The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (27 page)

The area changed not long after, though. Perhaps under pressure from the university, which owned most of the buildings nearby. Or maybe the city fathers felt embarrassed by the show
Life of
Grime,
which featured multiple episodes about places all within five minutes’ walk of the church. Bollards appeared to stop cars circling round the neighbourhood. Women were moved off
from the corners they usu ally worked. The street-based sex trade departed from the well-lit centre and relocated to the industrial areas around Corporation Street.

I moved out of St George’s after a year. But I was still studying at the Medico-Legal Centre, where Sheffield’s city mortuary shared space with the Forensic Pathology Department.

It was in that mortuary I saw what I would come to associate most strongly with the effects of driving the streetwalkers away from St George’s.

The mortuary was a rectangular room, with parallel stations set up for performing autopsies. One particular morning I was called down to look at a postmortem that I still remember in
excruciating detail. A young woman had been stabbed in a frenzied attack out past the dark underpasses of the Wicker, not far from Corporation Street. She lived long enough to give a partial
description of her attacker, but died in hospital. The victim was just twenty-five years old. I had just turned twenty-six the night she died.

Michaela Hague was picked up by someone unknown, stabbed nineteen times, and left for dead. I remember her dark hair, the pathologist methodically recording the position and appearance of each
place the knife entered. I remember the stuffed toy someone brought to the centre for her. Later I heard she had a seven-year-old son. Her killer has never been found.

Such a terrible, violent murder is only one tragedy. Many murders go unsolved every year. But the connection between what happened to Michaela and where she was working seemed clear to me. The
more I learned, the more the effects of ‘zero tolerance’ policing seemed partly responsible for her untimely death. This would not have happened if she had been on the streets near St
George’s, with loads of walk-by traffic and well-lit corners. This crime could only have happened away from prying eyes, where anyone alerted to
Michaela’s
distress would not have been able to save her.

There is growing evidence that moving prostitutes into the darkened industrial outskirts of cities makes their lives more dangerous. Michaela Hague is just one victim of a policy that is more
concerned with exploiting prostitution myths and preserving a façade of public order than it is about benefiting women.

Before discussing how current attitudes to sex work harm women, however, it might be instructive to take a little trip into our not-so-distant past.

The brothels that flourished in America’s West in the late nineteenth century were remarkably liberating for the women who worked there. Prostitutes of that age enjoyed rights that
mainstream feminism would access only much more slowly and decades later. In an era when women were barred from most jobs and had no ownership rights, sex workers made the highest wages of all
American women and could even own property.

According to historian Ruth Rosen, the average brothel worker in those days earned from $1 to $5 per trick. Many earned more in a single night than women in other jobs could get in a week. She
notes most prostitutes viewed their work as ‘less oppressive than other survival strategies they might have chosen.
¹⁴²

In the US in 1916, the average weekly wage for women in legitimate occupations was $6.67. Most women, of course, were not permitted to work and earned nothing at all. Skilled male tradesmen
earned $20 per week. Prostitutes earned between $30 and $50 per week. Some women achieved financial comfort by marrying well, but with no property rights, rich wives actually possessed little of
their own. By contrast, women choosing the sex trade could live well on their own terms, with their own money
¹⁴³

A study of Virginia City, Nevada, shows that prostitutes in the 1860s boomtown were far from naïve ‘white slaves’. ‘From the age data on prostitutes, it is clear that they
were old enough to realize the nature of their behavior and also old enough to have married had they so desired, for this was an area with many unattached men. Thus we conclude that these were
professional women intent on economic success,’ wrote historians George Blackburn and Sherman Ricards.
¹⁴⁴
The average age
of a prostitute in the Old West was twenty-three.

Timothy Gilfoyle wrote about how during the nineteenth century ‘an affluent, but migratory class of prostitutes flourished.’ A class that questioned the wisdom of working in
factories, when sex work was better paid, and arguably safer. One prostitute of the time is quoted: ‘Do you suppose I am going back to earn five or six dollars a week in a factory, and at
that, never have a cent of it to spend for myself, when I can earn that amount any night, and often much more?’
¹⁴⁵

Brothel madams were prominent citizens of their communities and funded public works projects throughout the West. In Denver, madam Jennie Rogers paid for water services to the city.
‘Diamond Jessie’ Hayman gave food and clothing to thousands left homeless by San Francisco’s devastating 1906 earthquake. Lou Graham of Seattle, ‘Queen of the Lava
Beds’, helped fund the city’s public school system. Anna Wilson, ‘Queen of the Omaha Underworld’, bequeathed her mansion to the city in her will. It became the
region’s first emergency hospital and infectious disease clinic.

There were few more powerful black women in that time than Mary Ellen ‘Mammy’ Pleasant. Pleasant escaped indentured servitude and became a successful madam in San Francisco. She
worked with the Underground Railroad, moving people trapped in slave states to free territory, and was a financial supporter of revolutionary abolitionist John Brown. As well as investing in mining
stock and making loans to the city’s elite, Pleasant earned the moniker ‘the mother of human rights in California’ after filing a lawsuit to desegregate San Francisco’s
streetcars.

According to research by Paula Petrik, 60 per cent of prostitutes in Helena, Montana, in the 1860s ‘reported either personal wealth or property or both’. Prostitutes’ average
monthly income there was $233 – far higher than that of skilled tradesmen who earned $90 and ‘white collar’ men making $125 per month. The red-light district in Helena was
(according to Petrik) ‘women’s business grounded in women’s property and capital’.
¹⁴⁶

There were many court cases in which prostitutes challenged men who assaulted or robbed them, and frequently with positive results. In half of such cases, ‘the judge or jury found for the
female complainants’. A pretty successful ratio, even by today’s standards. And blind
eyes were turned where and when it was sensible to do so: there was ‘a
singular lack of legal and judicial concern with sexual commerce . . . [O]fficers of the law arrested no women for prostitution or keeping a disorderly house before 1886, even though the police
court was located in the red-light district.’

It wasn’t only about the money. Madams also supplied birth control, legal assistance, and accommodation. They provided healthcare decades before other employers did. While women in the
general population had little recourse against violence, even in cases of marital rape, madams enlisted police and bodyguards to protect their employees.

Fiction has an outsize influence not only on perceptions of trafficking, but also on feelings about prostitution. Of the many depictions of prostitution in recent UK television
dramas, only one is based directly on a nonfiction memoir of prostitution – and it is widely accused of glamorising sex work by presenting a protagonist who is neither drug-addicted nor
abused. Yes, of course I’m referring to
Secret Diary of a Call Girl.

Most other media depictions of prostitution, however, rely on stereotypes of streetwalkers and other sex workers having chaotic, desperate lives. Even the Home Office supports this distortion.
Until recently it had a website which claimed: ‘Most women involved in street-based prostitution are not there through choice . . . Nearly all prostitutes are addicted to drugs or alcohol.
Many of them have been trafficked into the country by criminals, and are held against their will. Many were abused as children, and many are homeless.’
¹⁴⁷
There were no sources given for these statements – for the simple fact that they are wrong.

As sex educator and ex-sex worker Carol Queen notes in
Real Live Nude Girls,
‘A weapon consistently used against the marginalized is . . . insidious myth-making, leading outsiders
to believe things about individuals, based on their group status, that may not be true.’
¹⁴⁸

This reliance on fiction over truth influences how information is obtained and distributed. Lamenting the narrow focus of most research, Laura Agustín notes, ‘[T]he focus is usually
on personal motivations, the morality of the buying-and-selling relationship, stigma, violence and disease prevention.’
¹⁴⁹
Unfortunately, those
focused on opposing sex work very often come across as opposed to
sex workers themselves, rather than the work as such. Preconceived opinions are seldom challenged.

The reality of prostitution is rarely the
Pretty Woman
ending, but it’s also seldom as grim as
Band of Gold
. It’s incredibly diverse, attracting all kinds of people
with all kinds of motivations and ways of working in the business.

When researchers allow sex workers to tell their experiences in a way that does not prejudge the outcome, the results reveal things that are well known to those in the work, but still news to
people on the outside. A 2009 study polling sex workers is an excellent case in point.
Beyond Gender: An examination of exploitation in sex work
by Suzanne Jenkins of Keele University
revealed the results of detailed interviews with 440 sex workers.
¹⁵⁰
Not simply street-based women, either, but women, men, and transgendered sex
workers in all areas of the business. Over half were from the UK; the rest were based in Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

The results turn almost everything we think we know about sex work on its head.

Is paid sex all about clients dominating sex workers? No. Less than 7 per cent of the women interviewed thought that paying for sex gives the client power over the escort; 26.2 per cent thought
paying makes clients vulnerable; while the majority, 54.5 per cent, said that ‘Commercial sexual transactions are relationships of equality.’

People generally think that clients get whatever they want from sex workers, abusing and taking advantage of them. But when asked, ‘In your escort interactions who normally takes overall
control of the encounter?’ 77 per cent said they always or they usually did, 22.3 per cent said it varies, and only 0.7 per cent said the client decides.

Sex work is often characterised as brutal, with abuse a commonplace and even usual outcome. But when asked if they have ever felt physically threatened, only 25 per cent of women and 18.7 per
cent of men said yes; 77 per cent of women said they felt clients treated them respectfully; the same percentage said they respected their clients.

When asked, ‘How much longer do you plan to do escort work for?’, ‘I have no plans to stop escort work was joint first choice of answer for women along with ‘one to five
more years’ (both receiving 35.3 per cent). Only 3.2 per cent said they planned to stop in less than three
months. In many ways, this reflects a pragmatism familiar to
anyone with a more ‘traditional’ career.

Sex workers are often stereotyped as very young and naïve, unaware of the dangers of the choices they are making. But the age data do not suggest the field is populated with teenage
runaways and naïve youngsters. Almost 85 per cent of the women were aged 26 or older, and 19 per cent of them were over 40.

Sex work is frequently assumed to be a choice suitable only for the uneducated. But 35.3 per cent of the men and 32.9 per cent of the women had degrees, and over 18 per cent of the total held
post-graduate qualifications. Only 6.5 per cent had no formal educational qualifications.

When you compare these statistics to the general population of the UK, they compare very favourably. Overall, only 20 per cent of adults of all ages have degrees, rather lower than the
respondents in this sex work study. But with only a handful of sex workers over retirement age, they skew slightly younger than all adults, so it is more suitable to compare this group to younger
people. Data from 2008 shows that 35 per cent of young British people now attain degrees: almost identical to the proportion among sex workers.
¹⁵¹
The
proportion of all Britons under age 40 with no formal educational qualifications at all, at 8 per cent, is rather higher than it is in sex workers.
¹⁵²

The balance between risk and reward is something people address all the time. Whether one picks a career as a deep-sea fisherman or as a call girl, the potential income and danger are well
publicised, and yet people sign up willingly. This is a choice everyone has the right to make for him-or herself.

When asked what things they like about the work, two in three respondents in the Keele study reported ‘like meeting people’; 75 per cent of women and 50 per cent of men reported
‘flexibility of working hours’ as an aspect they enjoy; 72 per cent of women cited ‘independence’. Jenkins noted: ‘An appreciation of flexible working hours and
independence were factors that were valuable to women generally, not only mothers. The benefits of greater independence and flexible working hours were not just about the demands of parenting
– they were often about time provided for other, non parenting-related pursuits.’

This was certainly true in my case: the short hours of work I
performed as a call girl left ample time to look for science jobs, finish writing my doctoral thesis, and
participate in a demanding sport at a high level. Juggling those things with a job as a waitress or behind a bar not only wouldn’t have paid the bills, it wouldn’t have left time to
pursue a professional career. It can be damned hard to better yourself if you’re too tired to think about anything but where the next month’s rent is coming from.