Was reading this excellent article by Mia Döring about her memoir and I had never realised that we only ever hear from prostituted women that sex work is work, its only ever them who put their names and faces to that idea. If its just a service thats being purchased why do men never come forward and say I'm a punter, I'm just buying a service, I'm going to let everyone know its a choice I make.
She writes really well in this article and I'm going to be very interested to read her book
www.independent.ie/life/health-wellbeing/mia-doring-on-the-irish-sex-trade-seeing-you-is-a-hobby-they-feel-entitled-to-indulge-41360309.html
Why are we not talking about these men? Why are they not talking? In the debates about prostitution, we do not hear from them. They don’t ‘come out’. They don’t create associations or campaign for ‘punters’ rights’. If punting is the legitimate and harmless hobby they claim it to be, why not?
There is a lot of money to be made from operating brothels and running an escort website. Advertising is very expensive – one ‘online directory’ of women in prostitution had a turnover of €6m in 2015. The men pay around a €100 for 30 minutes of sex with a woman, around €200 for an hour. And with more than 100,000 punters, there is obviously no shortage of male demand for women’s bodies.
We know that most women in the sex trade are not there voluntarily, and when we understand sexual consent to be freely given, voluntary and reversible, it is inarguable that when people defend the sex trade in Ireland, they are defending the daily rape of women and girls. The pimps who run the websites become multi-millionaires by serving up a literal rape market.
She also did an excellent interview with Roisin Ingle about her book
www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/irish-men-are-raping-women-for-money-all-across-the-country-1.4797680
"Her argument is that paying for sex does not legitimise the act or make it consensual. “You can’t pay someone to be your friend,” she says. “You don’t have a ‘rent a friend’ scheme, because it’s never going to be mutual. Our expectations are on the floor when it comes to men’s behaviour, especially sexually. We say, ‘Ah, that’s just men, they pay for sex.’ But prostitution sex is not sex, because sex cannot be paid for. And sex is not work.”
She knows there are people, sex workers and their advocates, who argue strongly that it is indeed work, but she has a very different view. “They can call themselves sex workers if they want. I don’t care. I care about the vast majority of women in the sex trade, and that’s all I care about. The vast majority of them are coerced or there by trafficking or there out of desperation, poverty, abuse and addiction.”
She says in the book that as long as we’re all distracted, arguing over whether prostitution is ‘work’, we’re not thinking of the choices of the men running the sex trade for profit. As the debate rages, “these men can sit back and laugh, knowing they have nothing to fear.”
Some sex-worker advocates, she maintains, describe men who want to “connect”, who are in need of touching. The lonely or the elderly, the socially isolated. But, she says, in the four years she spent ‘servicing’ random men, she never met anyone who just needed to talk or needed a hug. These are the men she met: “In their 40s and 50s, middle class, self-assured and entitled.”
“Even if 100 per cent of punters were wheelchair-ridden, chronically lonely, altruistic philanthropists, they have no right to use a woman’s body to have an orgasm. Nothing gives anyone that right. To achieve orgasm is not a right. Sex is neither a bodily need nor a right.”