Scotland, a country increasingly seen as hostile to women’s rights, is currently debating whether men who pay for sex should be criminalized. Ash Regan MSP’s bill, proposed last year, also calls for the decriminalization of women selling sex on the street. This approach, first introduced in Sweden in 1999, is known as the Nordic model and has two main goals: to curb demand for prostitution and promote equality between women and men. It has since been adopted by a number of other countries, including Ireland and France.

However, media coverage of prostitution-related issues, including a new report by the BBC, is often biased towards the “happy hooker” myth, using such sanitizing language as “manager” for pimp and “client” for sex buyer. The headline is misleading: the debate is not “over selling sex in Scotland” but buying sex.

I have run training courses on the topic for journalists. The “sex workers” represented in the media tend not to be representative of the majority. They are presented as articulate, sober, empowered women who have made a positive choice to do this “work”. In reality, the typical experience of women in prostitution is not that of the dominatrix, awash in wealthy, handsome “clients”, but rather that of desperate women, usually with drug and alcohol addictions, flitting between street and massage parlor, barely holding it together.

The BBC’s interviewee, 26-year-old Porcelain Victoria, says she would “love to be doing this in [her] 60s”. I have interviewed well over a hundred women currently or formerly prostituted, and all told me that the idea of still selling their bodies in middle age — let alone their seventh decade — is the stuff of nightmares.

Porcelain Victoria says she loves bringing a “smile” to punters’ faces. She frames it as though it’s a social service, an act of kindness. The stark reality, as told by sex trade survivors, is that women loathe the punters, tolerating the sex only by escaping into some kind of out-of-body experience.

She goes on to claim that the bill, if passed, would drive her into poverty — when in fact women in prostitution are rarely able to save any money, the cash slipping through their fingers almost as soon as they’ve earned it. More than one woman I have spoken to described the cash as “dirty” money. If even one woman has been able to use her earnings to buy a second home in the Cotswolds and has never had a traumatic experience with a punter, she is a very rare exception. We shouldn’t be building policy around her.

There’s a reason why the vast majority of prostituted people are women, and the buyers men. It’s interesting that, relative to their female counterparts, men entrenched in poverty rarely end up in prostitution. The only way to de-normalize the sex trade and work towards ending the sale of women’s bodies is to criminalize punters.

All sorts of nonsense is used to justify the campaign against the Nordic model — including that it’s unfair to disabled men, because they can’t get a real date. We are told it’s the women who would suffer, as if men are handing over money out of the goodness of their hearts. There are darker excuses, too, such as the idea that a man unable to release his sexual frustration would be compelled to “rape a real woman”.

The new BBC article says that both sides of the debate want the same thing: to improve the lives of women. I believed this myself, until I approached a number of pro-prostitution lobby groups in the UK in the course of a campaign to expunge the criminal records of women who’d been prostituted as minors. My support for the Nordic model was their excuse for not supporting the campaign.

Prostitution is the oldest oppression. We should be working to eradicate it and, in the words of Gisèle Pelicot, the shame needs to change sides.

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Julie Bindel is an investigative journalist, author, and feminist campaigner. Her latest book is Lesbians: Where are we now? She also writes on Substack.

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