Billie Piper’s silly simulations of sex continue to stir the wrath of feminists. I have not watched The Secret Diary of a Call Girl yet, and probably will not as its slot on Thursday evenings now clashes with something I recorded earlier. Well OK, I’ll tell the truth, those too often trailed clips of bouncy bouncy sex reminded me so much of 1960s Britsex flicks like Confessions Of A Really Bad Actor not even the prospect of Ms. Piper pouting her beestung lips and fluttering the lashes of her doe – eyes as she pranced about in exotic lingerie could tempt me to watch.
I might just start though, if only to swell the viewing figures a little more and piss off the feminists a little more. I am sick of being told what I ought to think:
I do not need “government experts” to advise me on diet or on how much I can safely drink. All such advice is twaddle anyway, dietary needs and alcohol tolerance vary so much from person to person it is impossible to define a limit.
I do not need Gordon Brown to tell me to switch off my tele rather than leaving it on standby. What I and you and everyone on the planet need is for our political leaders to say “Oi, Free Enterprise, Nooooo! We need generation and distribution of electricity, gas and water to be prized out of the hands of the Free Enterprise thieves and taken into public ownership. Bumbling and inefficient maybe, but at least money invested in improving services will not go straight into the offshore bank accounts of senior executives.
I do not need Hampstead feminists and theier crony crones to tell me prostitution is a crime against women in which all men are complicit. I could just as well say Christian marriage is a crime against women that all in which and most women are complicit. And at least my statement would have the distinction of being more than half true.
About a year ago I was writing stroppy articles about the way the tabloid purveyors of overt moral outrage and tacit titillation were handling the story of young women murdered in Ipswich. So I am aware there is a nasty, brutal, exploitative side to prostitution. That is not the whole picture though. I have only ever known one prostitute, or escort as she would prefer.
One of my consultancy contracts involved “working from home” on Mondays, which meant I spread a few hours work over the weekend and caught an early evening train down to London. A fellow traveller was a smart, sophisticated Jewish woman. It was about the third time we met on that train she revealed she was a prostitute, or escort. Realising this expressed a level of trust I simply remarked that it was not something one comes across every day on the Inter City. She told me there were a few women from the Manchester area travelled down to work in the same line but most went later in the week as they worked the more lucrative weekends. Monique (her professional name) had children in boarding school and so kept her weekends free.
Once I dared ask how family and friends would react if they knew of her business.
“I’m not going to make a public announcement,” she said, “but frankly I don’t give a shit what people think. For ten years I was a good Jewish wife; a whore, housemaid, cook, sophisticated hostess, mother, I pandered to his mother, flirted with his business friends, and I was always under his control. Now though I have many clients, I only perform one service and nobody calls the tune. What I do, I do for me.”
So that is another side to the sex trade.
The reason I recalled Monique is that recently I read a book titled “God’s Call Girl” by Carla van Raay. This writer, now in her late sixties told how at sixteen she had entered a Roman Catholic convent to escape the oppression, violence and sexual abuse of a strict Roman Catholic home in Southern Holland.
’s funny how many times I read of devoutly Christian Dad’s who think its perfectly OK to shag their daughters. Oh well, everybody knows my views on Christianity.
Back to the theme however. Carla van Raay spent over ten years in holy orders and experienced at the hands of the Nuns greater cruelty than she had received from her father, greater indifference to her humanity than she had known from her cold, aloof mother, and all done “in the name of Jesus”. So badly was she treated that eventually she left the order and ran away, marrying the first man who showed an interests in her.
The marriage, predictably, was a disaster and Carla, now with a child to look after and unable to get a job teaching because though she had qualified while in the convent, the order refused her a reference, learned massage and turned to the sex trade. She liked sex but did not care much for men.
Carla was a sex worker into her fifties, she was always in control of her life, something she had never been before she was a prostitute.
It was not my kind of book, my wife bought it; she has an interest in Catholic girls who lapse even more spectacularly than she did. I prefer a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel, but God’s Call Girl opened my eyes, coming as it did on the heels of the film Magdalene Sisters, a story set in Ireland in the 1950s relating the abuses suffered by “wayward girls” handed over to the Nuns, sometimes for nothing worse than holding hands with a boy.
There are fewer women working now in the way Monique and Carla van Raay did according to the very unreliable information available. The irony is that liberal feminists are far more responsible than any of Monique’s clients for the change in the sex industry. A few years ago they were wringing their hands about the Government’s shabby treatment of asylum seekers from Eastern Europe, political activists and dissidents who would surely be murdered if they were returned to their homeland.
A lot of these asylum seekers, many of whom did not pursue their application for citizenship but simply disappeared out of the system, were not political activists on the run from covert agencies loyal to tyrants. There were very bad people who were on the run from even badder people from whom they had stolen money, or from rival gangsters or militia leaders whose supporters they had murdered.
These are the people who are driving the sex trade evermore downmarket. So now, thanks to our zeal for being “nice” we have the sex trade increasingly controlled by people to whom a woman’s life and dignity have less significance than that of a goat.
If I believed in any sort of God I would probably pray that it protect us from the stupdity of the self righteous.