Madeleine Bunting on ITV's Happy Hooker propaganda

[delphyne]

http://www.guardian. co.uk/comment/story/0,,2185863,00.html

"Sorry, Billie, but prostitution is not about champagne and silk negligees

The screen adaptation of The Secret Diary of a Call Girl legitimises a trade that in reality is utterly brutal and misogynistic

Madeleine Bunting
Monday October 8, 2007
The Guardian

It's really got to me this time. Egregious use of female flesh in advertising makes me spit tacks. Billie Piper's barely clothed body has been sprawled over billboards for days - and even a back full-page in this newspaper, to my intense irritation - advertising her new series of television tat, which ITV2 is using to promote its entire brand.

Part of the fury is that we are being subjected to an autumnal advertising splurge of lingerie-clad women - even Marks & Spencer - as if women spend the winter dressed in nothing more than a scrap of silk, and Piper is the worst. And part of the fury is that the smallest squeak of complaint prompts accusations of being prim, puritanical, moralistic and lacking a sense of humour. Women, and plenty of men too, are being bullied out of their own instinctive distaste at the way our culture exploits women's bodies and men's desire.

It gets worse. There's plenty of tat on television, yet Piper's The Secret Diary of a Call Girl plumbs new depths in its distortion of reality. Piper as the call girl has a luxurious lifestyle, earning huge amounts of money having enjoyable sex with pleasant - and often handsome - men in smart hotels. In a staggeringly disingenuous interview, Piper defended the series, arguing that her character was "in control" and that, while such an experience of prostitution might be rare, it was a story that deserved to be told. She provided a succinct summary of how feminism's language of empowerment has been hijacked to serve male entitlement.

What, of course, gets missed out of Piper's glamorous champagne-and-silk-negligee account is a few facts. In the UK, more than half of prostitutes have been raped or sexually assaulted. Three-quarters have been physically assaulted, 95% are drug users, and 90% want to get out. Nearly 70% meet the criteria of post-traumatic stress disorder, in the same range as victims of torture and combat veterans.

The prostitution market in this country is being transformed by eastern Europeans, trafficked or desperate. They're cheap and they are worked hard - up to 40 clients a day - in private flats hidden in the most unlikely of leafy green suburbs from Peterborough to Cheltenham. Police raids across Cambridgeshire uncovered no fewer than 80 new brothels last year. While sex trafficking is booming as one of the most lucrative forms of organised crime (low risk and high returns), Piper pops up in a fairytale role as sinister as the witch enticing Hansel and Gretel into her gingerbread house.

Piper's Secret Diary of a Call Girl is a dramatisation of the Belle de Jour novel. It's not a one-off: it is part of a genre you could call fuck lit, featuring titles such as Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire, Dairy of a Sex Fiend, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, Confessions of a High-Priced Call Girl and The Internet Escort's Handbook.

Piper has built up an appeal to children and teenagers through her Dr Who role. What are these fans to make of these billboards, even if parents manage to stop them watching the programme? As one of these fuck-lit memoirs recounts, the author first got interested in being a prostitute when, as a nine-year-old, she saw a prostitute at work. She went on to see "sex work as empowering ... somewhere where I could be a feminist ... and make men stammer and turn red at will". At another point, she ponders: "Everyone prostitutes some aspect of their body or soul for material gains ... It's difficult for me to understand why it is that a wife trading sex for financial support is granted society's approval." And: "Getting rewarded for being physically attractive is not an obvious barrier to self-esteem." Fuck lit is about normalising prostitution as just another career option.

It's a fantasy, but it helps buttress men's sense of entitlement to use a prostitute. And entitlement is key when many clients are well aware themselves of the moral ambivalence around paying for sex. A fascinating study this year by London Metropolitan University's Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit turned the spotlight on clients instead of the prostitutes. The interviews with clients showed that they see sex as just another commodity - "It's just like going to Tesco's," said one. They likened prostitution to a takeaway, it was convenient, guaranteed satisfaction and they were too busy for any other kind of sex. A large proportion use internet porn and the other forms of sexualised entertainment which are fast normalising the idea of paying for sexual satisfaction across our culture.

Men have always used the prevailing mores of their time to legitimise their exploitation of women, and now they use consumer values. Consumerism promotes the fulfilment of needs without examining the nature of those needs or the consequences - which provides perfect cover to legitimise prostitution. As one client put it: "I have a need and they've got a need so we're both taking care of each other's needs."

Clients' understanding of the prostitute's "need" in the survey was pretty vague beyond her wanting cash. Most shocking, only 7% of clients in the survey said that they would be deterred by signs that the woman had been coerced. What was more likely to deter them was fear of disease or the woman being unattractive. If, as the Home Office estimates, there are about 4,000 women who have been trafficked into the UK for sex and they can see up to 40 clients a day, there are thousands of men who are effectively raping women every day in this country. And thousands of men making thousands of pounds a week out of such misery.

Piper's billboards represent a flagrant provocation in the process of deluding people into the acceptability of an industry that is exploitative of women and men. I'm no conspiracy theorist, but it seems uncanny timing. It arrives just as the public have begun to grasp something of the horror of sex trafficking thanks to some dogged campaigning; and even more importantly, just as an alliance of committed feminist ministers in key posts - Harriet Harman, Jacqui Smith and Vera Baird - have shown evidence of a serious intent to grapple with the problem of the oldest, and most vicious, profession. Last week, home secretary Jacqui Smith announced a series of measures to deal with sex trafficking. There is also ambitious talk of bringing in criminalisation of the client, rather than of the prostitute, as Sweden did eight years ago - a move that campaigners have been pressing to be inserted into the criminal justice bill which comes back to parliament after the recess this week. It's going to take more time to prepare the ground, but if this feminist triumvirate pull it off, it would be one of Labour's most important progressive achievements since 1997.

Don't underestimate the backlash that will be mobilised against such proposals. Expect more fuck-lit fantasies, more cod claims of female autonomy and whingeing about the nanny state and humourlessness. This is a debate that is long overdue and it's about time women found a voice again. Prostitution is brutal, commercialised misogyny. Zero tolerance.""

[sam]

We're in the thick of the "fight" stage of this movement, and though Susan B. Anthony never got to cast a vote that was counted I have to believe that in the decades that follow the hypercommodifying of women will be reversed.

She provided a succinct summary of how feminism's language of empowerment has been hijacked to serve male entitlement.

Fuck-me feminism is just one more consumable product promising the best sex evah for the low cost of three payments of $19.95 plus shipping and handling. They put up an organic lemonade stand in the Walmart parking lot and think they're 'transgressing the metanarrative' of how Coca Cola and Pepsi dispense beverages around the globe.

[laurelin]

Okay, I lost my temper with the comments thread on the article and posted this:

Thank you very much for this article, Madeleine. The misogyny in the comments is hardly surprising, as any attempt to show how prostitution is, the vast majority of the time paid rape is always greeted by wails of 'unfair' 'anti-men' 'extremist' from those who benefit from the purchase of female flesh. (It is rape because the sex is not desired by the prostitute. Money doesn't make rape not rape).

I am also intrigued by the refusal to believe your information on the grounds that you have given no statistics- despite the fact those men whining about your lack of statistics see nothing stupid in asserting nonsense proclamations like 'men need sex' without any evidence. (On that note, by the way, you don't need sex. You may want it, but you don't need it. Monks don't die from celibacy, they die from the same things we all die from. And even if it were true that men 'needed' sex, it would in no way follow that women therefore were obliged to provide it).

prostitution is sex coerced by poverty; if you use a prostituted woman you are taking advantage of her poverty, of the fact that she has likely been abused as a child, of a culture which sees women as commodities. Take responsibility for your actions. Instead of screaming hysterically about how nasty we are for pointing out the bleeding obvious and ruining your fun, listen. Do the research. Do your homework. It is your duty. (This counts whether you use prostitutes or not. Dismissive attitudes towards the suffering of women also contribute towards the abuse of women).

This is important. This is vital. Millions of women's lives worldwide are brutalised because of this new slave trade. If it were men who were the victims of prostitution en masse, and not women, I bet the reactions of most of the dissenting gentlemen on this thread would have been very different.

I'm preserving it here in case it gets marked as 'unsuitable' or 'offensive'.

[laurelin]

I don't plan on going back to the thread (as I'll no doubt get my head kicked in for what I just said, and my anxiety is up the wall already...)

[delphyne]

It's a really good comment. I haven't been able to make it to the end of them yet because they've pissed me off so much. Then I'm left inarticulate because I'm so angry.

There are some major-league scumbags posting at Comment is Free. I noticed in a few of them the CIF moderator had gone in and edited them. Why the hell don't they just ban the offensive people? I've been banned from the Guardian for going up against sexists but the sexists themselves get to hang around.

[laurelin]

Damn it, I just checked the thread again. I'm so on edge, I hate this feeling. I just need to leave it alone, I know. Speaking one's mind is so fucking hard to do under the patriarchy. It just chews me up with anxiety and rage.

[annared]

Well done Laurelin - my blood pressure can't cope with that sort of shit

[elfeminista]

"It's a really good comment. I haven't been able to make it to the end of them yet because they've pissed me off so much. Then I'm left inarticulate because I'm so angry. "

Don't I know that feeling, it leads me to online sputtering and typos.

[KatetheGreat]

Great post laurelin.
I refuse to even go read the comments but I'm tempted to set up one of those feminist bingo cards.
- use of the word/s "zealot" "puritanical" "fascist" "marxist" "nazi" "anti-sex" "nanny-state" or "prudish" or a reference to Orwell - get 1 point for each.
- Reference to some happy hooker story they once heard and how those women would be "rolling their eyes" at the victim angle, get 1 point.
- Some delluded tripe about the prostitutes getting off on the work get 1 point.
- One woman going "I'm a girl! and I even think prostitution is sexy!" get 1 point.
-Talking about the state having no place in defining our morals, get 1 point.

And so on...

I can pretty much fill the comments in myself.
Glad to see you've spoken up Laurelin.

[annared]

Okay I left one comment. Men hate us and I felt like saying it.