The power of sex
If money makes the world go round, sex is its ... lubricant
“Everything is about sex,” Frank Underwood confides to us in the Netflix series House of Cards, “Except sex. Sex is about power.”
Image: Kevin Spacey as Francis Underwood, confiding in us. Even though Spacey, the actor, was cleared of all charges, the accusations against him of a sexual nature just went to prove how very right his character’s utterances on the subject are.
Upon first hearing, that statement comes over as (a) very clever, (b) very conspiratorial and (c) quite surprising, if, like me, you had, before hearing it, thought that sex was about a mutual exchange of bodily pleasure. So, what most of us do when hearing this wisdom of Mr Underwood’s is reflect on our own experience of sex, in order to work out whether he is right or wrong in his assessment. And most of us usually get stuck at the first part of the statement, without ever really moving on to the second part: what does everything is about sex even mean?
Table tennis is part of everything and, except in the film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, we don’t readily associate it with sex. However, although the Olympic table tennis championships (which, even at half speed on the video recorder, can be difficult to follow with the naked eye) fall well outside my definition of sex, it is true that actress Julia Cortez, as Bob’s Filipina wife, Cynthia, in that film did find a more provocative use for ping-pong balls than just batting them across a net.
The film has been criticised as pandering to racist and sexist tropes, and yet the scene confers on Cynthia a strange power; to criticise the performance is to take a high moralistic stance: the question is whether that moral stance is assumed against the filmmakers, for how they depict her character; or against the character herself, for the power she exercises over the menfolk in the bar, including Bob, her husband? As a result of the escapade, she delights and entertains her audience with her somewhat bawdy, specialty act, and dominates her down-at-earth mechanic other half. Sex, no matter how free and equal the exchange of favours, always exerts something akin to power. Question is: power to do what?
The Rue d’Aerschot in Brussels is a red-light district. It’s the only stretch of roadway in Brussels—to my knowledge—that provides pissoirs. They’re arranged at regular intervals along the one side of the street that is just a wall, separating it from the railway. Before the pissoirs were installed, men simply urinated against that wall, and the collapse of the campanile on Piazza San Marco in Venice in 1902 shows us how deleterious that can be for stonework (the bell tower had continually been used as a public convenience). It’s worth noting, there are no public facilities provided in Rue d’Aerschot for women to relieve themselves, just the men.
When the French passed a law rendering the customers of prostitutes criminals in 2014, Belgium braced itself for an explosion in northern French clientele travelling to Brussels to take advantage of the more liberal stance in Belgium. The state may think it possesses ultimate power over the people with its lawmaking prerogative, but sex is more powerful than even the law—all it can do is shift the problem, if problem it be.
Ultimately, Belgium succumbed to the pressures applied by sex, and allowed prostitutes to register as sole traders, collecting VAT and remitting it to the state, so that our country now benefits from prostitution, even though it is still illegal to pimp. The new arrangement was supposed to factor out the pimps, who are regarded as the greater evil in the whole prostitution business. But there are places on this Earth where the greatest evil of all in the prostitution business is none other than the state itself.
Thus it is that the state actually helps pimps in Florida. Sex offenders (including prostitutes) and drug offenders have their accusations, home addresses, full names, ages and mugshots publicised on the Internet even before they are convicted. The situation isn’t vastly different in most other United States. Women charged with these offences and ultimately convicted go to women’s penitentiaries where they very soon start receiving mail. Mail from males. Unsolicited letters from correspondents who promise them this and that, even surreptitiously paying unsolicited sums into their commissary accounts. “If there’s anything I can do for y’all here on the outside, you just let me know. Kisses. Daddy.”
The girls are not imprisoned for long periods, hence they’re not exactly haggard old fishwives when they’re released. So, the prison system acts like a sort of catalogue, from which groomers and pimps and even women with bitches can pick and choose the cream of the crop, whereupon all they need to do is gain the incarcerated person’s trust and reliance and then arrange to be at the prison gates upon the women’s release. As long as prison staff see her climb into a vehicle upon her release, their job is done. They pay no attention to who is driving the car. The women are whisked to outlying areas where a single detached dwelling house can quickly become home to 25 girls.
Pimps vary in style. There are Sugar Daddies, who treat girls to all they wish for, for about two weeks, till the complaints come: they’re costing too much of Daddy’s disposable income. They have to figure out a way to repay him. And not just in bed with him. He knows some guys who’d really like to get to know them better, and who’ll pay for the privilege. A fortnight of freedom is quickly ended with a new prison sentence. If they hesitate, out of some residual sentiment of prudishness, a few quick slaps across the face will keep them in line. It’s the ironic reverse of the Roman tradition whereby a satyr would be slapped across the face by a nymph to indicate her unwillingness to have sex with him, so that if he pursued his advances, he was guilty of rape. Anyhow, there we are, either the girls are now introduced into prostitution, or, more likely, they already know the score and are fully aware of what is expected of them, anyway.
Then there are the Gorilla Pimps, who are not so delicately persuasive in their tactics: they beat a girl to a pulp so she knows what she has to do from the outset. Why do the girls hang around to be beaten? Well, where else can they go, rejected as they are by their families, and cornered by poverty?
Finally, there’s the Drug Dealers: the pimp plies them with crack (which is crystal meth these days, not cocaine) and, after making sure they’re hooked, he moves in to demand payment. It’s not vastly unlike confectionery companies getting you hooked on sugar, and some argue it’s not as bad as the candy companies. But there you are, yet again: those are the techniques.
The publicity with which Florida’s administration displays these victims and perpetrators of society’s evils (you decide yourself which is which: girl or pimp) feeds into the endless demand for young flesh. It is, strange to relate, the eternal whack-a-mole game between blaming the hookers, for being hookers, and blaming the pimps for providing the hookers. No one is too interested in staunching the demand side of the bargain, which comes from the johns (customers). And the state’s role is simply denied. Whether by way of the publicity given to the personal details of accused women, or the indifference of prison warders, legislators, police and even the general public, most of whom feel that, as a reverse of, say, burglary, it’s an area of law and order in which they have no involvement, if they do have plenty of interest.
Is it any wonder that Florida and its offshore islands are where Jeffrey Epstein plied his trade? The thing is, these girls are exposed to the machinations of groomers from the moment they are arrested: name, age, address, mugshot, previous convictions, the lot. The naming and shaming has got the grooming booming. It’s hard to see why Florida doesn’t revisit its laws in this respect. It’s as though lawmakers want it to happen. If so, that, once again, shows the power of sex.
Sex now has the power to get the president of the U.S. to make the most absurd denials of what is presented in black and white, with some pretty crayon colours in between. The Epstein files are all about sex, illicit sex, unlawful sex, grooming and nurturing children (from 1983) to be the masseuses (of 2003), and the president dismisses the whole thing as boring. I don’t know about you, I am entranced by the whole squalid story: to me it’s anything but boring. It’s the most salacious thing I’ve heard since John Profumo. At least Keeler was of age.
The only explanation for the sharp decline in public morals in terms of sex would potentially be the sharp decline in morals in terms of insider trading, gerrymandering, planting judicial benches, strongarming law firms, engaging in questionable deportation tactics, and other commercial and political machinations: a sense of entitlement. In that respect it would no longer be something that needs to be hidden, not from the inner circles, who’d likely know very well what’s going on. There would be some residual sense of propriety, which demanded that such things really best be kept out of the newspapers but, if need be, they’d just sue the newspapers for 15 billion dollars (to pick a sum at random) if they ever tried to publish a story even slightly alluding to such indiscretions. That would be my best guess, if the idea itself weren’t so laughably preposterous, of course.
I wonder if there is a fantasy world in which you can sit down to your morning boiled egg, and turn on the wireless to hear something like: Here is the BBC Home Service. This morning, the prime minister’s press service advised that he’d last night had a fourth tryst with Candy Buttons, his fourteen-year-old bit of fluff on the side, and said the results were more than satisfactory, before he’d delivered the girl into the company of a circle of perverts who sampled the youngster’s flesh for themselves for the rest of the night.
Not so very laughable, perhaps, but preposterous all the same, and very, very unlikely. By no stretch of the imagination could such an announcement be described as everyday. And yet the U.S. president says that what Epstein did was boring. Boring, workaday, everyday, nothing of interest to see here. Whatever your reaction is to that dreamt-up narrative in italics above, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that it may not be factually true, but its gist is precisely the kind of thing that is gradually coming into the public domain in terms of Epstein and the files, and such matters extend far beyond the standard that qualifies them as boring. That is the power of sex. The power to make retch-worthy descriptions of men’s illicit sexual escapades into something that qualifies as boring.
One wonders whether the lawmakers of the state of Florida are entirely in the know about the effects of their public shaming measures or whether they really believe the publicity given to a young hooker will dissuade her from treading that steep path to perdition. In Belgium, the girls who decide not to incorporate and collect tax for the state run the risk of being run in. But first they need to be caught, and it’s a low-priority criminal offence, even if it did get upped from an outrage of public morals to tax fraud. The police who patrol Rue d’Aerschot are generally there for public order and to protect the girls.
It’s safe enough, even if it’s not exactly a safe area. I was seconded by the public prosecutor a few years ago to translate arrest warrants for an Albanian youngster aged 16 who shot a man six times in a bar down there—and missed, of sorts. The victim turned away from the firing and took all six shots in his backside, thus preserving his vital organs and ensuring his survival, even if it was a while before he could comfortably sit down again. The youngster fled to Manchester, where he tried to mow some people down with a van. The Manchester police said that Brussels can have him, but need to wait until he gets out of Strangeways—that’ll be in about 15 years from now. I don’t mean to be uncharitable, but the poor lad wasn’t even a good criminal …
I don’t know, but I suspect that’s the worst of what you could witness down the Rue d’Aerschot. But where do you reckon the unsavoury types who inhabit that area would be if they weren’t there. Even cattle need to be corralled. When I was acting in a play in a theatre down there (forming the old stables of the castle that was demolished to make way for the railway station, so of historical significance), I would park on the street and the girls would smile and give me a thumbs up (I run a loud, ostentatious car), and would keep an eye on the open-top vehicle until I returned at midnight to run home in it (assuming they weren’t otherwise contractually engaged). There was never anything missing, never. It costs nothing and can have untold benefits simply to be friendly to a prostitute. If only because so many people aren’t. There, that’s just one more aspect: the sex on offer down there kept thieves away from my car; whereas the kid with a six-shooter wasn’t even able to take out his fellow countryman in a taproom contretemps. The power of sex.
In some ways, it’s that that rules the world. Or at least parts of it.
From south to north (or top left to bottom right): a photomontage of the collapse of the San Marco campanile in Venice in 1902; Belgium’s other sex hotspot, Sint-Truiden (“the language of the contract is the language of the customer”); Belgian police patrol the Rue d’Aerschot in 2014; and the classic market-leader—Amsterdam.