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.