About Roses and Thorns
by Theodore Dalrymple
Reading recently a monograph about the lives of heroin addicts in preparation
for an article about addiction I had been commissioned to write, I came across
a couple of comparatively new locutions that irritate me: sex work and sex worker. What is
meant by these, of course, is prostitution and prostitute. (Female heroin
addicts are often prostitutes as well as addicts.) In the Anglo-Saxon world at
least, there seems to be a law of the conservation of prudery: If we are not
prudish about one thing, we are prudish about another, the total amount of
prudery remaining constant.
Medical journals now use these locutions as a matter of course, and since
English is now the sole language of medicine and science, we spread our prudery
with the same self-righteousness and moral rectitude as that for which
missionaries were once famous—or infamous.
The new locutions, obligatory in the polite company of the politically
correct, are not only prudish but are instances of magical thinking. Those who
insist upon their use think that by changing the word they will change the
thing. For them, the problem with prostitution is not the phenomenon in itself
and all that hitherto has inevitably surrounded it, but the stigma that
attaches to it. And this, they think, can be eliminated, or at least reduced,
by a change in nomenclature. For them a rose would not smell as sweet by any
other name, nor would a skunk smell as bad by some other name.
Not only is the world more intractable than this supposes, but if
prostitution were really no different from, say, nursing or teaching as a
profession, it would not be an activity whose name the righteous reformers of
the world dared not pronounce.
Indeed, there is an intellectual debate over the moral status of prostitution.
In Germany there has been an attempt officially to treat it as just one way of
earning a living like any other, but this has rather odd consequences, at least
in a welfare state where people receive state benefits when they are
unemployed. For if we really believed that prostitution were the same as
hospital cleaning or serving in a shop, those who were unemployed could
justifiably be forced into prostitution if an opening for a prostitute became
available. There was allegedly such a case not long ago in which the
social-security system demanded that an unemployed woman take up prostitution,
and even if it turned out to be an urban myth the case pointed to the logical
consequences of the belief that no moral reprobation attaches to prostitution:
not to the prostitutes themselves, not to their customers, and not to the pimps
who help bring supplier and customer together.
Does anyone actually hold this belief, not only theoretically but in his or
her heart? I once shared a platform with a woman who had a doctorate in a
rigorous science and decided on a career break to become a prostitute for a
year to see what it was like. Apparently she enjoyed it enormously and became
something of a proselytizer on prostitution’s behalf. I said that
notwithstanding her happy experience of the business, I doubt that she would
want her daughter to be a prostitute (I’d had quite a number of prostitutes as
patients and none had wanted their daughters to follow them in their career),
but she said she would be delighted if her daughter were to become a
prostitute. I suspected she was lying. The problem with my attitude, she said,
was that I used a numerator—the unhappy prostitutes whom I had met—without any
denominator, that is to say the total number of prostitutes in the population
from whom they were drawn.
Perhaps the world is full of happy prostitutes who never come to anyone’s
attention because they lead such busy, fulfilled, prosperous lives, but I
rather doubt it. For one thing there would have to be very large numbers of
them if they were to outweigh the numbers of unhappy, exploited, abused, and
drug-addicted prostitutes who clearly do exist and are much more visible than
the happy ones. The only happy prostitute I ever met was a dominatrix who flew
around the world flogging judges from Alabama to Hong Kong. She found the whole
business amusing as well as lucrative.
I suppose that a woman receiving unemployment benefits who was told by
social security to become a prostitute might claim that she lacked the
requisite skills, but I once lived in a house into whose district numerous
prostitutes were transported in vans from outlying districts. They did not seem
to me to require much skill except the ability to run away when the
neighborhood watch my redoubtable neighbor organized came into view and took
down the numbers of the cars of the curb-crawlers, subsequently tracing the
owners and sending them stiff letters. These prostitutes seemed to me about as
sexually attractive as dead sheep, but they found customers nonetheless, at
least to judge by the used condoms that festooned our rose bushes the following
morning (the city council distributed free condoms to the prostitutes from a
large white van that toured the area in an attempt at “harm reduction”), and if
these women could find customers I could see no reason why the average
unemployed woman between ages 18 and 65 should not do so, however ugly or
deformed. Indeed, there is probably a niche market for the most severely
deformed.
In France the government, as if it had nothing better to do, is considering
penalizing not the prostitutes but their customers, on the reasonable grounds
that if there were no demand there would be no supply. (It is unlikely that
they will apply this logic to the supply and consumption of illicit drugs.)
This has provoked lively polemics on both sides of the question, polemics as
firmly detached from reality as they are attached to abstract principle. Some
say that women have an inalienable right to sell themselves as they wish, while
others say that they have an equally inalienable right to be protected from the
need to do so which is the inevitable consequence of living in an unequal
capitalist society. (Obviously, they had never stayed in the Intourist Hotel in
Moscow in the good old days.)
I have no solution to offer, except to sweep the whole problem firmly under
the carpet under which so many problems properly belong.
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