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.

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.

His date (Sandra Bullock) recoils: “Ew! Disgusting! You mean…” — she can barely say it without gagging — “…fluid transfer?!”

This scene isn’t exactly pivotal to the movie, but with time it’s come to seem significant. “Rampant exchange of bodily fluids was one of the major reasons for the downfall of society,” Sandra Bullock says, explaining that the practice — which includes not only sex but kissing — has been outlawed in the name of safety. In our future, human touch has been deemed a luxury no enlightened society can afford.

Obviously, our own attempts at social engineering haven’t reached the point of outlawing physical contact, although the height of the Covid pandemic brought us remarkably and sometimes hilariously close. Remember when a Canadian Center for Disease Control recommended that couples have sex through glory holes to avoid breathing on each other? And yet, that instinct towards safetyism is one to which human beings have always been susceptible — and one that’s visible today in our ongoing attempts to streamline, organise, automate and make frictionless all the parts of life that used to be messy.

The vacuum left by the decline of old-fashioned dating and relationshipping, the kind that involved meeting someone in person and experiencing the exciting chemical process known as “hitting it off”, has been filled by a fair amount of explicitly anti-social behaviour as people eschew, or even fear, the possibility of making a connection without the intermediary of a screen. Meanwhile, the lure of the online world and its peculiar system of rewards has upended the etiquette surrounding romantic entanglements, particularly when it comes to being gracious with and about rejection. It is not frowned upon, for instance, to publicly share and mock the awkward messages men send to hopeful matches on dating apps.

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The more we delegate to the apps and the algorithms, the more we swipe and tap our screens, the less we ever actually touch anything else, including each other. In lieu of connection, what we increasingly have are services, which offer a safe, controlled facsimile of the real thing. A lot of these are also online: there are the camgirls who perform for a faceless crowd of observers, all competing for their attention through donations. There are the OnlyFans performers who offer the illusion of an intimate online connection in exchange for cash. There are virtual chatbots who will role-play as your girlfriend and talk to you for hours; some of them are even AI clones of real people.

But most interesting, and most controversial, are the services that simulate intimacy face-to-face and skin-to-skin. In the past, a person aching to be touched by another human being would make do with massage or having a stranger shampoo her hair; now, there’s a booming cottage industry of professional cuddlers who will hold you (or just hold your hand) for about $100 per hour. One, recently profiled in the New Yorker, has a menu of 80 different positions to choose from and says that the country is suffering from an epidemic of “skin hunger” in the wake of the pandemic — though he skirts the question of whether said hunger can truly be satisfied by this sort of transactional intimacy. All he knows is, his clients keep coming back.

A professional cuddle is safe and certified, but also explicitly non-sexual. For those who want more, who desire the intimacy but not the risks or vulnerability or self-doubt of a sexual relationship, there’s a whole new category of sex therapist, one who will not only discuss the physical act of love, but actually do it with you — at least sometimes, at least for a while. Their patients are people who struggle with physical intimacy, perhaps due to disability, military injury or gender transition. They call themselves “surrogate partners”.

A New York Times article about the practice is at pains to explain that they are not prostitutes, but nor are they just therapists. What they offer is something like psychology with a dash of sex work, with elements of self-improvement and skill-building. To me, they seem like a sort of sexual sensei, the equivalent of a fencing coach who has to spar with his client to help them improve their game. But also the word, surrogate, means substitute or replacement, and a central tenet of these relationships is that they’ll eventually end — that the surrogate partner will be replaced by a real one.

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Here, there seems to be something of a catch-22: how well do the teachings of a paid sexual sensei translate in real-world relationships? By the time you’ve hired one of these therapists to teach you how to have a normal sex life, don’t you sort of definitionally not have one? When you find a real partner, do you tell them about the sex therapy you’ve had, as you might discuss your sexual history — or keep it to yourself, as you might the intricacies of your medical one?

But the question of whether surrogate partners are effective is less interesting than the question of how they came to exist, what societal void they’re filling. Obviously, there’s always been a market for people who are willing to trade sex for money — but again, these are not prostitutes. (As one of the profiled therapists notes, sex workers do not generally require you to attend months of therapy before sleeping with you.) Their appeal, their purpose, must be something else. Maybe it’s this: they make formal and transactional what is, by nature, unpredictable and messy.

A surrogate partner will never ghost you, never blindside you with an “it’s not you it’s me” breakup; “sessions,” the New York Times notes, “are typically held weekly, in one to two-hour meetings until all three” — that is, the client, referring therapist, and surrogate —”agree that the therapy is complete.”

In this way, surrogate partners seem to be a product of a broad cultural desire to organise every emotionally risky endeavour into a rules-based framework that makes it safe — from refereeing the conflicts of children during their parent-organised playdates to making spontaneous flirtation taboo (“I didn’t consent to being asked out!”). We’re not quite at the point of finding the unbridled human experience revolting, or trying to make it illegal, but there does seem to be an emerging consensus that fumbling around in the sexual realm, be it literally or figuratively, is dangerous.

The controlled, controllable, bought-and-paid-for version of intimacy offered by professional cuddlers and surrogate partners is arguably one example of mitigating that danger. Another, perhaps, is the incursion into ordinary relationships of therapy-speak, which simultaneously obscures and exacerbates whatever actual conflicts a couple might have. A scroll through TikTok or Instagram reveals that normal dating and relationships have been all but pathologised, the conversation surrounding them rife with “red flags” and “triggers” and “boundaries” — the latter often used to describe things that might have once been called “preferences”.

In one recent and remarkable example, the actor Jonah Hill was accused of “coercive control” (note: still more therapy-speak) after his ex leaked a years-old text message in which he described his desire for her not to post bikini pictures on Instagram as one of his “boundaries”. On the one hand, the whole incident was just a piece of not-particularly-salacious celebrity gossip; on the other, it does reveal the mechanisms by which we try to protect ourselves from our own human messiness. To speak of boundaries in this context implies a sort of moral righteousness — the kind associated with the phrase “doing the work” — even as you seek to exert undue control over another person’s choices. It also implies that this is a high-stakes conflict in which the very integrity of one’s person is at risk. Yet scratch the surface of Hill’s so-called boundaries, and what do you find? Jealousy, plain and simple.

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Of course, it’s not hard to figure out why someone would prefer to frame this as a conversation about boundaries instead of one about jealousy. Boundaries are enlightened, elevated, therapeutic. Jealousy is ugly, and unpleasant, and ordinary.

And so is loneliness.

Here is where, I think, the worlds of therapy-speak and surrogate partners and professional cuddlers collide: people don’t want to feel bad. They especially don’t want to feel bad about themselves. And channeling our feelings of humiliation or loneliness or jealousy through a different framework, be it therapeutic or transactional, allows us to pretend that they’re something other than what they really are. To hold them at a clinical distance. To experience them as an inoffensive copy of a copy of a copy of the real thing.

It’s an understandable impulse, not to want to wade around in the mess. And maybe for some people, the ones who might never otherwise experience intimacy at all, the ones who fear losing control too much to ever allow themselves to be vulnerable, these risk-free relationships — or the illusion thereof — are as good as it gets. But it’s hard not to notice that, like the VR sex helmets in Demolition Man, the safe and transactional version of intimacy has a way of making everything a little bit less human — including ourselves.

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. 

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.

And what are we to make of the fact that “exploitation” can mean many things at once? If stripper and customer exist in symbiosis, both taking advantage and being taken advantage of all at once, what then? Exploitation can be a means of self-advancement. It can be morally neutral. It can be mutual. It might, in fact, be none of our business.

A recent book, Wanting You to Want Me, examines these questions (among others) through the eyes of the strippers themselves, with photos and first-hand narratives from more than a dozen women who have been — and in some cases, remain — employed in the industry. When I wrote last month about the current glut of stripper-themed literature, which uses the profession as a platform for everything from activist organising to business strategy, I singled out Wanting You To Want Me as compelling, unvarnished, and unique in its willingness to dwell in the self-contradictory nuances of these women’s lives:

“There are no easy answers here, no unified narrative. But there is honesty: about how stripping can be a source of both shame and freedom at the same time, about the diversity of relationships that incubate within the confines of a strip club, about wanting to stop but also not wanting to, about the rapid-onset despair that comes when the fantasy can no longer sustain itself.”

I praised Wanting You to Want Me as a book that doesn’t try to sell anything. It didn’t occur to me, until I heard from one of the women featured in its pages, that it might be exploitive in an entirely different way — not because it was selling something, but because it had stolen something.

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Who wants to be a stripper?

By Kat Rosenfield

Bex is one of more than a dozen women whose image and words were used in Wanting You to Want Me, but even within the pages of the book, she stands out: ballerina thin, with razor-sharp cheekbones and a wild cascade of loose, brown curls. She has an angular, elegant look that runs counter to the stereotypical image of someone in her industry, and which made her something of a star in high-class Parisian clubs when she first began stripping at the age of 20. In the book, she’s photographed wearing black, lacy lingerie and a pair of black, thigh-high stockings — or, in one case, just the stockings — and a confident, slightly aloof expression on her face. One gets the sense that this is a woman who never feels naked, even when she’s nude.

And yet, she tells me, this book rattled her. It was a level of exposure she wasn’t prepared for, and didn’t agree to.

Bex’s path through the world of stripping is a blast to read about. In Paris she partied with famous footballers; in London, she was based in a slightly dilapidated club, where the changing room doubles as a repository for dysfunctional kitchen appliances. But what matters is that she’s a career stripper, and unlikely to ever do anything else. Partly, it’s that she’s unsuited to office life; partly, it’s that she just likes stripping. “It’s a job you’ll only do well at if you enjoy it on some level,” she says, and Bex has definitely done well.

Bex doesn’t like the term “sex work”, not least because strippers by definition don’t have sex with their clients. The men who frequent strip clubs are paying not for physical intimacy but the fantasy thereof, the thrill of that sexually-charged moment in which something could happen (but never does). “I usually call myself a performer,” she says, and part of that performance is the creation of boundaries. Not just no touching (that cardinal strip club rule), but no sharing, no intimacy, no letting her clients pay their way into her personal life.

“When people have information on you, you’re giving them power,” she explains. “I’m always thinking about doing my job. The minute you start to think that you’re just a friend, you’re having a chat — you’re not. You’re acting.”

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Bex has diligently maintained a separation between the person she is onstage or in a private dance room — who she describes as bossy and dominant — and her whole, vulnerable, slightly eccentric self. But it was the latter person whose words have been reproduced in Wanting You to Want Me, and her willingness to let her guard down stemmed from a sense that the project was informal and extracurricular: the author was someone she knew, a fellow member of London’s relatively small community of strippers, and the interview from which her portions of the book were derived was presented to her as “a casual thing between friends”.

“This sounds really naive now, and it probably was — but I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal,” she says.

Bex’s conviction that she was contributing to something small and frivolous — more like a pamphlet than a hardcover book from a big-name publisher — might have been misplaced, but it was also understandable. She’d done media before, including a radio interview with the BBC, and had a working knowledge of its professional norms: “They just use a couple paragraphs, and you don’t hear much more about it.” Also, perhaps most importantly, these projects typically paid her for her time.

The authors of Wanting You to Want Me did not. Bex’s interview took place at her own home, without remuneration, and caught her at a bad time: it was early 2020, London was going into lockdown, and the sudden loss of income had thrown her into a state of panic. She did the interview, then forgot about it — until two years later, when the book landed on her doorstep.

To write nonfiction is to tell other people’s stories. There’s no getting around this, and it can be fraught, especially when we take it upon ourselves to capture a story that is fascinating and true but not necessarily flattering to the person at its centre. But Wanting You to Want Me arguably goes a step beyond this: when Bex opened the book, she found her interview reproduced more or less verbatim, including some comments she desperately wished she’d had the opportunity to edit.

“I wouldn’t have gone in and nitpicked and changed all of my story,” she says. “I stand by the things that I say. Some of the things I’ve said are outrageous, and that’s fine.”

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What she would have changed were one or two sentences that had the potential to damage her professionally, or to affect her relationship with her colleagues in the club — and she was shocked that the authors hadn’t given her the chance to review her comments before sending them to print. “We all say stupid things, and you don’t expect them to be made permanent. I don’t want anyone to be hurt by something I said that might potentially be on the shelves at Waterstones for years to come.”

That neither authors nor publisher considered giving the women whose stories formed the heart of Wanting You to Want Me a chance to review their comments is perhaps a hazard of the current culture, in which stripping can now serve as a launchpad to greater things: activism, business, journalism, writing. In the book’s introduction, the authors position the project as something at once unprecedented and noble: giving voice to the voiceless, telling the untold, opening the door to a secret, seedy, and oftentimes sad little world of invisible women.

The more stripping comes to seem like a cool accessory — something with which to burnish your resume and make yourself look more interesting than the average MBA-seeker — the easier it is to forget that for women like Bex, stripping is their job. One that requires, among other things, an absolutely iron grip on what you allow other people to see. Without the ability to control what she puts out there, Bex can’t make a living; her depiction in Wanting You to Want Me wrested away that control in a way that threatened to undermine her professionally, that blurred the carefully-crafted boundaries she’d put up between her real life and her life on stage.

That the women they interview needed to return to work after sharing their stories — and that a stripper might have a professional reputation which she needs to preserve in order to stay employed — seems not to have occurred to the authors of book.

“I felt weirdly reduced,” Bex says. “It’s like, here’s a book about strippers. They put a label on it, and it felt so final, this narrow identity. It’s a performance, and it’s a part of my life, but this made it seem like it defined my life.”

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It was also, arguably, something akin to robbery. Having pivoted to online camming during the pandemic, Bex has come to understand that her time, and her stories, can be even more valuable than her body when it comes to earning a living. “Those are the kind of things that people ask me all day long on webcam, and they pay me a lot of money to hear those stories.”

The fact that the authors and publisher of Wanting You To Want Me packaged those same stories into a book without paying the women who shared them — and that the book itself was marketed as some sort of noble, photojournalistic art project to which they should have felt honoured to contribute — felt both deeply exploitive and uniquely demoralising. “This was the first time I got scammed,” she says, “and it was by someone I considered a friend.”

Even more than the book itself, the story of how it came to be highlights the tension inherent to working as a stripper, the precarious balancing act it requires, and the hypocrisy of avowedly pro-sex-work people who manage to dismiss and devalue that work even as they profit from it. A book like Wanting You to Want Me requires hours and hours of interviews — which is to say, hours and hours of time that the women in its pages spent talking about their work for free, when they might have been working. The activists, artists, and media figures who use strippers or sex workers to advance a narrative — and with that narrative, their own interests — may not be engaged in the same type of advantage-taking as the men who pay for their services, but it’s exploitation all the same.

And as for Bex, one gets the sense that this will be the first and last time she allows someone else to leverage her stories for their own self-advancement. The people she’s friends with now, she says, “don’t have an agenda. they’re not trying to write a book about me. They don’t need me for photo shoots. They don’t want me to come along on a political march. They don’t need me to sign a petition.”

And while this experience hasn’t turned her off from stripping, it has led her to guard that part of her life more carefully — not because she’s ashamed of it, but because it belongs to her and nobody else.

But the days when feminists were largely against porn are a distant memory. With the rise of the Christian Right in the Eighties — and the rise of home video — so-called “sex-positive feminism” won the day. As a popular Ellen Willis line went: “In practice, attempts to sort out good erotica from bad porn inevitably comes down to ‘What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic.’” In this view, pornography wasn’t about social issues such as the eroticisation of violence against women or their submission, economic and physical. It was just about, well, “what turns you on”.

This view is a pretty simplistic one. As Amia Srinivasan observes in The Right to Sex, it’s not like our desires come inborn, just waiting for their validation and release by streaming. Instead, porn sites — algorithmically overdetermined, like everything else dependent on online ad sales — push site-goers to eroticise whatever’s getting the most hits in their area. Most often, it’s pretty harrowing stuff.

One might object to this state of affairs. The porn industry is worth almost $100 billion worldwide; it is the way most boys and many girls are first exposed to sex in the developed world, and often at preteen ages. Performers are rampantly abused, and women mostly age out by their twenties. Many posit a connection between porn consumption and sexual dysfunction and body dysmorphia. Only the most naive would deny that women feel pressured to accommodate an androcentric ideal of behaviour, and that pornography partakes of and amplifies that pressure.

But despite a recent spate of critiques of “sex-positive” liberal feminism, few today really condemn porn. Co-opted and defanged like so many countercultural movements of the Sixties, feminism has now generally settled into uncritical embrace of choice, wary to articulate any theory of good, bad, or even fair sex beyond the presence of “consent”. This liberal, legalistic framework is something of a fiction, of course; much as the underdogs in capitalism are treated as giving free and informed consent even under the most dire economic duress, women today are treated as giving consent even when their wishes are as minimised and obscured as ever. But the imperative of sex-positive feminism is to not question women’s desires, but instead take them at their word.

Hence the strange case of Pleasure, the feature debut of Swedish director Ninja Thyberg, for which I had high hopes: it is perhaps the most widely released film about porn to actually go “behind the scenes”, hand sanitiser and all. By delving into the actual production of all those mountains of mysterious videos, Thyberg handles a subject ripe for a critical perspective. As lead Sofia Kappel told the Guardian, “I think the porn industry as a subject is very interesting since it’s very present in our lives but we don’t talk about it. We act like it doesn’t exist.”

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She’s right. But a promising subject is no guarantee of artistic success. Pleasure, praised to the sky by major critics, is less a work of art than a piece of self-defeating propaganda. It is an attempt at a pro-porn feminist flick that is so violent, so thin, and so degrading for creators and viewers alike, that Thyberg may have inadvertently created one of the greatest arguments yet against so-called sex-positive feminism.

Thyberg is a former anti-porn activist, and Pleasure is an adaptation of her 2013 Cannes short portraying the violent pressuring of a woman performer into an extreme act. As one might expect, its plot reads like an after-school special. Bella Cherry, an attractive 19-year-old Swede with virtually no backstory, personality, or desires, comes to California to enter the porn industry. In short order, she’s pressured into BDSM and then an even more extreme act before, in her own words, being “raped for hours” and finally quasi-assaulting a more attractive rival. She ends up so sickened with herself she crawls out of her limo onto a crowded LA freeway.

But as she has exhaustingly demonstrated on the press circuit, Thyberg has squarely imbibed the dogma of non-judgment. Explaining to the Guardian that she’s changed from anti-porn to judgment-free, she says, “The things that [Bella’s] going through that are bad in the film don’t have anything to do with having sex on camera.” In a New York Times profile, Thyberg declares that “Bad things happen, but it’s not because people are having sex on camera… Abuses of power exist in all workplaces.” To HuffPost: “[Bella is] sometimes the victim or in the bottom of some kind of hierarchy, but sometimes she’s also the one in the top.”

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Reviewers have praised Pleasure as a triumph of even-handedness. In its glowing piece, titled “She’s a Go-Getter”, the New York Times tells us that “women make porn and women watch it, and for different reasons, including because they like it. Because it’s their choice.” The LA Times similarly observes that “Thyberg does well to withhold judgment, approaching the porn industry not as an evil.” Mechanically drawing on the word bank of liberal feminism (“affirming”, “sex-positive”, “consent”, “non-judgmental”), NPR praises a scene where a female director has the lead tied up in rope, ball-gagged, and beaten by her easy-going male costar.

But no one unfitted with blinders could see this as anything other than an anti-porn film. Pleasure’s script is a string of feminist clichés set against scenes of violence, exploitation, and entrapment that collapse the shaky, pro-porn myth of free choice they rest on. Indeed, one wonders whether Thyberg may have been pressured to market the film for a sex-positive age.

In Bella’s first shoot, she meets the counterpart to her “teen” role — a fat, much older man, in what’s essentially a babysitter scene — and while preparing in the bathroom, has a panic attack. The director and crew tell her that she simply has “stage fright” and that “when you’re doing anything for the first time, it’s normal to feel nervous”. They successfully pressure her back on stage. Her final, post-coital triumph involves smearing the desideratum all over her face and posting selfies to Instagram with the hashtag #proudslut. Driving her back to her model house, a male porn star asks her how she got into this industry. “Well, my dad raped me…” she begins to joke in remarkably bad taste, before he tells her to shut up. Then she provides the right answer: “I just want to fuck!”

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But for all her claims to concupiscence, neither she nor any other character in this film has any amorous or even amicable relationships: they have sex on camera, in scenes that, from that first one on, are consistently horrifying, and none of which seems entirely “voluntary”. If Bella really just wants to have sex, as she repeats again and again, why does she freeze up before every scene? And why does her vision go fuzzy during every shoot, even the “feminist” one? How, after she is “raped for hours”, can she possibly be saying to her agent that she does porn because “it’s a lot of fun”? How does her triumph over a prettier rival consist of sexually brutalising her? How can the conclusion of a pro-porn film involve the protagonist jumping out a limo in shame?

How is this not satire?

Despite herself, Thyberg has made an allegory for the central contradiction of “sex work is work”: it may be work, but sex is also the main human conduit for intimacy and mutual desire, and its alienation in a free market makes it all the more difficult for one to say what they really feel or desire. Bella’s only consolation is the hope of online stardom, which doesn’t seem to be coming. All she’s done is become a monster.

In her interviews, Thyberg has said that the film was about how abuses in porn stem from capitalism and patriarchy. But is a heterosexual BDSM scene with a female tied up and gagged, so long as it’s filmed by a woman, really all feminism can aspire to?

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To Thyberg’s credit, she does emphasise the more craven side of the industry: the pressure to go extreme to get bookings, the pressure to follow through to get paid, the way Bella’s darker-skinned roommate is dismissed as “trailer trash” and abused on set. But in her attempts to withhold judgment, Thyberg has landed in unsettling and unsatisfying territory: there are clearly attempts to make porn seem fun — that Instagram post, that nice female director, that pool party — but the bits of economic reality she allows in reveal those touches as the hollow ornaments they are. “Abuses of power happen in all workplaces”, but in no other industry but prostitution do people’s rent cheques depend on a woman submitting to violent sex acts with strangers, driven by the ever-more-extreme tastes of audiences at home.

Bella Cherry doesn’t have any trauma, apparently. But nor does she have any joy, any desire, or, after the first few minutes, much of any hope. Ultimately, Pleasure is unable or unwilling to develop a positive theory of why she wants any of this, or why anyone wants any of this. Thyberg has said that she wanted to show what Bella “gets out” of porn; to show the moments where she’s on “top”. But even at her highest moment, she is merely a blank face, insecure and overwhelmed, sticking her tongue out at her iPhone as strangers wash up a few feet away. And that is its own judgment.

Today, the veils and jewels have been replaced by fishnet body stockings and six-inch lucite heels, but the intrigue surrounding strippers remains — as does society’s conflicted relationship with them. These women (and they’re almost always women) inspire a mess of competing sentiments: we pity them. We envy them. We want to help them and also just want them, sometimes at the same time. Against a modern-day backdrop of shifting sexual mores, strippers occupy the dual archetype of cautionary tale and aspirational figure, fallen woman and girlboss. They are the living embodiment of feminist agency, but also agents of the patriarchy. That the strippers themselves tend to disagree on all of the aforementioned points makes things even more complicated.

Meanwhile, the eternal fascination with sex-adjacent professions — strippers, phone sex operators, and, lately, the online purveyors of self-produced porn on OnlyFans — periodically coalesces into a pop cultural moment. The last one, in the mid-Nineties, gave us a glut of films including Showgirls, Striptease, Spike Lee’s Girl 6 — and, in an entertaining riff on the intersection of objectification and emasculation, The Full Monty. In keeping with the more purity-centric conventions of the time, these stories were mainly warnings: taking one’s clothes off for money was an inherently undignified enterprise, the purview of desperate women (or, in the case of The Full Monty, recently unemployed steel workers) faced with the choice to strip or starve.

Now, 30 years later, the wave of stripper content appears to be cresting again, this time in the form of multiple memoirs from current or former strippers, and this time without the implied subtext that these are the stories of fallen women. Genre-wise, the books run the gamut: Wanting You To Want Me, by Bronwen Parker-Rhodes and Emily Dinsdale, is a collection of first-person narratives and photographs from more than a dozen strippers, many still employed in the industry. The Ethical Stripper, by Stacey Clare, is a pro-sex-work, pro-labour argument steeped in the language and politics of contemporary social justice activism. Paulina Tenner’s Laid Bare: What the Business Leader Learnt From the Stripper is a run-of-the-mill business book dressed up in nipple tassels and a thong.

The only thing any of these titles have in common is a nominal (and in the case of Laid Bare, painfully contrived) connection to stripping. And yet, this loose mutual affiliation is also the most striking thing about them: that in our present moment, what used to be considered a dead-end job for desperate women might now also be a launchpad to greater things, at least for those with the means to make it so. Both Stacey Clare and Paulina Tenner are strip club veterans, now leveraging that experience to become thought leaders in activism and corporate strategy, respectively. Their credibility is burnished, not diminished, by their affiliation with what is still understood by many to be a seedy, exploitive industry.

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It’s worth asking whether this credibility is deserved. For Tenner, the stripper connection feels desperately gimmicky — “In many ways company culture, no matter how evolved, is like a stripper’s arse,” reads one chapter opener — and only serves to highlight the relative dullness of the subject matter. (Despite the author’s best attempts to dress it up, the truth is that company culture is a great deal less interesting than a stripper’s rear end.) For Clare, the connection between the world of stripping and her central subject — the movement for sex workers’ rights — is both more organic and better executed. Her book artfully interweaves education with titillation, offering a detailed history of sex work activism in the UK alongside anecdotes from her own experience in strip clubs. That this narrative strategy in itself mirrors the push-pull of a striptease can’t be an accident: Clare clearly knows how to keep an audience’s attention.

And yet The Ethical Stripper is, in certain ways, even more tortured and grotesque than Laid Bare when it comes to massaging the truth. In service of its argument for fully legalised sex work, Clare dwells at length upon the labour issues inherent to stripping as a trade — including brutish club owners, exploitive business practices, and coercive customers — yet doesn’t engage with the potentially fraught nature of the work itself. In one anecdote about her experience with badly-behaved men at strip clubs, Clare writes of being “pretty much coerced” into a full-contact lap dance with a patron (in violation of the strip club’s cardinal “no touching” rule), yet her scorn is directed not at him but at the policies that constrained them both: “I consented because in truth I actually prefer giving full-contact dances, so it never feels like a violation, but I took a risk by breaking the rules of the club on my first night. It was a perfect example of how consent  is undermined time after time by the economic context of the business model the industry is built on.”

Meanwhile, the notion that being paid to simulate sexual intimacy with strangers night after night might do something to a person is simply absent. And in lieu of reckoning with it, Clare tends to fall back on the rote identitarianism that has come to dominate so many progressive spaces. What might have been a compelling discussion of workers’ rights in an industry that is historically, and perhaps innately, hostile to women instead becomes a bunch of empty bluster about the importance of “the narrative”, the scourge of “whorephobia”, and the “appropriation” of “sex worker culture” by drive-by eroticists with (pun intended) no skin in the game.

It’s deeply strange to encounter this particular form of cultural gatekeeping amid what is supposed to be a conversation about worker’s rights: everyone from investigative journalists to Hollywood writers to practitioners of pole-dancing as a form of fitness are dinged for encroaching on stripping as if it were a protected identity category rather than what progressives insist it is: work. In an extended lament over the film Hustlers, Clare complains not only that its promotional events exploited strippers, but that the plot (based on a true story about NYC strippers who drugged their clients with MDMA and ketamine and then robbed them blind while they were passed out) would only create more stigma against sex workers.

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But then, to focus at such length on offences given by a movie is a luxury in itself — which somewhat undermines Clare’s argument that strippers like herself represent an important faction within the larger category of marginalised persons known as sex workers. Publishing a book at all, let alone complaining within it that a Hollywood film failed to adequately represent your culture, implies a certain degree of privilege. But more than that, Clare fudges the lines between stripping and other, more dangerous forms of sex work in a way that feels a bit appropriative itself.

There is no better rejoinder to this approach than the collection, Wanting You To Want Me. The book features not only first-person narratives from a variety of different strippers who wouldn’t otherwise tell their own stories, but also this line, in the introduction, which captures the inherent tension of trying to roll up stripping and escorting and porn and prostitution into one big, sloppy sex work burrito: “[Strip clubs] are a form of escapism for everyone who enters, punters and strippers alike — an an enclave of desire and disappointment.” And yet, even in an environment steeped in sexual frisson, “the encounters that take place inside have very little to do with sex”.

Indeed, stripping is one of the few forms of sex work that not only leaves sex purely in the realm of unfulfilled fantasy, but in which the lack of satisfaction is the entire point of the thing. The men who frequent strip clubs are paying explicitly to be titillated, to be teased within an inch of their lives, and then to leave, without ever having touched the object of their desire. Why? What does this say about the men, about the nature of the transaction, about what is being really being sold when money changes hands in the Champagne Room?

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And what are we to make of the fact that amid this glut of stripper-themed literature, only the women of Wanting You To Want Me — the ones who not only will never write a book but may never do any job apart from this one — are willing to dwell in the uncomfortable, unvarnished complexity of the work they do? There are no easy answers here, no unified narrative. But there is honesty: about how stripping can be a source of both shame and freedom at the same time, about the diversity of relationships that incubate within the confines of a strip club, about wanting to stop but also not wanting to, about the rapid-onset despair that comes when the fantasy can no longer sustain itself.

“Always at some point it happens that the balance tips and they want something that you can’t actually give them,” one seasoned stripper notes. “They realise that this make-believe isn’t actually gonna come true, and it becomes too sad or too pointless and hopeless.”

Of course, books like The Ethical Stripper cannot afford to be so honest. But perhaps this is the lesson: that the most compelling narrative, whether it belongs to a stripper or someone else, is one that does not seek to sell anything extra, be it a business strategy or a worthy cause. The most compelling story is just the truth: that stripping is hard, and fun, and sad, and exciting, and messy, and human, and it’s no surprise that 200,000 years later, we’re still writing songs about it.

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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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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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.

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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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.

They were from a particular subculture within the lesbian movement, known for flaunting their predilections for sadomasochism, pornography, and public sex. They were outrageous by most people’s standards — including my own. These women argued that the practice of S&M was rebellious and liberatory; that it allowed women to break free of the expectation to be sexually submissive.

Memories of it all came flooding back as I watched Rebel Dykes, a film about that particular tribe. It follows a group of close friends who met at Greenham Common peace camp and became part of that significantly rebellious lesbian subculture. There are clips of the women having public sex shows at BDSM nightclubs; marching in full regalia on anti-Thatcher rallies, and joining forces with gay men to demand action around AIDS.

Of course, my tribe of lesbians was at odds with the rebel dykes. We campaigned against male violence and abuse of women, and, like the US feminist Robin Morgan, believed that “pornography is the theory; rape is the practice”. We railed against acts of sexual sadism and fought hard to dispel the misogynistic myth that women enjoy being abused and degraded during sex. In my view, the S&M that the Rebel Dykes celebrated was simply a re-enforcement of the way violent men treat women.

For their part, they painted us as dull and sexless, dismissing us as joyless prudes. Roz Kaveney, a transwoman involved in the ‘kink’ scene back then, would mock my tribe, saying that lesbians like me thought that “holding hands in 20 different positions” was hot sex. That’s another thing that struck me about the film: the parallels between now and then. Lesbians and women who are critical of porn and S&M and sexual exploitation today are treated in exactly the same way as we were back then: portrayed as anti-sex prudes.

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The talking heads in the film have great fun re-visiting their youth, spinning tales of drunkenness, sex with multiple partners, and direct action. They talk about Greenham Common women’s peace camp, where a group of them broke into the squaddies’ bar and stole all the booze. But the film mainly focuses on the squatting culture in London, and the so-called “lesbian sex wars” that raged through the UK in the early to late Eighties. Those wars were fought over the turf of porn, kink, S&M, and public sex.

In April 1985 I went along to the very first extraordinary general meeting (EGM) of the newly founded Lesbian and Gay Centre in London. The centre should have been a haven for the entire community, with its café, bar, bookshop, creche, meeting rooms, media resource, offices for rent to lesbian and gay projects and enterprises, and a regular disco. It could not have been more perfect, on paper. But its management committee was involved in a huge dilemma. Who could use the centre, and for what, and which views would be acceptable to be aired in the premises? At that stage, the management committee was an all-white group of men and women, and they were keen to make it more accessible to a diverse crowd.

The main item on the agenda at the EGM was the S&M issue. Although the Management Committee had initially allowed groups advocating for and practicing S&M to meet at the centre, they had reversed that decision following complaints from the Lesbians Against Sadomasochism (LASM). These women objected to the sight of leather, chains and Nazi regalia in a space that was supposed to be protective of persecuted minorities. The packed meeting was extremely tense, and nothing was resolved.

The film includes fascinating, grainy footage of the event. One clip shows Linda Bellos, a black, Jewish, working-class lesbian opposing S&M ideology, while a young S&M dyke in the audience, also black and working-class, was being nudged by white women to speak up “as a black lesbian”. The attempt by both sides to use identity politics as a way to claim more credibility and ‘right to speak’ was counter-productive, as each time a Jewish woman, for example, said how offended she was at symbols of Nazi Germany (such as the peaked leather cap) being used in S&M role-play, one from the other side would claim she was ‘subverting’ its meaning.

In a subsequent meeting, the extremely polarised issue of dress codes came up. A group called the Sexual Fringe, which represented the S&M contingent, wanted an “anything goes” policy whereas the hard-core feminists wanted to ban leather jackets (something I was opposed to, on the grounds that leather jackets per se were not in any way offensive). The main topic of conversation was whether certain items of clothing and accessories could be seen as racist, fascist or antisemitic. There were some sadists who liked to lead women (who identified as masochists) around on all fours on a leash. There were others who liked to wear chains, swastikas, whips and handcuffs. This was an unusual meeting in that certain things were resolved, for once. It was agreed that the swastika should be banned, and it was also agreed, albeit grudgingly, that leading a woman around on a chain on all fours should also be banned.

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Generally, though, neither side saw eye to eye. When the fetish club Chain Reaction was opened by the S&Mers in London in 1987, home to everything from mud wrestling to exhibitionist sex shows, and strippers. LASM picketed the club. We handed out leaflets explaining why, as far as we were concerned, eroticising pain and humiliation was the very antithesis of women’s liberation. Our leaflets read: “there can be no defence of a practice which is racist, anti-Semitic and woman hating. How is this different from what men do to women?” But the party went on inside. Nothing was resolved.

At another meeting, in 1988, Joan Nestle, a “sex positive” lesbian heavily into butch/femme role play spoke. There was a massive debate between the feminists and the pro-S&Mers during that meeting, and I could see why so many were captivated by Nestle. Funny, charismatic and honest, she appealed to so many of the working-class women in the audience who felt judged by the hard-core feminists. More than once in the film, references are made to how middle class the anti-S&M feminists were in contrast to the Rebel Dykes, but this gives an inaccurate impression. I was one of many working class protesters against S&M, and the sexual libertarian movement that inspired much of the Rebel Dyke standpoint was rooted in French post-structuralism — hardly a topic for down The Dog and Duck.

The Rebel Dykes loved being provocative and bad taste riffs were common, verging on harassment. For example, when Lisa Power, a Stonewall founder who is interviewed in the film, started the lesbian sex-toy business, Thrilling Bits, she named “our smallest and most inoffensive vibrator ‘the Sheila’” after anti-porn feminist Sheila Jeffreys, which was a pretty ugly move. The black dildo in the Thrilling Bits collection was named “the Whitney”, (after Whitney Houston) but interestingly this was not mentioned in the film.

The arguments over S&M, public sex and anti-Semitism raged in America, too. I visited San Francisco in 1985, having been told that a new magazine, aimed at lesbians, had been launched into this crucible. It was called On Our Backs. The title itself was poking fun at the feminist magazine, Off Our Backs (meaning “women, there is no need to be on our backs for the patriarchy”). On Our Backs took a pro kink, pro porn stance, and featured S&M content.

I requested an interview with the editors of On Our Backs, and turned up looking like something out of Bunty magazine. In my pale blue linen trousers and white cotton blouse and Birkenstock sandals, I exuded an air of innocence that sharply contrasted with the image of the leather-clad editors. Looking me up and down, one of the women told me that she had considered asking me to pose for the magazine, but had now decided against it. I was not offended, merely relieved.

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During the conversation I asked the women if they had a line in the sand that they would not cross in terms of pornographic and sadomasochistic content. One of them gave me an example: “We had a story submitted by a woman to fantasised setting fire to her I lover, and it was very graphic, but we couldn’t decide between us whether or not it was too extreme to run it, so it is still sitting in our in-tray.” If it was not already obvious to me that there could be no peaceful coexistence between feminism and S&M practitioners, that moment crystallised it.

The film, rather than draw any conclusions about the Rebel Dyke scene is a nostalgic trip down a particular memory lane. A number of the interviewees, including Roz Kaveny and Lisa Power, are still actively campaigning to discredit feminists — in particular those of us who critique pornography, kink, and extreme trans ideology.

That’s what struck me particularly forcefully: that not much has changed. Today, feminists who oppose porn and prostitution as forms of violence against women are seen as anti-sex and ‘whorephobic’; the Queer movement is enthusiastically embracing kink as an identity as part of the alphabet soup of LGBTQQIA+. But the Rebel Dykes did not have the institutional support that the feminist hating Queer Isis of today does.

For all the S&M lesbians saw themselves (and clearly still do, going by the views expressed by the talking heads in the film) as edgy, progressive and sex-positive, they were anything but. Buying in to the misogynistic myths that women love to be hurt and humiliated during sex — that pain is erotic; that pleasure can be derived from the steel-capped boot on the neck — is nothing short of capitulating to patriarchy. I will continue to fight for the liberation of women from sexual violation, because for me, the true rebels are those who refuse to see masochism as anything to celebrate.

They were either still in college or freshly out of it. But the reason they, rather than the young man, were able to go yachting off Sardinia while sipping Dom Pérignon was because rich older men ­had hired them to come on a luxury holiday with them. The job — look hot, be nice, and be ready to accommodate more without crying assault — is called sugaring. It is — though sugar daddies or babies might not admit it — sex work. My friend betrayed no sense of surprise at the arrangement; such things had, he explained, become totally normal in his age group.

Indeed, sugar daddy-baby “arrangements” are booming, with increasing numbers of female students in the UK and US advertising on sugar websites. Unlike traditional sex work, it’s popular among young women at elite institutions; destined for fine careers, they nonetheless see it as a time-efficient way to offload student debt and, as Molly, a 22-year sugar baby who read PPE at Oxford, told me, “get a taste of luxury”. In 2019, nearly 1000 students at Cambridge were signed up to Seeking Arrangements, the top sugar-brokering site in the Anglosphere. According to the site’s 2020 annual report, the number of university students in the UK seeking a sugar daddy, or a sugar mommy, increased 36% from 2018 to 2019.

The crux of “sugaring” is hardly new, as mistresses throughout history could testify. And Gen-Z and millennials are inheriting the earth at an expensive, professionally uncertain time. Nonetheless, despite the familiarity of the trope and the clarity of the need, the rise of elite sugaring among young, extremely upwardly mobile women points to two profound and rather shocking shifts. One: that dating, with all its messiness and the in-built possibility (if things go well) of an actual relationship — complete with compromise, give and take, and real intimacy — has imploded. And two: that feminism has morphed from a movement with ideals — which envisioned, for instance, a socialist world in which women might be free from sex work — into a hard-nosed, misandric, mercenary pragmatism.

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Feminists of the first wave looked for male allies to get laws changed. Those of the second wave, freeing themselves for the first time from the trappings of normative heterosexuality, had separatist instincts. But those of the present wave see men as pathetic, selfish, hard work — and only good for two things: sex and cash.

“All the sugar babies I know consider themselves feminists,” said Molly. “But it’s more misandry than feminism. It’s ‘men are scum’. Both parties sort of despise each other.” Aria, 25, a Cornell graduate currently in law school in DC, has been on Seeking Arrangements for five years. She, too, despises her clients, telling me over WhatsApp video from a Balkan city: “Men are nothing. They’re just fucking idiots. The hardest thing about being a sugar baby is pretending to give a shit what these older men have to say. Older men are so archaic and out of it.”

For these women, the sex is the ok bit — the easy bit. Aria “can have sex with someone without having any feelings towards them. I don’t even have to like them to have sex with them. Being a sex worker: that’s nothing. I can always pretend. Sex is easy.” This sentiment, almost down to the word, is echoed among other sugar babies.

The callous terrain created by ten years of dating apps and misapplied “sex positivity” seems to have rendered physical intimacy a shiny token whose value lies in shifting the needle of power up or down, while the relationship of sex to things like romance or affection has been cauterised. Increasingly, relationships are seen as exchange mechanisms. Last week, influential sex podcaster Dan Savage reassured a well-spoken sugar baby, who had called his advice show to express worries about telling her new (real) boyfriend about her arrangement: “I think all relationships are transactional … We all pay for it. We don’t always pay for it with money. We pay with time, affection, diligence, intimacy, care. If we don’t ‘pay in’, they end.”

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In the 70s and 80s, feminist sociology focused on the extra, “emotional” labour women had to do at work (as constantly-cheerful flight attendants, for instance) or, often on top of full-time jobs, at home (as the family glue and domestic drudge). In a twisted reinterpretation of that sociology, nowadays “women my age see all relationships as sexual labour,” says Molly. “Why not get paid for it?” She points out that Twitter is full of women who think men should pay a deposit before they go on a date with them. Aria put it more scathingly still: “Men have a dearth of people they can share their feelings with… Thanks a lot toxic masculinity. So if I’m performing all this emotional labour — if I have to listen to a man complain for an hour — I should get $500.”

Sex work has been transformed, or rather wishfully squeezed, into the same category as any form of work. At the same time, all relationships have been reduced to a form of sex work. To complete the bitter triangulation, these developments are seen as compatible with empowered young womanhood. Leah, 24, another brainy American sugar baby who messaged me on Instagram from Portofino, speaks the language of ambition: “We want that financial security while we go after our goals. Everybody sells their body. Construction workers sell their bodies. What’s different?”

It is perhaps no coincidence that sugaring has flourished since the MeToo movement. Beneath the reasoning of many sugar babies’ testimonies lies a terrible disappointment with how men are, and, one might infer, a desire to be treated considerately, tenderly by them. Molly sugared because she was “broke” but “at the back of your mind you think, well, you’re going to get treated badly anyway…”

The discourse of MeToo pitches heterosexual sex as barbed power play in which young women must aggressively have, or be had. Intimacy no longer comes naturally: boundaries have had to be erected and policed, the status of sexual consent constantly monitored. Against this backdrop, sugar relationships offer something more tranquil and easy to control — something, in photographer Elysia Nicole Downing’s  words, “much easier to navigate and manage because I’m not emotionally attached, I feel whole and like my needs are being met.”

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But MeToo also had a profound effect on the professional landscape by effectively ending male-female mentoring. “A lot of older men are reluctant to reach out to you now [on a professional basis],” notes Molly, who says that the “best gift” is a man using their contacts to “get you access to an industry”. By establishing the sexual utility of the young woman and professional value of the older man at the outset, the sugaring relationship circumvents the nasty power play pinpointed by MeToo.

But this is in a way the saddest irony of all: MeToo was meant to free women in the professional sphere from being treated as objects. Instead, it seems to have encouraged them to sell their bodies for work-related advancement. Aria is happy: her sugar daddy is one of America’s top political lobbyists. From the outset, he asked: “How can I help you [professionally]?”

However lucrative, helpful, easy, or apparently “empowered”, life as a sugar baby erodes a woman’s sense of self. But if the women are losing something wholesome, the men seem to be gaining, even gobbling it. After all, sugar daddying is about more than renting a hot body. It’s also about getting a friendly, sexy therapist; someone who will listen, even nurture. Sometimes the men just want friends. Aria’s political lobbyist prefers office gossip to sex, which fades into the background when they’re together, taking up “less than five minutes” of a three-hour session.

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Aella, a versatile star on OnlyFans (the meeting-place for many babies and daddies), has described some of her relationships with clients in strikingly therapeutic terms. “These men desperately want to be valued by women,” she has said. One man just wanted to cry on her; after talking about “his life”, they:

“held each other and sobbed for a while. Then we took off our clothes and just had skin to skin contact. So we lay, intertwined, hugging and that was the entire session … He said he didn’t have any other outlet like that. From then on he would hire me about once a month and I would come see him and he would just hold me and cry.”

With top therapists charging hundreds an hour, these men are actually getting quite a good deal. For a few hundred bucks, they get emotional succour as well as sex.

Sugar babies repeatedly describe providing the same service. It seems easy: the babies I spoke to, or whose accounts I read, all said ease was their primary reason for pursuing these arrangements. But in the end the cost is high. Molly felt despair and had a breakdown after her sugar daddy paid off her student debt. She is still struggling with the long-term effects of seeing all relationships with men in terms of a sexual quid pro quo. Like Molly, I suspect, a generation of sugar babies will eventually discover that money is worth an awful lot, but it’s not worth everything.

In the Tumblr of the 2010s, quasi-Japanese imagery married pastel colours and adolescent limbs; Lana Del Rey’s fan base found itself; teen girls were identifying with “Daddy dom/little girl” relationships and adopting labels like nymphet. And it was prescient of a broader shift in pop culture, which was becoming increasingly sexually open. Fifty Shades of Grey de-mystified BDSM, giving it a veneer of the mundane. Millennials resigned themselves to hook-up culture. Vice and other hipster media outlets worked hard to glamorise sex work. Bold sexual admissions crept into everything from sitcoms to programs like The View; confessional, often deeply sexual, essays boomed in popularity.

Tumblr didn’t create this atmosphere but, by allowing seeds to germinate among young people, did help propel it forward — as it did many other now significant cultural issues. It’s been well-documented that the modern trans rights movement has roots in organising that took place on Tumblr. The platform also influenced Black Lives Matter.

But the internet shortens the life cycle of cultural moments. The boom in hypersexuality took place a decade ago; “The Man” adopted it and it stripped it of its cool factor. The pendulum is swinging. Young people feel rightfully burned by America’s imbalanced relationship with sex. A growing collection of articles, blog posts, TikToks, and popular Twitter personalities now implicitly and critical — or at least sceptical — of sex positivity, third and fourth wave feminism, as well as manifestations of both, like Brazilian Butt Lifts and fillers.

If I point this out to sex positive feminists, they’re quick to retort that purity culture has long been a mainstay of American life and has dominated public policy. They’ve got a point. The United States is a deeply conflicted country when it comes to sex — abortion and access to birth control remain hotly contested issues; accurate sex education is neither standardised nor a guarantee in public schools; untested rape kits pile up in police precincts around the country; gynaecological textbooks used in American medical schools didn’t have a full or accurate representation of the nerve endings in the clitoris until the activist Jessica Pin fought for its inclusion a few years ago.

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But ultimately, it’s not the puritans — the Republican congresspeople, abstinence-only sex ed teachers in Deep South public schools, Evangelical Christian ministers — who are setting the tone for how ordinary Americans view sex. They have their own impact, especially on the individual level. But they’re not going to drive any massive cultural shifts. It’s corporations, universities, and mass media that lead the way. Until now, they have oversaturated popular culture with sexuality. In the coming years, could they give birth to a counterculture reacting against the Sexual Revolution?

Of course, there have already been myriad attempts, outside of Evangelical purity culture and Right-wing politics, to dampen sex positivity. Famous radical feminists like Germaine Greer have been deeply critical of so-called “sexual liberation,” prostitution, and pornography. There have been less well-known movements, like True Love Revolution at Harvard — a pro-chastity movement critical of hook-up culture, set up by student Julie Fredell in 2008. At Princeton, there’s the Anscombe Society, a similar student organisation that preaches the sanctity of sex. At the University of Texas, graduate student Ryan Hacker began his own chapter of the Anscombe Society, and led several protests about a wide range of issues on the subject of modesty. There was Wendy Shalit’s books Girls Gone Mild and A Return to Modesty, and Laura Sessions Step’s Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both.

In fact, there have been critiques of online pornography and dating sites and apps since before they went mainstream; criticism of hook-up culture was practically a vertical in and of itself between 2005 and 2015, just before #MeToo. But still, hypersexuality marched on: pole dancing became a popular form of exercise and was elevated to an art form beyond a small niche; sex workers’ rights became a cause célèbre even if it enjoys relatively little efficacy; OnlyFans is a unicorn; Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion participated in tribadism on stage to an audience of millions and to the shock of no one, my mother learned what “W.A.P.” stood for.

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So while it’s true that our policies do not always reflect the fact that the nation is pro-sex work or pro-sex anything, in popular culture there is no sexual topic that is off limits. But what do the youth always want to do? Rebel against authority. For most people, that’s the fast food restaurant, retail store, or office where you’re underpaid and overworked. The digital advertisements which haunt your every waking moment, as you endlessly doom-scroll Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, for reasons that elude even yourself. The faceless corporations and affectless billionaires that promote all manner of sexual identities, lifestyles, and expressions while evading taxes. That’s not an environment that screams cool. The commodification of sex as both a product and a slogan has de-sexed sex: it’s like having police at the Pride Parade. Kids experiment, and they’ll experiment with what they think is taboo, not what their local Citibank is promoting.

So the difference between the “sex negativity” of the 1990s and the sex backlash of the 21st century is that it’s going to have a strong countercultural contingency. It won’t be driven by, for instance, religious groups who feel marginalised by hip-hop music videos on MTV and Clinton’s sexual impropriety; it’ll be driven by people who’ve tried sex work, and the people who would have tried it, had they born in 1995, not 2005. People who want to rebel.

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Tumblr proved that youth-led online behaviour is a canary in the coal mine. But now TikTok has become the most popular place for young people to obsessively hang out online: a platform where messages are mimetically transmitted. And TikTok is full of clues, when it comes to the burgeoning backlash against sex positivity.

Ashley Clark Huffman, @trashley_anonymous on TikTok, makes videos almost exclusively critical of prostitution and the flippant attitude young people have about platforms like OnlyFans. She has 1.3 million followers, and her videos have become iconic, spawning a meme format. There’s also @glamdemon2004, otherwise known as Serena Shahidi, who has 411,700 followers, and was recently interviewed by The New York Times’ Taylor Lorenz. Her specialty is turning the depressing state of modern dating into a hilarious joke. While she’s not as expressly critical as Huffman, her videos are certainly sceptical:

“I realise the thing I hate about social media, lip gloss, girls-support-girls, we’re-all-baddies type of feminism is that it centres men’s opinions so aggressively … Men criticise women for being promiscuous, and then all of a sudden, it’s no critical thoughts, just sex positivity.”

There are countless other accounts, too. Young women creating videos where they talk about feeling left behind by a hypersexual feminism that centres the young woman as sexual object. @mommypilled (14.8K followers) mocks liberal feminism for “telling young girls hookup culture is liberating … and encouraging them to get into s*x work the minute they turn 18.” Then there’s here’s @slutty_tradwife, who makes videos on topics like the limits of #MeToo and the failures of liberal feminism. And finally, my personal favourite, @hystericfantasy, appears to be a parody of what the hipster of the aughts evolved into: a Red Scare-listening, Christopher Lasch reading, liberal feminist critical art ho who thinks we should outlaw divorce and restore the sanctity of marriage.

It’s pure camp, but it wouldn’t be so funny if there wasn’t any source material to draw from. That is to say, she’s a theatrical version of a real woman walking around. It was reported in January that that adult GenZers (18-23-year-olds) are having 14% less sex than the previous generation at that age. One woman, in Vice‘s report on the statistics, says: “I only want to be with a man who has earned my trust, who worships the ground I walk on, who honours and respects me,” seeming to make an explicit reference to the marriage vows. Will the professed opinions of @slutty_tradwife and @trashley_anonymous become the new normal? After all, there’s not one movement that took root on Tumblr whose echoes you can’t see in the broader culture today; and TikTok is the new Tumblr.

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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By Mary Harrington

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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How the Left betrayed feminism

By Sarah Ditum

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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By Julie Bindel

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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Forty years after the Ripper, women still aren't safe

By Joan Smith

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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Is casual sex immoral?

By Louise Perry

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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Why bother having babies?

By Louise Perry

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.

The idea was to discard items that symbolised women’s oppression. Passers-by were invited to join in, and at some stage, rumour has it, one of the bins was set alight — but the organisers have always denied this.

Not only did those women galvanise a movement, they gave birth to one of the most enduring myths of early feminism: that women literally ‘burned their bras’.

The Miss America protest sealed the beginning of feminism’s second wave: the Suffragettes had won the right for some women to vote, but true liberation was still light years away. I can safely say, as someone who found feminism as a 17-year-old in 1979, it still is.

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The Yorkshire Ripper fired up my feminism

By Julie Bindel

The chance for British feminists to make their mark came shortly after. In February 1970, a small group of young women organised the first national Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) conference at Ruskin College, Oxford — a landmark moment in the second-wave of feminism.

The idea for the 1970 conference came from Sheila Rowbotham, now a noted historian, and Arielle Aberson, a Ruskin student from Switzerland who was tragically killed in a car crash only months later.

The organisers had expected a crowd of around 100 — but over 400 turned up. The venue had to be moved to the bigger Oxford Union, where delegates covered the statues of men by draping them with women’s shawls. The crèche of 60 children was run entirely by men.

Feminist publisher Sue O’Sullivan describes the 1970 event as a weekend filled with the new discoveries of women’s liberation:

“We looked at what ‘patriarchy’ meant and how to challenge it. We listened to stories of equal pay struggles and examined questions of women and class. With toddlers in tow, mothers, fathers and others addressed questions of childcare, contraception, sexuality, and more.”

The ‘minimum demands’ of the conference were equal pay; equal educational and job opportunities; free contraception and abortion on demand; and free 24-hour nurseries. And such was the energy created, several campaigns for legislative change, such as the Equal Pay Act, were kick started. Following the event, newly-invigorated feminists began setting up the first domestic violence refuges and rape crisis centres.

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By Tanya Gold

Sally Alexander, another Ruskin student, also helped organise the event. It certainly inspired her into direct action: a few months later, in November 1970, Alexander orchestrated the now world-famous disruption of the Miss World pageant in London. Dozens of feminists bought tickets to the televised event, and (in front of millions of viewers) threw flour bombs, putting a dramatic halt to proceedings.

One criticism of the early WLM is that it was dominated by white, middle-class women. But feminism is not, and never has been, just for privileged women. The original conference in 1970 included trade unionists and working-class women and was held at an adult education college.

The Equal Pay Act became law in 1970, but according to the Fawcett Society, equal pay is still ‘a distant dream’. The majority (60%) of women in workplaces across the UK believe they are earning less than men who are doing the same job.

The Sex Discrimination Act was passed in 1970 but did not become became law until 1975. It was hoped by early feminists that it would serve to protect women from discrimination on the grounds of sex or marital status. But today it is as likely to be used by men claiming they are discriminated against — for example when free drinks are offered to women in bars to promote ‘Lady’s Night’ — than it is by women facing real sexism.

We have come a long way since 1970. At that time, FGM (female genital mutilation) was not a crime, women were denied anonymity when reporting rape and sexual assault, domestic violence was considered to be a ‘private matter’ between husband and wife, and no laws whatsoever were in place to protect lesbians from discrimination.

During the 1970s through to the 1990s, lesbians were in danger of losing custody of their children, often to abusive ex-husbands, for no other reason than their sexuality. Today, lesbians can foster, adopt, marry and have joint custody as same sex couples.

But sexual violence is still a global pandemic. Despite decades of effort from feminists such as myself, in the UK only 1.4% of reported rapes in 2019 will result in a conviction — a significant decrease from a decade ago.

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By Joan Smith

‘Women’s Liberation at 50’ will see women of all ages interact and learn from each other. In today’s climate of a feminism that better suits men that women, many young women in universities are much more likely to be picketing outside of our feminist events, shouting ‘blow jobs are real jobs’ and ‘trans-rights are women’s rights’ than demanding equal pay, maternity leave or an end to male violence.

But the tide is turning and a genuine, grass-roots feminism is enjoying a revival, as attendance of the recent women’s liberation conference in London indicated. One thousand women (and a few men) were there. And the message was that feminism is a collective movement, not about individual women breaking through the glass ceiling.

“We can challenge sexism, and the likes of Harvey Weinstein. We don’t have to stand for this shit anymore,” says one of the organisers of tomorrow’s event, Tracy Walsh. “In the 60s and 70s there was some fantastic activism that needs to be revived today. Imagine turning up at Miss World and disrupting it in the way that Sally did.”

I hope passionately that the conference does inspire and invigorate — just as I was inspired and invigorated in 1979. For, despite 50 years of campaigning, young women are, in many ways, worse off. Feminism is the only social justice movement on the planet that prioritises women and girls. We must inspire a new generation to take up the mantle.

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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The birth of the transsexual empire

By Julie Bindel

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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Feminists should support a woman's right to sell sex

By Victoria Bateman

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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Trans athletes make a mockery of women's sports

By Meghan Murphy

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.

If that album were released today, progressive young men would be in woke heaven, supported by blue-fringed women in universities, claiming that the black and blue woman had been ‘empowered’ by her ‘choice’ to exercise her ‘agency’ and ‘partake’ in some ‘liberating BDSM[1. BDSM is a variety of often erotic practices or roleplaying involving bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, sadomasochism, and other related interpersonal dynamics]’.

And if feminists like me protested, we would be no-platformed for ‘kink-shaming’. It is extraordinary that today, strangulation is seen by some as ‘sexy’ and often referred to as breath-play.

Women are in worrying territory. Sex today is increasingly dangerous for them. In 2018, five women –Christina Abbotts, Lesley Potter, Laura Huteson, Anna Reed and Charlotte Teeling – died after what their killers claimed was “rough sex gone wrong”. That this alarming practice is deemed erotic, and is increasingly common, is the result of the normalisation of male violence. This, in turn, is due to the proliferation of hard-core, violent pornography accessed via the swipe of an iPhone – something that kids as young as eight years old are able to access.

Further reading

There's nothing woke about the sex trade

By Julie Bindel

Sex has long been used as a way to control and punish women. Often this is through the imposition of humiliating sexual practices; but it also in telling us when we can or can’t have abortions; or promoting the notion that paying for sexual access to women’s bodies is a universal male right.

Legal, social and coercive restrictions being exerted on women and their reproductive rights are becoming the norm – while they also grow increasingly draconian. The recent law on abortion passed in Alabama, US, for example, exemplifies this trend. Several other states are doing the same, such as in Georgia, where they recently passed the fetal heartbeat bill. But it is no good simply pointing the finger at places far away and shaking our heads. There are similar laws closer to home – in Northern Ireland for example.

As women’s rights go backwards, casual misogyny picks up pace. High numbers of women regularly experience harassment by men, according to a recent poll. Almost half have experienced unwanted sexual advances, 46% had been groped, and a quarter had been flashed at.

Online abuse is also massive. In this same survey, a fifth of respondents had experienced it. One reason that an offence that targets hatred of women has never been added to the statute book must surely be because the police, courts and prisons would snap under the strain of dealing with the sheer volume of it.

So how, then, should women react faced with such an increase in misogyistic violence, abuse, and increased restrictions?

Further reading

The inescapable misogyny of the modern world

By Tanya Gold

We feminists have long campaigned using tactics including direct action and public protest. In Poland, when the government proposed a total ban on abortion, a women’s strike was organised, calling on women to take the day off from their work.

More recently, the actor Alyssa Milano proposed a “#SexStrike” as a response to the recent attacks on reproductive rights in multiple states across the country. It’s been taken up with excitement by women across the globe.

I’ve no doubt Alyssa Milano was well-intentioned when she called for the strike: “Until women have legal control over our own bodies we just cannot risk pregnancy.” We mustn’t forget those millions of women and girls around the world who don’t have that control. Whose bodies and reproduction are controlled by other people. Let’s not forget, either, that it’s the men who are responsible for 100% of unwanted pregnancies.

But sex strikes are an incredibly bad idea as a protest. They are playing in to the male narrative that sex is something women only ever do under duress. I am currently researching a book on what feminism is and is not, and have been talking to lots of young feminists about their relationships and encounters with men, and they tell me that heterosexual sex is seen by too many men as a form of labour women do for men.

Further reading

How come the misogynistic Frankie Boyle is so acceptable now?

By Jenny McCartney

“My previous boyfriend,” one woman told me, “despite him presenting himself as a feminist ally, would expect sex when he wanted it even when I made it very clear I was not in the remotest bit interested.” So much for the new “feminism for men” –  or “I will stand up for your rights for as long as that suits me”.

This idea is reinforced by the sex strike: women are put in a position of treating sex as something they do for men, rather than for themselves. It only emphasises the idea that their worth is sexual. And it turns sex into something transactional. They belittle their sexuality by using it as a bargaining tool.

In any case, it is only possible to strike if you are in a position to withdraw labour. And as I will never tire of saying, sex is not ‘work’, no matter what these new feminists and male feminists contend. And given the prevailing climate of misogynistic behaviours, to withdraw sex puts women in a dangerous position where they could be forced and coerced into sex. It’s called rape.

There is no greater example to illustrate men’s power over women than sexual violence, alongside the constant battle to restrict women’s reproductive rights. We are living through a global pandemic of sexual violence at the moment and, women are punished by man-made laws for attempting to take control of our own bodies. I fear it’s going to take more than a hashtag for men to realise our bodies are our own business – and not open for business.

I attended on a heavily discounted pass, representing a great abolitionist charity, and it is just as well. Cinderella couldn’t afford this ball. NGO ‘discounted’ tickets started at £599, with £1,495 the premium rate (not including VAT of course).

It’s a cause everyone can get behind. But the only trouble is, there’s no way on earth the people actually doing frontline anti-slavery work could afford to be here. For the price of the cheapest ticket, a Latvian charity could run their prevention work for a month. And that’s not including the travel and accommodation.

Further reading

Normalising sex work benefits pimps and traffickers

By Meghan Murphy

I have been in and around the anti-trafficking world since the late Nineties, and have watched big business pile-in. I’m not against this per se. And I’m glad the issue is finally getting the attention it warrants: business needs to up its game to eradicate slavery from their supply chains. But there’s a world of difference between authentic efforts to clean up business practices and window-dressing.

It’s hard to tell how much corporate sponsorship has actually helped. As things stand, there is nothing to prevent businesses from requiring all of their suppliers to meet human rights standards. And there’s nothing to prevent those businesses from policing their supply chains to ensure they’re not full of slaves. But how many have actually chosen this route? As big fashion brands chase lower labour costs, it seems the problem is getting worse.

The corporate take-over has failed to make a positive difference to the lives of trafficked women, partly because cash tends to be injected into the already established, well-funded NGOs with bigger profiles than those who are actually making a real difference. A story broke only last week about the anti-slavery NGO, Prajwala, which has been lauded by praised by celebrities and governments alike, yet now stands accused of exploiting the women it shelters.

Further reading

Questioning the misogynistic veil isn't racist

By Julie Bindel

It’s a narrative that cuts across the whole aid industry. It is at the heart of the two-year Civil Societies Future inquiry which was published last week, which concluded that charities have become disconnected from the people they are meant to serve. They are focusing, instead, on chasing cash, growing bigger and protecting brands. In my experience, too, the anti-trafficking organisations that do make a difference are those smaller grassroots ones, run by those who can best support the victims – such as women of colour who understand the misogyny and racism that underpins the slavery business.

It has become fashionable for big corporations and trusts to throw money at this issue, mainly thanks to the efforts of those small human rights organisations which have worked so hard to expose how many enslaved, trafficked labourers have been working within corporate supply chains. But as I listened to these businesses “sharing best practice” in combatting trafficking, I heard nothing remotely innovative or new. It felt like it was just a way of enabling those businesses to put something in their Corporate Social Responsibility reports.

Further reading

Why woke keyboard warriors should respect their elders

By Julie Bindel

What really left a bad taste in my mouth, though, was when a young woman was wheeled out to talk about ‘sex work’. She wept as she begged the room – filled with rich Westerners – for money, on behalf of the NGO Kranti.

I know very well that these stunts are part and parcel of the fundraising ‘business’ these days. Comic Relief does it to great effect and it convinces thousands of Westerners to put their hands in their pockets. But small, grassroots NGOs tend to balk at displaying survivors in this way, considering it patronising and undermining.

There were several delegates there who agreed with me. But they were loathe to be identified lest their personal quest for funding be scuppered. Like an abusive relationship, the money seduces and enamours, only then to become the monster you can’t live with, can’t live without.

After all, socialism is supposedly about true egalitarianism. And as a lifelong campaigner for women’s liberation, I am well aware that male Leftists think of themselves as feminist allies.

Conservatism, on the other hand, is not so friendly towards us. It often favours a commitment to so-called traditional values and ideas, isn’t so keen about change. And let’s not talk about Thatcher – she was certainly no feminist. She was a classic example of a certain type of right-wing woman who espouses the view that women are to blame for holding themselves back; it’s not the patriarchy’s fault, and they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps as she had done.

And yet, in recent years, I have experienced far more direct sexism from these so-called feminist ‘socialist’ men than Tory ones. When they speak about fighting for equality, more-often-than-not they mean ‘among men’. They are actively supporting activities and industries that harm women and girls. They are calling feminists bigots and they are waving the flag for fundamentalist religion.

More from this author

Why are so many left-wing progressives silent about Islam's totalitarian tendencies?

By Julie Bindel

Do I exaggerate? Let’s look at a perfect example of the shift in attitude on the Left, as epitomised by the new brand of hard-left brocalists that surfaced with Corbyn’s cabal.

Owen Jones, a hard-left journalist, campaigner, and one who should attacking the exploitation of women, is a classic example of the socialist hypocrites I’m talking about. In an  article for the Guardian back in 2015, the Corbynista poster boy defended a serving member of Parliament, Simon Danczuk, who was exposed as a prolific pornography consumer.

And yet, only a month earlier, Jones had lectured other men about why they should do more for feminism. In the article defending Danczuk’s use of porn, Jones also criticised the fact that three judges had been dismissed from their positions because they “watch(ed) porn on the job”. They had, he said, been “publicly embarrassed and dismissed”. Instead of recognising that pornography directly harms women and girls, Jones sided with the male public servants who were enjoying women being exploited instead of doing their jobs.

He’s not alone in this view. His Leftist chums in the Labour leadership agree with him about the rights of men to consume women through pornography and prostitution. Corbyn and John McDonnell  both  believe in decriminalised pimping, brothel owning and sex buying – all in the name of women’s liberation, of course.

More from this author

Slaying dragons: Corbynism and its cabal of thugs

By Julie Bindel

Jones is also notorious for  lecturing  women about who actually  has the right  to decide who is female or not; he regularly berates anyone who dares suggest that people with penises are not actually women. In one of his  articles, he declared that the group of people he terms ‘transphobes’ (who refuse to accept men as women) will be consigned to the “wrong side of history” for their views.

This wasn’t how it used to be. Remember Tony Blair? Hard-line Leftists may despise him, but many feminists did not. He was the one who introduced women-only shortlists in order to successfully address some of the massive imbalances in parliament. What has the great socialist leader Corbyn done? Decided that the base-line criteria for being included on a women-only shortlist is to have self-identified as a woman

There is no clearer way to dominate and disenfranchise women than to insist that we don’t even know what one is!

The Tories, on the other hand, no longer the reactionaries of old, are more open to the idea that women are full, equal citizens than those macho Momentum types who act like thugs around female MPs who refuse to toe the hard-left line.

As the typical Leftist male gets his boxers in a twist, crowing his support for everything from stripping to legal brothels, the Conservative Human Rights Commission is holding an urgent enquiry  into the harms of the sex trade. Meanwhile, the kerfuffle over men who define as women being allowed on all-female shortlists is being challenged by men writing for right-of-centre publications.

Further reading

Can we reform our rancid political debate?

By Douglas Murray

Even stranger, though, is the Left’s new attitude towards religious fundamentalism. Once the Left baulked at the idea of hardline religious doctrine because of the inherent misogyny and homophobia. Not any more. Now the political Left is full of men defending the ‘right’ of women to be covered in a full-face veil in the name of modesty but some on the Right are respectfully challenging.

I do think this shift has come about as Leftist men have latched on to a distortion of feminism that is all about individual ‘empowerment’, and nothing to do with challenging male power. This ‘fun feminism’, in which baking cupcakes and pole dancing are deemed liberating, lets woke dudes off the hook.

But as far as I’m concerned, if men like a particular brand of feminism, it means it is not working. And it is hardly surprising that there are certain men would rather cheer on the idea of a woman walking around in a basque rather than dungarees; men who prefer the ‘slut’ marches to the angry Reclaim the Night demonstrations. Rebrand feminism so that men are no longer threatened, and everyone’s happy. Except the actual feminists that is.

It seems to me that when it comes to feminism, and defending the rights of women to live as equal citizens, the categories of Left and Right don’t imply what they used to. Politics has been turned on its head. Let’s face it, if Corbyn and his henchmen believe that it’s fine and dandy for a man to decide he is a woman, and shout ‘bigot’ at those of us that refuse to accept this madness, we may as well go to the Tories for a little old-fashioned courtesy.

And here I don’t mean to point to the usual stories involving sex trafficking and abuse, but the (sadly) undereported story that is the state’s consistent failure to provide basic market support that, in turn, condemns sex workers to a life that is significantly more dangerous than would otherwise be the case.

A lack of recognition of sex work (as a career like any other) means that sex workers are consistently being persecuted by the authorities rather than given the basic legal and social insurance footings that any other form of work offers. This marginalises sex workers and leaves them vulnerable to abuse – not only from clients but from the authorities themselves, with the latter making the former more likely as sex workers have nowhere to turn.

I have little patience for moralistic attitudes that have resulted, for centuries, in politicians brushing the issue under the carpet. Sex work has existed since markets were first created and it’s not going away anytime soon – in fact, demand is growing. To moralise is not only to ignore some of the most vulnerable workers in our society but to actively make the choice to leave them in a much more precarious position.

It’s time we not only put the practicality of sex workers’ lives before our own moralism but that we also dig deep within ourselves to ask why we respond in the way that we tend to do as a society. That may have something to do with the way, historically, a woman’s virtue has been tied to sexual purity… the way in which we fear women being in control of their own sexuality.. and the sense in which, since the Enlightenment, we have lifted the brain to a position that is superior to the body.

For readers wanting to explore more I recommend my piece for Times Higher Education – “Prostitutes need the help of economists to argue for the rights and protections that other workers take for granted“.

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Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.