Today’s date, 1st April 2010, is likely to have been circled in the calendars of many pimps and lap-dancing club owners. If it isn’t, it should have been, because from this day it is illegal to pay for sex with someone who has been exploited. And six days from now, anyone wanting to open up a lap-dancing club will have to apply for two, rather than one, licenses, including the new “sexual entertainment licence”—which is harder to get, and more expensive.
Those with vested interests are duly worried: Peter Stringfellow has vowed to go to the European Court of Human Rights if any of his clubs’ licenses are terminated as a result of the law. The licensing requirement, he argues, breaches his human rights because it “deprives him of his possessions.”
In truth, he has little cause for complaint. The size and profitability of the sex industry has exploded in recent years. During the 1990s the number of men paying for sex acts in the country doubled, and in London alone there are now at least 921 brothels spread across every borough. The lap-dancing sector has similarly undergone a major expansion: between 2004 and 2008 the number of lap-dancing clubs in Britain doubled to over 300, and worldwide the business is estimated to be worth $75bn. The Licensing Act 2003 made it simpler and easier for lap-dancing clubs to open, requiring them only to obtain a premises licence: the identical requirement for operating a pub or karaoke bar.
It took took a coalition of residents, local authorities, equality groups and parliamentarians—led by women’s rights organisations Object and the Fawcett Society—nearly two years to get the law to recognise that buying a lap dance is significantly different from buying a pint. Finally, in 2008 parliamentarians from across the parties started calling for reform—(although commitment in the Conservative camp was questioned when delegates to their conference in Birmingham received discount vouchers in their welcome packs to the local lap-dancing club). In November 2008, the then home secretary Jacqui Smith vowed to bring in a government-backed bill to make it easier for local people to stop lap-dancing clubs opening in their areas.
Running parallel to these developments was a campaign by women’s organisations to crack down on the demand side of prostitution—the punters—by making it illegal to pay for sex with an individual who has been coerced. This proved an even greater struggle, with the sex industry lobbying hard to crush the proposal. See Elizabeth Pisani's Sexual politics on the arguments against the law. Even feminist campaigners seemed slightly surprised when peers waved through the legislation at the end of last year. But the success of these two campaigns reflects a growing awareness within Whitehall that the glamorised picture of the sex industry, painted by television programmes like Secret Diary of a Call Girl, obscures the reality of most women’s experiences of it.
Of course, the sex industry is not a new issue for lawmakers. But the scale on which stripping, pornography and prostitution now take place is unparalleled in human history. The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, free-market ideology and developments in technology all aligned to make the 1990s the decade the sex industry went truly global. A hugely successful PR campaign by the industry managed to not only pass off women’s involvement in it as ordinary “work,” but it even managed to frame acts like stripping and prostituting as empowering for women, by adeptly co-opting the language of “choice” and “liberation.” Even the government-funded Job Centre Plus now advertises jobs for “masseuses” and “escorts”—despite full knowledge that some women who have gone on to apply for these jobs have been asked to sell sex acts.
For all the different ways that such products are marketed or packaged, it always boils down to one very simple product concept: a man can pay to have a sexual interaction with a woman who doesn’t want to have it with him. Her reasons for participating can be many: she may desperately need the money, she might want to please her pimp, she might think that’s all she’s good for. But her motivation for allowing her body to be used is not sexual or emotional satisfaction. And the “purchaser” knows this, otherwise he wouldn’t have to pay her to be there.
The consequences of such a transaction are devastating for women. A study in 2003 of 854 women working in prostitution, in nine different countries, found that 68 per cent of had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a direct result of their work—a rate comparable with survivors of rape and state-sponsored torture. Emma, a woman I interviewed whilst researching my new book, The Equality Illusion, described her experience of prostituting to me: “When I had sex I think I numbed out, or tried to, tried not to think. I tried to pretend this was happening to Angel [the fake name she was required to use], not Emma, that they couldn’t hurt me, that I was in control.” Emma has been out of prostitution now for three years, but her experiences still haunt her. “I suffer nightmares, flashbacks, and am triggered by numerous things… I still struggle massively around sex. I still dissociate, and feel like I split off from myself.” It’s estimated that between 50 and 75 per cent of women in prostitution began selling sex acts before they were eighteen years old, and 78 per cent surveyed in a 2005 Canadian study had been raped. These are not your average employment profile statistics.
Women I met who had worked in lap-dancing clubs frequently spoke of exploitation and abuse, too. When Tatyana arrived in London from eastern Europe she found it difficult to get other work. But she also had another motivation for starting work at a lap-dancing club: “I wanted to be westernised and sexy like the way the media portrays women should be in the west.” Performing in the club, however, was not how she had imagined it. “I was constantly looking over my shoulder and the stress I was under, constantly, without a respite would become unbearable… We were all propositioned for sex on a daily basis.”
Typically, women performers are not employees of lap-dancing clubs. They have to rent space in the clubs and are often mandated to tip the bouncers and bar staff. The only way women can actually make any money in clubs is through private dances. And on some nights, it is actually possible for them to lose money. Tatyana’s view of women’s status in the lap-dancing industry? “We are the main attraction yet we are treated worse than anyone in the business. In this hierarchy, female dancers are at the bottom of the food chain.”
And interviews with men who use lap-dancing clubs suggest they actually share this view. Over half the men in the US that researcher Katherine Frank surveyed in 2003 said they felt relaxed in the clubs because they could escape the everyday rules of conduct they had to follow with women in other settings. Lap-dancing clubs were described as offering a more “traditional” setting where men could interact with women who weren’t “feminist.” The sex industry transports its consumers to a land that feminism forgot. A land where “men can be men” (read: in control of women). But, increasingly, it’s a land in which we are all being forced to live.
Today, you can’t pop to local newsagents without being exposed to pornographic lads’ mags openly displayed at child’s height. The average age of boys’ first exposure to internet pornography is just eleven years old, and the porn empire of Playboy currently markets a hugely successful range of children’s products: pencil cases, duvet covers, and so on. When the female pop stars they watch on MTV routinely pole dance and strip, it’s not all that surprising that 63 per cent of fifteen-to-nineteen year old girls would rather be a glamour model that a nurse, teacher or doctor.
The seep of the sex industry into mainstream culture has dissolved the boundaries of acceptability and drowned out criticism of the harm done to women. Yet this harm is real. The legislative successes by women’s rights campaigners over recent months are significant but, in truth, they are just the tip of the iceberg. Massive wholesale legislative reform—and major cultural change—will be needed to release the grip of the sex industry on western society.
This is one of the reasons myself and some of my colleagues have set up UK Feminista: a unique new organisation that supports ordinary women and men to speak out about the harms of the sex industry, and to take action against all aspects of sexism in today’s society. Because only when feminism is mainstream, when a broad movement of women and men engaged in the process of change, will we see an end to the injustices suffered by women like Emma and Tatyana. That time may be some way off, today is a reminder that we are getting closer.
For more information on UK Feminista visit: www.ukfeminista.org.uk
A small blow to the sex industry
It's now illegal to pay for sex with someone who has been exploited, and harder for lap-dancing clubs to get licenses. But the battle is far from over
April 1, 2010
