IQ2 debate: ‘It’s wrong to pay for sex’

It was back to basics at Intelligence Squared last Tuesday as we debated the morality of prostitution. Newspaper executive Jeremy O’Grady proposed the motion by taking us on a graphic tour of Amsterdam’s red-light district which he’d visited ‘in an anthropological capacity’. The spectacle of hungry-eyed men sloping from door to door with their moist tongues lolling from their mouths had convinced him that buying sex was demeaning to all concerned. ‘Thinking about sex in the same way as buying a ticket degrades your humanity.’ Mutual desire should be the essence of sexual relationships. Anticipating his opponents’ arguments he examined the notion that courtship and marriage are morally identical to prostitution. The difference, he said, is that a man taking a woman out to dinner is paying to facilitate her desire for him. When he hires a prostitute he’s paying for the absence of her desire for him.

Opening for the opposition Germaine Greer argued that our entire society is based on commerce. ‘Everyone must sell something to make a living.’ She knew from experience that ‘waitresses who show cleavage get tips’, and she saw no reason to single out prostitutes for censure. ‘There’s a lot of faking it in the service industries, sex included.’ Attacking the myth of ‘sexual idealism’, she rubbished the idea that coition produces a mystical convergence of the souls. ‘Just because he puts his little finger up your nose doesn’t mean you’re spiritually united.’ There are worse things to sell, she said, than your body. ‘Your child, your kidney, your soul.’ In comparison with ‘the whole panoply of exploitation that is the consumer society, prostitution is honest and innocent’.