Home Secretary Jacqui Smith may be taking giant steps to tackle prostitution this week, but according to Germaine Greer, she needn’t bother. Greer claims that prostitution was less degrading than ‘stacking shelves in Tesco.’ Greer is one of the few people in public life who dares to call themselves a feminist, despite being faced with sneers and ridicule as a result. How particularly disappointing, then, to hear her join the recent chorus of voices seeking to trivialise the sex industry and downplay its serious impact on our society.
I work in a shop to keep my finances afloat during my journalism training. Anyone who thinks it would be more empowering for me to earn ten times the cash in half the time working as a prostitute is a deluded middle class moron who has watched far too much Belle Du Jour and has no idea how dark, dangerous and exploitative the sex industry really is. Prostitutes are eight times more likely to be murdered than the average person. I’m sure brothel owners can’t thank Greer enough for fooling stupid lefties into thinking that they’re merely employing a team of feisty English spice girls who can look after themselves, rather than exploiting vulnerable drug addicts and illegal immigrants.
Prostitution is almost as debasing to men as it is to women. Just as women are not just intellectually vacant sex objects, men are not just brutish one-dimensional cavemen driven purely by testosterone. Why, then, do the government think it’s really cool of them to classify lap-dancing clubs in the same way as cafes so that communities are powerless to curb their spread? Why, in the Max Mosley case, was this married father’s ‘right’ to sleep with five prostitutes in private so vigorously defended by the judiciary? Why is high achieving, if abhorrent, Sarah Palin criticised as a bad mother and hailed as a MILF (Mom I’d like to f*ck) in the same misogynistic breath?
I think it’s because we live in a society which is more sexist now than it has been for at least a decade, and which is getting worse. The cultural consequences of these worsening sexual double standards are undeniable. Twenty years ago the damaging impact of the sex industry on sexual equality was unanimously recognised. Nowadays feminism is a dirty word, about as cool as space hoppers and shoulder pads. The ‘cool’ young woman isn’t supposed to get cross about her boyfriend watching porn or her male colleagues socialising in a strip club. We’re supposed to tag along, and find the whole thing hilarious.
In the eighties, sexual liberation meant women’s dominion over their own sexuality and fertility. Today, it is increasingly conflated with the triumph of a masculine fantasy of woman: namely, the tireless nymphomaniac who wants constant sex. If women don’t love it in the way men do, they must need ‘liberating’ from their fearful, narrow minded cages. They need some furry handcuffs, or a rampant rabbit. Yawn. If this is liberation, you can keep it.
As a young female student, the disparity between today’s aspirations to gender equality and those of our parents are palpable. Male lecturers in their forties and fifties will listen to a young woman as an intellectual equal as a matter of course. But, as one of my fellow journalism students pointed out yesterday, some men our own age think it’s fine to patronise us and shout us down in serious conversations in a way they would never dream of doing to each other. My parents’ generation would be horrified. Who handed out these new codes of behaviour? Women? I think not.
There are people of both sexes who find these developments deeply disturbing. Unfortunately, there are far more people of both sexes who buy into the belief that sexism doesn’t really exist anymore, or, if it does, it’s not ‘bad’ enough to really matter, and that feminism is irrelevant. But as my generation’s young women enter the workforce, and find that the gender pay gap is now 17% (a whopping 39% in the city), that maternity leave is the worst in Europe, and that they can expect hostility and disbelief if they complain of sexism, I wonder whether they will feel the same for much longer.
2 Comments
November 28, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Brilliantly written post, and I absolutely couldn’t agree more with your insights. I hope it’s not long before you’re a high-flying columnist for a national paper so you can write this kind of stuff all the time!
December 9, 2008 at 11:52 pm
Firstly I commend you for working in a shop whilst studying. I think that there are too many students who just drink on a Friday night and lie in bed whilst their ‘alarm doesnt go off’ at the weekend.
It is very important to distance prostitution from porn movies and lap dancing. Im sure that most lap dancers would argue that their work is more of an art form and that they are using what ‘god has given them’ to make a living. In the same way that a journalist uses the talents that they have. Training and hard work goes into both. Surely the cool, young woman should make up her own mind how she wants to behave. If she choses to ‘tag along’ maybe it is because she is open minded, and ‘cool’ enough to appreciate lap dancing. It is about time that Women were prepared to stand up for what they believe in rather than blaming men for everything that is wrong in society. Do men go on and on about male strip shows and ridicule the women that go to them? I think that it is time to remove this misplaced perception that these problems are down to men. Germaine Greer was a woman last time I looked, surely women that can influence public opinion should stand up and be counted.