There are questions that are central to the debate about prostitution. Are there some things that should not be sold, even if a person is willing to sell them? And if you buy consent, does that destroy the meaning of consent?
To look at the first question in a different way: is the buying of sex closer to buying a vote for planning permission than it is to buying a service? Are there some things that it is wrong to buy?
Why is it that if someone buys a vote from a councillor, it is seen as corruption, but if someone buys the use of someone’s body, it is somehow liberation?
One narrative sees prostitution merely as work. Whether I choose to wait on tables, or sell sex, it is all the sale of a service. To see prostitution in any other way is to be moralistic, and prudish.
What people choose to do with their own bodies is their own business, and to suggest otherwise is to be paternalistic and entirely out of touch with modern reality. The only taboos are situations where there is force involved, or people are underage, or being exploited.
Writer and activist Kajsa Ekis Ekman is a 34-year-old Swede who tackles this narrative head-on. She says that talk of selling sex makes it seem as if sex were a noun, or an object, that somehow can be sold independently of the self.
It’s as if sex were something that “a person can carry around, hand over to somebody else or leave under the doormat if the recipient isn’t home”.
She talks about how people working in prostitution claim that what is for sale is not the “self”. “This is how the idea of prostitution is formulated today: a self that sells her own body.”
Ekman writes: “Her body has miraculously wrenched free, and stepped into the marketplace, becoming one of many commodities for sale, while her self remains in command, holding the reins, directing sales from a distance and raking in the profits.”
Sexual abuse
Separating the self from the body, strangely enough, is what happens in sexual abuse. Survivors describe leaving their body, going somewhere else in their heads, observing as though it were happening to someone else.
There is one further step. Sex becomes something separate from both self and body. Everywhere from academic journals, to the comments on Irish Times articles, it is patiently explained that the woman or man is not selling his or her body, but only sexual services.
One such commentator who claims to work in prostitution says that of course she is not selling her body, because it is not as if she is selling her organs. After the transaction is over, her body is hers to do with as she wishes again.
So at this level, “sexuality wrenches free from the body and constructs itself as a service”.
So we do not have a young woman selling herself to a married 36-year-old who has told his wife that he is working late, but instead, we have an exchange of a service for money, on the same level as if she were servicing his car instead of him.
But marriages do not break down if a husband says that he is working late, but instead takes the car to the garage. But if a wife discovers that her husband is buying the “services” of a woman working in prostitution, the sense of betrayal is immense. Why is that?
Does the act of sex involve an intimacy that makes it fundamentally different from any other sale? Are there some things that should not be sold, even if a person is willing to sell them?
Intimacy
Certainly, there are many things that people would not do unless they paid the rent, such as cleaning toilets, or indeed, lots of other jobs. But those jobs do not involve an intimacy so radical that you have to cease to conceive of your body as your self in order to carry them out.
On the sites where men rate women in prostitution, the men complain bitterly if a woman appears bored or indifferent, or as if sex were just a chore.
The highest ratings are for women who “were really into it” and who provided the so-called “girlfriend experience”. In other words, the women allowed men to happily maintain the fantasy that they were in some kind of relationship with them.
Money
However, the reality is that this experience must be paid for, or it does not take place. In the vanishingly rare circumstances where a relationship subsequently ensues, money no longer changes hands.
Is what happens between a client and someone working in prostitution closer to bribery than to a free act?
Can you bribe someone to sell her or his consent, and still call it consent?
Legalising prostitution legalises a fantasy – that sex does not involve the self, only a service, and that bribed consent is real consent.
Criminalising people who buy sex is a reminder that human beings should never be bought and sold, even if they consent to the transaction.