices of friendship are quite feasible; for example the prostitute may tell the client her troubles and be comforted, not only the other way about.
Many people would put romantic love as the next rung, although I would dissent, on the grounds that romantic love makes profoundly false claims about itself. In any case, for clients to become romantic about and infatuated with a prostitute is extremely common. For the worker to fall for the client is less common, but it does happen; as witness the fact that sex workers find it necessary to severely warn one another against doing so. If it were biologically impossible they would not need to issue such warnings.
The last rung on the ladder would be love in the true sense, wherein the welfare of the Other is more important than your own. This must be extremely rare in the business, although one might just possibly imagine a punter who sacrifices his life in the attempt to save his favourite girl from a psycho knifeman.
Now, assigning the various rungs of the ladder to the prostitute and her client in this way does not prove anything in particular about the profession unless we undertake the same exercise with other relationships. How many rungs does the average Saturday-night number involve? The average third date? The average six-month affaire? The average trophy-girlfriend set-up? The average marriage?
Curiosity, philanthropy and networking
Not all the escorts and brothel girls who claim to enjoy their jobs attribute this to the actual sex. Many speak instead about meeting new people. One interpretation is that they want to talk up their job, but do not think they will believed if they say that they enjoy prodigious quantities of sex; another is that these are women with a particular personality, namely curious about and interested in human beings. Some place the emphasis on what they learn and get from the men, others on what they give and teach them. None, however, are likely to think that men were put on this earth in order to be lectured on female superiority, so that there will never be a meeting of minds with the ideologues.
Some providers fancy themselves as therapists; the opportunity to do good to other human beings, to help and heal them, is attractive to a great many people, especially to women; and the illusion of having done so is even more popular. When men come back as regular customers it is also quite flattering, all the more if they are paying just to talk. That all this is somewhat of a cliché does not prevent it from being largely true, at least on the level of rationalisation; they may not be handing out any profound therapeutic benefits, but may still derive job satisfaction from imagining that they do.
Another group gives the impression of wanting to find out as much as possible about everyone else’s profession so as better to understand society and the economy; especially upmarket escorts may be on the look-out for networking opportunities, rubbing shoulders as they do with ‘the great and the good’. The job thus gives them both capital and contacts for the next phase of their careers. It would be interesting to discover whether successful female entrepreneurs are better-looking than the general population.
