I recently watched an excellent documentary on prostitution. As someone who opposes the profession (through various arguments of womanism, mental, spiritual and emotional health), I at least want my arguments against it to be educated ones that are fleshed with actual understanding and insight. I wanted to see if the ladies featured in the exposé could make me see that there were some positives to prostitution. It didn’t happen. Here’s why;
The two women who came closest to showing being an employee in ‘the oldest profession in the world’ could actually be empowering for some women were two sex workers living the high life in the capital. They spoke of the wealthy men who would use their services and the lavish locations and privileges they encountered through it. These were confident women who knew what they wanted and how to get it. They seemed to be winning.
For me the cracks came back into full view when asked how they deal with sleeping with different men they find very unattractive. The confident and ample bodied escort responded that ‘you just switch off.’ You switch off. You are no longer you. This theme continued throughout the rest of the program. Through all the different women that were spoken to, in different levels of prostitution, even in Germany and Amsterdam where the profession is legal and girls are protected, the coping mechanism was the same. Dehumanizing yourself.
One lady speaking at a meeting run by an organisation caring for prostitutes on the streets of Manchester verbalised the issue so well. She said (paraphrased) ‘ You are just a thing for someone else’s needs and pleasure. And if you continue to push your own needs down and down, what do you think that does to a person?’
One Dutch man who worked on a likewise behalf of helping women in Amsterdam leave the profession said after they let their guard down, they confess to him the reality of having to go home after a day or night’s work. They talk of going into their shower and feeling the need to stay under the water for an hour. They talk of waking in the night, smelling the scent of a man they have had to sleep with. Such psychological effects are often left out of the prostitution discussion.
The ladies who insist the job is ‘empowering,’ have mistaken what that word means. Allowing someone to pay to do what they want with you, while you subdue your own thoughts, needs, personality and natural revulsion, even for a few moments, is actually an act of you suspending your own power.
Those at the ‘higher’ end of the profession who earn a lot of money and are requested by wealthy and sometimes famous men, love the lifestyle offered to them by their work. Naturally, they are not going to retire the ‘I am empowered’ and ‘I love sex’ defences very easily. However, when you really dig deep and get behind the diatribes, you expose prostitution for what it essentially is at its bare bones –a seedy trading of women as soulless slabs of flesh.
