Cerebus In Hell? #4 (April 2017)
by Dave Sim & Sandeep Atwal
A Fake Name's Reasons For Thinking That Sex-Work Is Wrong
by Chester Brown
(first published on Patreon, 14 June 2017)
In response to my request, the individual who goes by the name A Fake Name has politely explained why he-or-she thinks sex-work is morally wrong and should be illegal over on
A Moment Of Cerebus.
When I'm quoting other people in this piece, I'll do so in italics, but I'll put A Fake Name's positions in bold type, like this:
"Prostitution is damaging to men because it’s saying they can’t attract a woman on their own."
In relation to this proposition, we can broadly divide the clients of sex-workers into four types of guys.
Type One: According to sex-workers, the majority of their clients are men who are married or are in a romantic relationship. They’re not guys who can’t attract a romantic partner, they’re guys who have attracted one and yet want to have sex with sex-workers for a variety of reasons.
Type Two: Some guys can get romantic partners, but see sex-workers in-between serious romantic relationships.
Type Three: There are also guys (like me) who are not in a romantic relationship, who do not want to be in romantic relationships, and who prefer being with sex-workers. I've had girl-friends, so I know the difference between being in a romantic relationship and paying for sex, and I like the latter better. So it’s not emotionally “damaging” for me (and other Type Three guys) to pay for sex, quite the opposite.
Type Four: Of course, there are some guys who want romantic partners but can’t attract them and visit sex-workers as a substitute. But sex-work and sex-workers have not caused the problem there. The problem is the inability of those guys to attract romantic partners. Blaming sex-work for that is misplacing the blame.
(Not all clients of sex-workers fit into those four categories. For one thing, some clients are women. And some clients have unusual circumstances, like the guy who was a virgin, got cancer, and wanted to get laid before he died. His story, written by his twin sister, can be found at
SexWorkClients.org under the name MsLeigh, posted March 1st 2017.)
"Instead of honest self-assessment and fixing things within themselves, [the clients of prostitutes have] chosen to pay for a fleeting illusion, knowing any orgasm and accompanying feelings are based on a financial transaction, creating a mental and emotional dissonance. In place of self-improvement, putting in the effort to be a better version of themselves, thereby increasing their confidence, achieving more in life and thus attracting women they’d want to have sex and relationships with, they’ve settled for a damaging shortcut."
The assumption here seems to be that, if sex-work didn’t exist, Type Four guys would be forced to better themselves and would then be able to get romantic partners, so, therefore, sex-work is bad. The thing is, Type Four guys want romance but can’t figure out how to get it. Even if all sex-workers magically disappeared from the planet, the majority of Type Four guys would still not be able to get romantic partners. I have a friend who’s a Type Four guy who pays for sex regularly. Believe me, he put lots of effort into trying to find a girlfriend before he resorted to paying sex-workers. Sex-work wasn’t responsible for his failure with women. He doesn’t feel “damaged” by sex-work — he’s glad it gives him a way to experience sexual intimacy despite the fact that he can’t find a girlfriend.
There are actually some guys out there who were Type Four guys and who, through their interactions with sex-workers, were able to learn how to be with women, and, as a result, were then able to attract girlfriends. (There’s a story very similar to this at
SexWorkClients.org but it’s about a woman who was having difficulty relating to men but wanted a romantic relationship. So she hired a male sex-worker, and her experiences with this guy led her to feel “at home in my body, able to not just tolerate another’s touch, but enjoy and relish the sensation of skin on skin.” As a result, she was able to start dating and found a guy she’s now been married to for two years. Her story’s under the name Sheila and was posted on April 23rd 2017.) Far from damaging, as I've said before, sex-work often has therapeutic value.
"On top of that, men risk developing feelings for a prostitute, deluding themselves and missing out on real opportunities with the opposite sex. Unrequited love is bad enough without having to pay for it.”
It does happen that some clients fall in love with sex-workers, and such a client can imagine that his sex-worker loves him back. A lot of sex-workers wouldn’t lead on such a client, but some would — this happened to two guys I know. (Neither of them is the friend I mentioned above.) But these sorts of guys sooner or later figure out that the sex-worker doesn’t really romantically love them. (Having to continue to pay for sex is usually a clue.) If such a guy has “real [romantic] opportunities with” non-sex-workers while he's in love with a sex-worker, then he’ll likely still have real opportunities after he realizes that the sex-worker doesn’t love him. The two guys I mentioned who fell in love with sex-workers and were taken advantage of by them? Both of those situations happened several years ago. One of the guys hasn’t seen a sex-worker since then, but, even though he wants a girlfriend, he hasn’t found one in the intervening years, so I very much doubt he missed any opportunities for real love during the few months that he was in love with that sex-worker. The other guy has seen a few sex-workers since then, but not many. He’d like a girlfriend too, but knowing this guy well (he’s a friend) I can assure you that his inability to attract women has nothing to do with seeing sex-workers. I’m completely positive that he didn’t miss any romantic opportunities while he was in love with a sex-worker.
And this says nothing about the profession in general. The fact that some sex-workers can exploit the emotional vulnerability of some clients doesn’t mean that all sex-work is wrong. There are people who pretend to be in love with someone in order to marry for money, but that doesn’t mean that all marriage is wrong.
"While it’s quite possible one can switch from prostitute/client to a relationship, I’m skeptical since the beginning of the relationship comes down to: Would she have fucked you if you hadn’t pay her? […] I doubt any relationship in which the man directly pays the woman can ever be as legitimate as those who don’t, the obligation casting a shadow over any and all interactions."
I have a female friend (who is NOT a sex-worker) who has a well-paying job and, many years ago, was able to buy a relatively large condo. She met a guy who seemed very loving and affectionate. He didn’t make as much money as she did, but that wasn’t an issue for her because his personality seemed so wonderful. So they decided to live together, and he moved into her place. (Given his financial situation, he’d been renting a much smaller apartment.) They seemed like the perfect couple. Only years later did she admit to me that, as soon as he moved in, his personality changed — he became cold and unaffectionate when they were alone. She didn’t speculate about this to me, but I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d ever loved her. It seemed to me like he'd been pretending to be a certain kind of guy in order to get her to want him to move in with her. Once that was accomplished, and he was ensconced in a nicer setting (one in which he didn’t have to pay rent), he felt able to be his real, unloving self.
What I'm saying is that financial concerns also cast a shadow over a lot of romantic relationships between people who have no connection to sex-work. There are a lot of romantic relationships between people who are financially unequal. Even romantic partners who are financially equal can and do fight over money. Despite the experience of my above-mentioned female friend, there are good romantic relationships between financial unequals. If one can recognize that that can be true for romantic relationships, then one should also be able to recognize that there are good (non-romantic) relationships between sex-workers and clients who are financial unequals.
Aside from my own experience with Denise, I’ve read many sincere, heartfelt declarations of affection for their favourite clients written by sex-workers in various books and on the internet. I don’t doubt that sex-workers can genuinely like their clients. An example can be found in
this interview with Annie Sprinkle:
“I had this client I’ll call Samuel. […] I saw him steadily for twenty years [….] Over twenty years you really get to know someone. […] He was someone I wouldn’t be having sex with had he not been paying me. But I cared about him deeply and genuinely wanted to know about how his life was going. […] Looking back I’d have to say it was definitely a type of long-term relationship. The only reason it ended was because I moved out of New York. He was a great guy. […] He was a client, and also a friend. Such things are more common than people might think.”
Since Annie’s relationship with Samuel sounds very similar to the one I have with Denise, I know she’s right that “such things are more common than people might think."
It’s inconsistent to use financial dependence as a reason to dismiss real connections between sex-workers and their favourite clients while ignoring that financial concerns also affect romantic relationships. If one uses financial dependence to argue that all sex-work is wrong, one should be condemning all romantic relationships for the same reason.
Another thing to mention is that the financial inequality between sex-workers and clients often goes the other way. Many of the escorts I used to see (maybe all of them) made more money annually than I did (probably much more for most of them). When I first met Denise, she was certainly earning more than I was. An individual client, even a wealthy one, doesn’t really have much financial power over a popular sex-worker who already has many regular clients.
"What about the damaging effects on women? My experience is women are happiest inside a relationship if the man is perceived as worthy of their emotion and time. Sure prostitutes can compartmentalize clients from boyfriends/relationships but I still think they want to be loved. The romantic cliches exist because they are true and fundamental to how people are. There are always exceptions […] but most women want to be in a relationship. Brazen Lee said she’s a “…romantic at heart.” So even someone who sells sex for money still retains the primal drive to date, be in love. From a strictly utilitarian point of view, most men won’t be interested in a woman who has the level of sexual partners that a prostitute has. It may not seem fair, but I’m being honest, most men would be turned off. So, by being a prostitute she’s running the risk of ruining a shot at a real, longterm relationship.”
Sex-work is wrong because sex-workers are risking "ruining a shot at a real, longterm [sic] relationship”? Not all sex-workers want a conventional romantic relationship. Some of the ones who do want such relationships have been able to find them. Still, A Fake Name is right that sex-workers who want romantic partners have challenges finding them, but that doesn’t mean that sex-work is morally wrong — it means that our society has screwed up sexual values. A Fake Name states that people have “utilitarian” reasons for not getting romantically involved with sex-workers. From a utilitarian perspective, what is a romantic partner for? Sex-workers can be and usually are loving people. The prejudice against having a sex-worker for a romantic partner has nothing to do with their value as individuals or their ability to be loving partners and everything to do with an emotionally insecure reaction to the idea of a romantic partner having sex with someone else. This isn’t something to condemn sex-work for, it’s a reason to condemn our society’s immature sexual values. A change in our values — a change that would recognize and honour sex-workers for what they do — would make it easier for them to find romantic partners (male, female, or gender-fluid, depending on the orientation of the sex-worker). (A Fake Name seems to strangely assume that all female sex-workers are heterosexual.) (Would A Fake Name be making this argument about male sex-workers? And if he-or-she wouldn’t, does he-or-she think male sex-work is okay and should be legal?)
Since this is part of his-or-her justification keeping prostitution illegal, what A Fake Name is calling for here is social engineering. A Fake Name thinks that law-makers should recognize that, because most women supposedly want to be in monogamous heterosexual relationships, the law should force women to make choices that increase their chances of ending up in such relationships. For most sex-workers, engaging in the profession earns them more money than they could get doing any other sort of work. Sex-workers are aware that their occupation reduces their chances of finding a romantic partner. The ones who want such partners know that they’re balancing money against romance and that is a choice that should be left to them. No one else can say which they should be valuing more. Law-makers should not be trying to influence the choice by making one of the options illegal.
Stripped down to it’s essential point, A Fake Name is saying that sex-workers are making a mistake in choosing money (career) over romance, but these days lots of women who aren’t sex-workers are doing that. It’s not immoral for women to choose to focus on their careers at the expense of their love-lives.
"For women, accepting money for sex is saying you have no other way to generate money other than on the most base level of existence. That’s not mentally healthy in the longterm. […] Having sex, surrendering an intimate part of themselves to men who pay for it is mentally damaging in the long term.”
The assumption here is that sex-work is base and that all sex-workers would agree that it is. That’s not the case. Here’s ex-sex-worker Norma Jean Almodovar on the subject:
“On a scale of pain or pleasure human beings can inflict on each other, if murder, rape, and torture are the worst, certainly giving another person an orgasm must be among the best. I cannot fathom how one could think that making another human being feel good for a fee could be degrading or demeaning [….] I derive a great deal of satisfaction knowing that I’m turning some guy on”. [From the 1993 book Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do by the late, great Peter McWilliams.]
A sex-worker who agrees with A Fake Name that sex-work is base might find sex-work mentally damaging, but they might not. I’m sure there are people who clean toilets for money and consider it to be base and yet aren’t mentally damaged by doing that work. What mentally upsets people is going to vary widely from individual to individual. I heard a piece on the radio recently about the high incidence of violence that nurses face and how many of them are experiencing P-T-S-D as a result. The fact that some people in a profession will experience mental health problems as a result of doing that work doesn’t indicate that the profession as a whole is morally wrong and should be outlawed.
When there’s a stigma against a certain activity that causes mental health problems in people who engage in that activity, that doesn’t demonstrate that the activity itself is necessarily “base". As I wrote in Paying For It:
“Many gays prior to the sexual revolution experienced shame, depression, guilt, and disgust about being gay. That doesn’t mean that homosexuality is wrong, it means that, at a certain point in time, homosexuality was reviled, and many gays internalized the gay-negative values of the culture they lived in. Today, many prostitutes internalize the whoring-is-bad attitude of the culture we live in. That doesn’t mean that sex-work is bad.”
Counter-balancing the potential negative mental problems is the fact that sex-work can also benefitthe mental health of prostitutes, in large part because earning good money is good for one’s mental well-being. An article that addresses this is
this one by ex-sex-worker Mitzi Poesner. From that piece:
“[C]ontrary to popular view of sex work, it is not a one way ticket to a breakdown. […]
“What drove me to sex work was a need to exist without aching poverty, to have time to see my many doctors, to work on being as healthy mentally and physically as possible, and to be able to claw back my life from the jaws of zero hours contracts and gaping overdrafts. You may see those things as separate to my mental health, but let me tell you: if you have never been poor you cannot understand the grip money holds you in. […]
“Sex work was messy, dirty, weird, confusing, and scary. It took me to places I wasn’t sure I wanted to visit again. But it also scooped me out of abject poverty and enabled me to start living life with joy.”
There can be other mental health benefits to being a sex-worker. In the interview with Annie Sprinkle that I linked to above, she says this:
“My johns adored and worshipped me, therefore they empowered me. When I was 18, 19, and 20, I had a poor self-image and needed attention. It’s hard for people who haven’t been prostitutes to imagine, but I think it’s often true.”
Back to A Fake Name:
“For society I think [prostitution] could damage civilization in ways I can’t quite explicate. A society with billboards advertising prostitution would be a place further down a spectrum of degradation.”
As Norma Jean implied in the quote that I reproduced above, consensual sex is generally good for people. A society that decriminalized prostitution would be a society in which more people would be having their sexual needs met. I think there’s a lot of unrecognized healing work going on in sex-work that benefits society in subtle ways.
As for the matter of billboards, there’s plenty of sexually suggestive advertising out there already. Using sex to sell sex seems more honest than using it to sell cars or beer. Such billboards wouldn’t have to be any more explicit than advertising already is.
"I don’t think prostitution should be legal […] but nor do I think the prostitution that Chester speaks of should be bothered by those in law enforcement.”
The easiest way to make sure that “the prostitution that Chester speaks of” isn’t “bothered by those in law enforcement” is to decriminalize sex-work between consenting adults. Why not? Especially since A Fake Name was not able to come up with good reasons for keeping it illegal. Let’s review A Fake Name’s reason’s again:
- — Prostitution damages the clients who can’t attract a romantic partner.
- — Clients fall in love with prostitutes and miss opportunities for real love.
- — A sex-for-pay relationship can’t be as legitimate as other relationships since money can influence the sex-for-pay relationship.
- — Women need romantic love and are less likely to get it if they’re prostitutes.
- — Being paid for sex is base, so being a sex-worker it is mentally damaging.
- — Decriminalized prostitution will “damage civilization”.
Reason One isn’t true. Reason Two is unlikely. Reason Three ignores the influence of money on other sorts of relationships. Reason Four is partially true, but societal attitudes are to blame for the problem, not sex-work. Reason Five is partially true, in that some sex-workers might feel that sex-for-pay is base, and they might, therefore, find the work to be emotionally difficult, but that’s offset by the fact that many other sex-workers do not think of prostitution as base, and many of them report that the work actually improves their mental health. Regarding Reason Six, A Fake Name honestly admits that he-or-she does not know what civilizational damage could result from decriminalizing sex-work.
A Fake Name doesn’t have strong reasons for thinking that sex-work should be illegal, but I appreciate that A Fake Name has made the attempt to explain why he-or-she thinks the profession is wrong, even if I don’t find his-or-her reasoning persuasive. And I admire A Fake Name’s civil (if sometimes exasperated and weary) tone throughout all of his-or-her comments on my posts. I hope A Fake Name has a sexual partner who brings him-or-her as much happiness as Denise brings me.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////
In the same comments section, Jeff Seiler writes:
“While it is an old, old joke, the statement remains valid: ‘You don’t pay a hooker for sex, you pay her to go away afterwards.’ "
Yes, it’s an old joke, but it has limited validity. I’m sure there are clients who, after their orgasm, want the sex-worker they’ve hired to go away, but almost any sex-worker will tell you that a sizeable percentage (probably the majority) of her-or-his clients would be only too happy to spend as much (unpaid) time hanging out with the sex-worker as she-or-he would allow.
According to Seiler:
“The culture of strippers and sex-workers […] includes a lot of damaged people."
It seems to me that we're all “damaged” in some way. Are sex-workers more damaged than other people? Not in my experience. People are at their most vulnerable — literally naked — when having sex. We’re more likely to see the damaged aspects and insecurities of our sexual partners — particularly of partners we’ve been having sex with for a while — than of people we meet in more superficial circumstances. Yes, I can see ways that Denise seems “damaged”, but I’m sure that I seem just as damaged to her. And she doesn’t seem more damaged than the non-sex-workers I’ve slept with. She’s actually a remarkably well-adjusted person.
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Damien Lloyd writes:
“I do not think Chester is correct that someone practicing in a field will automatically know more than an academic who studies that field.”
I tend to think that real learning comes from doing, not studying, so that a cartoonist who’s created comics for many years will understand the medium better than an academic who’s never created comics but who’s read a lot of them and has interviewed creators. But I can imagine that a very intelligent and well-read academic could understand the medium better than a stupid and untalented cartoonist, so I concede the point to Lloyd.
Chester Brown
has been writing and drawing comics and graphic novels since the 1980s:
Yummy Fur, Ed The Happy Clown,
I Never Liked You,
Louis Riel,
Paying For It,
Mary Wept Over The Feet Of Jesus. You can help provide him with a stable
source of income while he works on his next graphic novel by donating
at Patreon.
