He tries not to get the three confused.
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He tries not to get the three confused. |
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Home HIV and the Developing World Another World gay life on five continents God Would Be An Atheist Fiction Opinion Reviews martin@martinforeman.com Appeal to your wallet:  for US readers...  29 May 2002 World Copyright © Martin Foreman |
One of my favourite newspaper columnists is Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of the London Independent. No one else with whom I basically agree manages to irritate me as much as she does. Not once is she content to let a good argument stand on its two feet; she has to surround it with wad after wad of hyperbole and back it up with the odd misinterpretation and misunderstanding. By the time I get to the end of one her columns, I'm usually so exhausted by her hectoring that I end up sympathising heartily with whoever has been the brunt of her attack. And when the Brits among you realise that she once made me feel almost sympathetic to Norman Tebbit, you'll understand how full on she can be. Take her latest column. It's basically a riff on prostitution, starting with the Angus Deayton affair (non-Brits: don't ask, just substitute your own middle-aged but trendy telebrity in a sex-romps-with a-whore-and-drugs scandal). She covers several angles, including the pertinent point that we often attribute sleaze and passion to races other than our own, before concluding that "The enslavement of girls and women for the sex industry is one of the biggest businesses in the world." Well, yes, that particular statement is true, but the implication that all sex workers - the term preferred by many who rent out their bodies - are coerced into prostitution is way off the mark. I get the impression that like a lot of opinionated people, Alibhai-Brown knows enough about the subject to generalise, but not nearly as much as she thinks she does or as would help her form a more nuanced opinion. So let me pull rank and describe some people and scenarios I have seen or participated in over the years. Like the human excrement I stepped over in a Bombay (as was) slum and the room inside, six feet by four feet that was home to a seventeen year old who had to service half a dozen men a night. Or the bargirl in Tanzania who shyly propositioned me. The twenty-four year old Thai woman who saw no other way of making money. The twenty year old youth in the same city taking part in a sex act he did not enjoy. Or the young man in London who chose sex work because of the friendships and the money it brought. The transvestites in Costa Rica and Brazil who laughed as they ripped off their customers. The laughing Australian woman with a husband, a teenage son who shares pride in her profession with the hundreds of women she works with to help them protect themselves from sexually transmitted disease. Not to mention the Cynthia Paines and Heidi Fleisses of the world (sex workers turned madams) who learned pretty quickly in their lives that a sexually excited male was not someone to fear but someone they could easily bend to their will. Sex is a commodity. Some of us have more than we want, some of us don't have enough. Some of us offer it for money, others for love or companionship. Some of us use it as blackmail, others as bribery. Some of us associate it with fear, others - at the most inopportune moments - with laughter. Ultimately, however, sex is no more than an asset that each of us tries to use to our best advantage, to bring ourselves material or emotional reward. At least those sex workers who enter the profession freely and some of their clients recognise there is no intrinsic shame in the exchange. In other words, amongst the millions of young women and men who rent their bodies (the pedant in me dislikes the word "sell"), there are indeed many, perhaps the majority, who do so unwillingly. Often they are unaware that they are being coerced, by poverty or lack of education and opportunity, a scenario common in Africa and Asia, but by no means unknown in the West. Sometimes the coercion is obvious, and backed up by abuse and violence; it is also more prevalent here than we would like to admit. But many intelligent, educated and stable individuals enter the profession with their eyes open, some to stay in it for many years, others who give it up after the first few weeks or days when they realise that it is not something they feel comfortable with. Tarring all sex work with the same brush is ineffective, because it fails to distinguish between the essence of the practice, which is beneficial to both parties, and the conditions which frequently influence it. Cracking down on all prostitution will only drive it underground; clearly targeting that which is exploitative while respecting that which is not, stands a far greater chance of reducing its harmful components. The trouble is that too many people who rail against prostitution are like those who rail against drugs, making no distinction between those that are addictive and those which are not and assuming that legality equals acceptability. Before I finish, let me take a detour, Alibhai-Brown repeats what I suspect is as much myth as reality - the idea of the whore (using the term poetically) with the broken heart who just longs to be loved. Yes, of course some want to fall in love and wait in hope for the rich client who will spirit them away, but I suspect there are many more who have taken up sex work because they were once in love, because some man took advantage of that emotion and then abandoned them. In many communities, a single woman with a baby or without a maidenhead has no prospects of marriage and without education prostitution seems the only option. Many such women would spit at the idea of love, while the stories some sex workers tell of the clients who fall in love with them last long into the early hours of the morning. The man desperate for sex and affection can be as pitiful as the woman forced to supply it. Two conclusions for those who can't be bothered reading through the above, or who have got lost in the undergrowth of my argument: The first is that to assume all prostitution as evil and all sex workers are enslaved is a naïve response that creates more problems than it resolves. And the second point is the broader conclusion that little about this world is black and white (or convex or concave or whatever is your favourite metaphor for opposites). Unfortunately, the tendency to see things in black and white (or up and down or whatever) lies behind much human misery - you only have to glance over to the Middle East for one example - but that's another issue for another time. |
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