At night, women cluster around the most exclusive addresses in tiny skirts, towering heels, and fishnets. They are looking for men who will take them to their apartments or hotel rooms; they would refuse the back seat of a car. “These women are high class,” a local bartender tells me. “They look for clients with money.”

Outside his bar, I watch a tall black woman enveloped in fake-fur approach an elegant-looking man with swept-back silver hair and a well-tailored suit. The pair turn together and enter a smart hotel close by. The concierge swings open the door, bidding them a pleasant evening.

Belgium, famous for its chocolate, beer and EU officials, has more recently acquired a less salubrious notoriety: in 2022, it became the first country in Europe to fully decriminalize its entire sex trade. The legislation removed what activists termed “voluntary sex work” from the scope of the criminal law and invited pimps, brothel and escort agency owners to see themselves as legitimate businesspeople.

Then in 2024, following further lobbying from pro-prostitution activists, Belgium went further, offering formal employment contracts to women who work as prostitutes in licensed brothels; coercing others remains illegal, with unlicensed pimps liable for steep penalties. In theory, this should mean that Belgium’s estimated 30,000 women in prostitution are now workers just like any other — with access to maternity leave, sickness and holiday pay, and union membership. This, supporters of the legislation claimed, would “[lay] the groundwork for broader societal change in the perception of sex work and sex workers”. But has it?

In practice, these labor contracts are not available to students, part-time workers, or women without work or residency visas. Given the majority of women in the Belgium sex trade are trafficked — and therefore undocumented — they are excluded. So too are those in the “sugar babe” trades, stripping and porn. In fact, so far only four businesses have been legally recognized as legitimate brothels, compliant with the new laws.

In other words, the majority of women in this “business” are excluded from legislation that activists celebrated as “transformative” and “historic”. To date, there have been no cases in which a “brothel worker” has been granted sick leave, maternity pay, or taken a case against a brothel manager to an employment tribunal. Belgium has contrived to empower every one of its pimps and open up unparalleled choice for the male sexual consumer — while doing almost nothing to improve the lives of the women whose “work” makes any of this possible.

On the outskirts of the city, far from the polished facades of Avenue Louise, the trade is far less glossy. George operates his business from a former family home on a residential street, advertising on the internet. From the outside there is little to distinguish his property from his neighbors. Inside are three cluttered rooms, their walls adorned with pornographic art, including an almost life-size painting of a naked woman on all fours, with a man penetrating her from behind. George tells me he has “many regulars”.

Though he’s currently operating without a license, George hopes to become what Belgium’s new legislation terms a “brothel manager” — that is, a legal employer, entitled to hire women as “sex workers” under formal contracts.

George is keen to convince me that it’s all about giving “proper rights to the girls”, and “doing the right thing”. He speaks the language of regulation fluently. But then, he shows his hand: “I want to have a reliable workforce,” he says. “If they work for me, instead of just doing a shift when they feel like it, I have more control.”

Like all pimps, he’s in it for the profit. And if George gets his license, in the eyes of the law he will no longer be a pimp: he’ll be a respectable businessman with a “reliable workforce” doing his bidding.

Still, the fact that so few sex businesses — just four — have so far been given the green light from the authorities reflects the grim realities of the trade, which can be gleaned from the official guide to occupational health and safety in the sex trade in New Zealand, which decriminalized prostitution in 2002 and is a model for countries like Belgium. It addresses condom breakage, repetitive strain injury, violence from punters, and rape — described in the document euphemistically as an unfortunate occupational hazard which occurs “where workers are forced by clients to have sex without a condom against their will”. It also includes advice on “mopping up semen” potentially contaminated with HIV.

Last year, Belgium’s Public Health and Social Affairs Minister announced that seven STIs — hepatitis B, papillomavirus, syphilis, chlamydia, gonorrhea and trichomoniasis — would be officially recognized as “occupational illnesses”. The health and safety advice in general is provided by pro-sex work lobbyists. 

The fact is, it is not in most brothel owners’ interests to become legitimate businesses. It would force them to comply with health and safety measures — and most are surely aware that the conditions in which they prostitute women would never pass muster. Some have criminal records, and do not want the scrutiny, or fear prosecution if they fail compliance checks. And most obviously, pimps don’t wish to pay tax.

The reality, then, remains that despite the reframing of pimps as legitimate business owners and vulnerable, exploited, frequently trafficked women as empowered “sex workers”, much prostitution in Belgium remains in the control of criminals. This much is clear from a walk down the Rue d’Aerschot, close to Brussels-Noord station. The street is filthy with litter and drug paraphernalia and lined with “window brothels” in which bikini-clad women, perched on stools, wait for punters. This is where punters come who don’t have a fancy hotel room, or any hotel room at all, to take women. Still it has a semblance of legitimacy. One regular sex buyer writes on a review website that the women behind the windows are more likely to have “been tested for diseases, unlike the ones hanging around on the street corner near the railway station”.

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The windows are rented by small property companies, and private landlords, and then sublet to the women in two shifts — 6pm till 6am and then a swift crossover. Lit up in neon red, they are starkly grotty. Imagine a butcher’s with its merchandise strung up for perusal in large display windows — only here, what’s on sale is human.

I arrive at just past six in the morning and see groups of young men, loitering. They are pimps: watching the street, smoking and speaking to a smattering of punters as they come and go, running through the prices and “services” on offer. The men are mainly Romanian and Bulgarian. Many of them sell drugs as well as sex, and some are part of trafficking gangs. These men are almost certainly operating illegally, in spite of the change in the law, which actually has hardly any effect on them at all. It’s a free-for-all, untroubled by the police.

Two women dressed in tracksuits and coats, and carrying sports bags, emerge from one brothel at the end of their shift. They exchange pleasantries with a similarly-dressed woman who is on her way in. Across the road, a smart middle-aged man disappears into one of the window brothels, beckoned in by a woman in a thong and bikini that barely covers her nipples.

“They often go for a quickie on their way to work — they want the women to be ‘fresh’, hence going there as they change shifts,” Taina Bien-Aimé tells me. She is director of the Coalition against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and has been watching the Belgium sex trade closely since it was legalized. “For these men, it’s just like having their morning coffee.”

This is no flippant analogy. During a previous investigation into the legal sex trade in Switzerland, I discovered an application made by businessman Bradley Charvet in Geneva for a license to open a “fellatio café”. For 50 Swiss francs ($50), customers were invited to choose a woman from an iPad menu, then order her to give him a blowjob along with his cappuccino. This is where the logic of legalization leads: a whole new menu of options for men. What it hasn’t done, anywhere it has been applied, is improve the lives of women.

The Netherlands legalized its sex trade in 2000. Only 5% of women who work as prostitutes have registered for tax. Germany introduced legislation in 2002 that meant that women in prostitution could, in theory, enter into employment contracts, sue for payment and register for health insurance, pension plans and other benefits. It didn’t work. Out of hundreds of thousands of women in the sex trade, only 44 registered for benefits prior to it becoming mandatory. Now that it is a requirement, it remains that only a minority have done so. Germany has become the “bordello of Europe” — with reportedly more prostitutes per capita than Thailand. Indeed, it is a key example of how decriminalization expands demand and creates the conditions in which trafficking can flourish.

It is estimated that anywhere between 200,000-400,000 women are in prostitution in Germany, serving over one million men per day. Mega-brothels are now a common feature of German cities, a form of industrialized prostitution. As in a battery farm, owners pack in as many bodies as they can. Some offer “early bird” deals: burger, beer and sex. Others offer “two for the price of one”, “happy hours” and “all-you-can-fuck” passes.

So who benefits? Again, it’s the men. Only 1% of women in the German sex trade have entered a full “work-contract” at a brothel or escort agency. A government investigation in 2018 could only identify 76 people who had registered as “prostitutes” in order to access social security. “You can’t call it a job and then have panic buttons in the workspace,” Bien-Aimé says. As she explains it, the new legislation only serves to normalize the exploitation and sale of women.

Indeed, the new laws put women at more risk. One clause in the Belgium legislation stipulates that if a prostitute refuses 10 sex acts or individual clients, the brothel owner can make a complaint about her. “A woman being unable to refuse certain johns, or sex acts, is called rape in any other circumstances,” Bien-Aimé points out.

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Nonetheless, the legislators insist they are on the side of the women. By legalizing prostitution and giving “workers” protection, Sandrine Daoud, a spokeswoman for the Belgian health minister, wrote, “we hope to enable all sex workers who want to leave the sector to do so”. However, she attempts to justify the law in the same breath as undermining it. “While we recognize that not all sex workers perform their activities out of their own free will,” she says, “it is much more difficult to get into contact with and inform sex workers about their rights when they hide their activities.”

Inevitably, though, the government didn’t listen to many dissenting voices when drafting its legislation. Natasha and Charlotte work for Isala, a feminist charity opposed to the new laws in Belgium. “They didn’t consult us, they didn’t go in the street, they didn’t open consultations to those of us that are critical of the sex trade,” says Charlotte. “They went through those associations that are openly pro-prostitution.”

Last year, Isala submitted a legal challenge to the government with the hope of eventually repealing the legislation and introducing the Nordic model. This model, pioneered in Sweden, criminalizes the demand for sexual services and stigmatizes the men who go looking for it. Meanwhile, it decriminalizes women who work in prostitution and provide “exiting” services to help them out of it.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of women in prostitution, and they all had very few alternative options and scant opportunity to leave. As Natasha points out, the majority of prostituted women in Belgium do not have a level of French or English that would allow them to have another job. Nor do they have much grasp of the law — and in practice, even if they did, it would likely be of little use. “In principle, the 2022 labor contract says they should be able to refuse sexual acts without being penalized by the brothel owner, but in reality, the client can do what he wants,” says Charlotte. “What control does she have with him when they are alone?”

And what of the argument that, now prostituted women in Belgium are legally able to unionize, new organizations will magically emerge specifically to fight coercive contractual clauses? Well, this is not what has happened, anywhere. As one former prostitute told me: “You can’t unionize prostitution. Why should the pimps care about stuff like sexual harassment, or violence, when this is what they are selling?”

Back on Rue d’Aerschot, squeezed between two window brothels, I find an organization that describes itself as the “Belgian union of sex workers”, or UTSOPI. Set up in 2015, it came to prominence during the Covid lockdowns, its (male) director Daan Bauwens tells me. “Sex workers were not entitled to the same benefits other workers were during the lockdown, so we would raise money to buy them food, and to keep them going. We were on the media a lot, so got quite a few donations.”

By the end of 2020, UTOPSI had hundreds of thousands of euros, much of it from the Government. However, none of that money has been used to help women to leave the sex trade — there is no budget for that, Bauwens tells me. After all, if “sex work” is now indeed just like any other work, why would anyone want to get out of it?

Instead, their budget appears to be spent on what he calls “outreach work”, meaning the distribution of condoms and hot drinks in the winter, as well as lobbying for decriminalization and disseminating pro-prostitution views across the media and public institutions. The UTSOPI has never appeared at an employment tribunal, nor intervened in a workplace dispute in the 19 months since the legal change.

What is the point of this purported union, if not to mitigate for the rights of women? Bauwens tells me that the only resistance to the new laws has come from “the ones we would call ‘sex worker exclusionary radical feminists’ (SWERFS). But that strain of feminism is not here anymore.”

That’s hard to believe, given the existence of groups such as Isala. But Bauwens is dismissive of their attempts to repeal the laws. “Their main argument is that sex work is not decent work, and everybody is entitled to have decent work, so our law should be repealed,” he says. “The constitutional court will never make a moral judgment. So, I don’t think the court will even take the case.” In Bauwens’s view, then, this work is decent.

A short walk from Bauwens’s office is Rue Eunice N. Osayande. It is named after a 23-year-old Nigerian woman who was trafficked into Belgium and put to work in the window brothels. Two years later, in 2018, she was murdered by a sex buyer. The street is close to where she was found stabbed to death.

Would the law that was passed four years after her death have saved Osayande from dying in her “decent” job? The evidence strongly suggests not. Trafficking remains rife and its victims voiceless — and the new legislation doesn’t apply to them anyway. Moreover, the arguments made by pro-prostitution lobbyists — that any criminal sanctions against pimps and sex buyers will only drive the activities underground — are plainly unfounded. “Decriminalization does the opposite of driving prostitution underground,” says Bien-Aimé. “It expands the market, and we know that it leaves the women no safer. Just look at the murders of prostituted women in countries such as the Netherlands, to know that this is not about safety for the women, but simply making it easier for the profiteers to advertise for custom.”

Another of the many promises made by the Belgian legislators was that if men knew these women were legitimate workers, they would treat them with more respect. The new laws would normalize the reporting of abusive punters and reduce social stigma. It would attract a “better class of client”. There is absolutely no evidence to date that any of this has happened.

But there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. One Belgian website runs a “guestbook” for punters to leave a review of the women they buy. “Lena was very beautiful, she gave me a super good blowjob with a condom which I  would prefer without. Then I could fuck her in whatever position I wanted,” wrote one.

“She needs more focus on her job, she talks a lot, she doesn’t know how to suck a cock”, says another.

“If she cries, just ignore it,” wrote another. “She’s probably missing her kids back in whatever hellish African country she’s come from.”

In the shadow of the European Parliament at Maison Antoine, a famous frites spot, four young British men are discussing their hangovers as they wolf down fried food and drink pints of Coca-Cola. They tell me they are here to visit the red light area for a boys’ weekend. Why Belgium? “In Prague, the women are dirty, but here, because it’s legal, the government makes them have blood tests to make sure they are disease-free,” says one. “They are not allowed to work if it doesn’t come back clean,” says another. As far as they are concerned, the new laws are a win-win.

Back at my hotel, a middle-aged German man tells me he’s here to visit the Banksy museum, and the red light area. “I’ve given up on women,” he says. When I point out that he’s traveled across a border to be with one, he says: “That’s different. They don’t argue with you, the ones you pay.”

Many locals, however, are less enthusiastic. “We need someone to look at the mess it has made,” says a taxi driver who picks me up from the red light area. “British men, they come over, they’re drunk, and the Germans, they talk about the prostitutes like they are scum. And the pimps of the women are not nice men. I pick them up, and they are mean, violent, often on drugs. It’s ruining the city.”

Unfortunately, though, the trend for this laissez-faire approach to prostitution is only growing. France currently condemns prostitution as violence and abuse of women, and criminalizes the punters rather than the women. However, both Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella of the far-Right Rassemblement National Party are in support of the women running brothels as cooperatives. They too believe that paid-for sex is a necessary part of French society. A decent job.

Meanwhile, several bills have passed through the European Parliament naming the trafficking of human beings into the sex trade as a gross human rights violation. These same panjandrums would seem to be untroubled by the sewer on their doorstep.

“I was told, when I first came to Belgium, that I should work on Avenue Louise because that’s where all the ‘good’ clients are,” sex-trade survivor Margot tells me. “That I would make a fortune and be given champagne in fancy hotels rooms. But the men are the same. They all want to use and abuse you, wherever they buy us.”

The difference between the women on Avenue Lousie and the women in the window brothels of the Rue d’Aerschot is a bit like the difference between free-range and battery-farmed produce. The marketing is different. But the punishment is the same, as is the haunted look in their eyes. “Prostitution takes away our freedom, discriminates against us because we are poor, and female,” Margot tells me. For Eunice Osayande, stabbed on a cold, lonely street, death was the penalty she paid.

Talk of moral panics is cheap, but during an actual one, what is going on becomes difficult to name. Usually keen detectors of collective cortisol spikes go quiet, for the category of perceived evildoers has now started to expand chaotically. Make one incautious statement about insufficiency of evidence or the importance of due process, and you might find yourself in there too.

Still, it has to be said: there is definitely something dysfunctional going on. To press this point is compatible with noting matters of genuine public interest in the files: for instance, indications that Peter Mandelson and the former Prince Andrew passed on privileged financial information to Epstein, now being reviewed by police. Other countries are also belatedly realizing that when politicians or royalty get too close to billionaires, national interests can start to look horribly parochial. 

But there isn’t much excitement in a whiff of financial corruption on its own — as demonstrated by the relative silence on a recent Wall Street Journal scoop involving a UAE microchip contract and $500 million investment in a Trump-owned firm. The presence of colorful sexual scandal is clearly the magic extra ingredient that ensures a feeding frenzy. And yet, strangely, the files don’t offer much in the way of interesting new information in that respect.

This is not because they are low on sleaze — on the contrary. It is rather that we already knew about it. We have long been aware of Epstein’s exploitative sex crimes against minors and Maxwell’s grooming of victims. There have been interviews, documentaries, books. We also knew about the constant presence of very young women, the nightmarish taste in vaguely pedophilic art, and the boast of keeping a copy of Lolita by his bedside.  

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On this basis, we could surely have guessed about the pornography on hard drives, the women offered as gifts, the gynecologist on speed dial. For years, it has been obvious that many friends and associates must have turned a blind eye to the lubriciousness pouring off the man, and that a few of them were probably similarly inclined.

When Mandelson was appointed as an ambassador, the basic facts about Epstein were all in the public domain, and most did not care about the personal connection — a fact which makes the current hypervigilance about further associates look bogus. Some now seem to be playing a game of Six Degrees of Separation, but with Epstein in the place of Kevin Bacon. The mycologist Merlin Sheldrake was in the papers this week merely for discussing taking a large grant from Epstein, though in fact the two never met and no money changed hands. Elsewhere, the chairman of the Los Angeles Olympics organizing committee is under pressure to resign. The main charge is that he had a flirtatious email exchange with Ghislaine Maxwell in 2002. 

This feels like overcompensation, but is still fairly vanilla compared with the absolute scenes in cyberspace. A dump of one million files with little immediate context has proved irresistible to online detectives. The main rule of interpretation is that every document deserves the most lurid treatment possible. 

Any off-color remark or hyperbolic statement made in a private context — quipping about attending a “paedophile convention” with Woody Allen, or writing of an unnamed other “I give you permission to kill him” — is to be understood perfectly literally. Epstein’s ordering of a reproduction of “Massacre of the Innocents”, a 1591 painting by the Dutch old master Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, should be taken as a direct confession of baby-killing. 

In this hysterical register there is no irony; no possibility of a malignant personality knowingly satirizing his own infamous reputation; and nor are there any mistakes or coincidences. Pity the chef mentioned several times in the files, charged with satisfying Epstein’s apparently large appetite for “jerky”. This has been interpreted by internet sleuths as a secret code for human remains. In retrospect, the chef probably regrets his professional connection with the disgraced financier; and I bet he regrets naming his former restaurant Cannibal even more.

In one sense, this was all inevitable — the result of the ungovernable internet getting rocket fuel from the monetization of clicks. A variety of bedroom-based obsessives are teaming up to bang their drums together: I won’t mention your rampant antisemitism if you support my quest to bring down Harvard elites. But even mainstream commentators seem prepared to endorse madly conspiratorial claims as long as it will hurt their enemies. Given the unusual range of Epstein’s social associations, there is material in the files for score-settling in many directions; though frustratingly, nothing juicy for Trump haters yet.

There is a way of using the term “moral panic” which purports to exhibit a worldly indifference to Epstein’s sexual decadence, and a contempt for critics’ irrationalism and prudery. In this view, the panicking is bad but the moralizing is worse. I only half agree. People should certainly stop panicking, but they are not moralizing nearly hard enough. 

Were people to stop the former, the files would provide ample material for less dramatic, more acute critique of familiar human weaknesses. It’s like a satire of modern hypocrisies brought to life. There’s Deepak Chopra, the New Age spiritual guru who refers to Epstein’s “girls” as if they were a string of polo ponies; Noam Chomsky, the famous Left-wing intellectual apparently indifferent to the economic exploitation under his nose; Lawrence Krauss, the astrophysics professor dealing with his own allegations of sexual assault, asking the veteran offender for advice. (Epstein’s irritated verdict is also recorded for posterity: “you may be a great scientist but you suck at this sexual harassment game.”)

After the file release, Chomsky’s wife protested in her husband’s defense that Epstein “began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities” in order to “ensnare” him. You can see the same dynamic with Krauss in the emails: a car sent on a family holiday here; a lawyer paid there. One particularly dependent cognitive scientist, Joscha Bach, seems to have received plane tickets, an apartment, and tuition fees for his children at a private school. This may not have been prostitution, but there was definitely a kind of quid pro quo expected of academics taking Epstein money: they had to accept his rules, help him to perform philanthropic respectability for the outside world, and offer intellectual stimulation to keep him amused. While the women had to pretend to enjoy sex, the men had to feign interest in his ideas about the nature of consciousness.

But perhaps the biggest lesson to draw from the publication of the files concerns the reaction to them. The basic elements in the Epstein story that make his behavior abhorrent are, in fact, depressingly mundane. I have seen online outrage at child-like pornographic images in the files that would cause mere shrugging, had they been found on a different browser — not because they aren’t disgusting (they are), but because they are everywhere. And if you ignore the private jets and the Caribbean islands, everything awful thing that ever happened to a girl or young woman on an Epstein property would be just another day to many of those stuck in prostitution. Grooming, pimping out, coercive control, sexual exploitation, an insatiable appetite for extreme youth and novelty: all fall under the respectability cover of “sex work”. There was nothing unusual about Epstein’s perversions. He just had the means to indulge them to the max.

Yet it seems that onlookers can only get really offended about these sorts of events when there is another element to keep it spicy: for instance, if the perpetrators are billionaires. And even then, the topic cannot stay interesting for very long, apparently requiring further injections of drama to maintain fascination: tantalizing rumors about new names, or fantastical tales of murder and cannibalism. Before you know it, the discourse has run away with itself, and yet again the conspiracy theorists have failed to join up any actual dots.

The depressing fact is that sexual behavior like Epstein’s is absolutely standard in our society, in the twin forms of prostitution and the pornography industry. Not only that, but they are mostly tolerated. You can either take this as a defense of Epstein or as an indictment of society, and I do the latter. It’s great that we are all tough on Satanic cannibal billionaires now, but it would be good to channel all that outrage into something real. 

Tia Billinger is 26 and from Nottinghamshire. She didn’t know her dad growing up and was raised by a stepdad. She married young and took up a job in financial recruitment for the NHS. These days, she claims to make around £600,000 a month by having sex with men she doesn’t know on OnlyFans under the nom de guerre Bonnie Blue. Her stepdad watches her TikToks. Her mum works as her PA. She is a PR nightmare and a pornographer’s dream.

An old Facebook post shows Hope as a girl clinging about her father’s neck in a blue zip-up jumper, smiling sweetly. Another photograph dug up by sleuths on TikTok shows Billinger smiling with a group of friends in her early teens, decked out in quintessential 2010s British fashion — shorts over tights, dip-dyed hair, white Converses. These two images feel so removed from the polished, perfectly lit personas we see today, but are worth revisiting. Why? Because they more closely resemble those who suffer from a system which heralds sex on demand as a mark of progress. Open your eyes, and it’s anything but.

Bonnie Blue and Lil Tay are entrepreneurs of outrage, flirting with progressively shocking taboos as a way of driving engagement. Blue, never one to miss a headline grab, has messaged Tay asking to do a “collab”, piling hype on hype. They have each carved out a USP: Lil Tay is the barely legal wild child, very much still baby-faced, trading in her existing internet virality for quick cash from the porn world; Bonnie Blue is all about quantity over quality (1,000 men in one day) and quips calculated to piss off girlfriends (those who don’t satisfy their men are “lazy”, she says). Both are engaging in a form of disaster capitalism, whipping up spectacles of moral crisis so intoxicating that their stunts leap from porn sites onto the pages of national newspapers. Their infamy is the result of curiosity: how can she do this to herself? It has us looking through our fingers at each sickly development, and shifts subscriptions so porn-buyers might “see what all the fuss is about”.

Since the spring, a series of lily-livered articles on Bonnie Blue have lamely framed her as a maverick in a respectable and empowering profession: Cosmopolitan claimed her critics were peddling “moral panic” at a time of sexual conservatism; she is in fact an “autonomous worker” and victim of misdirected rage.

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Yet the fact is both Bonnie Blue and Lil Tay are middle-class young women who have chosen to imperil those more vulnerable than themselves by glamorizing pornography and prostitution — global scourges driven by the worst kind of men, who beat, traffick, drug, rape and hate women and children. For milquetoast feminists afraid to question men’s unimpeachable right to a fuck at any cost, it is the “stigmatisation” of “sex workers” that kills them. In reality, it is male pornographers, clients and pimps who grip women’s necks, pump them with sedatives, and grind their personhood into the mud.

Yes, there are exceptions. Yes, some women choose when to be filmed and bought and knocked around — but many do not. Many women, beneath the gleaming entrepreneurial tip of the iceberg, prostitute themselves to survive, to keep warm or high or escape a beating. For those who care to look, this reality is everywhere. Over the course of a single January night last year, Stuart Thomson raped three women, all prostitutes, at knifepoint in Manchester city center, and attempted to rape another. He selected them as his victims because he thought they wouldn’t report him to the police. When Thomson was arrested, one detective sergeant said that in the interview, he came across as if “he didn’t think there was anything to worry about”. Perhaps this was because he didn’t think of those women as normal people with dignity, but instead as collections of body parts to be penetrated, proprietors of bargain assets which could be bought, sold and stolen without much thought. The acceptable face of this perilous, exploitative world are women like Lil Tay and Bonnie Blue.

Amid all the chin-stroking about the role of camgirls in “the culture”, it is fashionable to be vague about the harms for which they are responsible. We wouldn’t want to be judgmental, would we? Yet all this appeasement is at the expense of clarity. Let me spell it out: Bonnie Blue and Lil Tay glamorize exploitation. We know that the subjects of porn translate into real-life encounters — like the 12-year-old girl strangled by a boy during their first kiss. “He had seen it in pornography and thought it was normal,” the children’s commissioner said. The fantasy of the porn lobby is that these videos are a sort of value-neutral shadowplay with no bearing on viewers’ behavior. The reality is that it is already warping sexual dynamics. For this we should hold both “creators” and “fans” directly accountable. It really is simple: don’t watch.

In the case of Lil Tay, the moral waters are muddier. Her family life seems fraught; in 2018, allegations of abuse against her father appeared on her Instagram account. She later claimed she’d been hacked. Elsewhere, various magazines have suggested that it is her older half-brother, Jason, who has always directed, controlled and profited from her flourishing career in the attention economy. “You’re no good, it’s no good,” he would shout at her, a source told The Atlantic; “she was crying hard.” When she was a child, Jason was said to be the only one with access to her megabucks Instagram account. Who holds the passwords now? Is Claire Hope really in control?

The stakes for Bonnie Blue and Lil Tay may seem high but in reality, these women are rich and protected by fame, managers, wealth — more than can be said for the average “sex worker”. I consider their videos degrading in themselves; they might not, and that’s alright. But they are famous, and so are responsible for more than their own degradation. They are responsible for cultural shifts which encourage men to think of women as buyable, disposable and exploitable. They are responsible for normalizing slinging women banknotes in exchange for their bodies. They toy with the frontiers of tolerance, pushing the envelope on what men can expect women and children to do for them.

All the while, they are engaging in a sort of sexual WWE: high-camp, high-gloss, low risk. Like stage wrestlers they adopt personas, vaulting between roles. Bonnie Blue is the cradlesnatcher (hunting for virgin freshers outside Nottingham Trent University in 2024) and the passive damsel (in her infamous “petting zoo”, for which she got booted off OnlyFans this summer). Lil Tay is the bolshy child gangster singing words she shouldn’t even know and then, as soon as it’s “legal”, the canny coquette. Yet in the real world, women and children are not able to put on different masks; they are pushed into porn-film formulas without wanting to be. Real women, real children, like the smiling little girl in her blue zip-up jumper, like the awkward teen in shorts over tights.

Blue publicizes her own violation in ways that are unusual in traditional pornography, with its closed sets and narrative formulas. She demystifies how porn is created, hosting public events where masked men queue up to “have a go”. She is no bashful industry starlet — she is a self-made brand, a camgirl disruptor for whom discomfort is not a problem: it is the point. She has well understood that OnlyFans, Reddit and PornHub are oversaturated: big followings can no longer be won by being the hottest, the youngest, the most shiny and waxed and inflated. The trailblazers of the 2010s, infantilized e-girl Belle Delphine and hijabi porn star Mia Khalifa, showed that controversy was now the best way to build a brand.

In pursuit of further controversy, Blue is now on a podcast with Andrew Tate. The misogynist influencer — who faces 10 criminal charges in Britain, including rape, actual bodily harm and sex-trafficking, and who promotes a business model of acquiring “girlfriends” who can then be pimped out on porn sites — appeared in a promotional image with Blue and podcast host Rob Moore. Tate wears wonky sunglasses and a shirt open to his navel in the style of Jack Sparrow, looking like a man who spikes drinks in Popworld; Moore, who describes himself as a “creator/ranter/rebel”, stands awkwardly next to Bonnie Blue, who is kneeling on the floor with her tongue sticking out. In a teaser on X, Tate wrote: “Bonnie is the end result of feminism.” He is completely right.

Blue, who is my age and from near where I grew up, is the product of a feminism which has encouraged young women to prostitute themselves — and I worry for her. I see her degrading stunts as acts of self-harm. Half of her job is to receive the emissions of the worst cross-section of men in society, film it and smile about it; the other half is telling society she enjoys this, along with volleys at the women who resent or pity her. In the podcast, she discusses “what men want”, the hypocrisy and laziness of wives and girlfriends, the myriad ways “sex work” is good for society, and why it’s alright for men to override women’s consent with money. She also says she believes Tate is innocent of the charges against him (“well, why would he?”). He naturally encourages this world view, bleating a line which will be familiar to any survivors of bullshit liberal feminism. Bemoaning the men who chastise Blue for her sex stunts, he tritely says: “It’s your body, your choice, right?”

Unfortunately, Blue struggles to hold her own in the conversation. She is useful to Tate insofar as she can appear to legitimize his business model, but really she means less than nothing to him — in fact, he views her with a kind of erotic revulsion. Tate says he would not allow a daughter of his to follow Blue’s path, nor would he want a son to sleep with her. She is a useful pariah: she, like him, has understood our sexual culture better than most, to great professional acclaim. But unlike him, she has no admirers (public ones, at least). It must be lonely.

The personal consequences for Blue in the years to come are uncomfortable to consider: we can already see the psychological cost of her lifestyle ticking up like a taxi meter in her glazed blue eyes, in her monotone voice, in the frightened look on her face as she is shoved around on that bed. But she is an adult, and she is responsible — alongside Tate — for accelerating a sexual culture which has enriched her and which will harm and mislead thousands of women and girls. I have known young women who have chosen, entirely without financial need and through a vague sense that it is empowering, to set up shop on OnlyFans; one, who did it aged 21, had the standard experience: she burned through the couple of grand she made, quit after a few months and now must live with the fact that pictures of her naked body and faux-ecstatic face will be circulated around the internet forever. How many young women across the country share her experience?

But there are other consequences, too. Worse ones; ones that pertain to the magma of sex violence coursing through modern Britain, ones that begin in the low-lit bedrooms of tween boys and end in dark alleys and dorm rooms, in the bruised and violated bodies of the girls of the future.

Last week, a primary school-aged boy was filmed shouting at a woman sunbathing in her own garden in a bikini: “Give us a bit of fanny… I’ve been craving it all day. Suck my dick. Get on your knees. Give me your minge. Bend over.” In the background, a companion made moaning sounds. They cannot have been older than 10.

The video upset me for hours after. Something irreplicable about childhood, something critical about the respect between adults and children, men and women, has been spoiled — probably forever — by degrading pornography. And Bonnie Blue is partly responsible. That these boys’ instinct was to sexually intimidate a woman they saw only as a potential porn star; that they themselves have been exposed to that sort of language and material; that the generation of girls forced to sit in classrooms with them will face problems none of us ever did, is no less than disastrous.

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When children are exposed to pornography, it burdens them with psychologically troubling ideas about the women they know in real life: that they all belong in a hidden sexual world in which men turn them into pretzels and fuck them unconscious, and that they secretly enjoy it. Our safeguards against violent sexism are hopeless: primary-school boys are scolded for pulling girls’ ponytails at break time; they are given history lessons about Cleopatra and Boudicca; they sit through assemblies about women’s football and Florence Nightingale. But all of this soft-touch equality conditioning is undone the moment they see a naked woman strangled, beaten and humiliated on a screen. And how could it not be? The absorption of the worldviews of Andrew Tate and Bonnie Blue is nothing short of radicalizing. Blue and Tate, and the pornography industry they represent, are directly to blame for the way Generation Alpha girls are being treated in the playground now, and will probably be treated for their entire teenage years. They will come up against a supercharged strain of misogyny which women my and Bonnie Blue’s age cannot even begin to understand.

We cannot rely on bullshit 2020s feminism to fix this — the boner-advocacy brigade which refuses to ask any difficult questions about who it represents or what it is for. As things stand, the young women of the future will be forced to fend for themselves, with Gen Z having utterly disappointed on the critical questions of gender, prostitution and pornography. So what can be done? Perhaps the only hope is that the 2030s will mark a turning point: that youngsters then will finally realize that the excesses of liberal feminism — the dogma that every choice a woman makes, however violating, is feminist — must be swept away if they are to survive this radioactive new breed of woman-hatred. Perhaps they will finally lobby politicians to accept that society simply cannot be trusted with extreme pornography; that, like other radicalizing material, it should be restricted, and that this fact is a matter of life and death. With moves to criminalize strangulation on porn sites made last week, there is a glimmer of hope in this regard. I hope that young girls of the future will view Bonnie Blue in the same way that Tate so clearly does, as a stooge for failed feminism. I hope for their sake that they do, because our culture, as it stands, will not save them.

The latter story sent ripples through my friendship group; we were horrified by Blue’s ragebait provocations that all men should cheat unless their girlfriends are “treating them every day”. Blue, a former escort, has made millions filming encounters with married men for her OnlyFans, and her star rose when she turned on the disgruntled girlfriends of her punters, whom she called, flatly, “lazy”. It is for these statements, calculated not to arouse men but to annoy women, that she is famous.

Elsewhere in the dystopian sex-positivity scene we read a viral account of Twitter-famous “whorelord” Aella’s birthday party — a factory-style line-up of 42 strangers rewarded for their participation in an orgy with a physical badge of honour (it reads “I went to Aella’s birthday gangbang and all I got was this crappy sticker”). In order to keep these scores of presumably deeply weird men entertained, a group of “fluffers… were strewn about, lying on fuckbenches”; after seeing to the birthday girl, the blokes could “continue banging” the fluffers.

Great. What’s wrong with that? Don’t you know it’s illiberal to object to the fact that many women, from privileged artists (Lily Allen, Kate Nash) to normal if naive teenaged girls, have so deeply drunk the kool-aid of neoliberal feminism that it is somehow empowering, rather than the most degrading thing imaginable, to be sold in any capacity to men? Or to recoil from the bleak spectacle of a methodical orgy in which anonymous pervs can waddle over to a woman sat on a bench whose only function is to fuck them?

It takes little consideration to see that these latest additions to the ancient and undying canon of prostitute-lore — from Mary Magdalene to Fantine to Pretty Woman — are yet more slanted apparitions, this time not icons of feminist victory but promotional material for feet pics. Internet virality and atrophying feminism have collided — and the result is more of the same.

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Because of just how hot being a sex worker is right now, we’re obsessed with reading about it. The pseudonymous Eve Smith’s How Was It For You?, released this summer, is a bracingly matter-of-fact account of a prostitute’s progress; in it, we are told that the only “type of man” who does not visit brothels are those who “buy you half a shandy on a date at the pub and expect to get into your knickers”. We are laughing at this man not because he sees sex as transactional, but because he is not willing to pay enough for it. How desolate. Elsewhere, Smith brushes away critics’ horror by saying her colleagues are merely “grinding to buy food, to pay rent, to support our kids”; “we can’t rely on men,” she writes, though by definition she has chosen by her own account to do precisely that. The great target of her ire is not the clients who endanger her so much that she must hide weapons “around my dungeon”, or the difficult childhood which sets the scene for her entry into brothel-work, but the “liberal, middle-class white woman with a moralistic agenda”, the radical feminists who pity her. This is understandable; their concern undermines her entire way of life, and so must be infuriating.

But this does not mean their fears are baseless. The statistics on prostitution are naturally elusive, and their presentation by advocacy groups is almost entirely contingent on the group’s bias: the pro-decriminalisation Prostitutes Collective claims only 6% of “migrant sex workers” are trafficked (“many said they prefer working in the sex industry,” the website cheerily states), whereas studies in Norway and Canada put the average age of entering prostitution at about 15; one 1986 study claimed that 90% of the “adolescent prostitutes” it surveyed had been abused by a caregiver or neighbour.

A culture which shamefully casualises prostitution, whose pornification is so complete that punters can reasonably buy erotic videos from the girl who works behind the till in the petrol station, has forgotten how bad things really are. In the UK, you are more likely to be murdered as a prostitute than in any other profession. One 2008 study of 130 prostitutes  in San Francisco found 68% had been raped on the job; this figure rises to more than 90% being raped in the past year in Phnom Penh, Cambodia (in a study which also noted gang rapes by police officers). At the same time, our engagement with these facts has been obliterated by the dogma of supposed sex positivity. A 2024 revision of “Roxanne” would have the fraught heroine not pining, lost, in a doorway but grinning from ear to ear while filing a hefty tax return (girlboss!).

The most likely reason for this extraordinary lapse in critical thinking is the transformation from in-person prostitution to the digital; it is analogous to the place of pornography changing from the top shelf of a newsagent to the private, free and instantaneous ease of the smartphone screen. It’s so simple, and so much less risky and humiliating, to hop on a website and set up a profile than to stand on a street corner. But the fact that your leering client is physically absent does not alter the philosophical lie at the heart of prostitution, digital or otherwise: that consent itself can be bought.

Until OnlyFans ballooned in the cultural imagination, prostitution was subject to a different kind of fantasy, one laden with pity and horror. Think of Taxi Driver (1976), Sport and Iris spinning slowly in the pinkish light of the bordello, the pimp’s ringed, lecherous fingers in a carousel with the child’s own, small and limp. Twelve-year-old Jodie Foster crystallises the spirit of prostitution: she clunks about in too-tall shoes, brazen and glassy-eyed  — that is until, in moments of privacy, she’s revealed as little more than a costumed kitten, her backstory blurted out in southern syllables between chomps of a jelly sandwich.

Iris reveals the doubleness of the fantasy prostitute: she is both surprisingly tough and impossibly vulnerable, vixen and victim, a painted-faced trader in a stageworthy performance and a font of misery waiting to shatter and spill. The message of cinematic portrayals of prostitutes has, until very recently, been thus: succumb to your tragic fate, or be saved. Those saved tend to be young: in Pretty Baby (1978), Brooke Shields’s Violet, the same age as Iris, is saved from the brothel by the New Orleans photographer Ernest J. Bellocq. Older, more cynical working girls tend to die off, like Christie in Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho who is dispatched by an airborne chainsaw. Christie is somewhat more plucky than her colleague, and so lives a bit longer. Ultimately, the 20th century would have its prostitute in her final act either returned to a state of cosseted security, or once again a tangle of limbs, paying the toll for her moral lapse.

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This fate was not always so fixed — once, prostitution at the higher levels could be a route to influence. Nell Gwynn, Charles II’s favourite actress and courtesan, escaped syphilitic destitution with wit and pluck in a world curiously both more pious and less horrified by the presence of prostitution in public life. The figure of the prostitute in the novel is, concurrently, less hinged on tragedy. The witty narrator Fanny Hill of John Cleland’s 1749 erotic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is tricked into the game as a 15-year-old, having her “maidenhead” auctioned off (to a client described as a “liquorice old goat”) before mastering, and enjoying, her craft and being carried off into married respectability by an eligible former customer. These cheerier narratives are yet more fantasies, though exceptions to a plight which mostly meant disease and destitution.

A century later, the archetypal prostitute-victim spirals into the cultural imagination via Victor Hugo’s Fantine in Les Miserables (1862). Buffeted between misfortunes by cruel swindlers and heartless bureaucrats, Fantine descends into penury and is killed by disease, having sold her hair and two front teeth. Then, it was understood that not all prostitutes would prosper; one was far more likely to end up a Fantine than a Nell Gwynn or Fanny Hill. Now, to warn of prostitution’s pitfalls is to be intolerant, shaming and unkind. Because concerns about the very nature of prostitution are unsayable, the character of charitably termed “sex work” is warped by the few OnlyFans girls who rake in millions a year at little supposed personal cost. It is of no interest to “sex-positive” feminists (and certainly the legions of oleaginous “fans”, rarely mentioned in these discussions) that many of those shunted into prostitution are subjected to regular violence, exploitation by pimps and brutality by police.

Just as we baulk at the victim/vixen archetypes of film and literature of the past, we should question the untouchability of the 21st-century cult of the digital sex worker, whose central claim — that we can get rich with no consequences to our happiness or safety — has led god knows how many women to sell pics to dirty old men in the village for a few weeks, realise they can’t earn anything like what they’ve been told, and delete their profiles, only for that material to exist in perpetuity on both third-party porn sites and in the minds of dismal men, for whom the object-status of all women was never in doubt. How is this new myth, of the emancipated OnlyFans model, any less of a fantasy than the child victim Iris saved from the bordello, or the witty, scheming Fanny Hill? Do not believe the messaging; we are further from seeing prostitution for what it really is — a scourge which visits the bleakest of fates on the most vulnerable — than ever.

For all these reasons, Dubai is loathed by a certain other type of person — one who abhors philistines, and for whom that city represents the vacuous vanity of a class which should be relegated to Tenerife all-inclusives. Much of this ire is trained on the marriage of luxury and meaninglessness at the heart of Dubai holiday culture: a tangle of fake wealth, fake boobs and fake sophistication is perfectly calculated to enrage the skiing set. While they may have some points (holidaying in a supersized House of Fraser isn’t on my bucket list either), this snobbery runs in parallel to one of the most ubiquitous and noxious legends of our time. The story goes that there are only two reasons why a young woman of small fortune might find herself in Dubai: to shop, or to get rich by having the weirdest sex imaginable.

I will not explain these familiar pub myths in too much depth in the interest of decency, but rest assured they are gross. A couple of years ago, these stories exploded onto Twitter timelines, with subsequent waves of interest sparked by “leaked” images and videos (of which Katie Price most recently fell victim). They involved extremely niche, and extremely extreme, sex acts which influencers were paid eye-watering sums to carry out during “content” trips to the UAE. National newspapers took note, revealing the haggling over £10,000-a-night deals that went on in Instagram DMs. Gossip websites speculated about heinous acts intended to satisfy the deviant tastes of loaded, mysterious Arab men — these involved coprophilia, German shepherds, underage boys who needed to “become men” and, invariably, exclusive hotels or yachts.

There is decent evidence for at least some of these acts — not least one particularly stomach-churning video which emerged in 2022, sparking the first wave of social-media obsession with the influencer/sex-worker crossover. We must not be shocked that in every city the world over, there are enough freaks to make a party; even less so when a city is sloshing with gold. But what is so different, so unsettling, about the “Dubai porta potty” legend — as it is known for reasons you can work out for yourself — is how wilfully it has taken root, and how ancient the Western fantasies are that it speaks to.

For centuries, the orientalised perversity of the Arabian world has been a titillating, disgust-flecked obsession in the West. What began in pre-Islamic Persia with Scheherazade’s tales in One Thousand and One Nights quickly spread throughout Western Europe after Antoine Galland’s French translation in 1704. This provoked a flurry of imitations, contes de fées set in oud-scented wonderlands. The archetypes were set: as in Western fairytales, bloodthirsty aristocrats and fraught sex-relations are everywhere — a wife is caught in bed with a black slave; she transfigures her husband with magic, but is killed in retribution. A woman’s dismembered body washes up in a river; her husband has killed her, wrongly suspecting that she was unfaithful. The jealous Prince Behram imprisons Princess Al-Datma in a tower and, pursuing her after her escape, murders her. These fairytales fed the Western appetite for Eastern narratives of cruelty and debauchery, and came to shape the character of the deviant Arab which lingers today.

As the 20th century unfurled, this trope picked up scandalous pace. The Sheik — first a novel by Edith Maud Hull which sold one million copies upon its release in 1919, and then a film starring Rudolph Valentino in 1921 — portrayed its kidnapping protagonist as exotic and sexually aggressive, an arc which is redeemed when he is discovered to not in fact be Arab at all, but a harmless Western romantic in disguise. The allure and threat of the voracious Sheik spawned a thousand afterlives, not least with the wildly popular 1921 ditty The Sheik of Araby, composed to answer the mania surrounding the film. What is essentially a parody song contains some rather choice lyrics: “At night when you’re asleep / Into your tent I’ll creep.” It’s a love song — the damsel will “rule this world with me”, after all — but the comedy comes from a vision of a lascivious brute who invades tents, pompously reiterates his status as sheikh, and is both floppily romantic and latently vicious.

Later renditions only reinforce this type, and have been compiled by the writer Jack Shaheen in the documentary Reel Bad Arabs. Versions of the sheikh haunt pop culture: Disney’s Aladdin (1992) includes the lyrics: “Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place where the caravan camels roam; where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face, it’s barbaric but, hey, it’s home.” In the 1975 bawdy comedy The Happy Hooker, we get a gag about being “forced to perform unspeakable acts with circumcised dogs” (sound familiar?); the Burt Reynolds caper Cannonball Run II (1984) includes the quip: “I have a weakness for blondes and women without moustaches.”

It is not hard to appreciate the modern mythologies of Arabian nights — now situated in VIP areas of Dubai nightclubs, the presidential suites of golden hotels — as continuations of centuries-old titillating fantasies of otherness and sexual abandon. Key to these stories is the alabaster-skinned Western blonde, who is regularly abducted by some high-ranking Arab, bored of the casual debauchery of his harem. In The Jewel of the Nile (1985), Kathleen Turner is our kidnapped heroine; it’s a trope repeated in the Connery Bond film Never Say Never Again (1983) and Sahara, also from 1983, in which it is Brooke Shields’s turn to play defiled American beauty. Now, this role has been taken on by the scores of influencers who, modern legend tells us, are going out to Dubai to be defecated on.

This eternal plot relies on assumptions about both Eastern and Western women: that the former exist in both oppressive conservatism and in a world of supposed harems, and that the latter are more highly prized for their own blend of defilable innocence and sexual liberation. Tayeb Salih’s 1966 novel Season of Migration to the North certainly points to such an assumption held by the murderous Sudanese lothario Mustafa Sa’eed, who spends his twenties roleplaying the oversexed Eastern villain to the young women of London. In the novel, Western women are willing, naive and corrupting. If there is a thriving sex trade based on itinerant British Instagram models, then this provenance must be part of the sales pitch.

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Whether these stories are true or not is less interesting than the appetite for them itself — an appetite which shows that we have not become any more self-critical about our prurient fascination with sex, Eastern-style, than The Sheik’s swooning readers in 1919. But while there is little doubt that the Dubai sex industry is big, monstrous and, by the very nature of prostitution, riven with exploitation, it might also be the case that these stories of hardcore depravity say something about us and our desire to see Western vulnerability — stereotypically contained in the body of the blonde woman — defiled and jeopardised by a sexy and unknown other, to enact our own fears and fantasies. If Instagram influencers are our new Hollywood stars, then they, too — just like the ultimate woman-child blonde, Marilyn Monroe, will forever be subject to suspicion over having done sex work to get to where they are today. Because of the mystery of an influencer’s day-to-day job — and the huge crossover with porn sites such as OnlyFans — this suspicion is even more marked.

We do not tell these squeamish stories out of compassion for their protagonists. For many, they are little more than masturbatory fantasies, or opportunities to imagine untold degradations to another woman and her hated high cheekbones. The legend of the Dubai sex industry, the natural heir of the desert romance, allows us the luxury of contemplating vicious things being done to women at one remove: it is happening over there and, we assure ourselves, never here. Yet the fact is, shoving a live salmon in unmentionable places for £40,000 is, if true, just another grotesque tumescence of our own porn-saturated culture that social media has helped to create — and is probably just as likely to go down in a Kensington mansion as an Emirati penthouse. Instead of addressing the cruelty at the heart of prostitution itself, these one thousand and one tales of our new Arabian Nights keep sex work safe and harmless: an exotic, erotic joke.

And these fables serve another purpose too: they keep our snobberies contained in the dystopian glass city in the desert, confirming our worst fears about what happens when decadent sexual tastes meet the unbounded wealth of the Gulf, the West’s playground. If Dubai remains, in the orientalising imagination, a moral vacuum — Sodom-sur-Mer — it is only to comfort us that we are different. In fact, the worst things about this story, the cruelty, the ostentation, happen absolutely everywhere.

Justin Trudeau has been a disaster for women here. He has done nothing to stem the violence and abuse faced by indigenous women, has made single-sex shelters illegal while supporting the blanket decriminalisation of pimping, brothel-keeping and sex-buying — and all in the name of “freedom and choice for women”.

This makes their resistance here that more powerful. I see it in full view when I return for the World Congress for the Abolition of Prostitution and march alongside survivors of the sex trade. Women of all ages, all nationalities, march and shout in unison: “What do we want? An end to prostitution!” We are rowdy, blowing whistles and singing in the vibrant and colourful demonstration. Placards bearing slogans such as “No john is a good john”, and “Prostitution is bought and sold rape” jostle above the throng.

There is, inevitably, a counter-demonstration. Whenever sex-trade abolitionists gather, rival activists who consider prostitution a “choice” and a legitimate form of  “work” turn up to shill for the pimps and punters. They refer to us as “carceral feminists” because we believe that the law should intervene to stop men from buying and selling sexual access to women and girls.

And so, a wall of mounted police is mustered to protect us from a group of women and men shouting through megaphones. Some of these protesters are draped in blue and pink trans flags, and many wear keffiyehs covering their faces. One man wears a T-shirt that reads: “No Swerfs, No Terfs”. Another, dressed in a tartan skirt, holds up a placard: “It’s pride month: fuck a tranny”; while a woman waves a sign which reads “Fuck TERFS”. There are shouts of “Real work sucks! Blowjobs are real jobs”, and “No room for whorephobia, no room for transphobia, terfs and swerfs”.

Then, I hear my name through the loud hailer: “The fact they invited Julie Bindel to speak says everything we need to know. She hates trans people and sex workers.” I’m not surprised. Wherever feminists gather to discuss the threat to women’s rights, the masked marauders show up.

It’s true there are key similarities between the movements promoting gender ideology and “sex work”. Both argue that they are motivated by liberation from oppression and stigma; both are fuelled by misogyny. Their arguments rely on sexual objectification, male supremacy, female subordination, and rigid stereotypes about masculinity and femininity.

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Liberal advocates of prostitution counter that it is a liberatory practice and a sexual identity — a stance which allows them to piggyback on the lesbian and gay movement. No wonder one of the many flags covering the busy streets of downtown Montreal to celebrate Pride month is that of sex workers’ rights. But this stance ignores the toll both take on women’s rights and women’s lives — especially upon the most vulnerable, who do not have the luxury of liberatory freedom.

For standing up for these women, many of those who have gathered at the conference have been subject to abuse. Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, has been targeted by transactivists for arguing that it’s dangerous to allow trans-identified males in women-only spaces. In a recently published report on prostitution, she condemned the practice of men paying for sex. The backlash was swift and brutal: sex workers’ rights activists accused her of supporting the criminalisation of women in the sex trade, even though she has made it clear that she considers them innocent victims of sexual abuse. Alsalem is not an uncontroversial figure. She came in for harsh criticism following her comments on the 7 October pogrom perpetrated against Israeli citizens by Hamas. When questioned as to why the UN had not (at that time) made a statement condemning the atrocities, Alsalem said she had not seen enough evidence to prove the terrorist group had used systematic rape and other forms of sexual torture during the attack. She has, subsequently, condemned any and all of the sexual violence being perpetrated during the current war.

Alert to all instances of female oppression, Reem does recognise that the sex trade is “a situation of extreme violence, to which many women and girls are subjected [to] systematically across the world”. But she also pinpoints another, more political, problem: “the drive to decriminalise prostitution, and the drive to demonise the victims and others that speak out against its normalisation is part of an incredibly dangerous, large-scale offensive that is being launched right now by evolved patriarchy against the rights of women and girls”.

She’s right. While those promoting these ideas claim to be progressive, they are actually reinforcing rigid, antiquated, anti-woman stereotypes. Men who pay for sex believe that they have both a need and right to do so, and rarely take into account the women involved. The same could be said for those men who wish to enter female-only spaces. While prostituted women are required to conform to an image of extreme femininity, men claiming to be women wear the trappings of female oppression like a costume.

As Andrea Long Chu illustrates in Females, many trans-identified men seem to aspire to the worst kind of sexual objectification: “The “barest essentials” of “femaleness” are “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes”. Similarly, Paris Lees, the trans-identified journalist, wrote: “Last summer I went to Ibiza, where I was catcalled, sexually objectified and treated like a piece of meat by men the entire week. And it was absolutely awesome.”

This kind of language is incredibly damaging for feminism. It conveys the idea that all women enjoy being objectified. At the conference, Kimberly, a sex-trade survivor from Vancouver, reflects on the horrors of such objectification: “I was so tired of being treated like a piece of meat, each and every day. “It makes us feel subhuman.”

As in life, so with prostitution: it is the weakest and most vulnerable who suffer the most. If the West decides that prostitution is moral and acceptable, it will have a devastating impact on other women living in precarity around the globe. In countries such as Holland, Germany and Switzerland, all with legalised regimes, significantly higher numbers of men solicit sex for money. And, in order to meet the rise in demand that legislation incurs, women have to be trafficked in from other countries. They are being legally bought and sold as commodities — treated as subhuman.

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This attitude is borne out in the way they are treated by punters. Women speak of the horrendous smell of the men, and the pain of being penetrated by a queue of them. They tell me about the horror of having his semen or other bodily fluids anywhere near their faces. The whiplash as they snap their head away as he tries to kiss them.

There are wider harms perpetrated by prostitution, such as the detrimental effect it has on women’s rights. The conference stood united in condemning so-called human rights organisations that claim selling sex is merely part of the economy. Sanitised language, such as “sex work”, is today used by the majority of police officers, media outlets and medical professionals. There are those who use the term “juvenile sex work” to describe sexually abused children. The term “forced sex work” has become widely used among some international non-governmental organisations (including, for example, Action Aid), which strikes me as an oxymoron.

By its very nature, prostitution is a cause and a consequence of women’s oppression by men. It is the driver for sex trafficking, and a hugely profitable trade in which money is made from the commodification of human beings, mostly women and girls.

The march through the city of Montreal on the first day of the conference was led by some of the bravest women I know — those who endured the hell of prostitution and lived not just to tell the tale, but to fight against the creeping influence of the pro-prostitution lobby, including those on the counter demo shouting about “blow jobs” being real jobs. These women stand tall against the wealthy and powerful pimp lobby, and without their voices and the resistance of those represented at the conference, we would be seeing far more countries introducing a legal model such as that in Holland.

The ever-present irony is that men would never dare campaign for their right to buy sex. In fact, they don’t need to: they get women to fight for prostitution on their behalf. Why do these men refuse to show their faces in support? Perhaps, it’s because they know exactly how sinister prostitution really is.

A look at the job advertisement offers clues. The first requirement is: “Practical experience from several years of visiting brothels”, and “experience with escorts is an advantage”. You’ll need a “clean, well-groomed appearance” and a “health certificate”. You have to “enjoy dealing with people” and have “no fear of contact”. The job description is simple: “You will test brothels for service, cleanliness and compliance with safer sex practices. You have fun having sex with the different ladies and then create an evaluation.” Something tells me only a man could do this job.

Many legal brothels employ undercover inspectors, a practice known as “test purchasing”. The aim is to assess the quality of “service” a prostituted woman is providing. If it is found that her performance is lax in any way — for example if she fails to convince the punter that she is enjoying herself, or refuses particular sex acts that he demands — she can be fined on the spot by the brothel owner. This is the reality of legal prostitution: it benefits the pimps and the punters and offers the women no protection whatsoever.

The advertisement for the brothel tester was on a website run by Kaufmich, a business that describes itself as a “social network for sex workers, customers, brothels and companies in the erotic environment”. If you are looking for any type of paid work in the German sex trade, Kaufmich is your go-to website. It also offers tips to punters on everything from the best local “gang-bang sex parties” to sourcing heavily pregnant women who are selling sex.

In countries such as Germany, Holland, and Switzerland — where all aspects of prostitution are perfectly legal — the women are marketed as merchandise, the sex buyers viewed as clients, and the pimps merely managers. At the heart of the project to sanitise the sex trade is the language used to describe it. In the Seventies, Carol Leigh, an advocate for blanket legalisation, coined the term “sex work” to suggest that prostitution is “a job like any other”. I’ve seen this phrase — as well as “sex work is work” and “blow jobs are real jobs” — emblazoned across placards and heard it chanted at rallies to promote legalisation. If prostitution is simply a job, then how can it be abuse? If it is merely labour, how can it be detrimental to wider society?

It’s a nice idea. But in practice, legalisation has left women terrifyingly vulnerable. In Germany, the current legislation imposes almost no rules on the punters. Condom use is supposedly compulsory, but as one woman in a “mega-brothel” pointed out: “Who, exactly, is going to enforce that rule and put one on his dick and stop him from taking it off, as they often do?”

Meanwhile, a high degree of control is imposed on the women. They are expected to be onsite for periods of up to 15 hours — until 3 o’clock in the morning — to allow brothel owners to confidently advertise that there are always dozens of different women to choose from. Partial or full nudity is required of all prostitutes while they’re on the premises. They don’t get to decide what acts they perform: management decides what “services” are on offer; whether “blow jobs are included in the basic rate”.

In German culture, prostitution has been whitewashed. There are many legal pimps on mainstream television. Michael Beretin, one of the pimps running the Paradise mega-brothel, had his own TV show, Redlight Experts, in which he reviews brothels. Beretin had seriously assaulted his then wife when he signed the TV contract. And in 2013, criminal investigators discovered that criminal gangs were operating within the business. Significant numbers of women had been trafficked from other countries. The brothel owners were sentenced to five years in prison.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. No other job on Earth exposes the so-called workers to such extreme violence, abuse and degradation. One 2018 study found that more than 60% had suffered a traumatic brain injury.

And yet, European authorities continue to enable the sex trade. In Zurich, there is a large “sex performance box” zone — a drive-thru outdoor brothel on the outskirts of the city — which is maintained by public money. Every day, local municipality workers empty bins full of used condoms, soiled tissues, and empty tubes of lube. The Swiss government spends more than $800,000 per year maintaining the booths. It is clearly keen to make it easier for men to pay for sex with financially desperate women. In 2014, it was revealed that inmates of La Paquerette, a social therapy department for prisoners near Geneva, were allowed to visit prostituted women being held in a local immigration detention centre. Members of End Demand, a feminist human rights organisation in Switzerland, tell me that the idea behind the visits was that the male prisoners could “let off steam” ahead of being released into the community.

Recent evidence shows that physical and sexual violence against women involved in the Swiss sex market is commonplace. Fortunately, there are moves, supported by a growing number of politicians in the country, to end legal prostitution and criminalise the punters.

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The problem extends far beyond Europe, however. The picture is just as horrific in Nevada, the only state in the US where brothels are legal. I have visited a number of them, and the conditions inside are nothing like the glamorous images that illustrate their websites. Many women both live and prostitute in a single room, where pornography plays on loop. They are not allowed any of their own personal possessions on display, and are only allowed to leave the brothels — which are often surrounded by metal gates — if they are chaperoned by an assistant pimp. This is in case they pick up a sexually transmitted infections from consensual sex.

There is no requirement for the punters to show that they are not carrying a disease upon entering the brothel, but the women are required to be tested every week. Brothel owners typically pocket half of their earnings, while the prostitutes are expected to pay for their own condoms, wet wipes, sheets and towels.

Of course, this is just good business. While in Nevada, I met with the late Dennis Hof (who died in 2018), America’s biggest pimp — he owned the majority of the legal brothels in operation at the time — who refused to accept the label, because he operated in the legal world. “I am a businessman,” he told me. “I have a license to do this.” For pimps, it is all about profit. The wellbeing of the women is irrelevant. All the prostitutes I interviewed in Nevada brothels spoke of using tactics aimed as dissociating from their feelings while having sex with punters, in order to cope. One woman told me she repeated the mantra, during each encounter: “I am not selling myself, but renting out my body for an hour”.

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Prostitutes desperately need protection, but every attempt to unionise these “workers” has failed. Pro-pimp organisations have long been masquerading as “sex workers’ unions” — in 2002, a London newspaper ran a front page with the headline, “Sex Workers To Join Trade Union”. People lobbying for the legalisation of the sex trade had persuaded Britain’s third-biggest union, the GMB, that prostitution was a job and that those selling sex deserved “worker’s rights”. The now-defunct International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW) was never a union; it is a lobby group for the decriminalisation of pimping. In the early days, its main spokespersons were two gay men — whose rather unrepresentative voices (at most, 20% of the entire sex market is men selling sex to men) became dominant in the “sex worker’s rights” debate. One of these, Douglas Fox, was co-owner of a large “escort agency” based in north-east England.

Another organisation that masqueraded as a union was the Red Thread, based in Amsterdam. Founded in 1984 — and funded, from 1987, by the Dutch government — even at its height, it had just 100 members, out of the nation’s estimated 25,000 prostituted people. It never fought a single case on behalf of a “worker” in court. What it did do was act as a propaganda machine for legalisation. The Red Thread only lost its government funding when the international media began to report on the evidence coming out of The Netherlands that legalisation had been an unmitigated disaster. Under this regime, Trafficking and pimping has increased, organised crime is rife, and women are not protected from violence.

Those who advocate for the legalisation of prostitution claim it makes it safer for the women. Those in favour of decriminalisation, including many liberals and some feminists, argue that “sex workers” can be protected by unions and health and safety measures. But prostitution is inherently abusive. There is no way to make it safe.

And, under legalisation, prostituted women are inspected and not protected. After all, if selling sex is the same as flipping burgers for a living, there needs to be quality control of the product. This is another gross example of legalisation benefitting men while betraying women: whoever the lucky candidate is for the brothel testing job in Germany, he can easily pretend it is regular employment, while he is encouraged to “have fun having sex with the different ladies”.

Who cares what those ladies are thinking, feeling and experiencing? When women’s bodies become commodities, they cease to be human, and the men who buy and sell them can no longer claim to be humane. That is what the legalisation of prostitution achieves.

Anja, runs a support and advocacy service for women wishing to escape window prostitution in Amsterdam, and she sees the devastating effect that legalising prostitution has had on women, locals — and on punters. It has been an unmitigated disaster.

Trafficking and pimping has increased, organised crime is rife, and women are not protected from violence. Research from 2018 found that 97% of those involved in prostitution in the Netherlands had experienced some form of serious physical and/or sexual abuse from pimps and punters. Residents, politicians, police and prostitutes are all up in arms. And the sex tourists keep coming.

Yet the government, as I have discovered from 20 years of reporting on the Dutch sex trade, tends to favour the head-in-the-sand approach. Politicians are reluctant to openly criticise the industry because they make a lot of money from it. “Sex clubs, sex shows, sex shops and coffee shops all have a vested interest in keeping window prostitution going,” says Else Iping, a retired politician who lives locally, “because the windows act as an advertisement for the whole district.”

“The neighbourhood is going down the drain because of the window prostitution,” she says. “And it is not safe for the women. The windows themselves are now just as much of a tourist attraction — so thousands of people come to walk through. It’s humiliating: the women are like animals in the zoo.”

The progressive female Mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, is trying to compromise. She describes the situation as the paradox of tolerance: “People come to Amsterdam because of the tolerance but show behaviour we cannot tolerate, behaviour we should call immoral, that they wouldn’t show at home.”

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Having legalised prostitution, however, and opened its arms to sex tourists, the city is now trying to put the genie back in the bottle as residents complain of the noise, crime and expense. New rules have been introduced regarding the brothels: they will have to close at 3am at weekends instead of 6am. And there are plans to relocate 100 of De Wallen’s 249 famous window brothels to an “erotic centre“ on the outskirts of the city. Somewhere “chic”, says Halsema.

But this is to close a blind eye to the fact that the entire city is promoting “prostitution on an industrial scale”, says Anja, a former prostitute. “The government wants to shove the women out of the way to keep the residents happy, but it is just moving the problem elsewhere.” And while the women are there, the sex tourists will still come.

It’s hardly surprising that a particularly problematic group of tourists — British men aged 18-34 — sees the destination as an attractive one. In a rather naive attempt to put them off, a “Stay Away” video campaign was launched last month. Those using internet search terms such as “stag party Amsterdam” or “pub crawl Amsterdam” will be diverted to a video campaign that details “the risks and consequences of nuisance and excessive alcohol and drug use”.

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A 30-second video shows a very drunk man being arrested on the streets of Amsterdam. He is handcuffed and warned that coming to Amsterdam for a “messy night” and getting trashed will add up to a €140 fine plus a criminal record, so: Stay Away! Another shows a hospitalised man on a heart monitor, getting IV fluids. “Coming for drugs to Amsterdam? Stay Away!”

But I have interviewed dozens of British punters, including many in Amsterdam, and let’s face it, a video of a bloke being thrown in jail isn’t going to register, let alone act as a deterrent. One interviewee who paid for sex in Amsterdam told me, in harrowing detail, about his transaction. “She told me her pimp watched every punter leave the joint, and if he looked unhappy, she got a leathering,” he said.

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Men in De Wallen have no respect for the women they ogle. They take photographs of those perched behind the window, despite the many signs telling them that it’s prohibited. They flash their genitals at the prostituted women and shout obscenities towards women walking through the area. A 2018 campaign to stop sex tourists urinating, defecating and vomiting in the streets was deemed a failure by local politicians. “Nothing seems to deter them,” a city prosecutor told me at the time.

Renate van der Zee, a journalist and feminist activist, tells me there’s a Dutch saying that describes this campaign perfectly: dweilen met de kraan open. It means “mopping the floor dry while the tap is still running”. The Stay Away campaign is too little, and far too late, she says. “You can’t deal with sexual exploitation and excess tourism by warning the men they will be put in prison,” she says. “But at least if window prostitution was abolished, you will get rid of most of the sex tourists.” Legalisation, she explains, has been a huge mistake. “Almost all of the women are exploited.”

The mayor holds, at best, a disingenuous position. She talks of “sex entrepreneurs” and their business model in one breath, and in the next: “What we do not welcome is people who come here on a vacation from morals.” Meanwhile, the Dutch government clings to its legalised regime despite knowing that the situation is becoming increasingly dangerous for women: the Netherlands was forced to close an increasing number of its window brothels after it became clear that organised criminals were running them.

As Diederik Boomsma, leader of the local Christian Democratic Appeal Party, points out: “What I have tried to achieve for many years is to close down the red light district. It’s quite bizarre that you can defend it. People are still attached to this faux romantic idea that prostitution belongs in Amsterdam, and it is quaint and old, but at least we should all agree that prostitution should not be a tourist attraction?” He believes that nothing will change unless serious steps are taken to close down the industry. “Men come here and they think that they are able to behave as though they were at a sex festival… So if you really want to do something about it, then you shut the window brothels, and the sex clubs, and return the oldest part of the city back to the citizens.”

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Obviously, there are those in Amsterdam who are against the restrictions. At a meeting about the mega brothels at the weekend, angry locals who don’t want a “sex club” on their doorstep found themselves on the same side as PROUD, the Dutch “sex workers’ union” who want the women to stay in their red neon booths, where they can “work safely”.

PROUD, along with the progressive Left, insists that selling sex is a “job like any other” and that reforms against sex tourism are increasing stigma towards women. Its website has a front page devoted to a quote from Xaviera Hollander, one of Holland’s most notorious pimps who coined the term “happy hooker”. “You can call me mercenary, or call me madam, but, as I always tell my customers — just call me anytime!” Presumably with that in mind, PROUD opposes earlier closing times for brothels as well as the Stay Away campaign on the grounds that this is bad for business. They insist that they are being unfairly discriminated against and “used as a scapegoat for the city’s problem with mass tourism”.

I ask Anja whether sex tourists in Amsterdam are being unfairly vilified. “These men are the worst, and they have made Amsterdam into one big brothel,” she tells me. “Most of them act as if they are buying a burger, and quite frankly they would treat one better than they treat the girls in those windows.”

Julie Swede, a sex trade survivor who was interviewed for the article, is angry that despite making it clear that she wholly rejects the term “sex work”, “because it is abuse, and neither ‘sex’ nor work”, she was described by the two female journalists (Alexandra Heal and Anna Gross) as being “groomed into sex work aged 15 and trafficked by a pimp”. How can a child be a “sex worker”, she asks me. “This is rape and abuse of a minor.” When I made a complaint to the paper, I was thanked for “pointing it out” and told that the wording would be changed.

I despair that I had to point out that referring to a child pimped and trafficked into prostitution was grossly offensive and inappropriate in the first place. But what is becoming clear — and what the female-authored FT article would seem to corroborate — is the way in which so many women are currently bending over backwards to adopt the cool stance that “sex work” is a job like any other.

Nadia Whittome, MP for Nottingham East and the youngest serving MP, elected aged 23, is the epitome of what currently passes for progressive and last week tweeted her support for Hookers against Hardship. This new group describes itself as a “coalition of the major UK sex worker-led orgs, campaigning for more support for sex workers during the cost-of-living crisis”.

This approach may look attractive to those concerned about the human rights of the prostituted person — but selling sex in the UK is not a criminal offence. What Hookers against Hardship and their ilk are calling for is the decriminalisation of all aspects of prostitution, as well as maintaining the legal activity of sex buying. But I know that the claim that prostitution is a job “like any other” does nothing to destigmatise the women involved; what it does is normalise paying for sex and increase the illegal aspects of the sex trade. Blanket decriminalisation means legitimising pimps, punters, and brothel owners.

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We know how loudly men will speak up for their own interests; so shouldn’t women (especially those claiming to be feminists) protect women’s? After all, poverty is one of the driving forces that leads to women being exploited into the sex trade, and Whittome’s constituency is ranked as the 42nd most deprived area in the country (of 533 such areas). Surely she realises that the best way to support these women is to “put food in her mouth, and not [a] cock”, as sex trade survivor Rachel Moran said.

Young, female socialists like Whittome seem oblivious to this approach. As she told Channel 4: “I’ll be honest, I don’t really care about the men who are purchasing sex. That’s not what I’m interested in. I care about keeping women who are involved in sex work safe in the here and now. The solution is to fully decriminalise it and tackle the root causes.”

But the root cause is the demand: the men who pay for sex. What the hell does Whittome think makes the women unsafe? I have interviewed pimps, punters, and the prostituted women, and their harm is discussed as though it were an occupational hazard: a stone dropped on the builder’s toe. Rape is the daily occurrence, perpetrated by sex buyers and brothel owners, and the psychological damage as a result of prostitution is well documented.

Unfortunately, Whittome is not the only female MP supporting commercialised sex. Dawn Butler, Charlotte Nichols and Zarah Sultana form the new wave of pro-prostitution Labour MPs, shouting the “sex work is work” mantra from the comfort of their Westminster offices. All are against criminalising the men who create the demand, claiming that it would put the women in more danger. Even though this flies in the face of evidence from those countries where they have focused on the sex buyer as the problem as opposed to the women.

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It’s interesting that on the Left, several constituency Labour Parties have passed motions to “decriminalise sex work” and there have even been attempts to unionise the sex industry, and to frame the harm, such as HIV and rape, as “industrial injury” as has happened in New Zealand under decriminalisation. The claim is that treating prostitution as work helps women access resources that can protect them — such as legislation, grievance processes, and officially recognised unions. But unionising prostitution has proved impossible, both in the UK and in countries where it is legal, such as Germany, Holland and Switzerland. This is primarily because women don’t want to register and prostitutes and pimps don’t want to pay taxes.

In 2002, the GMB announced the founding of its Adult Entertainment branch, which began life as the International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW) and was founded by two academics, neither of whom were involved in prostitution. But it was never effective as a union, and operated primarily as a lobbying group for decriminalisation. Academics, sex buyers and pimps were welcomed as IUSW members, and the main spokesperson in the early days was Douglas Fox, co-owner of Christony Companions — a large escort agency based in northeast England which carried IUSW as a “kitemark” on its advertising.

Whittome has taken her fight for “sex worker rights” outside of her own constituency. She was delighted when feminists lost their fight to put a cap on lap dance clubs in Bristol, despite evidence that men outside the clubs sexually harass women on their way home. Great for working-class female office cleaners coming off night shifts.

There is a way forward for these women. What is effective in terms of reducing the harms done to them in the sex trade is what is known as the Nordic Model. This approach has been tried and tested since 1999 in several countries, including Sweden, Norway, France, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and, more recently, Israel. Under these laws, the demand is criminalised, and the prostituted person assisted out of the sex trade if she or he so wishes. It is a human rights approach and effective in reducing trafficking, and the sexual exploitation of children. Research from the London School of Economics found that legalisation of the sex trade increases both. The commercial sexual exploitation of children is rife, for example, the buying and selling of Albanian refugee children in Kent.

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Why is it, then, that so many prominent female politicians believe that further normalising sex markets is a better alternative to clamping down on the men who drive the demand?

Caroline Lucas, a former Green Party leader used to steadfastly support the Nordic model. She told me, back in 2008, that she wanted to see an end to the sex trade because she understood it as sexual exploitation, and a barrier to equality between women and men. But in 2016, Lucas met with trans activist Paris Lees (who is of the view that feminists campaigning to end prostitution are all white pearl-clutchers), having been admonished by her on Twitter. Following that meeting, Lucas performed an about turn and has since supported the campaign to decriminalise pimps, brothel owners and punters.

Natalie Bennett (another party leader) is also a vocal supporter of blanket decriminalisation. She has spoken of “sex work” as part of the model known as “green economics” — which “works for the benefit of all people everywhere, for the planet, the biosphere, non-human species, nature, and other life forms”. How wonderful to hear that men paying to access the inside of a woman’s body are helping the environment. In a paper entitled, “Sex work: a survey of social, philosophical and human rights issues” (2009), Bennett takes issue with the idea that sex buyers should be criminalised, calling this approach a “response to hysteria and the half-disguised exercising of religious-based moral views now rejected by the majority of this democratic society”.

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Moral views? Unlike the pro-prostitution lobby, whose members speak of “safe sex”, the many women who have escaped could tell you about the morality of their industry in great detail: the hideous smell of the punters, the pain of a dry, bruised vagina being penetrated multiple times, the anaesthetic cream applied to genitals to endure “shifts”, the imprisonment — Tina sold sex from high-end London hotels for years and was forced to sleep in handcuffs every night.

Whittome and others who claim to be motivated by socialist and feminist principles should take a hard look at the reality of the global sex trade, a trade that is built on the extreme exploitation of the most disenfranchised women. Perhaps, then, they might understand the hypocrisy of their position.

 ***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here. 

Prostitution, in all its forms, is legal in Germany, and has been since the end of the Second World War. Recently, though, attitudes have been changing. People and politicians are demanding that the government take notice of the  “pimp state” and consider the terrible toll prostitution takes on its women and girls.

Germany’s “industrialised prostitution” is horrific, according to those who have survived it. The laws there give licence to pimps; they are referred to as “businessmen” and “managers” as they buy and sell desperate women. Cologne opened the world’s first drive-through brothel in 2001, and since then, more followed. There are “mega brothels” in cities such as Munich and Berlin which can accommodate around 650 punters at one time offering an “early bird” deal of a burger, beer and sex. At quiet times, some brothels offer “two for the price of one” deals, and “happy hours” with discounted rates.

Legalisation has helped expand Germany’s sex trade: there are an estimated 400,000 prostitutes, and around 1.2 million men (the population of Germany is a little over 80 million) who buy sex every day.

However, launched at an international conference in Berlin last week, a new report did much to shift the narrative about prostitution and its harms, in a country that has long defended and promoted the inside of a woman’s body as a suitable workplace. The report, “Men who pay for sex in Germany and what they teach us about the failure of legal prostitution”, was built on data from 96 German sex buyers and it validates much of what sex trade survivors, and legal scholars, have been telling the world for decades.

The men, aged between 18 and 89, were a generally diverse group, ranging from the unemployed and men in unskilled, low-income jobs, through to high-end professionals. The punters provided candid information about their attitudes, behaviours and motivations when it comes to paying for sex. They were asked questions like how does legalisation operate? Does it make the women safer? Has it resulted in a reduction in trafficking?

The research, spearheaded by psychologist Dr Melissa Farley, marks the final part of a six-country study on punters, built on data from lengthy interviews with 763 men in the USA, Cambodia, England, India, Scotland and Germany.

In Germany, the Prostitution Act of 2002 introduced full legalisation which classified the sex trade as a form of labour, and a “job like any other”. Pimps became businessmen, and the women “sex workers”. It swept aside all those post-war restrictions which said prostitution was “not prohibited but… immoral”. And, despite government attempts to regularise the sex trade, barely any pimps paid taxes: as few as 44 (out of 80,000) prostituted women registered themselves as such, despite it being a legal requirement.

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In 2017, following lobbying from feminists and testimony from police officers about the rising levels of criminality and violence under the legal regime, the government introduced a number of restrictions: pimps were no longer allowed to dictate which “services” the women should provide to punters; brothel owners had to apply for a licence; and punters were mandated to use condoms.

“Of course, there was no way of enforcing these regulations,” Angie*, a German sex trade survivor tells me. “Pimps are criminals who just want to make money, and [punters] can’t be made to put on a condom. We still had to do what we were told.”

In Germany, prostitution is seen as a necessity for men, and almost good for wider society. As one sex buyer put it: “The nature of men is that they have no control over themselves. But because they can use prostitutes, there are fewer sexual offences.” He couldn’t be more wrong, not only are sexual offences being committed against prostituted women, but in countries with legalised prostitution, rates of male violence tend to be higher than in others.

Many of the German punters interviewed have seen evidence of coercion, terror and violence towards the women. Regardless, they would all pay for sex. “The German system has effectively legalised rape, so long as it’s done to a prostituted woman,” said Alice*, another sex trade survivor.

One argument used by those in favour of legalisation is that if the men know they are not going to be arrested for buying sex, they would be far more likely to report any evidence of trafficking and underage girls being exploited. However, only one of the 96 German punters interviewed had reported evidence of trafficking to police.

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The problem is that, as one john said: “Once you’ve paid, you can do anything you like to her.” The men were asked if they were aware of violence from pimps towards the women. Many were, having seen pimps routinely commit violent acts that meet international definitions of torture. One man said: “There was one [pimp] who really beat up one of his women. With the fist two or three times in the face and thrown her against the wall.” Another reported: “When the women didn’t pay the pimp enough, they had their fingernails pulled off, or they beat the women to a pulp. The women were scared and never said anything.”

The sex buyers showed little to no empathy towards the women. “It’s like having a cup of coffee, when you’re done you throw it out,” said one. “It’s like renting an organ for 10 minutes,” said another.

There is no shame attached to being a john in Germany, which is a large part of the problem. Legalisation is supposed to reduce trafficking, violence, and the underground sex trade, but, as the report highlights, the opposite has happened, with illegal activities burgeoning alongside the legal ones.

To them, prostituted women are “unrapeable” and that if they can’t have sex with who they want, when they want, how they want, they will be compelled to, as one man said, “rape a real woman”. Three-quarters of the interviewees held this attitude. As one said: “Prostitution is good for society because men have an excessive sex drive and men can take it out on them without attacking other women or attacking children.”

Until 2020, Helmut Sporer was a detective police officer responsible for investigating and monitoring prostitution in Germany, including international trafficking. During his career, Sporer saw a steady deterioration in both the conditions for the women involved in prostitution and the response by the criminal justice agencies to effectively deal with the proliferation of organised crime and abuses within the system. For Sporer, this deterioration is not in spite of blanket legalisation — but because of it.

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German punters seem to understand how abusive prostitution is: “Prostitution only works because the men are dominant,” said one.

So what would deter men from paying for sex? In Germany, it would require a change in the law. Legalisation would need to be repealed and replaced with a law that criminalises the purchase of sex, and assists women out of the sex trade. Incredibly, most men admitted that little else would stop them other than being added to a sex offender register or having a criminal conviction. This law has been adopted in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Canada, France, Ireland, and Israel, and evidence shows that the approach curbs the sex trade in all its forms.

Wouldn’t it be a bitter irony if the German government were so appalled by the words of punters that this gave them the impetus to finally condemn its laws? In the words of Rachel Moran, the Irish sex trade survivor whose powerful speech closed the conference in Berlin:

“These men have validated everything [we] have been saying for years,” she said. “And I never thought I would say this, but ‘thank you’ to the punters of Germany, for giving the German government every bit of ammunition it needs to shut down its sex trade.”

“It’s fine on the other side, it’s fine on the other side!” sing five rowdy, dancing Brits, to the tune of the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West”. On the other side of the 14^th century Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal, a cluster of partying men yodel back. It is midnight on a Friday in the heart of Amsterdam’s De Wallen district, and I am on a reconnaissance tour with Amsterdam’s Night Watch.

This is not the Night Watch memorialised by Rembrandt in 1642, the civic militia that would defend the city of Amsterdam from outside attack. Now the enemy is within, in the area named for the old city walls, but now infamous as the red-light district of Amsterdam. Els Iping and her neighbour Romeo are pacing the streets. Armed with quiet words and high-vis jackets, they are part of the “Wallen Watch”, a local vigilante defence force against drunken, doped-up tourists on raucous, licentious holidays.

When tourists slip behind chains intended to dissuade them from trespassing on people’s doorways to smoke weed, when there are strippers dancing on bars without a sex licence, when two groups of British tourists share their version of 1980s hits with entire neighbourhoods, Els politely takes note. “Please could you be quiet,” says this grandmother and former politician, who has lived in the Red Light District for four decades. “People live here.” To my amazement, every time, the tourists (often British) look abashed, say sorry and go on their way.

Why have the people of Amsterdam been forced to take public order into their own hands again? Because six decades of tolerating sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll have turned their city centre into a non-stop Saturnalia for visitors “on holiday from their morals” (as former Labour councillor Dennis Boutkan memorably put it). But morality aside, it is also a question of numbers: with thousands packing out the roads and streets on weekend nights, it is sometimes impossible for even emergency vehicles to access the area. And Els and Romeo are not alone in believing all this has been facilitated by the legal grey area of state policy on soft drugs.

Romeo, who has lived for six years at the heart of all this, says that when he leaves for his morning work at 4am, there are frequently still groups of screaming tourists. “With the corona rules, the place was empty in a day,” he says wistfully. “I saw people who live here, who never dared to sit outside before, having a picnic.” Now the pandemic lockdowns are gone, the tourists are back. And 47% of them are tempted to Amsterdam by the coffeeshops, although it’s clearly the combination of party behaviour (drinking, screeching, leering, urinating, with a spliff on the side) that creates the most localised nuisance. “We started last year with 30 people,” Els tells me. “Six people have moved away. It’s noise you can’t arm yourself against. We are desperate…but I don’t want them to win.”

“They”, in her view, are the businesses that have everything to gain from a loud and cash-filled Red Light District: the drug dealers offering a menu from pills to cocaine, the brothel owners, the 166 cannabis “coffeeshops” (100 serving tourist demand alone), plus sweet shops, bars and restaurants (for those with the munchies). Some may be set up by upright businessmen; some, says the mayor of Amsterdam, are part of criminal networks. Thanks to the opaque business constructions common in the Netherlands, it’s hard to tell them apart.

And for local residents, ironically, the Dutch idea of “tolerance” has become completely intolerable. The prostitution windows where sometimes-trafficked foreign women show off their cosmetically enhanced wares, the raucous bars, the coffeeshops where cannabis is sold and smoked, feel like an invasion: not a liberal paradise, but a human zoo from another age. A soft drugs policy that was ahead of its time in the Sixties has stranded the Netherlands in a no man’s land between controlled legalisation and arrant criminality. Under the Opium Act, a policy of toleration or gedoogbeleid means that the state allows “coffeeshops” to be established, taxed, and to sell cannabis to customers for consumption on site. However, since commercial cannabis growing is illegal, they have to buy from criminals.

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Mayor Femke Halsema, the deputy mayors and heads of the local police and public prosecution are convinced that the situation is untenable. Halsema believes that full legalisation and regulation of cannabis — and also cocaine — is the answer. In the meantime, she wants to enforce an existing national law to ban tourists from coffeeshops in order to shrink the sector. A majority of city councillors, concerned about more vulnerable young men being sucked into dealing to meet tourist demand and a consequent explosion in street crime, voted against her proposal this month.

Diederik Boomsma, councillor and head of the local Christian Democratic Appeal party, is one strong advocate of banning tourists from coffeeshops and is raising awareness about the dangers of drug use. “Peter Hitchens wrote a book about the drug policy in Britain and it starts with saying: cannabis isn’t merely a drug: it’s a cause,” he tells me. “That’s true in Amsterdam more than in other places and when something becomes a cause, people associate it with their self-understanding as a free, liberal, open-minded, tolerant city. But it doesn’t work. On the one hand, we say it’s allowed, you can buy the stuff in this coffeeshop, but it’s supplied by criminals so obviously you are going to have a huge criminal infrastructure. Why would you do something that funds violent criminals? Peter R de Vries was murdered right in front of my house.”

He is referring to the murder of a Dutch journalist who had been advising the crown witness against an alleged drug cartel — a killing which shocked the country into paying attention to its drugs problem. It was the third execution linked with the Marengo murder trial (involving leading members of a Dutch-Moroccan criminal organisation) following the deaths of the crown witness’s brother and his lawyer. For while the Netherlands’s transport links and horticultural and technical skills have made it a perfect landing-point for South American drugs (alongside its hugely successful domestic drug industry), this has brought violence in its wake. Experts like Jan Struijs, chairman of the Nederlandse PolitieBond police union, go as far as to call the country a “narco-state 2.0.”

Threats that the Telegraaf newspaper suggests come from the quarter of organised crime have recently even been aimed at Dutch Princess Amalia and Prime Minister Mark Rutte. And four suspects were arrested in and around The Hague on suspicion of preparing to kidnap Belgian justice minister Vincent van Quickenborne, after Dutch drug gang violence spilled over into Antwerp this summer. Across the Netherlands, drug experts like Pieter Tops and Jan Tromp — who wrote an influential 2019 report on the “dark side” of Amsterdam — believe some coffeeshops are part of a chain of ever more violent and lucrative drugs criminality, with shops, bars and property used to launder the money (part of a dodgy €16 billion a year that washes around the country, according to the De Nederlandsche Bank).

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It’s a desperate situation, with the Dutch government investing millions in deterring crime that undermines public order, and putting together international partnerships to make its coastline “as unappealing as possible” for drug criminals importing their products. The public prosecutor finally has a larger budget to go after crime that has seeped into the “upper” world: lawyers, art galleries, accountants, banks and even civil servants who have committed alleged passport fraud, sold private details, failed to properly scrutinise their clients, or been over-eager to take payment in cash.

The justice minister of the Netherlands, Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius doesn’t think legalisation by the Netherlands alone will do much, but admits the tolerance policy on cannabis really isn’t working. “If I’m honest, the ‘back door’ as we have it now in the Netherland, that [soft drugs] are tolerated but you can’t grow them, is very difficult to explain,” she tells me, after a meeting of European justice ministers in Amsterdam.

“Abroad, people look at you as though you are crackers. One point of view is that weed and soft drugs are another sector, another branch, with hard-working entrepreneurs and nothing wrong. But there’s also a notion that this is an entry point for cartels and other levels of drug dealing. You need to look at this very carefully.” She hopes that a much-delayed trial of legalised growing within 10 local areas begins soon so the ministry can analyse whether regulated cannabis growing reduces criminality. Meanwhile, others countries are experimenting with more permissive approaches to cannabis. Uruguay made the drug legal in 2013, followed by Canada, Mexico and some US states. Medical usage was legalised in Portugal in 2018 and Thailand is turning a blind eye, to stimulate tourism.

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While some people, including Amsterdam’s mayor Halsema and the attorney for the Marengo crown witness, Peter Schouten, believe legalising and regulating drugs is the only way to sort out the situation in the Netherlands, others want to send a message that drug tourism isn’t welcome. Boomsma has proposed a ban on weed smoking in public in the centre of Amsterdam, and believes his motion will get a council majority this year.

In the meantime, the situation in De Wallen — even compared with the bad old days of heroin addicts on the streets — is relentless for local people like Els and Romeo. While some political parties are focused on the problems of vulnerable districts on the outskirts, Els and Romeo point out that it is madness to make any part of the city essentially unliveable at a time of desperate housing need. Even some of the tourists seem blown away by it all. A young Australian woman emerging from the Casa Rosso “erotic theatre” at the end of the night on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal, seems a bit dazed. “I need to wash off the filth,” she says, looking around and only half-joking.

The Netherlands needs more than a shower of liberal platitudes to clean up De Wallen. It needs clear drugs policy, a flashlight on criminal constructions and a power hose.

Florence Read: Louise, you have made a case against the sexual revolution. What is it?

Louise Perry: My argument starts from the somewhat controversial recognition that there are some very important physical differences between men and women. Women are the ones who get pregnant; we’re much smaller than men; we’re much more vulnerable to violence in any kind of heterosexual encounter; we suffer all the negative consequences of hormonal birth control.

There are also psychological differences between the sexes, which very strong evidence suggests are at least partially innate. On average, men are much more interested in casual sex than women are, and they’re also more interested in things like watching porn, buying sex — doing all the things that have become much more socially acceptable post-sexual revolution. 

The argument that I make is that even though there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, a culture of sexual hyper-liberalism suits men much more than it does women, in terms of their preferences. The sexual revolution encouraged women to imitate masculine sexuality. And that is not good for the well-being of women.

FR: Aella, you are a porn performer. Do you think that you are imitating male sexuality in your everyday work?

Aella: Yes. A lot of what you said I don’t disagree with. Porn is purchased mostly by men. Men are typically the primary consumers of the content that I create. Female purchasers of porn basically don’t exist. A good chunk of women do in fact watch porn, but don’t typically pay quite as much.

FR: What’s the problem with that? Louise, what is your issue with the male-dominated world of sexuality?

LP: One of the ways in which women are quite different from men is: we have a much lower sexual disgust threshold. It’s much easier for us to get “the ick” in a sexual encounter. Women tend to be much choosier about their sexual partners than men are. There’s a very obvious evolved reason for this: up until five minutes ago, we didn’t have access to reliable contraception, which meant that having any kind of sexual encounter could lead to pregnancy. So it makes sense that women have evolved to be choosy about who they potentially get pregnant from: is he going to hang around, is he going to be a good father?

And the problem with trying to override that choosiness — trying to have sex like a man and trying to regard sex as casual: just a leisure activity without any sort of innate meaning or specialness — is that it forces women to suppress that instinct. It often causes distress. There’s a whole genre of articles in women’s mags about how to stop yourself catching feelings — strategies that you can use during sex to dissociate almost, to not bond with your partner. It’s things like: don’t make eye contact, take certain drugs, get drunk. Just look at the orgasm gap: the fact that most women don’t orgasm in casual encounters; women are much more likely to orgasm with long-term committed partners. Often women talk about casual sex as if you have to run the gauntlet: this is a phase in your life that you have to go through, the hook up phase, on the route to a more committed relationship.

FR: Aella, you’ve described yourself as polyamorous. Do you feel that you are in distress?

A: No, not at all. Polyamory has been absolutely fantastic. But I feel like the crux of the issue is: what percentage of women are having a bad experience of casual sex? Is this thing inherently damaging? People are kind of unskilled at casual sex. I went through a couple of different phases of casual sex, and the first phase was pretty terrible, understandably. No orgasms. But if you are told often that casual sex is bad for you, you’re going to re-parse casual sex as having been bad for you.

I lived in a house full of cam girls for a year. We were very close: we worked together, we talked about our deepest hopes and dreams. And we didn’t hide anything; we bitched about it quite a lot. Fast forward almost 10 years. One of the girls happened to date a bunch of men who really don’t like sex work. And she, in my opinion, revamped her past in order to be like, “Ah, that experience was damaging for me”. And I was like: “Bitch, I was there. I heard you talking about it at the time. There was no hint that any of this was bad for you.” When you enter a culture that’s feeding you this idea that you should feel bad about what you went through, you’re going to reverse develop this narrative.

To be fair, this can happen both ways. A lot of people will try to tell women that casual sex was definitely good for them, and they should feel good about it. Any narrativising, trying to tell women what they should feel, is, in my opinion, bad.

My ideal would be to ask women: do you actually like what’s going on or do you actually not? To what degree are you just trying to conform to other people? I think that’s a message that would result in a lot of people realising that they don’t want to have casual sex. And maybe a lot of people realising that, in fact, they do.

LP: I do agree with you that the power of narrative is amazing, and we restructure our memories according to narrative. There is a phenomenon, though — I don’t know if this necessarily applies to camming — but, a lot of women who’ve done in-person prostitution (particularly the worst end: street-based, brothel-based prostitution) say that, when you’re in it, believing a narrative that it’s okay is the way you survive. It’s the way you get through what is a fairly terrible experience.

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FR: There are many jobs that people do that are unpleasant, and they have to do for money. What makes sex work any different, Louise?

LP: The idea that sex is like any other kind of social interaction — comparable to working in a factory, to shaking hands, to making coffee, going surfing — I call that, in the book, sexual disenchantment. It’s this idea that comes out of the sexual revolution, that all of the religious, bourgeois, traditional norms of the past had to be done away with. The idea of sex having any kind of special status, let alone sacred status, had to be done away with in order for people to shake off the oppressive shackles of the past. And I think the problem with that idea is twofold.

One, I don’t think people believe it in the vast majority of cases. They overwhelmingly don’t behave as if sex is like anything else. There are people who do polyamory well and enjoy it. There are also, on any given platform devoted to discussion of polyamory, people really struggling with jealousy — finding it really, really difficult to suppress that instinct to view sex as being unique compared with other kinds of relationships.

And the problem with trying to pretend that sex is just like anything else: if you can’t have a special status for sex, you also can’t have a special status for rape, which we do in law. We recognise that rape is worse than theft — instinctively, and also in our legal codes. We recognise that sexual harassment has a uniquely harmful effect on its victims.

FR: Aella, do you think that sex is sacred?

A: I agree that for some sections of the population, sex is treated very seriously, and in others, it’s not. My guess is that people are much more flexible along the spectrum than you might think.

I worked at a factory — terrible hours — and then I escaped into sex work, and eventually into prostitution. After I did this, I was shocked that people had placed so much meaning on sex, in a way that prevented me from escaping terrible jobs to begin with. Because I didn’t go straight into sex work because of that meaning that people placed on it. And then when I did, I was like: “Fuck that, that meaning that people loaded up on to sex, prevented me from living basically my best life.” And I know a lot of other sex workers who feel the same way. And I’m not saying that everybody should. I also know some sex workers who tried sex work, and they were like: “Shit, I can’t not have the meaning here”. 

My overall issue here is: people are pointing a laser eye at the non-standard, non-normal, deviant types of sexual approaches than they are at the conservative, socially-accepted ones. You’re correct that a lot of polyamory discussions are talking about jealousy issues, but monogamy also has dead bedroom problems. Both are relationship structures that require some sort of negotiation of your desires, and what you can achieve in your life. And both of them have pretty severe downsides. And as a sex worker, I see a huge amount of the downsides in monogamy, from men who come see me because of failures in their monogamous relationships.

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FR: If you were not there to service their needs, do you think they would turn back to their partners and have a frank conversation about their sex life? Or do you think that you are offering them a way out?

A: I would ask the guys that I saw: “Are you married?” And if they said, yes, then I’d ask: “So why are you seeing me?” The general sense that I got was that most of them had wives that weren’t interested in them anymore. Basically wives that had a bunch of kids, or had health issues, and their sex drive was zero. And sometimes I would ask: “Well, have you considered bringing it up with her? Have you talked with her about it?” And the majority of their responses — I’d say 60 to 70% — were horror. They were like: “I don’t want to destroy my entire life.” It was common for guys to be like, “If I bring it up with her, I think she would leave me.”

A lot of the men had been sexless for ten years before finally trying to find a sex worker. Most men don’t feel great about making their wife unhappy, potentially, to do this. A lot of them are risking damage to their life. Most guys I talked to, I got the impression that they had made at least some effort. Some of them, no — some guys were like, “Fuck it, I don’t give a shit. Our relationship is totally separate from this, and I’m just going to fuck other people, because that’s what I want” — but it was not the majority. In fact, I got the impression that seeing these men actually probably helped save them from divorce, because their other option was leaving their wife because they couldn’t talk. So it was this safe, tiny outlet that allowed them to maintain longer, more dedicated relationships.

LP: Presumably, their wives would have left them if they’d known though. So these were secret encounters. Monogamy clearly has its downsides too, but everything in the whole entire world has trade-offs. I completely take your point that there are some people for whom polyamory is great, there are some people for whom sex work is great, there are some people who are just temperamentally much more suited to non-conventional sexual lives. But I think the other thing that I’m interested in, and which is much more difficult to talk about within a liberal framework, is how this scales.

So one of the things that I write about in the last chapter of my book is the fact that there are all sorts of ways in which societies that have a monogamous marriage system do better than societies that don’t, even though only about 20% of societies on the anthropological record have been monogamous. They tend to be more affluent, they tend to have lower rates of crime, they tend to have lower rates of spousal abuse, child abuse, compared to polygamous cultures.

A: I’m not surprised that this is the case. I would guess that if you compared polygamous cultures to monogamous cultures, monogamous cultures would probably do better.

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FR: Is there an ideal when it comes to how we build our relationships? Louise, do you for example disapprove of Aella’s work as a sex worker? In your ideal society, would OnlyFans not exist?

LP: “Disapprove” is not a word I would use. I think that it is clearly the case that some individuals do well on OnlyFans. Most don’t. I think we agree on the fact that OnlyFans is insanely unequal. The vast majority of women who become content creators are not going to make any real money, and are likely to suffer negative consequences down the track. I think it would be better if OnlyFans didn’t exist. That’s not the same thing as saying that I think it should be banned, because there are obviously all sorts of downstream consequences of that kind of legislation, which might do more harm than good. I think it’d be very, very difficult to ban OnlyFans or similar sites. But I think, on balance, they have a net negative impact on society.

A: Would you agree with OnlyFans if, say, before signing up, a girl got like statistics on how likely it was for her to make various amounts of money? Like, “90% of creators make under $1,000 a month,” or something like this?

LP: I think that would be good. I imagine the platforms would not want to do that, because it’s obviously going to limit their profit-making.

The other thing that I would want a lot of naive young women to be aware of is the fact that even though men are less likely to admit to the fact that they still ascribe to the sexual double standard, they do. And I think that one of the worst consequences of OnlyFans for very many women, which isn’t talked about nearly enough, is the fact that it becomes that much harder afterwards to find a committed relationship, which actually most women say is what they want long term, because men are judgmental about it.

A: My guess is that this is very well-known in women cultures. I’ve joined so many discussion groups where girls are thinking about getting into OnlyFans, or already doing OnlyFans, and a huge amount of that discussion is centred around, “How much is this going to damage my mate prospects? How much should I hide it from my potential mates? How can I do OnlyFans in a way where it’s not going to leak to potential mates?” This, to me, is one of the top things, at least in practice that I have seen women consider. To me it doesn’t feel like an overlooked aspect at all. 

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FR: Doesn’t that suggest we should be driving towards a more sexually open society? Because I suppose if we got into a place where nobody had any taboos around sex work, then we wouldn’t have to deal with that problem.

LP: I think that the nature of human beings is such that we seem to have a very strong instinct towards regarding sex as being special. Men seem to have a very strong instinct towards mate guarding. Trying to dissuade people from feeling this way is a serious uphill struggle. Any kind of political project based on the idea that we can undo human nature is one that’s doomed to failure. I think that we do still basically have minds evolved for a hunter-gatherer life, because that’s 90% of our species’ history.

A: I think that this is probably why women are very into BDSM — because evolutionarily, and historically, you had to be aroused by powerful men in order to survive. But also, to some degree, a lot of it is quite cultural, too. We’ve seen a lot of different sexual structures throughout history. I do think that we have a little bit more flexibility.

FR: Both of you seem to be arguing there that there’s a certain amount of nature involved here and we’re trying to push against nature, and to impose social norms upon it. Is there an argument for letting nature run riot and just allowing people to tap into their most primal selves?

LP: I think the problem with absolute liberation — just allowing people to do whatever feels right to them — is the fact that some people have dark, destructive, horrible desires. Actually, probably a lot of people do. Human sexuality is not necessarily nice and pro-social at all. So you have to think about how you’re going to manage the desires of people when that desire is destructive to others.

The other problem is: one sex is much more vulnerable inherently than the other sex. How you manage that asymmetry is, I think, a question that all civilisations have grappled with. And no one has ever come up with a free-for-all as the best solution, because clearly it wouldn’t actually work.

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FR: Digital sex work might be an answer there, though. Aella is behind a screen: she is, in many ways, invulnerable to male violence, and she is being paid for sexual acts, which she finds pleasurable, I assume. And so, isn’t that a win-win?

LP: Or, a step further, sex robots. Then there would be no ethical issues in terms of consent. It would bypass all of the feminist arguments over sex work that’ve been going on for so long. The focus is normally on the effects on women, though. And I actually think that having a class of men who basically just spend all day indoors, playing video games, and having sex with their sex robots seems like a fairly bleak future for that portion of mankind.

A: It seems nicer if they can have access to real women. I would be sad. I used to do OnlyFans, but to be clear, I’ve also been an IRL prostitute, and have been subject to male violence. But out of all the sex-work forms that I have done, the in-person feels the healthiest to me, for both me and the men. The others feel like some sort of weird, warped version of human interaction that objectifies us both more. And sure, it’s safer to some degree, but you can take steps to be safe in-person. In my opinion, in the healthiest future society, the dominant form of sex work would be human to human, eye contact, skin contact, just like God intended.

FR: What about these sex robots? That’s certainly not what God intended, but it’s a lot safer for everyone involved, isn’t it?

 A: I like the idea of sex robots existing. I think if men can have an outlet that they need that is affordable and accessible to them, this seems good. I’m generally pro people independently pursuing what they want. And if that’s sex robots, then go for it.

FR: But do you think that the skin to skin contact, as you said there, is superior to this kind of digital sex work that we’re talking about?

A: Yeah, absolutely. Because it feels really dehumanising, like I said, for both parties. With OnlyFans, I’m not dealing with a man, I’m dealing with the collection of men. I’m dealing with the statistical likelihood of a man clicking on this thing. It’s very robotic. And similarly, this is encouraging men to treat women the same way. You have like a billion women, and it’s just like cycling through them. You’re not really developing a relationship with any of them.

And again, I am pro people pursuing what they want, in their own time. I’m happy OnlyFans exists. But I noticed it was much better for my mental health to do it in person. It just felt so much better and more fulfilling to be able to touch an individual person.

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FR: There used to be quite high barrier to entry for sex work, if you’re talking about street prostitution. Whereas now, with things like OnlyFans, the barrier has been lowered massively. Is it a good thing that more and more people have access to a sex-work career?

A: Yeah. I know a bunch of single moms or women with health issues — women who are struggling to feed their kids on their own — who said, “Oh, I tried OnlyFans, and it gave me, not even that much money, an extra $300 a month, but now I can pay my rent.” There’s a whole bunch of people for whom their lives are really drastically improved by that amount of money. Typically people who are really disadvantaged in some way. It disproportionately assists the poor, or people I would consider to be lower-class — people who were culturally priced-out of the better paying jobs — which is why I think this worked for me so well. I grew up very, very conservative, no access to education, and so a lot of people are like, “Oh, well you should just go to college and get an education, and then get a job.” For some people, their lives just don’t work like that. And for some people being able to have easily-accessible side income that you don’t need training for, or elite approval or credentials, is incredibly beneficial and life changing. And I’ve known so many women for whom this is the case.

LP: I take that point, although I do think it’s worth emphasising the fact that drug and alcohol addiction is extraordinarily common among sex workers. The OnlyFans end of the spectrum is clearly the much less dangerous, traumatic end of it. But it’s also not representative of the whole spectrum of sex work, some of which is dire. And it’s very, very common for women to end up taking drugs and using alcohol as a way of dealing with the emotional fallout of prostitution. And that means that you’re not actually ending up in a better situation at all: you end up potentially spiralling downwards and getting stuck.

I’m not really a radical feminist at all – I think I can comfortably speak for radical feminists, though, in that they tend to think no woman should be in a situation where she can’t feed her children unless she’s doing sex work. I do recognise that we live in the real world and there are situations where that might seem like the best option. The other problem is that because lay people’s understanding of the sex industry tends to be very poor, it can be very difficult to know how you will find prostitution until you’ve actually done it. So saying at the outset, “I think I’m well suited to this, I think it will be fine. I’ve read through my checklist of warnings, and I think it’s fine,” isn’t actually quite the same as actually doing it.

When you make a move towards normalisation, de-stigmatisation, and presenting this as a perfectly valid career route, you are going to end up with people going down that career route for whom it is an absolute disaster and it ruins their lives.

A: There’s a lot of talk about alcohol and drug stuff with sex workers – which I agree is true, they have much higher rates of drug use. But if, say, we have a world where we dramatically criminalise something like plumbing — like, plumbers are really stigmatised and if you plumb then people are like, “I’m not sure I want to date you”, and if you get assaulted as a plumber, you can’t go to the police otherwise they’ll put you in jail — I would expect the kind of people who would gravitate towards plumbing are people who are unsuccessful in other aspects of their life, and probably have problems with drug and alcohol use. My guess is correlation, not necessarily causation.

LP: I agree with you that clearly the stigma makes all sorts of things worse in all sorts of ways. But also, I’m not convinced that the stigma is an after effect of the law. I think that actually the stigma seems to stick to the sex industry, across time and place. And I think it comes back to this problem of the socio-sexuality gap requiring a prostituted class of women. Most women don’t want to be in that class. It’s very hard to persuade anyone to think that that isn’t a bad outcome for those women and the stigma flows from that.

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A: It feels like you’re implicitly telling women that they should feel bad for these things. I wish I could hear more, “Yeah, some woman are like that and if you’re not, it’s chill.” When you were talking about prostitution I was like, “Well, you should just try it once or twice and see how it works for you, and if you don’t like it, then stop.” If you have a bad experience, it doesn’t seem to me like it needs to be traumatising. But if we treat it with this level of like gravitas, then it’s going to create that trauma in people. And I wish that when I was in a really sex-negative culture, I could have heard more messaging about how it’s okay to be sexually promiscuous if you want to. If I had been surrounded by people giving me the kind of message that you’re giving me, I think I would have ended up with a lot more shame and guilt overall.

LP: I acknowledge that it can seem condescending and judgmental — the anti-porn, anti-prostitution feminism — but we all know that the really brutal attitudes towards sex workers come overwhelmingly from sex buyers. I’m sure there are exceptions, but we know that men who buy sex are more likely to be sexually aggressive, more likely to admit to rape outside of the sex industry. I think the problem with the effort to de-stigmatise, in the hope that we will somehow arrive at a sex industry that really is just like any other industry, is: it is basically based on theory. It’s based on the faith that all of the stigma is causing the problem, not that stigma is attached to the innate problem, which actually has much more to do with the fact that most women find prostitution very distressing and most sex buyers don’t treat the women they buy sex from with proper respect. 

FR: Louise, do you think that you are part of a new movement? Is there a sex-negative movement? You said earlier that you’re not a radical feminist — so what would you call yourself? Are you a conservative?

LP: The key way I guess in which I diverge from radical feminism is I don’t believe in the blank slate. I don’t think that the differences between men and women are a consequence of socialisation. I don’t think that they can be just dissolved away. I think that we have to deal with the existence of these differences on a psychological level as well as a physical level, and kind of progress from there. I’ve arrived at some conclusions which some traditionalists agree with me on — not all of them by any means. I guess maybe this is a materialist form of feminism, in the sense that it’s coming out of the recognition that these material differences exist and we have to make our peace with them.

We are reckoning with these vast material changes. The one that I’m primarily interested in, in my book, is the pill. I don’t accept this idea of the great woman theory of feminist history, where the thing that drives feminist change is particularly charismatic women. There clearly have been charismatic women, but I think the thing that’s driven change for women has primarily been technological — the washing machine, the tampon, whatever you want to name.

And the points, if you look at the history, when you see feminist thinking flaring up, tend to be at the points where you have some important material flux. So you have the internal combustion engine and you have suffrage, and you have the Second World War and the move away from industrial economy and then you have the second [feminist] wave. And I think now, possibly, there is another flare up, and there’s another reckoning with feminist ideas, because we’re seeing the next revolution, which is the online revolution. And it’s really important to be thinking about sexual difference in that space, because it may appear as if we are just these genderless economic units who can all participate in the knowledge economy on a completely even footing and stuff, but actually sexual difference exists. And it will persist until I guess the transhumanists finally have their way.

FR: And Aella, do you feel that you’re an agent of change in this revolution that Louise is talking about?

A: An agent of change? I feel like I just want to defend people like me. It feels, especially in recent years, like I’m fighting against this push of people disrespecting me solely because of my sexual promiscuity and the way that I like to approach sex. And it feels like there’s more shame and judgement about it. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m exposed to different places of the internet or if this is actually a movement, but I feel really protective of it. I’m like, “No, I am okay the way that I am.” And I really want to give that message to anybody who’s like me. Living like me can be a wonderful, healthy and fulfilling and you don’t have to feel shame, or like you need to hide. And so if there’s people like me out there, I really want to take a stand and have a bold, unapologetic ownership of that. And that feels like the thing that I’m fighting for.

She describes a dream of growing old disgracefully, as a reward for being well-behaved. For now, we must “pay our rent and not swear in the street / And set a good example for the children”. When the proper age for being respectable is over, though, the poet vows to “go out in my slippers in the rain / And pick flowers in other people’s gardens”.

Though “Warning”, written in 1961, was voted Britain’s most popular postwar poem in one poll, it didn’t drive a surge in merrily misbehaving old matrons — at least not in the style she envisaged. Instead, at least judging by the press, older women get more invisible by the day. The lack of substantial acting roles for older women is so marked that a campaign to change it received Equity backing last year. And many women over 50 complain about feeling pushed aside and pushed out of the workplace.

A widely-trailed movie, out this week, seeks to challenge this narrative. Good Luck To You, Leo Grande is a two-hander in which Emma Thompson plays Nancy, a widowed schoolteacher in her early sixties, who hires handsome young rentboy Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack). The film documents their interactions over a number of meetings, as Nancy sets out to tick off a list of sexual experiences she never enjoyed with her late husband.

In this, it takes aim at a common experience described by older women: that as far as wider social perception is concerned, as women age we’re no longer seen as valuable. There’s some truth in this, at least at the superficial level of who gets ogled on the beach. According to the founder of dating website OKCupid, while women’s view of what’s attractive changes as we age, men of every age tend to rate women in their early twenties as looking the best.

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Exceptionally beautiful women must feel this keenly. Paulina Porizkova, once the world’s most highly-paid model, clearly does: she told The Times earlier this year how she just doesn’t seem able to pull any more. “I am now completely invisible,” she says. “I walk into a party, I try to flirt with guys and they will just walk away from me mid-sentence to pursue someone 20 years younger. I’m very single, I’m dressed up, I’ve made an effort — nothing.”

There is, in other words, something robustly consistent about what induces men to stop what they’re doing and stare at a woman. The fact that the age of maximum perceived female hotness coincides with the age of peak fertility strongly implies that it has a material basis, something recognised by writer Ayelet Waldman: “I remember reading some study that men can sense a woman who’s fertile, and they focus their laser beam eyes on a fertile woman,” she said. “Well, as soon as you’re not fertile anymore, it’s like they just skip over you.”

Surely this should be so obvious as not to need spelling out. The fact that it isn’t tells us something about how uncomfortable we’ve become at the idea that our bodies impose any constraints at all. And it’s often self-styled feminist women who push hardest against the constraints of sex, challenging the idea that women should be seen as fertile first and people second. Meanwhile, academics and activists alike call for us to envision brave new worlds of sex wholly disconnected from reproduction.

In this context, Leo Grande has been widely celebrated as empowering. Stuff the idea that our bodies constrain us, and that we stop being sexual later in life, it declares — we’ve moved past imagining that sex and fertility are connected at all. Older women can also want, need and enjoy pleasure!

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But in reality, older women are, in this sense, far from invisible. A recent poll announced that the age at which women feel hottest is in fact 53; campaigns such as Rock My Menopause and GenM encourage positive representation of menopausal women, and articles celebrate the joys of dating older women.

The same desire to resist the constraints of biology lurks behind another common theme: the celebration of older people engaging in activities stereotypically associated with youth — especially the “sexy” ones. Last week, for example, the Guardian published an enthusiastic profile of the Sun City Poms, a troop of retiree cheerleaders in Arizona. Last year, a retirement-home pole-dancing class made the news.

Desire, we gather, doesn’t have a sell-by date, and older people still get horny; the French are here as ever, with advice on shagging, the NYT is here as ever to take photos of you doing it. And if you end up catching an STI in the process, there are papers on the need to “educate” healthcare professionals to stop assuming sexual health for retirees is just about Viagra.

But while it’s of course true that older people get horny, in truth the premise of Leo Grande doesn’t challenge what’s behind female invisibility at all. Rather, it entrenches it. For it has very little to offer all those women for whom not having to be sexy any more is not a bug, but a feature. If, unlike the Paulina Porizkovas of this world, you’re among the far larger body of women who’ve made something other than looks the focus of your life, you may well find it a blessed relief when the gaze of male strangers begins to skip you in favour of younger, perkier women. In that context there are many upsides to ageing, including dressing for comfort, men talking to your face rather than your boobs, and (joy!) having lunch solo without being buttonholed by horny weirdos.

In her 1992 feminist classic, Women Who Run With The Wolves, Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés argued that moving on from youthful hotness is part of a specifically female life path. For those women who have kids (as some 82% do in the UK), she suggests, life is archetypally divided into three stages: maiden, mother and crone. The “maiden” child-free stage coincides, roughly, with the moment of peak fertility that the data shows is so captivating to men. In time, though, that ordinarily gives way to motherhood, a different life-stage with its own role-models and obligations: constricting in some ways but opening doors to new experiences and wisdom. And once the kids are grown up, so begins a new phase of life: the crone.

This figure, well-represented in ancient mythology, is the role Jenny Joseph looks gleefully forward to: wise and mischievous, trailing her walking stick along the railings, and kicking over all those little ways she worked dutifully before to uphold moral norms. Why shouldn’t she eat three pounds of sausages in one go? The crone can do as she pleases, for she’s done her time setting a good example and has the wisdom to show for it. So now she can pick flowers from other people’s gardens and tell children off for misbehaving.

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Leo Grande’s Nancy is a mother on the threshold of cronehood. But instead of donning purple and stepping across to a new stage of life, she longs for something that is, in truth, irreversibly lost: a return to hotness and freshness. Maidenhood. “I’ve never had an orgasm,” she sighs. “There are nuns out there with more sexual experience than me, it’s embarrassing.”

So she buys the illusion of that return from a prostitute. This is, we’re told, a sweet, healing, “sex-positive romance”: “empowerment” as pure transaction, that somehow turns out to be emotionally fulfilling, and not at all exploitative or squalid. The “liberating” message it offers is that even frumpy, wrinkly, saggy middle-aged women who have devoted their lives to public service and their loved ones are not wholly beyond redemption. They, too, can access hedonistic, self-centred gratification, thanks to the sex industry.

Er, thanks.

In the real world, someone like Nancy would be very unlikely to do something as cold, transactional and empty as buying the sexual services of a man young enough to be her son. A retired teacher in her sixties, husband deceased and children grown up, would far more plausibly lean into a busy cronehood doing what many perimenopausal women do: beginning a new career.

I’ve known women in late middle age retrain as therapists, run voluntary groups, read with kids in schools, become priests. The possibilities are infinite. These are the women whose quiet dedication keeps communities turning. For countless individuals, the everyday, humdrum life from which Nancy is shown liberating herself is rich with joy on its own terms.

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But far from celebrating older women, Leo Grande dismisses the vast bulk of everyday female experience as meaningless, miserable drudgery. “I’ve never done anything interesting in my life,” Nancy laments in the film. “You’re the only adventure I’ve ever had.”

It would have been nice, just once, to see a movie depict a female hero’s journey on its own terms. But from the perspective of movie-land, such things are profoundly unsexy. If you made a film that accurately depicted a thoughtful, conventional bourgeois woman like Nancy, taking stock of her life in middle age after decades of giving herself as a wife and mother, it would be “art-house” at best.

So the central message of Leo Grande is that it’s all downhill from maidenhood — but despite this miserable prospect, even frumpy women on the cusp of cronehood can avail ourselves of the “sexual marketplace” to return, however briefly, to the far more desirable state of maidenhood.

But this is a lie, as even Porizkova, once the world’s highest-paid model, can attest. And framing this lie as a positive story means dismissing everything that’s rewarding about any average woman’s life, except the stage where she was young and hot. In other words: setting middle-aged women up to fail, by making everything about us invisible except the sexiness we no longer have. I can’t think of a more insidious, and contemptuous, way of making us disappear.

Pornhub has a new category: “Ukrainian girls and war rape videos”; it is dominated by Russian soldiers documenting disgustingly brutal crimes. Domestic violence and street harassment have already spiked. Female refugees are falling victim to pimps and traffickers; official channels — the police, hospitals, legal systems — won’t help them.

Where women are concerned, “the foreign coverage of the war is concentrated mostly on women fleeing with children”, Maria Dmytrieva tells me. The Ukrainian feminist activist — a key member of the Global Network of Women Peacekeepers — believes this coverage misrepresents the reality of war for women, and the ways in which women specifically become targets for attack.

We speak via Zoom, and as night falls, she sits in darkness, so as not to be spotted by saboteurs. Although the Russians had not yet arrived in her small town, a few miles outside Kyiv, like everybody else in Ukraine she is in a perilous position.

Maria has been involved in the campaign to end male violence in Ukraine for more than two decades. I have visited her in Ukraine on several occasions and have seen her make powerful men in senior government positions quake when she rails against injustices towards women and girls.

One study from 2019 found that 75% of women in Ukraine reported experiencing some form of violence since the age of 15, and one in three reported experiencing physical or sexual violence. According to a recent statement by the United Nations, crisis and displacement has recently put women in Ukraine at increased risk of sexual and physical violence and abuse. There are no figures as of yet to show the levels of violence experienced by women and girls since the Russian invasion, but plenty of evidence is being amassed by women’s NGOs.

In many ways, the experiences of women in Ukraine echo the plight of women in wars throughout history: we face reduced protections from violence and often an increase of domestic abuse. The situation is exacerbated, though, by the fact that Ukraine is being invaded by a country which effectively decriminalised domestic violence in 2017. It is well-documented that, post-conflict, when traumatised men return home, levels of violence against women increase. But if Russia wins, the right of Ukrainian men to beat their wives will be enshrined in the law of the land.

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“So far we have felt as a nation, united around this common threat”, Dmytrieva told me. “But we are pretty much bound to have the growth of cases of domestic violence, of male violence against women, both during and after the war is over”.

Domestic violence is not the only threat to women in war. There is a “new wave of sexual violence”, with 11 reports from different women that they were raped by Russian soldiers in Kershon, confirmed by a local gynaecologist. Of those 11, only five survived. Other reports of sexual violation by troops are being picked up by the UK media, but, according to Dmytrieva, little is being done to help.

Rape victims will suffer consequences long after the conflict has ended — especially those whose violation is circulated on the internet. The existence of this sick revenge porn ensures that the women brutalised in it will never be able to return to a normal life. Even if they escape the conflict, it then ends, and they make it home, they are likely to be shunned by their families.

The videos are perfect ammunition for pimps and traffickers to use to control women and force them into prostitution. Displaced women and girls are often without any food, shelter or income, with many caring for children. Traffickers seize the opportunity to coerce women into selling sex, and soon they are trapped and held captive. “It is really terrifying how capitalism and imperialism are going hand in hand to exploit those who cannot defend themselves right now”, Dmytrieva tells me. “And it is truly terrifying to see that amongst all this surge in humanity in caring for other people, there are those who want to exploit this weakness and make money out of it. It is very disheartening”.

“Organised gangs [are] trying to abduct young women on the Ukrainian Polish border and we already have several cases in Germany where the girls have been abducted by pimps in the refugee camps”, Dmytrieva explains. Punters in Germany are delighted; feminist colleagues have seen screenshots of them “talking online with each other about how happy they are to have young fresh Ukrainian women crossing the German border”. With no home, no money, no job, no resources, and a very limited legal framework protecting them, these displaced women are among the most vulnerable in the world.

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Women are vulnerable to pimps within Ukraine as well. In the East, even before tensions with Russia escalated into a full-scale invasion, the local economy was on its knees. Previously high-tech industries had been stripped; machines and other valuable assets were carted, wholesale, back to Russia. Few options for employment were left. As a result, the number of women in prostitution in Ukraine before the war was around 80,000. That figure does not include children.

For now, the police have their hands too full “going around looking for saboteurs” to investigate or prosecute crimes against women. Dmytrieva understands the urgency. Terrorists are “placing bombs, explosive devices and shells in the basements … they are turning our country into a minefield”. But she is hopeful that the Russian invasion will be repelled, making space for better policy to protect women.

While authorities are too busy to consider the impacts of the conflict on women, those who do an international trade in children are taking full advantage of the situation. “Ukrainian surrogacy clinics are now advertising women through Facebook, even during the occupation”, Dmytrieva told me. The press in Ireland and elsewhere have reported on babies “rescued” from war-torn Ukraine by their surrogate parents, and on surrogate parents “in limbo”, because “their” children are stuck in the now inaccessible country. No word of the plight of the women who carried those children, postpartum and vulnerable in a war-torn country, sometimes literally “holding the baby” that they had made no plans to care for, as the Russians invade.

Ukrainian women are under siege, with profound threats on every front, whether they flee or stay. Of course, men are in danger too. Ukraine does not allow men between 18 and 60 to leave the country. This rule is, Dmytrieva told me, “reasonable”. But the women suffer a different and ongoing kind of violence.

Nevertheless, it is not only the ways in which women are victimised that is newsworthy. “There are a lot of women who have stayed, who picked up arms, who secure the logistics for our army. There have hundreds and thousands of women doing this work that makes it possible for the army to fully function”.

Nearly 17% of the Ukrainian army is female, one of the highest percentages in Europe. Dmytrieva is a pacifist, but I could hear the admiration in her voice talking about the women who have taken up arms. In the face of a foreign invasion, she is aware that “we cannot afford a weak army, because that is what brought us into this situation … with having Russia for a neighbour, we need a very strong army.”

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She is furious with the British feminists who campaigned to stop Johnson sending weapons to Ukraine to avoid “escalating” the conflict. “Maybe they are not aware that if Russia takes us over, there will be no women’s rights whatsoever”. She does understand these women’s desire for peace but thinks that it is “heavily misplaced”. When I asked her what feminists in Britain can do to support Ukraine, she replied, without missing a beat, “send aircrafts, lots of them!”

I can’t send Dmytrieva the fighter jets that Ukraine so desperately needs, to repel Russian air raids and artillery. But she speaks for me when she says: “As a feminist, I cannot turn a blind eye to the peril that women are facing in Ukraine, both on the front lines of armed conflict and when they come back home”. Local, national and international women’s organisations must confront the horrors faced by Ukrainian women; only then can they work out how best to respond to the Russian invasion.

In the meantime, Dmytrieva points out, there are no women at the negotiation table. Maybe because compromise is not what is being sought. “There is not much space for negotiation. We want them gone and they want us dead”.

But is he really the best candidate to speak about sexism? This is the same man who dropped Joan Smith from her role as Co-Chair of the Mayor’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board without explanation, although it is thought to have been because she has campaigned against giving biological men access to women-only refuges. Khan, like so many prominent Left-wing men, is on the “trans women are women” side in the gender war; he appears not to understand what sex is.

The gender wars have proved useful for these men over the past few years. They have used the issue to firmly and incessantly position themselves as progressive superheroes, bending over backwards to be seen as supporting the oppressed and marginalised at all times. These men signal their support for Black Lives Matter — and spout, at every opportunity, “trans women are women”. But scratch the surface of Left Man and you will find all kinds of hypocrisy.

Left Man uses liberal feminism as a smokescreen to mask his misogyny. He is unwaveringly committed to the “sex work is work” and “porn is empowering” ideologies. So long as there are a few female voices claiming that women freely choose to rent out their body parts for men’s one-sided sexual pleasure, the social structures that underpin porn and prostitution worldwide — the racism, colonialism and misogyny — can be set aside.

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While men on the Right tend not to bother pretending to support feminism, progressive men not only claim to be feminists, but also then try to dictate feminism’s terms. Recently, in the interval of a play exploring the history of racism in the US, I heard a white, bearded dude shout, “my feminism will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit”. He was sitting with a group of mates, sipping real ale, and I heard mumbles of “transphobia” and “TERFs”.

The mantra that the young man shouted out was coined by Flavia Dzodan who, in her scathing critique of feminism, argued that “intersectionality” means including men in the category of women, and celebrating prostitution. It is a twisted version of the original definition, which was created by the feminist law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe the specific challenges faced by black American women in the workplace. If you’re standing in the path of multiple forms of oppression and exclusion, Crenshaw argued, you are likely to get hit by both.

The shouty beard at the theatre brought home to me what a gift Dzodan’s bastardisation of Crenshaw’s concept has been to so many men on the Left. They get to look progressive, while still disdaining women.

Likewise, as Tom Farr, a lawyer and pro-feminist campaigner against violence against women says, the reason so many white men are keen to attach their name to anti-racism activism is because they can look as though they are challenging their privilege without actually doing anything. They have precious little awareness when it comes to their own racism — or indeed their sexism.

“The championing of ‘sex work’, which is in part built upon the racist objectification of black women, makes it clear these men care not one iota for deconstructing their actual privilege”, says Farr. “But to actively challenge sexism and misogyny they would be required to change their behaviour and own up to their own contribution to male oppression and exploitation of women”. They can virtue signal about ending racism, but to work towards ending misogyny, they would have to give up the advantages associated with their male privilege, and their right to treasured modes of sexual release.

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Some men get it, and their genuine commitment to tackling misogyny shines a light on the posturers. Robert Jensen, the author of The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men (2017), believes that men on the Left who celebrate pornography and prostitution tend to downplay the prevalence and devastating effects of rape and other forms of violence against women. It is no longer possible for men on the Left to claim that racism, economic or global inequality is irrelevant to their work, he tells me, “but men on the left can, and routinely do, ignore the relevance of patriarchy”. He writes not only about the misogyny explicit in pornography, but also the racism; unlike many men on the Left, Jensen understands Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, and is able to apply it.

But for every man like Jensen, there are ten like Owen Jones. The leftist uber bro insists he is a massive supporter of feminism, while defending men’s use of pornography, despite its inherent racism and obvious harms to women. Jones has even defended MPs and judges — our public servants — accessing it during office hours, because however much men like Jones want to be seen as on the right side of history, they will almost always defend the right of men to debase women. As Jones himself said, magnanimously forgiving the disgraced judges, “There’s clearly a sound argument that judges should be doing their jobs, not getting off on porn. Fair enough, but there’s all sorts of procrastination that goes on in the workplace.”

Men tend to bond over sexual entitlement, and porn specifically. The American civil rights leader Jesse Jackson waxed lyrical about the commendable anti-racist values of Hugh Hefner — the pimp and pornographer responsible for transforming images of women being sexually degraded from a niche market into mainstream entertainment. Hefner “featured” black women in his pornography, because selling the racist stereotype of “exotic” women to white men makes money. Jackson was thrilled to be interviewed in Hefner’s flagship porn rag Playboy, and in an article following Hefner’s death in 2017 lauded him thus: “Very few whites associated with blacks publicly. But Hefner opened his nightclubs to African-American performers and patrons.”

Hefner hated women and referred to them as “dogs”. But boys stick together and damn those bitches that make a fuss about being degraded and abused. It is almost as if they only support social justice movements in which men have a stake. Or, as feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon put it, “It seems that if your oppression is also done to a man, you are more likely to be recognized as oppressed, as opposed to inferior”. As these men of the Left might put it, it’s bros before hoes.

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And, in their quest to put men first, they tell actual feminists how to do feminism properly — using intersectionality, again, to silence women. There was a particularly egregious example at Washington’s march against Trump in 2017. Perched on a plinth above the crowds were two young white men, sporting smug expressions, standing either side of two young black women. The men were holding the poles of a huge banner bearing the slogan “White feminism was built on the back of women of colour”. The imagery is clear, and straight out of the Marvel Universe: Left Man saves the poor powerless heroine, while pouring scorn on the lady villains of “white feminism”. This is a toxic combination of white knighting and virtue signalling, covered by a progressive smokescreen.

And you can see this toxic mix guiding policy. Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch (and a highly paid white man), has lobbied for the removal of all laws pertaining to prostitution, including pimping and brothel owning. When criticised by feminists (including black women) for his support of the sex trade, Roth erected a façade woven from arguments about free choice, and economic empowerment for women from the Global South. “All want to end poverty, but in meantime why deny poor women the option of voluntary sex work?” tweeted Roth. To which sex-trade survivor Rachel Moran responded with: “Wouldn’t you say, if a person cannot afford to feed themselves, the appropriate thing to put in their mouth is food, not your cock?”

But patriarchy is depressingly resilient. It can thrive in all sorts of environments. “As a member of the Labour Party my whole adult life, I’ve always taken it for granted that lefties were the progressives ones, and the racism and sexism was left to the nasty party (the Tory’s)”, says Lucy Masoud, a former firefighter who was one of the very few black elected officials in the Fire Brigade Union, and the only black lesbian. Like many feminists, she is sick of the new breed of progressive man. “They describe themselves as ‘cis’ and hang around in Dalston drinking stout and declaring that trans women are women. But under all the faux progressiveness always lays the same entitled misogynist.”

What worries me, a life-long leftist, is how much power and influence Left Man has over young women looking to find their way as feminists. It is hard to see and believe that these men are seeking only to protect their own interests. But these sexists in sheep’s clothing can’t be allowed to set the agenda.

I met this punter while investigating the sex trade in Auckland, New Zealand. It was said to be the gold-plated model for decriminalisation. While the men might have liked it, the women didn’t. “I have been raped more times and I can remember,” Lindsey told me. “Some of the bastards enjoy hurting us, the last one the punched me in the face after he’d finished and ran away laughing.”

Carly who worked in a large, busy brothel told me that even though there were house rules, all the punters ignored them: “What’s the pimp going to do? He just charges the men more for unprotected sex, because what they want, they get. Why anyone thinks that when you turn a pimp into a legitimate businessman that they will treat the girls better, I will never know. It’s made it much worse.” 

Most people assume that “decriminalisation” of the sex trade would make lives better for women in prostitution. It won’t. Along with its close relative “legalisation” it has made them worse. Which is why I am astonished that public money is going towards Decriminalised Futures, a highly politicised exhibition opening later this month at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA).

“Full decriminalisation of sex work is the rallying cry that unites the sex worker rights movement across the world,” reads the blurb on the ICA website. “Under this banner, sex workers and their allies have fought tirelessly for strong workers’ rights, an end to exploitation, an end to criminalisation, and real measures to address poverty.”

This “celebration of the ‘sex workers’ rights’ movement” features 13 artists from countries including the UK, France, Germany and the US,  and highlights the history of the campaign to decriminalise the sex trade. 

It is no surprise to discover that one of the major supporters of the show is the Open Society Foundation (OSF) — the world’s biggest financial backer of the pro-legalisation lobby. Also involved is SWARM (Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement) which “aims to highlight the ways in which sex workers’ rights are inextricably linked to struggles for racial justice, migrant rights, anti-austerity work, labour rights, trans rights, and many other movements and campaigns”.

The debate is weighted heavily on the ‘“sex work is work/legalise it” debate, as this is the commonplace liberal position, but it is based on fantasy rather than fact. Prostitution is not work, and every attempt to legitimise the inside of a woman’s body as a workplace has failed. 

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I know the global sex trade well. I have visited legal brothels and street toleration zones in the US, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. I have spent time with the women selling sex, the punters, the pimps and brothel owners, and I know that the only benefit of decriminalisation for the women is that they are not arrested. And that pales somewhat when you realise the devastating effect of assuming that prostitution can ever be work, and that the punters are merely paying for a service.

The Netherlands, which legalised its sex trade in 2000, realised in short order what an unmitigated disaster that move had been. Dutch politicians began to publicly admit that none of the promised benefits had been realised: rather than tackling the illegal side of the market, such as trafficking of women across borders, underage girls, and associated criminality such as drug dealing, violence and murder of the women by pimps and punters, the opposite happened. Soon after legalisation, the US Department of State ranked the Netherlands as one of the top five countries of origin for trafficking victims worldwide.

Under legalisation, the illegal sector grew alongside legal brothels and street toleration zones, and pimps imported their human merchandise from other countries to meet the growing demand.  Something similar happened in Queensland, Australia, where it has been reported that up to four times the number of trafficked women have been discovered in legal brothels than in illegal ones. 

Neither decriminalisation nor legalisation will ever result in a reduction of or an end to prostitution. Instead, both approaches set in stone the idea that prostitution is an inevitability. And the gold standard today, according to pro-prostitution activists, including SWARM, is the New Zealand model that Lindsey and Carly are toiling within. 

In 2003, New Zealand became the first country to decriminalise its sex trade, passed by only a majority of one vote in parliament. The application form to open a brothel in New Zealand is just two pages long: three pages shorter than the form to apply to adopt a pet from the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home in London. 

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Prostitutes are slaves, not workers

By Julie Bindel

Freedom of information requests by anti-sex trade campaigners in New Zealand found that, despite the promises from local governments that legal brothels would be regularly inspected, there had been only 11 inspections between 2003 and 2015 across the whole of New Zealand, all of which originated from complaints from the public. Meanwhile, the women are getting younger and the men are demanding sex without condoms. 

Rachel Moran, author of the best-selling memoir, Paid For: My Journey through Prostitution and now actively campaigning to dispel myths about the sex trade is vehemently opposed to the ICA’s exhibition. 

“Art is its own thing, but there is a strong argument for it to be true to life when it’s presented in the service of a political objective and with public funding,” says Moran about Decriminalised Futures. “This exhibition warns that it contains ‘depictions of violence’ but there are no warnings about the exhibition’s political objective — to campaign for the full decriminalisation of brothel keepers and pimps. This unacknowledged agenda constitutes visually presented political propaganda.”

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Men do not have the ‘right’ to sex

By Louise Perry

The exhibition will doubtless be welcomed by the liberal feminists and the bearded dudes who chant “sex workers work” and “blow jobs are real jobs”, because they subscribe to a faux feminism that actually benefits men more than women. And it is telling that the majority of the artists whose work is featured in the exhibition identify as they/them, and at least one of the she/hers are trans women. The pro-prostitution and trans activists/queer identified activists have become so intertwined they sing from the same hymn sheet. 

But there should be no place for a sanitised, romanticised version of the sex trade in a city which is home to countless brothels full of abused women. While there is always room for debate about removing the harms from prostitution, a propaganda puff piece that legitimises and normalises prostitution is dangerous. In staging this exhibition the ICA is making a very strong, political statement about its acceptance of the world’s oldest oppression. It’s a shame the money wasn’t spent helping women out of the sex trade.

What might be most remarkable about this document, and the cultural moment in which it exists, is that this final data point doesn’t necessarily make much difference. The spreadsheet in question belongs to an internet personality known as Aella, who views the physical act of love with the detached curiosity of a scientist and the strategic eye of a statistician. She’s a rare bird, not just in her approach to sex but in how she’s successfully parlayed it into a miniature empire: Aella is a former camgirl, now escort, and an elite member of the 1% on the amateur porn-subscription site OnlyFans, where she once netted six figures per month sharing self-produced photos and videos. 

But while it’s not unusual for someone in her line of work to be good at decoupling heart (and hormones) from mind, when Aella appeared in conversation with sex educator Laci Green at last week’s “Hereticon” thoughtcrime conference in Miami, the presentation revealed less about the niche mindset of the sex worker than it did about how ordinary people struggle to connect in a gamified dating landscape driven by data before passion. In the era of the algorithm, the personal brand, the Tinder marketplace, perhaps all sex carries a whiff of transaction, whether or not any money changes hands. And in a world where young, single people are increasingly taught to be frightened of any threat to their safety — emotional, not just physical — the prospect of true intimacy grows ever distant, ever more impossible.

What’s happening in heterosexual couplings now is also, crucially, about what isn’t happening: a sexual famine amongst Gen Z, who are upending the entire romantic landscape as they come of age. There is less sex, but also less dating, less social interaction writ large without the intermediary of a screen.

This isn’t the free love of the sexual revolution, nor the sex positivity espoused by the commitment-free hookup culture that reigned in the early Noughties. It’s something new, and also something post-#MeToo, and perhaps not entirely unrelated to our contemporary obsession with consent as the primary (sometimes only) framework for determining if a given encounter was good or not. Meeting strangers on the internet went in a generational spasm from being maximally unsafe to the only way to do things, as the existence of dating apps rendered the old ways of connecting not just quaint, but creepy.

Our pre-internet rituals were especially fraught with the risk of approaching someone who didn’t consent to be seen as a romantic prospect. Now, every interaction is preceded by the assurance that your crush has contractually agreed to be lusted-after, that no boundaries are being violated.

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The death of intimacy

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At the same time, the idea of sex as something people do for fun seems faded from the public consciousness, perhaps a natural consequence of too many millennial women having discovered that the utopian promise of feminist sex-positivity was laden with hidden negatives; that being able to have sex free of stigma or slut-shaming still comes with costs nevertheless.

For years, women had been thrust into the role of the bad cop, assigned the unpleasant duty of forever resisting the advances of horny men who couldn’t be expected to exercise restraint or good judgment on their own. But having been released from the social obligation to say “no” lest you be labeled a slut, a new pressure emerged to say “yes”, lest you be tarred with the stigma of the sex-negative prude. The result was a generation of women engaging in sex that was, yes, consensual, but also not much fun, especially when it was happening at the behest of a generation of men whose idea of sex was heavily influenced by internet porn. Women cast off the mantle of the sexual gatekeeper only to find themselves in a world where your boyfriend’s idea of first-date intimacy was to engage in a little light choking before ejaculating all over your face… oh, but consensually, of course.

When you consider how many women have been foundering around for years in the vast grey chasm of sex that is technically consensual but not remotely enjoyable, it’s no surprise that the act itself took a reputational hit. The emerging perception now is that sex is dangerous, dicey, probably not worth the risk — especially as concepts like “trauma” and “abuse” have expanded to include everything from the sting of a lover’s betrayal to the heartbreak when a consensual relationship ends. (See also: the increased use of the word “grooming”, once reserved for the sexual predation of children, to describe flirtatious relationships between consenting adults.) Under this rubric, the idea that someone might engage in physical intimacy for fun seems practically absurd. Young women in the post-MeToo era are taught that they can’t let their guard down for one single moment, while young men are told that they’re always just one misread cue or mixed message away from committing a rape.

It’s hardly surprising under the circumstances that this generation would take refuge in the safety of dating apps, or, for that matter, in the certainty of transactional sex. Whatever the pratfalls of subscribing to a freelance porn star’s OnlyFans the way some people used to do with Playboy, paying for intimacy outright at least eliminates the dangerous ambiguity that plagues an ordinary dating relationship, where the line between asking and coaxing, or coaxing and coercion, might shift at any moment and leave you standing with your pants down on the wrong side of the line.

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Porn will destroy you

By Sarah Ditum

Whether it’s settling for an imperfect match or turning to OnlyFans to fill your needs, human beings have always appreciated the security and promise of a sure thing. And when an entire progressive messaging apparatus insists that prostitution is the new empowerment, there’s little to dissuade young women from leveraging the minefield of sexuality into a remunerative side hustle — or young men from gravitating toward it as a safer form of sex.

We may not have quite reached the point where making freelance pornography is a rite of passage akin to attending the prom (even if anecdotes from Green suggest that “Do you have an OnlyFans?” might soon become the new “Will you go out with me?” among the school-age set). But will anyone be surprised when some young, enterprising, self-identified male feminist suggests that subscribing to OnlyFans is the only way to ensure proper consent, actually? Are we, perhaps, already halfway there?

All of this is happening against the backdrop of a radical shift in how we conceive of sex, sexuality, self. In the age of social media, sexual orientation is something you identify into, a public performance that requires no partner and no physical follow-through. (Consider also the odd proliferation of straight-married women who identify as “queer,” based on what seems mainly like a conviction that they’re just too interesting to be plain ol’ heterosexual.) It’s all identification, no action, a complete decoupling of sexual identity from the act itself. If this is a sexual revolution, it’s the chastest one we’ve ever had.

At the same time, the battle of the sexes has been arguably won by women, who are outperforming men in everything from education to investment. They best boys in high school and outnumber them on college campuses. They go to grad school in greater numbers and earn the majority of PhDs. And while they haven’t yet flooded boardrooms or executive suites, women are increasingly likely to outearn the men they marry — all of which adds up to a total inversion of the old dating dynamics wherein women with slightly less education or earning power made ideal mates for men with slightly more.

Instead, a whole lot of accomplished, educated, highly-paid ladies are competing in a dating pool that contains a scant few high-achieving men — and if they can’t land one, then their options are to date down, or not at all. In this reality, it’s the women jostling for position, optimising their dating profiles, trying to look good to the algorithm that will in turn serve them up to someone as a desirable catch. And the odds are stacked against them: for reasons that will some day make fascinating fodder for evolutionary psychologists, women are far harsher judges of male desirability than vice versa. Studies suggest that about 80% of women on dating apps are in competition for about 20% of the men.

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The whole enterprise highlights the distinction-without-much-difference between selling yourself in the dating marketplace and just, well, selling yourself. Maybe you’re trying to make money, or maybe you’re trying to get married, but it’s the same hustle, more or less. If you’re not keeping a spreadsheet yourself, you’re just a data point on someone else’s. Except here, the disposability is a feature, not a bug. If your OnlyFans affair bores you, you can just unsubscribe; if your Tinder match fails to deliver, you can swipe the other way and vanish behind a block. No fuss. No muss. No breakup. Tinder, like Twitter, is not a real place.

This might make women like Aella the smart ones: if they’re savvy (and lucky), they can work the system to their advantage instead of fumbling around inside it like blind supplicants. Making metadata of human beings will always be better as a business proposition than as a strategy for human connection — which might explain why, despite the lauded safety and convenience of the apps, Gen Z is not only having less sex but also suffering from greater rates of depression and anxiety.

Dating apps, social media, the sexual marketplace where you can pay for parasocial affairs: all of this has been an attempt to organise not just raw data, but raw humanity, to contain the complexities of love and sex and intimacy in a set of neat little checkboxes. If it didn’t exactly make us happy, then at least (we thought) it would keep us safe. And it did, sort of — insofar as there’s a certain sort of protection in the avoidance of intimacy. If it’s all just a numbers game, if you’re getting what you paid for, if you never truly allow yourself to be vulnerable and naked, literally or figuratively, with another person, then nobody will ever get close enough to hurt you.

But they won’t get close enough to touch you, either.

And so maybe this is where the next sexual revolution will emerge: among young people who are tired of trying to connect with the contraceptive barrier of a screen between them. Who resent the hidden manipulations of the algorithm in messy human affairs. Who would rather risk the pain of an old-school heartbreak. Who understand the difference between being empowered and being a control freak. Who know, in their bones, that they would rather be sorry than safe.

As the mother of a son who identifies as part of the transgender community,[1. My son uses the pronouns associated with his sex. I have chosen to remain anonymous to protect his identity.] the prospect of there being an epidemic of trans murders holds an added weight: is my son’s life in danger? Should I be beside myself with worry when he travels to work, let alone when goes out to a gig at a weekend? Suffice it to say that this is not an issue that I can afford to take lightly.

Facts always matter — but they take on a particular importance when they’re being used to claim that your child could be murdered. So I decided to delve into the research used to inform these claims. For me, it was personal.

The Government doesn’t publish data on the number of transgender people in the UK, though in 2018 it “tentatively” estimated that the figure stood between “approximately 200,000-500,000”. What proportion of that number must have been killed to warrant today’s warnings of trans murder epidemic? 10? 100? 1,000?

To find out, I analysed data collected by the trans-led organisation Transgender Europe, which has received more than a million dollars from the Arcus Foundation, who are based in the US and take a keen interest in transgender issues. As well as donating almost $150,000 to Stonewall, in 2015 the Arcus Foundation handed $312,000 to Transgender Europe specifically to supply reliable global data on transgender murders. The website it created provides an interactive map and links to documents naming the transgender victims.

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Looking at Transgender Europe’s list of cases, it became clear — to my relief — that  the total murders reported for the United Kingdom since 2008 amounted to 11. This translates as a murder rate of around 0.165%.

Now, that is still significantly higher than the murder rate for the UK as a whole: the ONS reports that the homicide rate in the UK for the year ending March 2020 was 11.7 per million people, rising to 17 per million among men. But look a bit closer at the list of trans murder victims, and that figure of 11 becomes increasingly suspect.

For instance, two of the listed victims, Vikki Thompson and Jacqueline Cowdry, appear to have been erroneously included. Thompson died by suicide while incarcerated in HMP Leeds, while Cowdry’s death was ultimately ruled as non-suspicious. This reduces the total to nine unlawful deaths, all of whom were born male. (By contrast, the number of homicides committed by transgender people between 2008 and 2017 was 12.) For context, the number of women killed by men during the same period was 1800. So much for our alleged “cis-privilege”.

Searching for more information led me to the work of Karen Ingala-Smith, who founded the Counting Dead Women project in 2012 after she realised that there was no central record of the extent of femicide here in the UK; thanks to her, a list of murdered women is read out in the House of Commons each year to imprint the rate of femicide on the minds our political class. Ingala-Smith’s tireless work focusses on female victims of, predominantly, male violence, though she made an exception to highlight the discrepancy between the mass hysteria about transgender victims of homicide compared to the treatment of woman-killing as mere background noise. (There is still no equivalent to the Trans Day of Remembrance for the much greater number of women killed by male violence.)

Crucially, her research sheds a vital spotlight on the nine remaining victims identified by the Trans Murder Monitoring report. Reading it, two things become clear. The first is that it is not entirely certain that all the victims themselves identified with the label “transgender”. The second is that the motives behind these crimes are more complex than straightforward “transphobia”.

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Three of the nine victims were murdered by a violent punter while working as prostitutes; another was killed by their husband, who lived on her earnings from prostitution. Another of the victims died at the hands of someone who was also trans-identifying. Another was a gay man who cross-dressed occasionally, and the motive for the murder has been ascribed to both transphobia and homophobia. Two of the murders were linked to drug use.

In other words, despite the way their deaths are often framed in the media and by activists, the large majority of these trans victims were not killed simply for being trans. Almost half appear to involve prostitution — a fact that has been quietly brushed under the carpet.

Nor is this wilful misunderstanding confined to the UK: according to global statistics, 58% of transgender murder victims were born male and work in prostitution. It seems remarkable, then, that “Trans women are women” and “Sex work is work” remain two of the most heavily promoted mantras in trans-activist circles. Indeed, a number of role models in the trans community go as far to claim that it was only because of prostitution that they were able to afford their treatment and surgeries.

Take, for example, trans activist Janet Mock, who has described how the “sex trade becomes a road well-travelled, helping trans women alleviate financial woes while also making many of us feel desired as women”. To be fair to Mock, she has also spoken publicly about the dangers of engaging in prostitution, emphasising the impacts of economic coercion, sexual abuse and trafficking on the trans community. She has also highlighted how prostitution is heavily racialised, with black and Latino communities making up a disproportionate number of transgender “sex workers”.

For reasons of sexual politics, I do not use the phrase “sex work” on the basis that the inside of our bodies, be they male or female, is not a legitimate place of work. That isn’t to say that I believe we should reprimand former prostitutes, or those still engaged in prostitution, for using this phrase. I know of former prostituted women who say this description was a survival strategy and allowed them to distance themselves from their experience.

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But that doesn’t make the phrase helpful — especially when used to describe transgender people. In recent years, the fetishisation of the transgender body has come increasingly into focus: PornHub’s annual report for 2021 — yes, they do an annual report! — showed there had been a 126% increase for porn searches using “trans”. There is clearly a “market” for trans-identified sex acts; and paired with the vulnerability of trans people to violence and murder while engaged in prostitution, the association of trans activism with “sex work” becomes even more dangerous.

Presented in this light, it seems obvious to me that we need to rethink the accepted narrative around transgender murder rates, regurgitated with monotonous regularity by both politicians and the media. For example, rather than holding vigils, those concerned with the tragic deaths of transgender people would do better to watch The Sex Map of Britain, a BBC documentary that follows two young men who were both homosexual and rejected by their family. In one of the most heart-breaking scenes, Mia, now a transgender escort, is brought to tears when talking about maternal rejection for the crime of being gay. Later Mia seeks reassurance from a client that they enjoy each other’s company. The punter answers that he does not want to cause offence, but he is only there because of the sex on offer. In another scene, Mia talks about hoping to find love in sex filmed for pornography.

It pains me to say it, but I see my son in Mia, and of one thing I am certain: looking for love, validation and self-worth in porn and prostitution won’t help him. Likewise, pretending that there’s a trans murder epidemic, when incidents are isolated and largely confined to prostitution, is equally unhelpful and even dangerous — not just to people like my son, but to the women whose murders are quietly forgotten in favour of performative headlines about an ‘epidemic’ that doesn’t exist.

My take is pretty straightforward. Yes, there is evidence to suggest she was abused by her father, and it is clear that Epstein had a certain level of power and control over her. But Maxwell is a woman with immense privilege and power of her own. She was not convicted for associating with Epstein, she was convicted for procuring young women into prostitution. There is nothing of the victim about Maxwell.

She was corrupted by her own power. She wasn’t just a “daddy pleaser” who transferred her subservience to Epstein as a replacement for her father. She was an agent in her own downfall; she used her wealth and class superiority to outsource abuse. Maxwell had scant respect for her victims: during the trial, we heard how she would refer to the poor, barely educated, vulnerable young women as “scum”. It’s all grimly reminiscent of what happened during the grooming gang cases in England, where the girls were viewed as “troublesome slags” who had “chosen” a lifestyle of prostitution.

Just as in Rochdale and Rotherham, the girls served up to Epstein and his friends were mostly from disadvantaged backgrounds. Seen as “disposable”, the perpetrators knew that if the victims spoke out, it was likely they wouldn’t be believed.

Prostitution, regardless of who is procuring, drags everyone down to the same level. Epstein and Maxwells’s victims have become complicit in the abuse of other women, just as happened with the grooming gangs in the UK. Victims are encouraged to bring along other girls, which they do because they are terrified. I have interviewed so many desperate women who escaped prostitution only by recruiting others to take their places. The prostituted victim becomes the pimp. The guilt they then feel when they finally escape the sex trade is almost as traumatic as the nightmare of prostitution itself.

The truly distressing thing about all these cases, though, is how the victims are belittled, ignored and erased. All those young women who were raped are barely mentioned in press coverage nor even during the trial. And we know very little about the sheer numbers of lives Epstein and Maxwell conspired to ruin.

Reports say that Epstein demanded sex with women and girls up to three times a day. Presuming none were consensual, that could mean up to 1,068 rapes a year. It is also known that Epstein had been abusing girls for 30-40 years, which could account for over 30,000 instances of rape and sexual exploitation. We don’t know any of their names.

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And naming is important, as is the language used to describe what happened to these women. We dehumanise them by using the word “trafficking”. Trafficking is merely a process used by pimps to coerce victims into the sex trade. The word obscures the grim reality of what happened. We need to call this type of abuse what it is: “child rape and prostitution”. Maxwell and Epstein, as well as the grooming gangs in the UK, were commodifying another human being for one-sided sexual gratification. It’s a human rights violation, not a transportation issue.

Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, an organisation that fights against commercial sexual exploitation, has been watching the Epstein/Maxwell case closely. “We must see the verdict as just a first step toward accountability, not a conclusion,” she says. “And remember that Epstein and Maxwell offered many of these girls as cocktail gifts to some of the most powerful men in the world, from princes to presidents, from philanthropists to politicians. Maxwell was an incredibly successful sex trafficker and the whole episode underlines how difficult it is to tackle the male demand for prostitution that fuels the global sex trade.”

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Robert Maxwell was no mystery

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She is right. A collective tolerance of the sex trade, and the acceptance of the sale and consumption of female bodies, by both the misogynistic Right and the liberal Left, lies at the heart of this problem. This is sexual abuse of the most vulnerable. But by labelling Epstein a “pedophile”, we suggest that his attraction to young girls was beyond his control, and obscure the fact that this was a massive commercial endeavour. And Ghislaine Maxwell was right beside him.

She was no coerced “handmaiden”; but she has been a useful fall guy. After Epstein killed himself, Maxwell became the sole focus of the survivors. Her conviction, though, only means that four women have been believed. What about all those other survivors? Where is their justice?

What if Maxwell were to name names? What if she were to tell law enforcers who paid Epstein for their human merchandise, no matter how powerful or well-connected these men are? That would bring all those silent women some sort of closure. It might also act as a meaningful deterrent: it might even make some men think twice before they rent a child to rape as an after-dinner treat. And surely all feminists can agree that would be a good thing.

The police eventually turned up and moved us on, but not before we had made our point and incited curiosity and solidarity from passers-by. Our demonstration was even reported in the Yorkshire Evening Post. Our message had been heard.

That sort of in-your-face feminism was — alas —  a bit sidelined by the internet. Along came the rise of keyboard activism, whose warriors prioritise sending out petitions and messages of condemnation on Twitter over taking to the streets alongside their sisters. Partly that’s convenience but partly it’s because the internet is where a lot of the violence is incited and savage verbal attacks take place.

Take the particularly vicious campaign against Milli Hill. Last November, Hill, founder of the Positive Birth Movement and the of bestselling books including Give Birth Like a Feminist, was the victim of an online pile on when she took issue with the phrase “birthing people”. She wrote: “It is women who are seen as the ‘fragile sex’ etc, and obstetric violence is violence against women. Let’s not forget who the oppressed are here and why.”

On they piled. Slowly at first, but then harder and faster: “anti-LGBTQ”, “transphobic”, “toxic” “dangerous”… And people she had worked with dropped her. So she laid low for 8 months and then wrote a blog about her appalling experience.

At which point it all kicked off again. One trans activist tweeted at Hill: “Milli, you obviously haven’t learned from the response JK Rowling got from her post. You aren’t incorrect that obstetric violence is sex-based. But how difficult is it to acknowledge that not everyone who is capable of giving birth, identifies with the female or woman label?”

Rowling shot off a blinder in support:

Judging by the tsunami of supportive emails and letters I've received, if women learned anything from the response to my post it wasn't that they should sit down and shut up. Solidarity to the brave and fabulous @millihill (and I love your books, by the way!) pic.twitter.com/dLdsYR73Qd

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) July 15, 2021

The response from women everywhere was amazing. As I write, the tweet has been ‘liked’ more than 24,000 times.

Rowling’s refusal to be cowed by the bullies is giving strength to other women to stand up and speak out. Rowling keeps going because she knows that thousands upon thousands of women have her back.

This feels like a significant moment. Feminists are rising up.

And as this brilliant sisterly solidarity plays out out on the internet, it’s filtering out on to the streets again. More and more women are putting down the keyboard and picking up the loudhailer — some for the first time.

Earlier this week, more than 300 women and a smattering of men gathered at Glasgow Green in protest at the ongoing case against Marion Millar. The Scottish accountant was arrested, interrogated and charged under the Communications Act for sending six tweets in 2019 which were deemed to be offensive. One tweet included a photograph of a bow of ribbons in the green, white and purple colours of the Suffragettes, tied around a tree. According to the complainant(s), the ribbons represented a noose. For her crime, Millar faces six months in prison, away from her young family.

Even though the hearing was postponed, the protest went ahead, with supporters congregating on the green, waving banners and placards reading, “#WomenWontWheesht” (wheesht is a Scottish colloquialism meaning ‘shut up’) a hashtag that has come to symbolise the feminist refusal to be silenced.

They chanted, sang, and made a fuss. It was excellently old school. And they were full-throated in outrage for police and prosecutors targeting women for supposed “hate crime” when convictions for rape and male violence are at an all-time low.

For as long as there has been male violence and oppression, women have protested. The very first women-only direct action on record was in Manchester in 1905. Christabel Pankhurst and millworker, Annie Kenney, disrupted speeches by prominent Liberals Winston Churchill and Sir Edward Grey, asking where the men stood with regards to women’s political rights.

In November 1910, suffragettes stormed the House of Commons to protest against the hostility of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith to women’s voting rights. The police responded by attacking the women with truncheons, and many were beaten, sexually assaulted and humiliated.

Thus was the women’s case proven. The women hit back and rampaged through Westminster smashing windows and attacking property. They were arrested, but this particular direct action went down in history.

Feminists threw flour bombs at the Miss World competition in London in 1970; invaded the Ideal Home exhibition in protest of lesbians having their children removed by the state in the 1980s; and spray painted buildings and stormed churches during sermons in the campaign to criminalise rape in marriage.

It is only visible action that will shame governments and other state agencies into change. Social media could never replace standing outside a court building and shouting our demands in full view of the public. That’s why I’ve helped organise hundreds of public demonstrations across the UK against domestic abuse and injustice towards women.

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It’s important we are heard because there is currently a concerted effort from both the Left and the Right to silence us: the Left won’t let women talk about their sex-based rights; the Right is stripping resources from the places were abused women find shelter. And something is shifting. Women are getting noisier. Women are making a stand. Just look at the masses who turned out to express their anger and grief over the Sarah Everard murder.

And those who stand up inspire others to do the same. Just like Milly Hill, who told me: “Other women made me feel braver, and I wanted to in turn help other women to feel braver.” And JK, too, standing up to the bullies and facing down the death threats.

I have interviewed 50 young women over the course of two years for my forthcoming book on feminism, in order to explore cross generational understanding and cooperation, which recently has been lacking between young feminists and the Second Wave, like me.

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But each and every interviewee told me a similar story – that they are rising up against the liberal notion that everything bad that happens to them is “empowering”. They are getting angry about the global sex trade, about forced marriage, FGM, and daily sexual harassment. That is why more and more younger women are taking to the streets – to reclaim them.

Like Marion Millar and her supporters, feminists young and old will not be intimidated into silence or capitulation. It is the antithesis of our movement. Feminism exists because women have been under the cosh patriarchy for centuries. My favourite chant, constantly heard at feminist rallies is, “Women’s tradition: Struggle not submission.”

I will never forget the exhilaration of my early public protests and direct actions. I was even held in a police station on one occasion, having been accused of public order offences. I was finally released without charge the following morning, and I recall feeling the sweet sense of freedom. I want all women and girls to feel that freedom, but every hour of every day.

Myers-Powell was first molested — as far as she can remember — when she was four, and went on to endure decades in the sex trade. She details it all in her blistering account of a life of extreme sexual abuse and exploitation: Leaving Breezy Street.

“I want people to feel uncomfortable when they read my story,” she says, “as uncomfortable as it was for me to live it.”

Hers is a tale of violence, abuse and addiction, which began with an uncle, and also men that were brought home by her grandmother. Then came violent boyfriends and abusive pimps, and of course the sex buyers, whom Myers-Powell refers to as “tricks” or “johns”.

She exudes the same resilience that carried her through the horror to become a leading figure in the campaign to end the sexual exploitation of women and girls; it was born of humour, optimism and hope. “My book is about a woman who persevered,” she says. “It’s about how I kicked ass to survive. And then I made it through and I helped others. From the ho house to the White House, dammit.”

Her grim childhood prepared her for prostitution. She couldn’t play outside, didn’t have friends, knew how to be invisible when adults were doing inappropriate things: “I was trained to be a ho before I knew what one was.”

Raised by her physically abusive, alcoholic grandmother (Myers-Powell’s mother died when she was six months old), she became pregnant at 13 and 14, had two babies to feed, and was under pressure to provide for them. She asked the advice of a girl in the neighbourhood who was selling sex, who hooked Myers-Powell up with a local pimp. Her first trick paid her an extra $20 when he discovered she was only 14, and she soon learned that underage black girls were in demand with white men.

After 15 years on the streets, she developed a hardcore crack habit and went on to serve several prison sentences for prostitution-related offences — which had an upside: the only time she was really clean was when she was in jail.

In her strong Chicago accent, Myers-Powell pulls no punches in describing some of the horrendous violence she endured. “They were big on anal rape. They were big on doing terrorising games.”

Stabbed 13 times and shot five times during her time on the streets, after 25 years she eventually turned her life around. In 1997, just before she turned 40, she survived a near-death experience when a trick viciously attacked her and she tried to escape from his moving car.

Her clothing snagged and she was dragged six blocks: “I lost half my face that night,” she says. “I wasn’t to know it, but that day was my last day as a ho.” After several weeks in hospital, Myers-Powell was admitted to Genesis House in Chicago, a refuge for women wanting to leave prostitution.

“I was really messed up. The first night I was there, Barbara (one of the staff) came to my little bed and changed my bandages, handed me my medication, covered me back up and slipped a teddy bear under my arm. I was like, ‘Shit! I might be able to stay here.’ I went to this house after I got out the hospital and this woman treated me with tender loving care.”

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After leaving, she started volunteering in organisations set up to help vulnerable women with Stephanie Daniels-Wilson who she had also met in a women’s treatment centre. The two women decided there was an urgent need for a service for prostituted women run by those that had lived the life: Dreamcatcher. It would be run by survivors.

She tells me: “I love hos because I was a ho. I don’t save hos, they save themselves. If they need saving, they need to let me know. I’m only there with a hand to help pull you up. I don’t run around here like these religious organisations shouting, ‘We save hos!’ I don’t save shit. I am a helping hand to a sister when she needs somebody.”

Myers-Powell has too many shocking stories to tell, but perhaps the most disturbing is having men bring their underage sons to her, wanting her to take their son’s virginity and make him ‘a man’. “I ain’t turning the money down but I took a little boy in the back and I said, ‘You don’t want to do this, right?’ And the little boy’s shaking his head, ‘No, but my dad wants me to do it.’ I said, ‘This is what we’re going to do, I’m going to tell your dad we did our thing. But I’m going to take your dad’s motherfucking money. Because he’s an idiot and he’s drunk.’

She is also adamant that attitudes need to change. There is a fundamental societal problem, she says: “Prostitutes are talked about almost like American pie. They’re the cocktail party joke. They always say we’re the oldest profession, we’re not, we’re the oldest form of slavery, the oldest oppression.”

But there’s also a sense of entitlement that is inculcated in men: the very idea that they have the right to buy women’s bodies: “They feel entitled to go to strip clubs and snatch up porn and they can do this because they have been told it’s their right as males. But it’s not their right. So we start early, when they are children. We have to raise young boys to say, ‘If you buy another human being, you’re actually doing an act against nature’”.

It was only after escaping the sex trade that Myers-Powell was able to see that prostitution was only one aspect of a wider problem of male attitudes. “When I was in recovery, it was those suburban women who would cook us meals with those expensive pots, and I used to listen to their stories about being date raped in college and going through the bad marriages and being treated like shit by boyfriends, and I used to say ‘Well, shit, you all went through the same shit we went through, but with money.’”

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She’s angry, too, about the language used to describe prostitution: “Sex work? I don’t have employment rights, I don’t have any vacation time, I don’t have a retirement plan. What part of the workforce is that? Why are we calling it ‘sex work’ to smooth it out? You’re not going to slap that garbage down my throat. I call it what it is, we’re prostituted women. Under the control of traffickers and men who use us. I am not a sex worker.”

It took Myers-Powell years to heal. At first, after leaving the hostel, she just wanted to “be normal”, pay her taxes and live like everyone else. But her knowledge of what the life was like for other women took her back on to the streets to support those left behind.

She kicked her crack habit, was reunited with her daughters, and gradually realised the important role she could play in supporting other women. She’s won awards from the FBI and has been appointed to the US Council for Human Trafficiking in the White House, because “I didn’t want any girl to go through the nightmare that I had.”

Leaving Breezy Street is a horror story with a happy ending. But there are currently around four million victims of sex trafficking worldwide: one million of them children and 99% are female. For them, the nightmare continues.

My politics then, formed mostly by reading blogs in the noughties, said that sex-work-is-work, and that critiquing prostitution was a prude’s position. But in my neighbourhood, I was treated like a whore, and it scared me. I would internally chastise myself: who was I to dwell upon my fears, when there were women for whom these men were a living? The obvious answer here — that I was a woman who just wanted to be able to walk near my home without intimidation — did not occur to me.

The kerb crawlers didn’t disturb me only because of what they wanted. I think they troubled me also because men who buy sex are the most difficult element to reconcile with a pro-sex work position. It’s possible to argue in the abstract against the policing of female sexuality (if, of course, you never ask yourself why “female sexuality” would subsist in the things men pay women to do) or to denounce the state involving itself in consensual arrangements between adults (again, if you can pretend that purchased consent is valid consent).

But the grim actuality of the man who wants to have sex with a woman who can’t say no to hopping in his car — where does he fit into this conception? Where does her inability to refuse fit? Because I thought a lot about this. About what made me unlike the women those men were looking for. I think about it now, when I teach at a university, because I know it’s possible some of the young women in my classes are selling sex. When I teach again next semester, the possibility will be even greater. That’s why the University of Leicester has just introduced what it calls a “Student Sex Worker Policy and Toolkit”.

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Students who enter the sex industry now, of course, are unlikely to be pacing their cities’ red light districts. Instead, they’ll be putting themselves on OnlyFans, or signing up for Sugar Daddy websites, or maybe escorting — non-contact work selling pictures, or mediated work brokered by a third party. Either way, the alarming figure of the man in the car can be kept at a certain distance. Some young women will enter in with a feeling that they’re embarking on a sexual adventure, maybe with Megan Thee Stallion’s boast from “WAP” repeating in their brains (“Pay my tuition just to kiss me / On this wet-ass pussy”). But all of them will be doing it for the money.

The reason I would never have jumped in a car with a stranger and accepted a fiver for a handjob is that nothing in my life had conspired to force me to. I didn’t have any of the chaotic pressures like substance dependency that would make me desperate for money and stop me holding down a job, and there were always retail and service roles around that I could do. My parents were able to top me up when needed. I didn’t have one of those boyfriends who insinuates that if you really loved him, you would pick up men to make cash — or who beats you if you refuse.

Between dead high streets and a devastated hospitality sector, the sorts of jobs students usually do are harder to come by now. In fact, Covid means that the sorts of jobs everyone does are going to be harder to come by, which means that already more women are reportedly selling sex. It’s important to keep this in mind, because there’s a tendency — hardened by the sex workers’ rights movement, which has borrowed the forms of gay liberation — to treat prostituted women as a kind of sexual minority who should be freed from persecution.

But it’s desperation, not inclination, that pulls most women in. Policy creates prostitutes: remove the welfare safety net, stop funding the refuges that help women get away from abusive men, and more women will either resort to selling sex or be unable to escape it. Prostitutes are also created by acts of classification. If dirt is “matter out of place”, whore is often just a word for a woman where she shouldn’t be. The men who kerb crawled me didn’t do it because of who I was, but because of where I was.

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A new Netflix documentary about the Yorkshire Ripper underlines the many mistakes made by police in their investigation, but one of the worst was their decision to treat their unknown serial murderer as a “prostitute killer”. For one thing, it was inaccurate. Many of Peter Sutcliffe’s victims, including ones tagged as prostitutes by police and media, never sold sex: they were simply given the label because their lives were unstable and they died horribly.

The police investigating the murders assumed their perpetrator was motivated by a “hatred for prostitutes” — they even appealed to his “better nature” after he killed a victim who they classed as an “innocent girl”, imploring him to stop his attacks before he made another such mistake. They didn’t consider the possibility that he was motivated by a hatred for women, who he attacked opportunistically; prostitution was relevant to his crimes inasmuch as it made women more vulnerable. When Sutcliffe paid for sex, it’s entirely possible he was doing that out of hatred as well.

There’s an awkward silence in pro-sex work arguments about who’s buying. Sometimes they’re cast as gracious libertines. Sometimes, they’re portrayed as the undeserving poor of the intimacy economy — disabled men who crave pleasure but struggle to attract a partner are often invoked here, even though it is plainly insulting to say that disability makes you a sexual non-person. But the internet made it difficult for the idealised fictional punter to survive the suddenly visible real ones: the ones who leave reviews complaining about a woman’s unenthusiastic blowjobs or wonky teeth or the fact that her tits did not match up in all regards to the picture, and all in the most insulting terms.

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So the pro-sex work argument moved. If the punter is indefensible, better not to talk about him at all. In the book Revolting Prostitutes — which advocates a “Marxist-feminist, labour-centred analysis” — authors Molly Smith and Juno Mac (both of whom identify themselves as sex workers) conspicuously avoid talking about the reasons men pay for sex. Instead, they invert the economic model of supply and demand, writing: “In an important sense, clients are not the demand but the supply; for sex workers, clients represent the supply of resources into our lives.”

This is a strange claim, because it ultimately implies that the more men there are who buy sex, the better it would be for women who sell sex. In this argument, a bigger market means more money for women in precarity; and more choice to refuse men they perceive as dangerous. But (as Smith and Mac repeatedly underline in the book) “women who sell sex” are not a constant population. Deprivation drags more women in. “Men who buy” are a porous group too, encouraged or deterred by policing and social attitudes. And the more punters there are, the greater the incentive for third parties (the word “pimps” works here) to find desperate women to service them.

A 2012 study found that, globally, legalising prostitution increased human trafficking: a bigger market demanded more women, and they had to come from somewhere. Critics of the Leeds “managed zone” — an area where prostitution is effectively legal (devised under the guidance of Teela Sanders, who also spearheaded the Leicester student toolkit), in the city where Sutcliffe committed many of his crimes — say that men come from hundreds of miles away to take advantage, and traffickers respond by bussing in more women to offer.

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It’s distasteful to remember that women are the merchandise in prostitution, but any decent Marxist analysis should be able to predict the way trade reacts to opportunity. And the greater the opportunity for prostitution, the greater the opportunity for abuse. Women working in the managed zone are assaulted, raped and — in the terrible case of Daria Pionko in 2015 — murdered. Women who live nearby are pestered, threatened and sometimes attacked by men who consider any female around to be fair game.

As for the claim that a larger pool of punters lets women dodge the violent ones, I am haunted by the Steve Wright case. Wright murdered five women in prostitution over a few weeks in late 2006, targeting the Ipswich red light zone. After he was convicted, other women who worked the area recalled him as “just another punter”. If a serial killer doesn’t stand out, profiling doesn’t work.

When the punter is remote, the case seems even more tenuous. How does a camgirl know which anonymous watcher is fine, and which one will repost her images to humiliate her for years to come? How do you know which one will be a stalker? And even if dangerous men did give themselves away, there will ultimately always be a woman destitute enough — Smith and Mac class women who trade sex for food and shelter as “sex workers” — that she can’t say no to someone she fears. Destitute enough, or coerced enough. At the bottom of the market, women are killed.

In my feminist writing, I’ve resisted the reframing of prostitution as “sex work”, but perhaps embracing it might force a confrontation with what this “work” entails. What kind of workplace pays extra for ditching your PPE (punters put a premium on un-condommed sex)? In what other industry would the sexual assault of members of the public be an acceptable negative externality? How, exactly, does one apply an employment rights model to an exchange that takes place between two people in a locked room — or a locked car — where one demands sex and is big enough to force the other? In the announcement of the Leicester “Student Sex Worker Policy”, though, all this is hidden under the vague heading “wellbeing and inclusivity”.

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There is no perfect response to prostitution. Smith and Mac deride feminists who back the Nordic model (my preferred option, in which sale of sex is decriminalised but the purchase is illegal) for lacking a faultless real-world example they can point to. When it comes to Smith and Mac’s favoured model of New Zealand-style decriminalisation, though, they concede that there are “problems” but put these down to the fact that it “does not go far enough”. We are all apparently just waiting for the kingdom to arrive.

But while we wait, there can be no pretence that prostitution is anything other than a practice where male entitlement takes advantage of female vulnerability — and no disagreement that any response begins by ameliorating that vulnerability. That means, among other things, benefits to lift women out of poverty, drug treatment to give them control of their lives, and a coordinated approach between the women’s sector and the criminal justice system to address male violence against women and protect women from the men who exploit them.

You might — perhaps fairly — accuse me of sentimental tourism for identifying myself with women in prostitution. For cringing when I think about the mechanics of an unwanted body pushing its way into a body that has no means of refusal. After all, it’s not me who has to take that trauma. But when those men on my old route to town kerb crawled me, it was because they saw I had the kind of body they wanted to do those things to. The difference between me and the women who would have taken their chances in those cars isn’t in our natures — it’s in our luck.

Yet as with so many sexual issues, old moral norms have been rebottled with new and often contradictory arguments, and with the expansion of human rights law the “right” to sex has returned. This was illustrated last week when the Court of Protection heard a case that digs right down into a central contradiction in contemporary sexual attitudes.

It concerns a mentally disabled man, called only “Z”, who is in the care of his local authority. Z would like to have sex, but feels that his social anxiety prevents him from finding a girlfriend, and is therefore asking his care workers to find him a woman who is prepared to have sex with him for money.

The case has reached the court of protection because it’s not clear if care workers would be breaking the law by granting this request. We know that there have already been instances in this country of the taxpayer indirectly paying for sexual services in brothels and lapdancing clubs both in the UK and abroad, via money that vulnerable adults in the care of the state are permitted to spend on their “mental and physical wellbeing”.

But this case takes us a step further. Psychiatrists have ruled that Z has the capacity to consent to sex and indeed to buy it. He does not, however, have the capacity to manage his own finances, and his care plan includes restrictions on the films and video games he is allowed access to, due to the risk of triggering “inappropriate” behaviour.

In other words, he is not able to actually arrange to buy sex, and therefore requires his carers to take practical steps on his behalf — steps that may or may not be illegal, contrary to section 39 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

I cannot share details on what exactly Z’s “inappropriate” behaviour has consisted of, but I can share facts that have already been reported in the press: that Z has spent several years in a specialist facility, detained under the Mental Health Act, and has told care workers that he has sexual fantasies involving violence and children, and so his care plan is therefore designed to prevent him coming into contact with children.

Buying sex is not illegal in this country, even for men who confess to such disturbing fantasies. It is illegal to keep a brothel, solicit in a public place, or (as of 2009) pay for sex with someone who has been “subjected to force”. So, to get around these legal impediments, Z’s advocates propose that his care workers seek out an escort for him through a charity called the TLC Trust, who provide a registry of self-employed escorts who are willing to have sex with disabled people in exchange for money. In court last week, barristers representing Z and the Local Authority presented the TLC Trust as a safe, responsible and carefully-regulated source of sexual services.

But UnHerd contributor Julie Bindel, who has investigated TLC, is sceptical of this assessment, once arguing that although the organisation is technically a charity, it is really in the business of “peddling the commercial services of individuals and escort agencies advertising sexual services. Checking the websites of the escorts listed shows that they are not particularly targeting disabled men, but simply adding to their customer base.”

TLC is also a campaigning organisation that promotes the decriminalisation and destigmatisation of the sex industry. Foregrounding the “right” of disabled people to access “sexual service providers” has long been a media-friendly strategy employed by such campaigners, since it presents a sanitised and compassionate side to the sex industry.

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I say “disabled people” advisedly, because the people we’re talking about here are actually disabled men, and the “service providers” in question are almost always women, although you’ll rarely hear campaigners spell this out, since “men have the right to have sex with women” doesn’t sound nearly as good as a campaigning slogan.

In fact, when the judge tasked with deciding on Z’s case said this in regards another case, his comments attracted a great deal of controversy. Mr Justice Hayden had been asked to consider imposing a court order preventing a man from having sex with his disabled wife because her carers believed that she was no longer able to give her consent, and during proceedings he remarked “I cannot think of any more obviously fundamental human right than the right of a man to have sex with his wife.”

This did not go down at all well with feminist commentators, the criminalisation of marital rape being a hard-won legal battle in this country, only fully won in 2003.

It remains to be seen what Mr Justice Hayden decides in Z’s case; a judgment is expected by the end of the year and will potentially set an important precedent, since a key plank of Z’s argument is that he has a right to a sexual life, protected by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. He therefore insists that the state must not only meet his needs for food, shelter and medical care, but must also facilitate his desire to have sex. Which means, of course, that someone else has to have sex with Z, and if no one is willing to do so for free, then their consent must be bought.

But then, to be fair to Z, his demands do follow on logically from two assumptions about sex that hold sway among many Westerners in the 21st century, despite the fact that they are in tension with one another.

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The first is that sex is not a want, but a need: that it is impossible to live a happy and fulfilled life without sexual intimacy since, although historically there have been established and high status social roles available to celibate people — primarily through the Church — these have now faded away, leaving only a contemptuous attitude towards celibacy: at best, it is eccentric; at worst, suspect.

The second assumption is that sex is a leisure activity that is only invested with meaning if the participants choose to give it meaning – it has no intrinsic specialness, is not innately different from any other kind of social interaction, and it can therefore be commodified without any trouble. People can understand their own sexual encounters as meaningful or even sacred, but there’s no obligation on them to do so.

As the American writer Aaron Sibarium puts it, “if the scientific revolution disenchanted the world… the sexual revolution disenchanted sex.”

If we accept both of these assumptions, then we have to accept a difficult contradiction: that sex is at the same time as essential a need as food or water, but also as trivial as going to the cinema or getting your nails done. According to this logic, sex is simply a service that one person can perform for another, but it is a service that must be performed — that must even, in cases like Z’s, be facilitated by the state.

Z is asking for access to some anonymous, replaceable woman (albeit, presumably, an attractive one) in whom he can relieve his sexual frustration. And he insists that not doing so would violate his Article 8 rights.

If Z wins, we should thus expect a disabled man’s hypothetical care team to grow beyond cleaners, cooks and taxi drivers to include a female worker whose role is to give out blow jobs. And we will all be asked to pretend that the service this worker provides is no different from any other service, since apparently, as Mr Justice Hayden said during proceedings last week, “we’re not here to pass moral judgments about people’s decisions in the sphere of their private life or their decision to go to a sex worker.”

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Except we all know that this is not a service like any other, and that we should not suspend our “moral judgments” when it comes to the sex industry. For one thing, in what other line of work are workers so often left with PTSD, suffering rates far higher than military veterans? In what other industry does youth carry such a premium, with a worker’s pay actually declining as she gains more experience? What other work can routinely be carried out with the worker drugged or unconscious? And what other industry so reliably attracts trafficking, and violence, regardless of its legal status?

The whole point of paid sex is that it must be paid. It is not mutually desired by both parties — one party is there unwillingly, in exchange for money, or sometimes other goods like drugs, food or shelter. The person being paid (almost always a woman) must ignore her own lack of sexual desire, or even her bone-deep revulsion. She must suppress her most self-protective instincts in the service of another person’s sexual pleasure. There is a reason that this industry usually attracts only the poorest and the most desperate women. It is the same reason that the Crown Prosecution Service guidelines explicitly address prostitution as “sexual exploitation”.

If Z wins his case, the judgment will lend legitimacy to the sex industry. It will also affirm the idea that sex is both meaningless and a “right” to be claimed by men, at the expense of women. And such a decision would embolden those who consider male feelings of sexual frustration to be very important — but consider female feelings of sexual violation to not be important at all.

It’s a shame that Z regrets his lack of a sex life. But it is not the responsibility of the state to sexually satisfy every frustrated, entitled and potentially dangerous man who demands it. Z needs state care, but he desires sexual intimacy, and the difference between these needs and desires should be obvious: no one has ever died for want of sex.

Here is one such scenario: imagine a man goes to a supermarket and buys himself a whole dead chicken. He takes it home, has sex with it, and then eats it. No one else ever finds out. Did he do anything wrong?

Haidt has several other scenarios concerned with sexual morality. Is it ok for a brother and sister to have sex, if they use multiple forms of contraception, and no one else knows about it? Or, to use a real scenario, is it ok for a man to consent to being eaten by another man, for the purposes of sexual gratification?

The psychologist reports that his participants’ responses tend to be affected by their political allegiances. Social conservatives generally give swift, confident answers, because they are able to appeal to values like sanctity and authority. For them, having sex with a dead chicken or a sibling obviously violates religious or traditionalist moral principles and is therefore unacceptable. End of story.

Liberals have more difficulty: they want to say that the acts are wrong, because they are instinctively disgusted by them, but the scenarios are designed to prevent any appeal to J.S. Mill’s harm principle: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

In the chicken example, for instance, it is difficult to identify anyone who has been harmed by the man’s behaviour, since the chicken, being dead, can’t be harmed, and other people, being ignorant of the act, can’t be harmed either. The man is simply exercising his sexual autonomy, which means that, as Haidt puts it, “if your moral matrix is limited to the ethic of autonomy, then you’re at high risk of being dumbfounded by this case.”

Not everyone is dumbfounded. The American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, for instance — a key figure in the sex-positive feminist movement that emerged in the 1980s — would, I imagine, be unbothered by the chicken scenario, just as she is unbothered by unusual sexual behaviour in general. “Ultimately, of what possible social significance is it if a person likes to masturbate over a shoe?” Rubin writes, “in Western culture, sex is taken all too seriously”.

Rubin is radical in her liberalism. She famously rejects the idea of “good” or “bad” sexual behaviour, interpreting such moralising as inherently oppressive. To her mind, sex does not need to involve either love or commitment, and it certainly needn’t have any connection to marriage or reproduction. The only thing that matters to sex-positive feminists like Rubin is whether or not all parties are able and willing to consent to a particular sex act. All other sexual morality must be discarded — indeed, one group that was influential early on in arguing for the destigmatisation of commercial sex made the point crystal clear with their choice of name: COYOTE, “Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics.”

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Within the last 40 years, sex-positivism has been remarkably successful within academia and the media, to the point that it is now the dominant ideology among liberal feminists, who are themselves the dominant feminist sect. The moral minimalism that comes from holding only to the principle of consent results in certain policy positions.

For instance, the neutral or even positive attitude that liberal feminists take towards transactional sex leads them to support the decriminalisation or legalisation of porn and prostitution, including pimping, as long as all participants consent. BDSM (Bondage, Domination, Sadism and Masochism) is also permissible, according to the principle of consent — in fact, some argue that BDSM relationships are preferable to “vanilla” ones because explicit discussions of consent are (supposed to be) front-and-centre within the community. A rejection of traditional sexual morality or “Old Tired Ethics” also encourages a positive attitude towards casual sex, polyamory, fetishes and more.

On university campuses sex-positive liberal feminism is currently the order of the day, along with its various trappings. At the beginning of term, freshers are given a lecture on the importance of consent and sent on their way with “I heart consent” badges and tote bags. The rule they’re taught is simple enough: with consent, anything goes.

But while threesomes, nipple clamps and butt plugs may now be acceptable topics of conversation on campus, there still remains a frightening taboo: the fact of innate, average differences between men and women when it comes to sexuality. The research evidence is clear — we know that men, on average, prefer to have more sex and with a larger number of partners, that fetishes are far more common with men, that sex buyers are almost exclusively male, that men watch a lot more porn than women do, and that the vast majority of heterosexual women do not orgasm during casual sex and mostly say that they would prefer a committed relationship, if given the option. All in all, the evidence demonstrates that the acts that sex-positive feminism encourages are acts that men are much more likely to enjoy.

These differences make perfect, intuitive sense when you reflect on male and female reproductive roles. Of course the group of people left literally holding the baby are going to have evolved to be pickier about mating partners, and of course the other half, who are able to pass on their genetic material painlessly and in a matter of minutes, are more likely to have a preference for sowing their wild oats.

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The uncomfortable truth is that, up until the arrival of reliable contraception — about five minutes ago, in evolutionary terms — sex was much riskier and costlier for women than it was for men. And as Mary Harrington writes in these pages, “ignoring our animal nature in favour of an abstract vision of egalitarianism has ended up disproportionately harming women”.

But you can’t say this in sex-positive circles, where a belief in the blank slate mandates that any differences in male and female behaviour be explained as solely a consequence of socialisation. So when inexperienced young women are encouraged by liberal feminism to behave exactly as men would like them to, and find themselves feeling used, violated and miserable — as they often do — they have no way of understanding what is happening to them, or recognising that the system is rigged.

This cognitive dissonance can lead to some strange places. Last week, there was the predictable social media outrage after liberal feminist writer Heather O’Neill wrote: “If you have sex with someone knowing full well it is going to be a one time thing, but the other person believes they are embarking on a relationship, I don’t think you can really consider the sex consensual. (Although this opinion gets me into trouble at dinner parties.)”

O’Neill was widely mocked as an extremist and a fool. I think she’s wrong to stretch the definition of “consent” to breaking point, but I have some sympathy for her viewpoint. Many liberal feminist women are sincerely unhappy with the sexual status quo, but they struggle to reconcile their unhappiness with their ideology. And since the only moral principle left standing under the reign of sex-positivism is the need for consent, this principle must be put to work in order to explain away their feelings.

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O’Neill is correctly identifying a problem — the fact that horny and unscrupulous men (“fuckboys” in contemporary slang) will regularly manipulate naive women into casual sex that leaves the women feeling wretched. Such sex isn’t illegal, since the women do say “yes”, but it’s unpleasant and unkind. It’s immoral, in other words, but this is not a term that liberal feminists feel comfortable using, given its icky associations with religious conservatism, and so the only vocabulary left available to O’Neill is that relating to consent.

Liberal feminists have got their premises wrong. A moral system based solely on consent is inadequate because the presence of consent is such a very, very low bar — an absolute bare minimum requirement, not an ideal. Given the profound importance and complexity of sexual relationships, a much larger and more sophisticated moral system is required to determine what good, not just legal, sexual behaviour looks like, and the Gayle Rubins of the world are not best placed to describe it.

Liberal women are being asked to rationalise away their moral intuitions — to believe that a punch to the face can be a sign of love, that “catching feelings” for a sexual partner is something to be resisted, and that consent is all that matters. When it comes to sex, the ideological toolbox put together by liberal feminism contains just one blunt, useless implement. Unsurprisingly, it isn’t up to the job.

Set up by West Yorkshire Police (WYP) and Leeds City Council (LCC), the rules look simple: women can ply their trade within a certain area, between the hours of 8pm and 6am, without fear of arrest. Men can openly solicit sex from cars or on foot, so long as they stay within the boundaries of the zone. The area is policed, and a well-funded service provides condoms, tea and support for the dozens of women who are probably prostituting in order to buy drugs, whether for themselves or their partners.

Several security cameras cover the area, and a number of yellow bins are visible, in which the women and their punters are encouraged to drop used condoms. Every day, cleaners arrive to remove last night’s debris — which usually includes needles and other drug paraphernalia, empty booze bottles, vomit and items of women’s clothing.

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There is ample evidence from residents and other sources that prostitution has bled outside of the zone and into surrounding areas, and that a number of houses on the outskirts have become brothels. There are regular sightings of punters having sex with women in public, including in residential gardens, and women are often heard screaming while being attacked. I have spent time on the zone since 2014, and have spotted pimps, traffickers and drug dealers in and around the area. Many of the zone’s residents, including some of the women who work there, disagree with the recent report that the Managed Approach has been a success.

Campaigners against the zone believe that police and other agencies care little for the safety of the women, now they are supposedly “contained”. Speaking to residents, police, the women and the punters, I have developed a bleak impression of the situation. The punters, many of whom travel from outside of the city, are able to buy a woman with the same ease with which they might pick up a burger, often treating them like meat. “Because they can’t get arrested, they think they can do anything they liked,” says Angel*, a woman who sold sex on the zone during 2018. “I’ve been raped, and one man pissed all over me once and took a photo.”

Sammy*, who was pimped on her 17th birthday straight into the zone by her “boyfriend”, tells me that the police “don’t give a fuck about the women”. She says: “One night I was screaming my head off when a nasty punter got really rough with me, but these two coppers just walked past. All they want is to shove us away from the city centre so we don’t put off the tourists and those going out for meals.” Established local business owners in Holbeck have reported that trade is down because many potential customers avoid the area.

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This zone came into being because pressure was mounting on the police and local council to do something about street prostitution in the centre of Leeds. Residents and workers, sick of stepping over used condoms and fending off harassment from kerb crawlers looking for business, had filed enough complaints to make the problem a headache for the authorities. Arresting the women was counter-productive: all that happened was that the courts would fine them, which led to the “revolving door” situation of the women going straight back on to the streets in order to pay up, because they had no money.

But LCC and WYP had a choice: the money spent on containing the problem could have gone into exiting and drug rehabilitation services, for instance. Instead, the authorities have made it easier for pimps and punters to exploit the women, abandoning the prostitutes to a life of hell — and making residents feel unsafe.

There have been a number of rapes and sexual assaults within the zone, and in 2015, a few months after it became operational, Daria Pionko was murdered by a punter there. Pionko’s murder thrust Holbeck firmly into the national spotlight and saw serious questions being asked about the long-term viability of the experiment. And yet it continued. A few years later, in 2018, a Holbeck woman was raped on her way home from work by a group of men who assumed she was a prostitute.

My most recent visit to the Holbeck zone was in February. I arrived at its border around 10am and saw several women braving the cold and looking for business, despite it being hours past curfew time. Walking around, I saw carnage: dozens of used condoms and some blood-specked needles, as well as human faeces and empty bottles of spirits.

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One group of local feminists, including sex trade survivors, set up Campaign to End Leeds Sex Trade (CELST) in 2018. They roundly reject the conclusion of the recent report, saying it reads “like a fairy tale” to those living and working in the area. “Criminal gangs will be celebrating if this zone is maintained,” says CELST founder Fiona Broadfoot, who escaped prostitution in the 1990s:

“The vast majority of women on the zone don’t even speak English and could well be trafficked. Drug dealers peddle their goods openly with impunity. The punters use their privilege and entitlement to pay a pittance to the most vulnerable women in society.”

I spoke to Paul* who lives next door to three young Romanian women. He said: “Men come to the house all hours of the day and night. I have only seen one of them leave the house in months and she was accompanied by a man. I worry that they are being trafficked.”

The report failed to mention that the sex trade has expanded in Holbeck as a result of the zone. Meanwhile complaints of sexual assault have doubled, and rates of gonorrhoea, syphilis and chlamydia have risen significantly in Leeds.

Leeds Councillor Sarah Field is one of the most vocal critics of the zone within LCC. Field is furious that the authors of the report have recommended that the zone continue and, like me, believes that the only possible way to reduce the harm of the sex trade is to help the women exit and to deter the punters from buying sex by threatening arrest.

“Once again we see academics enthralled by what they call ‘sex work’ while they would never live in Holbeck, nor entertain the idea of their daughters or wives ‘working’ there. Adequately funded exit strategies remains the only way to stop vulnerable women being sold by men to other men on the streets of Leeds, with our council calling it success.”

The founders of the Holbeck zone should have seen the warning signs coming from countries such as the Netherlands. Having set up zones in a number of areas since legalisation, Dutch politicians have since admitted defeat and closed down every single one.

The first tipplezone (tolerance zone) opened in The Hague in 1983, with eight other cities following suit over the next three decades. As with the Leeds experiment, the aim of tipplezones was to deal with complaints of residents in the areas frequented by street prostitutes, and to ensure safety for the women. But the tipplezones did not deter violence from the punters, and trafficking, including of underage girls, increased, as did rates of HIV.

In 2004, Job Cohen — the then mayor of Amsterdam, which is known as “the vagina of Europe” for its highly visible sex trade — announced: “We’ve realised this is no longer about small-scale entrepreneurs, but those big crime organisations are involved here in trafficking women, drugs, killings, and other criminal activities.”

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While those selling sex should be treated as victims, not criminals, decriminalising the pimps and punters is not the answer. A number of other states, including Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, France, Sweden and Israel have adopted the Nordic Model, in which the pimps and punters are criminalised, while those selling sex are decriminalised and offered support to leave the sex trade.

That might include drug and alcohol rehabilitation programmes, counselling, access to safe accommodation, and, where necessary, parenting skills. Training and re-education can give some women the confidence and ability to access gainful employment — and because prostitution is not criminalised, those who exit it aren’t automatically hindered by criminal records in seeking other work.

The Leeds zone has been thought up and maintained by those who see “the oldest profession” as an “inevitability”. But the women of Leeds deserve better than a strip of industrial wasteland and a few condoms. They deserve jobs and a future. The Managed Approach is an open invitation to the most disenfranchised women with the least choices in life, to enter a life of hell; there is no justification for leaving these women to die of drug overdoses, HIV or even murder.

The legitimisation of prostitution, often referred to by the women involved as “paid rape” is morally reprehensible. And as for the men that fuel this vile trade: it’s high time they were given a loud and clear message that women are not for sale.

*These names have been changed.

The latest controversy centres on support for stripping and lap dance clubs. Sophie Wilson, a 23-year-old Sheffield councillor who was last week selected as Jeremy Corbyn’s candidate for Rother Valley, has campaigned against feminists trying to close a notorious club, and for the “right” of women to “choose” to work there.

Last year, Wilson was carpeted by Sheffield City Council after a complaint about her online conduct was partially upheld. She had tweeted that the women protesting the existence of lap dancing clubs in the city — many of whom are survivors of sexual exploitation — were “trashy SWERFS”. Another tweet read: “SWERFS and TERFS are usually one in (sic) the same, aren’t they?”

SWERF (Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists) and TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) are both misogynistic slurs, and the recently thought-up acronyms have become merged to the point where you literally cannot support one without supporting the other.

Wilson joined a protest earlier this year to save the Spearmint Rhino club when its licence was under threat. Feminists campaigning for its closure had released film footage, obtained covertly, which allegedly showed dancers “sexually touching customers”. The club, according to the campaigners, breached more than 200 regulations.

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I have seen similar things at lap dancing clubs with my own eyes. In 2004 I visited a number of them, posing as the PA of a businessman who was persuaded to join him for a few drinks. I found that many of the clubs were fronts for prostitution, and that the women were routinely sexually harassed.

It’s especially poignant because if elected, Wilson will represent part of Rotherham, the South Yorkshire town notorious worldwide for turning a blind eye to endemic child abuse by organised gangs between 1997 and 2013.

Why, then, would any woman claiming to be a feminist fight to keep such a club in business? An open letter to Sheffield City Council, signed by pro-prostitution campaigners, argued that stripping is merely “sex work” rather than abuse, and therefore the “workers” need employment rights.

The signatories argued that the claim that Spearmint Rhino is harmful to its employees is mistaken, and “serves to refocus attention away from the real perpetrators of that harm (men who harass women, and who are subject to the already-existing legislation that prohibits that behaviour)”.

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The key argument for keeping the club open, however, is that closure would result in women losing their jobs, which could lead to them seeking alternative work under more dangerous conditions. Running through their argument was, as per usual, the notion that no one has the right to “take away women’s choice to do safe, legal work”, a position they describe as “anti-feminist”.

Unfortunately for Sophie Wilson, she has a formidable opponent in Sammy Woodhouse, who, if Wilson is elected, would be her constituent. Woodhouse has in the past courageously spoken about the abuse she suffered at the hands of grooming gangs in her home town, and has published a book about her experiences, called Just a Child.

Woodhouse was failed by the authorities, but nevertheless put heart and soul into helping police and prosecutors nail the perpetrators of the biggest sex scandal of modern times: the Jay Report uncovered the abuse of 1,400 children in Rotherham.

For Woodhouse, no abuse of women can be seen as “work”, and the notion that women “chose” to make money this way is “bonkers”, in her words.

“Fun feminists” have long supported the pro-prostitution lobby, buying the lies that prostitution can be “sexually liberating” for women, and this group somehow lends its voice to other campaigns against patriarchal control of our bodies. But prostitution, of which stripping is a part, is about the right of men to access women’s bodies, and to view and treat us as commodities.

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Woodhouse is furious with the Labour Party for selecting Wilson to represent part of a city that is notorious for sexual exploitation. “The fact that she has publicly called us SWERFS and TERFS,” she told me after the latest episode, when “some of the women protesting the club are rape victims and have been abused in those clubs and treated horrifically.”

Sammy Woodhouse has more direct experience of the issue than her prospective MP. After escaping the grooming gang, she worked as a lap dancer at Sheffield Spearmint Rhino, where she says the women were treated like “a slab of meat”.

Lap dancing, she says, is anything but feminist: “Rotherham is known all over the world for its exploitation, and we have a woman standing who is in favour of exploitation,” she said. “That lot say it’s empowering. But let me tell you, there is nothing empowering in sitting on some sweaty man’s lap grinding into his dick.”

What Wilson is defending is unconscionable, for as Woodhouse put it: “If you put a bloke on a street corner selling girls, we call him a pimp. Put him in a suit and stick him in a licensed lap dance club and we call him a businessman. He’s just a pimp in a suit.”

The Labour Party has trouble ahead if Wilson gets elected. Surely, there can be no room in leftist politics for the support of a trade built on some of the worst exploitation of women on the planet?

Why is anti-feminism always assumed to be a domain of the Right? Clearly, the far-Right hates feminism, because its members hate women and consider us inferior and good for nothing but breeding, cleaning and sex, but most young people in the UK today are on the Left. How then, is the current wave of mainstream misogyny being fed by the alt-Right?

I would wager that a hatred of feminists in the current climate is being fuelled by leftist men who claim to be “on the right side of history” but are, in fact, misogynists dressed up as progressives. Take Owen Jones, using his Guardian platform to regularly stick the boot into feminists who are fighting to retain sex-based rights. In one article, he dismissed my 40 years of activism to end male violence against women and girls, and reduced me to an anti-trans campaigner. This merry band of leftist puppets would have it that those many thousands of women attending public meetings to discuss the potential clash of rights between trans people and natal women if self-identification is introduced in Britain, are also, by default, homophobic bigots.

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Feminists that campaign against abuse in the global sex trade are labelled as White Feminists, and, whether they are white or not, racist. No matter how many times black and brown feminists refuse to capitulate to the version of feminism that benefits men a damn sight more than it does women, they are vilified by the super-woke and publicly ‘cancelled’ – social media’s version of witch burning.

When Vice, which has run an article entitled Ban Sex Work? Fuck off, White Feminism published a piece on the murder of the schoolgirl Charlene Downes, based on my investigation a decade ago, I was described as “The journalist Julie Bindel – these days better known for her divisive views on trans issues.” In one sentence, my entire body of work over the past 40 years, including four books on feminism, thousands of articles on rape, domestic violence, child abuse, and trafficking of women, and travelling the world to investigate human rights abuses, is reduced to my views on transgender ideology.

Then there are brilliant feminists, such as the Canadian writer Meghan Murphy being pushed off Twitter. Murphy’s crime? Pointing out that a man who calls himself Jessica Yaniv was a biological male with a penis. Why was that necessary? Because Yaniv had filed complaints against 16 self-employed female beauticians in Vancouver (primarily from ethnic and religious minorities) for refusing to treat his scrotum to a ‘Brazilian wax’.

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Countless other feminists, many of whom do amazing work on behalf of the most abused and disenfranchised women and girls on the planet, have also been kicked off Twitter, for ‘misgendering’ men who identify as women. This means that the voices of those perfectly reasonable feminists are being drowned out by a chorus of men who like nothing better than women being silenced in the name of progressive wokeness.

Is it any wonder that so many young people watching this debate unfold want nothing to do with feminism, painted as a movement of bigots, transphobes and homophobes hell-bent on abusing an oppressed group, as opposed to liberating women? The most widely used slur to describe people thought to be anti-trans is Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist (Terf). Not, you may notice, “violent men”, the group most likely to hate and attack transgender people, but feminists.

There is a war against feminists in the UK, and the so-called progressives are the ones throwing the grenades.

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I am writing a book on feminism, exploring how so many young women are being sold a version of a glorious liberation movement that is the opposite of reality. During the 50-plus interviews I have done so far, I have been told by women from a range of backgrounds and circumstances that they feel under pressure to sign up to fun feminism, support “sex work”, stripping, porn, and to chant the mantra, “trans women are women!” They are being groomed into hating actual feminism, and adopting a faux-version that does not challenge men at all.

Male Left-wing misogynists who hate feminism are too cowardly and inadequate to be open about it, and would rather rebrand feminism to suit them. The young women who dare to challenge them are exiled. And in the meantime, those of us slogging our guts out to end the global pandemic of sexual and domestic violence, which every woman and girl on the planet fears – and, all too often, experiences – are being painted as reactionary bigots.

Women need feminism, and I will continue to support and mentor young women resisting the dudes trying to indoctrinate them about what type of feminism is ‘acceptable’. Men on the Right are not, in my view, ever going to be feminist allies, but nothing is as pernicious as a sheep in woke clothing.

It was with this in mind that SPACE International, set up by Irish sex trade survivors who believe that prostitution is a cause and consequence of women’s oppression, organised the world’s first conference exploring racism in the sex trade.

‘Women of Colour against the Sex Trade’, held in London’s Conway Hall was a sell-out event, attended by women (and a smattering of men) of all ages and ethnicities. As one of the organisers I was mindful of the risk of protest. Not, as you might think, by thuggish racists, or pimps protecting their business model, but from self-identified ‘progressives’ such as the International Union of Sex Workers, one of the many fake “sex worker’s rights” unions. Thankfully, the protesters did not turn up, as they did at my book launch in 2017 – trying to shut down the voices of black and brown sex trade survivors is rarely a good look.

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Nevertheless, the fashionable, ‘woke’ position taken by many white, middle-class students and other young people is “sex work is work”. According to this ideology, to be anti-prostitution is to practise “White Feminism”.

How can feminists support an industry which is, in the main, controlled by rich, powerful men? One that relies on exploitation of the poorest, most disenfranchised women and girls, in particular from developing and war-torn countries, to maintain its flow. In wealthy countries such as the UK, demand for prostitution leads to women and girls being trafficked in from South East Asia, West Africa, and Eastern Europe. How can the Left claim to be all for liberating oppressed peoples and yet support the most exploitative industry on the planet?

At Conway Hall the atmosphere was electric as the speakers explained with passion and honesty why the sex trade has to be shut down. More than half of the speakers had escaped prostitution, and the others supported women and girls caught up in sexual exploitation.

Ne’cole Daniels, an African-American sex trade survivor who works with at-risk women and girls in California told the rapt audience: “The sex trade is built on racism. Black women are paid less [than their white counterparts], and treated even worse.”

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Bridget Perrier is a Native Canadian activist who was pimped into prostitution aged 12. Eventually, after years of abuse and degradation, Perrier escaped, going on to set up the feminist abolitionist organisation Sex Trade 101. Perrier recounted how, during a previous debate, a member of the pro-prostitution lobby group the English Collective of Prostitutes, accused her of  having “blood on her hands” because she campaigns to introduce laws that criminalise the men who pay for sex.

The ECP argue that going after the punters means the men will be more nervous and potentially more violent. But countries that have introduced this law have found the opposite to be true – men are deterred, and women are able to be supported by police if they encounter a dodgy buyer because she is no longer seen as the criminal, he is.

At Conway Hall, Perrier spoke of how she is raising the daughter of one of the victims of the serial killer Robert Pickton, a Canadian farmer convicted of murdering 69 indigenous prostituted women. “It’s not stigma that kills our women, or laws,” she almost shouted, “it’s the men who buy us.”

When legalisation of the sex trade is so lauded by the woke crowd, hearing from the likes of the anti-trafficking activist Roëlla Lieveld is crucial. The founder of Share Network, an organisation based in Amsterdam that campaigns against trafficking and the sex trade, Lieveld says that the majority of prostituted women displayed like meat in the windows of Amsterdam’s brothels are from Romania and West Africa. There are so few Dutch-born women selling sex that pimps put stickers with the Dutch flag or “NL” (Netherlands) in the window for advertising purposes.

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Vednita Carter, an African-American sex-trade abolitionist who in 1996 set up Breaking Free, a support service for women and girls in prostitution in Minneapolis. “Black women are at the bottom of society’s barrel,” Carter told Conway Hall. “If you refuse to stand with us to condemn prostitution, you can no longer say, ‘Sisterhood is powerful’. You would be betraying us if you support the buying and selling of the bodies of black women and girls.” The white, Leftists supporting campaigns such as Black Lives Matter need to have a think about the lives of the black women being exploited in the sex trade.

Suzanne Jay, of the Asian Women for Equality Society, described the history of male exploitation of women of colour. “US soldiers in the Philippines described the women they exploited as ‘little brown fucking machines’.” Jay spoke of the “comfort women system”, an abhorrent Japanese practice of keeping women under conditions of sexual slavery for use by army troops. The practice began prior to the Second World War and lasted well over 15 years and the countries in which it operated spanned the breadth of Japan’s wartime empire in the Asia-Pacific region. The US military even re-enacted the system during the post-war years when it occupied Japan.

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And sexual exploitation in developing countries by military personnel continues today – among UN peacekeepers the issue is endemic and routine. Prostitution is built on inequality, and there is nothing as stark as the power imbalance between impoverished women of colour in developing countries, and the white male saviours supposedly there to help. Some punters I have interviewed have even had the nerve to tell me that paying desperately poor women for sex is an act of kindness, because at least they get to eat.

In the words of the Irish sex-trade survivor Rachel Moran, in response to the head of Human Rights Watch who was suggesting that “sex work” is better than going hungry: “Wouldn’t you say, if a person cannot afford to feed herself, the appropriate thing to put in their mouth is food, not your cock?” Those woke men and women who embrace the view that prostitution is “sex work”, and a genuine choice for women, should think about Moran’s words.