Prostitution should be classless

New York governor Eliot Spitzer resigned yesterday after it was revealed he had spent $80,000 on prostitutes. Having spent much of his legal and political career going after public figures with loose morals, he didn’t have much choice. But what interested me was the way the story was reported. The New York Times and the LA Times both referred to a “high-priced prostitution ring”. By contrast, the BBC, the Telegraph, the FT, the Daily Mail, The Guardian and no doubt many more in the British media are talking about “high-class” hookers.

I suppose it might be cultural. Americans, as we know, are proud to have no hereditary class system; thus their inbred, defenceless beast-shooting halfwits are referred to as ‘rednecks’ and not ‘your lordship’. But of course they do have one, and it’s based on money. So it could be that for Americans, high priced means high class.

By the same token, we Brits don’t like to talk about money, it’s ungenteel somehow. Thus “high class” could be a nice delicate way of saying “high priced”, which I suppose in itself is a nice way of saying “really fucking expensive compared to a hand job you might get off some Ukranian 15-year-old from the place in town above Topps Tiles”.

You can’t blame the journalists. In the Spitzer case, where the sum of money spent was so huge that it apparently triggered FBI anti-terrorism monitoring, it makes sense to explain that he was spending a lot of money on a few individual prostitutes, rather than having harems of really cheap ones attending him at all times. That does affect the story.

But I wonder, how does a prostitute get to be high priced, or even high class? Is she, on the American model, fairly affluent herself and dabbling in prostution only for luxuries such as lobster and Manolos? Is she, on the British model, from a good family? Is she educated? Is she particularly good-looking? Is she really, really good in bed?

Basically, I don’t think there is anything high class about charging or paying for sex. I know I’m out of step – if ITV are paying Billie Piper to play a prostitute, it’s definitely becoming OK. The next issue of Arena will feature an interview with a male prostitute; in the past, a few of its contributors have written about using them.

Still, I’m going out on a conservative limb here and saying, I don’t care how much you pay for it, that doesn’t make it OK. If you make a woman (or a man) into a commodity like a car, or a coat, or a bottle of wine, you lose some of your own humanity. I don’t care if you’re saying she’s a high-class thing, a Bollinger rather than a Lambrini, I don’t care if she says she chose to do it for the money. You’re still treating her as a thing to be bought and sold; any kind of euphemism you want to put on it is just clouding the issue.

Let’s acknowledge that. Let’s call a prostitute a prostitute. It’s honest – and you can’t put too high a price on that.