Banyard - Pimp state: sex, money and the future of equality

Would you mind stepping outside?

Not wanting to draw more attention to myself, I did as the official whispering in my ear asked. I got up from my seat and tried to look surprised, though unconcerned, as I was escorted out of the conference room.

Out in the corridor the event official turned to me. I just want to make sure cause weve had some situations. Are you here with a company?

The woman didnt elaborate on what situations had occurred, but I knew what she was referring to. Three days earlier, delegates arriving here at XBIZ EU, a pornography trade conference held in London, had received a rather unceremonious welcome from a group of feminist protestors. Now the mere presence of one youngish-looking woman on her own was apparently enough to make the organisers twitchy.

But why should a single woman stick out like a sore thumb at a porn industry meet-up? After all, the worlds most famous porn peddler, Hugh Hefner, has argued that Playboy and the Playboy clubs were the end of sexism. Women were being held in bondage for hundreds of years, owned first by their fathers and then by their husbands. Playboy helped to change all that. Thats what the sexual revolution was all about. have been queuing around the block to find out what new developments in the porn industry would help keep patriarchy at bay?

Hefner portrayed himself as a womens rights pioneer, straight-faced, to a reporter quizzing him in 2011 about protests against his new Playboy Club in London. They had been organised by the pressure group Object and UK Feminista, an organisation Id set up the previous year, precisely because the engine rooms of the real revolution Hef helped inspire the global expansion of the sex trade are not packed out by the grateful daughters of feminism. They are filled with the people I sat among that day in 2013 when I attended the porn trade conference: businessmen. (As it transpired, I was allowed to return to the meeting room after I reassured the organisers I was there for research, rather than placard-waving purposes.)

The conference was hosted at the four-star Radisson Blu Edwardian Bloomsbury Street Hotel. This high-end setting was a testament to how far the porn trade has travelled. Once deemed the preserve of seedy backstreets, the pornography industry has bulldozed its way into the mainstream, and on to Wall Street. In 2011, US investment fund Colbeck Capital Management gave a $362 million loan to a porn company.

Casting a wistful eye over his long career, eighty-four-year-old Hugh Hefner reminisced in 2010, The criticisms that troubled me the most came from the feminists, from liberals, at the very beginning. I was blindsided by them and didnt know what they were talking about. But the Playboy founder was resolute as to who had come out on top. I think my critics are dead wrong. It was clear to me then; its clearer to me today, because I think history has proven me right Ive won. We now live in a Playboy world.

Hefners claim cant easily be written off as mere delusion of grandeur. Pornography has never been more easily, cheaply or heavily consumed as it is today. You can buy Playboy magazine from high-street shops, go to a Playboy Club, visit Playboy Online, and watch Playboy TV on cable and satellite. The websites owned by Manwin (now MindGeek) alone are reported to clock up around 16 billion visits each month,

Pornography isnt the only part of the sex trade to have experienced a boom over the past two decades. During this time, the number of women paid for sex in Germanys prostitution trade is thought to have doubled, with the current

As the sex trade has ballooned, inevitably its influence on popular culture has too. Sometimes that influence isnt just a knowing nod from advertisers, or a borrowed motif in a music video, its a direct fusion of the two worlds. In 2005, HBO launched Cathouse: The Series,

Pointing out that the sex trade generates substantial profits or that it has secured a firm foothold in the cultural mainstream is not a source of great controversy. How societies should respond is. Indeed, how the state should deal with this trade is shaping up to be one of the big debates of our time. Should it be legal to pay for sex? Whats the best way to promote the safety of women involved? How does online porn impact on boys attitudes towards women and sex? Is this an industry that is irredeemably sexist or something we should accommodate? In essence, are feminism and the sex trade on a collision course? These are questions that go to the very heart of societys notions of sexual consent, violence and equality.

In recent years a consensus has begun to form around the idea that the sex trade and sex equality can in fact be comfortable bedfellows. Few would deny that the sex trade currently has a sexist side. But then, the argument follows, dont all industries? The proposition that the two are compatible allows room for multiple interpretations: at euphoric best, the sex trade represents the promised land of feminism (see Hugh Hefners previous end of sexism proclamation). At worst, its present outputs merely reflect misogynistic attitudes in wider society. Somewhere in the middle, the trade is afforded a more mundane profile: that of ordinary work. Yet however sexist it is currently considered to be, what these interpretations share is the underlying presumption that the sex trade is compatible with feminism; that we neednt work to end it; that it can be reformed.

The claim that building a feminist future does not necessitate the abolition of the sex trade is not some esoteric, ivory tower hypothesis. Its a contention that today underpins a global bid for governments to accept, regulate and accommodate the trade. This book is a challenge to that bid. I will show that it is only possible to maintain that the sex trade is compatible with equality between women and men through the creation and retelling of toxic myths: the myth that men paying women to perform sex acts on them is a harmless consumer transaction, on a par with him paying her to serve a cappuccino, dry clean his clothes, or perform any number of other service jobs. The myth that pornography is mere fantasy, not real life, and that all we have to do is teach young people how to differentiate between the two. The myth that the sex trade can be made safe, and that the route to get there is by making paying for sex, pimping and brothel-keeping legal. And the myth that any sexism in the sex trade is merely a problem with the message (directors instructing male porn performers to use misogynistic language, say), not the medium itself (sexual consent that was purchased, in a brothel or on a porn set).

These myths are being used to create a culture and set of laws that encourage and facilitate mens paid sexual access to womens bodies: what I call a pimp state. It is being pursued most explicitly and literally in the call for governments to take a direct financial cut from the transaction by licensing brothels, imposing rules on the people inside, and taxing them.