review of Paying For It by Scarlett O'Kelly

This book was written by an Irish woman who became an escort as a result of the recession. She is one of the women who some feminists dismiss as being unrepresentative of prostitutes. The same was said of Brooke Magnanti but this is some women's reality. What proportion of sex workers are like O'Kelly and Magnanti is difficult to know, especially as things will have changed over the decades.

In Chapter 11 and 25 she writes about 'wifey sex', where a man feels he should only make love to his wife slowly and gently, not go faster and harder as he would wish. Lots of men go to an escort for this reason. Her advice is for him to talk to his wife - she might want rampant sex sometimes. In Chapter 25 she also writes about premature ejaculation and how to solve it. The answer is the start/stop squeeze technique and pelvic floor exercises.

In Chapter 27 Scarlett tells us how she divided up the men who came to see her into different categories. They are Unhappily Married, Fearful Catholics, Students, Middle-class Liberals, Young Family Man, Mr Self Employed and Manual Labour Man.

In Chapter 28 Scarlett goes into great detail about anal sex. On page 203 there is one paragraph that explains how to do it without pain. Later she goes into great detail about prostate massage. She writes that all of her customers have asked for anal sex. That surprised me, because I thought that most sex workers don't do it.

In Chapter 32 Scarlett recounts how she realized that other sex workers charged less money than she did. This is one of the reasons that she eventually gave it up. I don't think she realized though that most of these women would be charging extra for anal sex, and many of them would not be providing that service at all. That's what I think anyway, I could be wrong. Also, they will be spending less time with their clients than she did.

Several times in the book she says that she had no alternative to what she did, it was an economic necessity. During the recession the only way she could maintain her standard of living was to do sex work. There must have been hundreds of thousands of women in exactly the same situation as her. One wonders what they all did. Presumably they lived much poorer and many of them lost their homes.

If you have a hundred people, all of them in exactly the same circumstances, and 99 of them choose to do one thing, does it make any sense to say that the one person who did differently was forced to do so? That she had no alternative? You could say she had no alternative if she wanted to avoid being poor, in the particular circumstances of a recession. You can't say though that all sex workers at all times don't have a meaningful choice.

She writes that she has no regrets about being a sex worker, and that she enjoyed the sex sometimes. So it's not true that although women in sex work can be positive about it, once they have left they cease to be so.

hatred of clients

One thing that surprised me when I read Sara Pascoe's book is her hatred of men like me. She thinks that we are psychopaths, antisocial and unsympathetic.

I have read a new book that sheds some light on this attitude. The book is The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, a professor at Oxford.

There are six chapters in the book, each on a different aspect of sex. The two chapters that were of interest to me were the last one (Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism - about prostitution) and the second one (Talking to My Students About Porn - about pornography).

In some ways this mirrors two of the three sections in Sara's book. The third section is about prostitution and the second is about pornography. Sara and Amia's approaches to these subjects are very different though.

This is what Amia writes (on page 151)

"At the level of the symbol, prostitution is seen as a distillation of women's condition under patriarchy. The prostitute is the perfected figure of women's subordinate status, just as the john is the perfected figure of male domination. Their sexual transaction, defined by inequality and often accompanied by violence, stands in for the state of sexual relations between women and men more generally. Seen in this way, the prostitute calls out to be saved, the john to be punished, and their transactional sex to be stopped - for the good of all women."

She is using the word 'john' to mean the clients of sex workers. It's a common term in America. Amia writes that the criminalisation of men doesn't help sex workers. So why do some feminists want it? They want to punish men. That is more important to them than helping women.

There are two points I can make about that. First, these feminists believe that prostitution can be reduced even if it can't be eliminated. They have a statistic which says that the proportion of Swedish men who bought sex decreased after the law was introduced that criminalises men. That is a false statistic, as I have explained in detail here. Second, the law doesn't harm men. In most Nordic model countries very few men are convicted: it seems easy to avoid prosecution for an intelligent sane sober man.

Amia quotes from the book Revolting Prostitutes by Molly Smith and Juno Mac. "The client thus becomes the symbol of all violent men: he is the avatar of unadulterated violence against women, the archetypal predator." This all seems very odd to me. I can understand antipathy towards drug dealers and pimps (if the person accused is really a pimp: lots of people are convicted of pimping offences who aren't pimps).

Amia, Molly and Juno aren't saying that they believe the clients of sex workers are predators, they are saying some feminists believe that. Some sex workers work alone and never have a violent client. There may be gangs who want to take her money. There may be vigilantes who want to harm her.

Some women would like to work with other women to avoid potential violence but that's not allowed. Some brothels were well run and never had any violence but the police have closed them down. If sex workers were allowed to keep themselves safe they would probably be just as safe as estate agents, nurses and social workers.

Perhaps they think that men like me exploit the supposed power imbalance. In the quotation from Revolting Prostitutes there is this: "prostitution as a deeply unequal transaction - one scarred by patriarchy as well as white supremacy, poverty and colonialism. It seems intuitively right to criminalise men who are, in many ways, the living embodiments of these huge power differentials".

Today both sex workers and their clients come from many different backgrounds. The idea that clients are affluent white men and sex workers are poor black women is rarely true. It is more often true of employers and their servants or even employers and their cleaners, but nobody seems to be bothered by that. I do not consider women or non-Europeans to be inferior to me or only there to serve me. I pay women and not men for sex because I am heterosexual. Mostly English women because that is my preference. They have probably got more money than me. Lots of sex workers today are highly educated. Lots of clients are working class.

A clue to one possible reason for the hatred of clients comes from Sara's book. She writes about a gig where a man called Stefan came over to talk to her. On the subject of early internet pornography, he said that the pictures took so long to download that he wished they would do so upside down. He was trying to make a joke, the idea being that he was impatient to see the woman's genitals (the 'good bits') and not so much her face.

Sara took great offense at this. Two pages later there's a note about Alexa, the cloud-based voice service. Sara writes "Stefan wouldn't like her, she's all brain and no good bits." This is very unfair on Stefan. She is assuming that any man who has a strong sexual attraction to a woman's body is incapable of appreciating her personality or her mind. That he thinks women are only good for one thing.

That's a common prejudice, and it's wrong. Where does it come from? Sara writes about millions of years of evolution that reinforce certain attitudes. I think it comes from cultural conditioning and in our culture that comes from thousands of years of Christianity with its disgust and fear of basic human sexuality. Lust reduces us to the level of beasts, so they say.

So some people hate men like me because we are supposedly violent, we've got more money than most and we are incapable of appreciating women's personalities or minds. There is no evidence for any of this. It seems to come from a lurid imagination or an outdated ideology. Or the female equivalent of misogyny. Perhaps I should feel guilty: after all, I am a Living Embodiment. Another word for that could be scapegoat.

You would think that the Radical Feminists would hate men like Jim Wells. Or Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers. But they like Jim Wells. Julie Bindel and Kat Banyard have quoted him (as 'Mr Wells') in recent books despite the fact that he is an Evangelical Christian who doesn't believe in abortion or gay rights. They like him because he wants to stamp out pornography and prostitution.

Amia Srinivasan in her book The Right to Sex comes out unequivocally in favour of decriminalisation. As do Molly Smith, Juno Mac and Emily Kenway in their books. I wish that Sara Pascoe had done the same in her book (see previous post). Even so there seems to be more and more support for decriminalisation and less for the Nordic model. I know which side I'm on, and it's not with Jim Wells.

In 1991, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), an abolitionist group that [Kathleen] Barry founded, took its case of 'prostitution as slavery' to the United Nations. 'To be a prostitute was to be unconditionally sexually available to any male who bought the right to use a woman's body in whatever manner he chose,' CATW told the working group on contemporary forms of slavery. This unconditional availability and the man's right to do whatever he wanted was tantamount to ownership and slavery.

The paragraph above is from Nine Degrees of Justice by Bishakha Datta.

They didn't get anywhere. Sex workers choose their clients. They can and do deny their services to any man they choose. They tell the man what they will accept and what they won't. If a man wants anal sex without a condom he won't get it. There are no 'survivors' who say that he will. In Rachel Moran's book, for example, she states that she didn't have anal sex once.

So the whole basis of Barry's argument is false. The whole basis of the Radical Feminist argument is false. They don't know what they are talking about. Their hatred of men like me is based more on victim porn than reality.

I have never bought a woman's body. Trying to link it to slavery doesn't make any sense. I don't believe that women are only good for sex - only worth 'what some man will pay for her'. This explains more about why punters are hated - people are being told that we buy women and that we think that women have no value apart from sex. This kind of hatred can only come from a repressed sexuality.