“Respectable”
Guardian article, Media section
Five’s new sitcom is about prostitution. You know the funniest part?
The women all love their work
Kira Cochrane
Thursday August 17, 2006
The Guardian
When it comes to sitcoms, some situations are inherently funnier than others. Snobbish radio shrink lives with feisty working-class father and difficult dog? Comedy gold. Manic hotelier with clumsy Spanish sidekick enrages everyone in his path? A no-brainer. How about this one, then? In an age of soaring sex tourism, amid reports that one in 10 British men has visited a prostitute and stories of sex worker “slave auctions” in the arrival lounges of British airports, how about creating a sitcom set in a suburban British brothel?
It’s the new comedy show from Channel Five, it begins in a couple of weeks, and it’s surely comedy genius! Four female characters, all prostitutes, and all - naturally, this being a comedy - happy hookers, hoofing it up and uttering deathless quips about blowjobs. There’s Maureen, the ageing madame, who offers such comedy lines as “less gabble, more gobble” and whose catchphrase - hilariously - is, “But I’m only 27!” There’s Kate, the brainy one, who is working in the sex trade to pay off her student loans, and Hayley, the extremely thick one (played by lads’ mag favourite Jodi Albert) who is working as a prostitute to pay for … heroin? No. Crack? No. You guessed it: her shoe collection!
Then, because in this day and age you gotta have an eastern European prostitute too, there’s Yelena, the haughty, though permanently willing Serbian, who struts around like Ivana Humpalot in the Austin Powers films, throwing out immortal lines such as “Men are like cashpoints with cocks. I milk them and then I buy beautiful things.” And all of them, including Maureen, walk around almost constantly in their scanties!
And then, in case your sides haven’t ruptured yet, why not make the central character a sweet, shy, middle-class man called Michael who’s driven into Hayley’s arms by his whining, whingeing wife, who’s more concerned with walnut worktops than with servicing her beloved? The least sexually predatory character in TV - possibly fiction - history, Michael professes his love for Hayley by the end of the first episode, but, even by the end of the third episode, hasn’t slept with her. This is because, you understand, he’s extremely caring and loving, and just really misunderstood by his appalling bitch of a wife.
Sounds appealing? Yes? Well, you’ll soon be able to decide for yourself when Five screens the sitcom, called Respectable. Having watched the first three episodes, and emerged thoroughly depressed (and not just for political reasons; this is one of the direst pieces of comedy writing in history), there’s a part of me that just wants to ignore the show entirely. It surely can’t last more than a few weeks.
Its arrival on our screens, however, coincides almost exactly with the publication of the Belle de Jour sequel - a book based on the supposed blog of a Bridget Jones-esque high-class British prostitute. In this instalment, Belle is looking to find a new profession. Not because she’s desperate, you understand, but because she just wants to try something new. “There’s no denying I’ll miss it,” she writes. “Lunchtime trips to swank hotels; dinners out with the sort of men you usually only read about in the business papers; the underwear; the sex.”
Because, if you hadn’t got the message by now: life as a prostitute is brilliant! Respectable and Belle de Jour are the latest additions to a long, non-illustrious list, including the films Pretty Woman and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, all of which depict prostitution primarily as a great lark, offering fun, flexible hours, and the chance to meet interesting, caring, fascinating men.
And these stories are dangerous. Because, although it’s tempting just to ignore them, the image that they promote - that the sex industry is entirely benign and enjoyable - offers the ultimate in flattery to men who pay for sex. These stories obscure any sense that prostituted women might not be acting entirely out of free choice, instead suggesting that they’re driven by a huge love of sex and an entirely indiscriminate attraction to men (however ugly, hairy or smelly they might be).
And in shows like Respectable, nobody mentions sex slavery, or the fact that rape is more a likely outcome of prostitution than romance, or that an estimated 95% of prostitutes are addicted to drugs or alcohol. In Respectable, the character Kate might be selling sex to pay off student debts, but because all students have debts now and not many become prostitutes, this message still allows for a large dollop of free choice. Her motivations are far from the hopeless desperation of long-term heroin addiction, because - well, that wouldn’t be sexy. The real story of prostitution is occasionally brought to our attention through stories of serial killers or serial rapists. These women, staring out from newspaper pages, their pictures arranged in a tableau around a photograph of their accused killer, are clearly not happy hookers. And it’s accepted that we will do no more to engage with their individual stories than to list their names. When it comes to these prostitutes - surely much more representative of the industry than their all-singing, all-dancing fictional peers - we don’t want to explore what their lives are really like, because it would bring the whole structure that supports and fuels prostitution crashing down. To engage with these women would be to accept that one half of the human population being bought and sold by the other isn’t entirely acceptable or, you know, actually all that amusing.
With an estimated 80,000 prostitutes in Britain and millions more worldwide, I’m willing to accept that women engaged in prostitution have a wide range of experiences and opinions, and that some will even enjoy aspects of their work. I’m just not willing to accept that prostitution is a whole heap of fun.
One of the most interesting books I’ve read this year is In My Skin, by Kate Holden, a brilliant account of the years she spent as a prostitute in Australia. It’s a subtle book, in which Holden admits that she sometimes enjoyed the sex she had, but in which the overriding narrative is shaped by her heroin addiction. Because, despite her occasional enjoyment of her job, Holden only became a prostitute when she fell into addiction, and she gave up as soon as the heroin left her system. All of which tells its own story.
[comment seems hardly possible; nevertheless, comments below]
DeAnander:
whatever next? “Laughs on the Line,” a sparkling new comedy about the hijinks and romances of gorgeous teenage maquiladora workers who sing at their sewing machines while vying slyly for the boss’ favours? Romance and Comedy in the FTZ? or how about “Happy Campers,” a bright and heart-warming comedy-romance set in the refugee camps of Afghanistan, starring handsome hunk Manfred E Manly of the US Army, a sensitive blue-eyed heart-throb struggling to hold off the attention of those passionate Afghan maidens?
excuse me while I put some padding on the wall so that it hurts less when I have to pound my head against it.
actually I think maybe we could draw the parallel with various military propaganda efforts… including Hogan’s Heroes and the British wartime comedies, which tried to turn the realities of warfare and occupation into humorous Pablum for a similar reason: to normalise and make acceptable (Respectable!) a dangerous and predatory social institution (warfare, the army). the brothel and the armed forces are not just symbiotic, they’re structural parallels… engines of consumption, into which a poverty draft pushes society’s expendables…
there’s a recurrent masculinist fantasy of the Demon Wife vs the Happy Hooker, i.e. the ease and comfort of “the woman who really understands” [is paid to make nice, do whatever is asked of her in a contractually binding commercial relationship] vs the demanding/cranky/uncooperative wife at home. underlying messages seem to be that men only seek out prostitutes because their wives are unloving or mean; that johns are all Nice Guys just looking for a little sympathy or understanding; that johns fall in love with prostitutes (this is a common delusion/fantasy among young prostitutes, especially those who come from poverty and dream that a rich john will fall in love with them and whisk them off into a better life).
somehow this belief-set is clustered in my brain filing system with the masculinist beliefs that family law discriminates horribly against men, that men are victimised by e.g. alimony and child support payments, that prosecution of deadbeat dads is actually social persecution of oppressed males, etc… basically that wives are the Bad Guys (er, Girls), husbands are henpecked victims, and that prostitutes are, by contrast, Good Girls. kind of turning patriarchal morality on its head, perhaps in a vindictive payback for feminism?
this then leads us to the lively “men’s rights movement” and the mythopoetic side of that — the whole Robert Bly / Iron John shtick. interestingly if you google these days for “deadbeat dads” or “alimony failure to pay” almost all the initial hits (when I tried it anyway) will be links to Men’s Rights sites, vilifying feminists… either the MR guys are googlebombing or Google is doing a bit of editorialising
anyway, a new TV genre: the brothel sitcom. I hate to think what happens when the “reality show” people get hold of this one.
22 August 2006, 1:14 amDan:
Since this is an English story, I thought people might be interested in a little English history. The following is excerpted from a Letter published int he London Times, Feb. 24, 1858. It was written by a London prostitute, and is incredibly ironic. She says she is the daughter of a brickmaker and his wife, that they were drunks, that most of the prostitutes she knows are poor women, not “seduced” chambermaids or “fallen” middle class girls. If those were the “romances” of prostitution she wrote to dispell, maybe things haven’t changed too much in 150 years.
“I am a stranger to all the fine sentiments… All my experiences in early life were gleaned among associates…whose chiefest triumphs of wisdom consisted in picking their way through the paths of destitution… at the age of 18 [I] was living partly under the protection of one who thought he discovered that I had talent…[who] drew from me something like a feeling of regard, but not sufficiently strong to lift me to that sense of my position which the so-called virtuous and respectable members of society seem to entertain… I suppose it is because I am one of those who, as Rousseau says, are ‘born to be prostitutes’.
“Common honesty I believe in rigidly. I have always paid my debts… I have always been charitable… I have not neglected my duty to my family… I always abhorred stealing. Now, what if I am a prostitute, what business has society to abuse me? Have I received any favours at the hands of society? …we come from the dregs of society, as our so-called betters term it. What business has society to have dregs - such dregs as we? You… who stand on your smooth and pleasant side of the great gulf you have dug and keep between yourselves and the dregs, why don’t you bridge it over, or fill it up, and by some humane and generous process absorb us into your leavened mass, until we become interpenetrated with goodness like yourselves? …we who are not fallen, but were always down…Cannot society devise some plan to reach us?â€
22 August 2006, 11:35 amTimothy R. Anderson:
Off-topic again. But I apologize.
Uh, you know how Pres. Bush said, yesterday, that certain places in the world suffer from a lack of hope and further said something delightfully obtuse about how despair can turn a person into a ….. um … into a ” suicider ” ?
It’s a weird bit in a series of even weirder bits. Has the man not heard of the citizens, the NON-ROYAL
citizens of Saudi Arabia ? Uh, I think the majority of the, ahem, ” suiciders ” of the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks were citizens of Saudi Arabia. I think, further, that the current White House of Washington DC, and the current Congress of Corporation Washington D.C. HAVE DONE NOTHIN
THE ENTIRE TIME that HAS / Will IMPROvE
anything for the AVERAGE, ORdINARY SauDI ArABIAN citizen !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
War is a racket. U.S. Marine Butler said it.
President Bush has proven it.
Please sign the petition at
22 August 2006, 8:20 pmhttp://www.warisaracket.org Thanx, T.R. Anderson
Dan:
Anybody want to sign a petition to send to Mr. Anderson to ask him to stop doing this?
23 August 2006, 1:27 pmTimothy R. Anderson:
UPDATE : http://www.warisaracket.org ’s petition has more than 200 signatures ! Please keep up those names coming , y’all …. and thank you. T.R. Anderson
23 August 2006, 3:17 pmJulian Real:
Gee. Sure can’t wait for the U.S. version: perhaps starring Paris Hilton, the Olsen twins–or their even more Aryan and white supremacist “cousins” Lynx and Lamb Gaede:
http://prussianbluefan.blogspot.com/
Amerikkka might decide against having a woman of Color on the show, what with U.S. TV not really doing that too often. Were it not for antiracist and Jewish actor David Schwimmer, no Black woman would have ever been on Friends.
Perhaps the U.S version will substitute a bleach-blond-haired Asian woman who’s had her eyes Westernized.
I hope British feminists and supporters are ready to move against the producers of this “show”, quickly.
23 August 2006, 3:32 pmSam:
“I hate to think what happens when the “reality show†people get hold of this one.”
There is already a reality show set in a Nevada brothel running on HBO called Cathouse.
prepare to barf
23 August 2006, 9:50 pmjay taber:
10 Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution by Janice G. Raymond
24 August 2006, 2:58 pmhttp://www.prostitutionresearch.com/laws/000022.html
Gary Goodman:
Compelling article. Blanket solutions of any type seem wrought with conflicts.
I only know/knew two female prostitutes and one male prostitute in all my years. I’m speaking of America. All had addiction problems with drugs/alcohol.
I never discussed the sit. with the man, just knew “of” it from a mutual friend.
Legalization of drugs, expanded opportunities for drug treatment, is probably a big part of any solution. Obviously economic opportunities amounting to more than drudgery and “wage slavery” would discourage most people from entering into “sex slavery” or prostitution or “dancing”, rather than the two being seen as relatively equivalent exploitation by some who make that choice.
In this ideal environment, the remaining few people who choose this lifestyle/employment will most likely be either completely free will, or severe exploitation/kidnapping type scenerios which should obviously remain severely punishable (to the perpetrators).
I’ve only discussed this openly with one of the females. She was self-employed, had no pimp, and was usually tough enough to fend for herself, but not always. At times she experienced danger and violence, at other times she “felt sorry” for some of the lonely and pathetic men who were her customers. She also at times acted as “madame” for other women who asked for the opportunity, wisely or not.
I’ve also known several strippers, most who disliked their work and their customers. Many got a perverse pleasure from exploiting the male customers financially, as the women saw themselves as “in charge”, and their customers as “dupes”. (The club managers were all female and decent people, lessening the exploitation factor.)
Most “dancers” saw this as an opportunity to earn more money than they could by other means, in part due to what some have diagnosed as an engineered breakdown of healthy relationships.
Usually various troubles led to this “quick cash” solution to be relatively unproductive, i.e. spent foolishly on baubles, parties, or parasitic boyfriends rather than on establishing some “nest egg”.
One of them was divorced, entered a happy relationship with a sometime customer who she got to know personally. They have now been happily married around five years. She quit this second job almost immediately after the love relationship began. I know this is rare, because most of the male customers seemed have some tendency towards rudeness, exploitative nature, immature attitudes and behavior.
On the other hand, I met one woman who proudly said she OWNED a hair or tanning salon, who used the extra cash from “dancing” to go on frequent exotic vacations, totally free choice.
How I knew these people were from earlier days of drug/alcohol abuse/recovery, and from a time when I found titillation by “dancers” an exciting “fantasy” experience. Once I gained a grasp of the reality, the fantasy faded and my role in that charade became empty and pointless.
One of the MOST unhealthy applications of anti-prostitution regulations (against women, not pimps or customers) I’d ever heard about was Afghanistan, where women were prevented from working, and prostitutes could be subjected to harsh religious punishments, yet the Taliban enforcers themselves demanded “freebies” from desperate and ashamed women.
I’m rather embarrassed that I’m even attempting to take a balanced position on this erudite forum. I’m afraid I will be seen as boorish or trying to justify the unjustifiable exploitation and commodification of human beings. I can insist that this is not the case, and I hope the reader believes me.
I’m not totally libertarian, but libertarian enough to think that criminalization of “sex-worker-victims” is certainly no solution at all, criminalization of only-customers seems dangerously unbalanced (since some of the customers may be predators, others may simply be prey or weak), and full legalization (and government “investment” in the sex business) creates a a whole different set of problems. My unprofessional viewpoint is that widespread prostitution (and other forms of dehumanization) is just one additional symptom of sick societies, better solved by correcting larger societal gender and economic imbalances.
Or maybe I don’t know s#1t from shinola.
7 September 2006, 6:11 am