Prostitution is a degrading experience for both parties

an incredibly insightful look at why some men buy sex.

From The Times

March 13, 2008

My desire for sex was so overwhelming that I had difficulty breathing

As a US Governor becomes embroiled in an escort scandal, a call-girl addict reveals the lure of illicit sex

John X

This is what gets me about the debate about prostitution, this speculation of motive as if it were some profound secret that only a team of crack shrinks can unlock. "Why did he do it?" "What did he feel?" "How could he? Why would he? But he had a girlfriend!" "Is his penis microscopically small?" "He must have harboured subconscious murderous thoughts towards his mother."

For six years I was addicted to prostitutes. All the symptoms were there: the racing pulse; the hyperventilation; the inability, when the red mist of lust descended, to walk away; the exhilarating high before and the crushing low after; the cack-handed attempts to blot out shame, if only for a few minutes - usually by buying more sex. Why did I crave prostitutes like a
crackhead craves drugs? Because I wanted to feel nothing; oblivion feels good when you've had a bad day at work, or are hung-over.

First, let me explode some myths about Johns. Things that I have never been: ugly, unemployed, smelly, intellectually subnormal, illiterate, uneducated or proud of what I've done. Like most people, I can be decent company and I can be an idiot. I've always had a good, if distant, relationship with my family (hand on heart, I can tell you that I like my mother) and I've had girlfriends most of my adult life. I'm young (35) and married, thank God, to a woman who knows about my past and whom I'd never betray. It's true I used to drink too much and, like the urge for cigarettes, the urge for paid sex evaporated only when I dried out. All
addicts crave that headspace where nothing else matters. I'd get there with alcohol, and when the next day the hangover began, I'd get there again with sex. The hedonist's dilemma, I call it.

As a teenager I was packed off to an all-boys boarding school, where I was lonely and hated the group mentality. I lost my virginity at 15 but, like many boys of my background, my primary sexual relations were with the women in porn magazines. I emerged from school a man of average height and of average temperament, if a little intense sometimes, with a below-average
ability to relate to the opposite sex. My problem wasn't that I couldn't shag women; I just couldn't talk to them. My first time was in Amsterdam on my 18th birthday. I was drunk and high and with six friends from school who had decided that a brothel was on the agenda. Did it feel like crossing a line? Not really. I couldn't get it up and, afterwards, when the collective bragging began - the word "stallion" was bandied about - I lied. I remember thinking: "That was worse than popping my cherry!" The experience didn't leave me craving paid sex. What did remain were the lessons I'd already learnt from pornography: that women were there for one thing.



I don't know where the statistic that one man in ten has used prostitutes comes from. I'd say that 50 or 60 per cent of men have been to one at least once. I don't think most men like to talk about it even among themselves, but every now and again somebody lets something slip, usually when drunk. She was a "nice Swedish girl" or "good" or "professional". "Good" means that she acted it all out and hid the fact that she found you abhorrent. As for "professional" ... A friend told me about a place he went to in Chelsea: there were two women there, watching Friends. "Choose one," he was told. He had found it unprofessional that the girl he hadn't chosen was obviously so delighted to have wriggled out of sex with him. "She just skipped off," he told me.

You have to be deluded to think that a prostitute likes having sex with you. But you appreciate any woman who lets you suspend your disbelief. A "good" prostitute doesn't look at her watch in the middle of proceedings, or let you know that in paying for sex you have become everything that women hate about men.

Why do men go to prostitutes? To shag, is the short answer. It's a mistake to associate paid sex with feelings. Better to associate it with a lack of feelings, a big frightening void, an inability to communicate sexually and emotionally with a partner. Shagging a prostitute won't sort out emotional problems. You don't lie there pouring your heart out or wanting to save her from her miserable life. Why does a man need a prostitute if he's got a lovely girlfriend at home? No matter how beautiful the woman he's sleeping with, he just wants someone different, and then wants someone different again. Someone to take him out of his current reality, of which self-hatred is a decisive aspect. I never have sex with the same prostitute more than
once.

By the time I had sex with a second prostitute four years had passed. I was in Central London, hung-over, and saw a card in a phone booth. A thought passed through my brain: "If I ring that number, I could be having sex in five minutes." Suddenly the desire to have sex became so physically overwhelming that I was having difficulty breathing. Ten minutes later I was on a thin mattress with an older English woman. It was an unmemorable experience but, given the alcoholic mess that my life was becoming, the physical act was comforting. For maybe eight minutes life became a bubble, a bosom and a womb, a room full of cotton wool. And then I'd come to and there was a woman I didn't know leaving the room and always, without fail, the smell of bleach.

By the time I stopped using prostitutes, I was teetering on the brink of triple figures. At my worst I was seeing three women a week, usually in Soho where, at the time, you could buy full sex for £20. The urge to have sex was always worst when I was hung over. And anxiety is a great aphrodisiac.

I've walked out only twice - once when the prostitute turned out to be 50-odd, once when I found the girl chained to the bed (I didn't know if it was real or part of the act). And that's another myth about this business, that a punter will have a Richard Gere moment and rescue this woman from her misery. What are you going to do, give her £5,000? Some women I met I
couldn't believe were working as prostitutes. One German girl was very educated - something bad must have happened to her. I did try to find her again to give her the number of a friend who could get her work, but the place had been shut down.

Some men claim that they go for the conversation but, come on, you don't go to a brothel to talk. "Hello," she says. "Hello," you say. "Where are you from?" "Naples", she replies. Like a prat, you say: "Oh, I've been to Italy!" "Where are you from?" she asks, with zero interest.

"Er, England." That's about it.

The longest conversation I've had was spent talking about what she did at the gym. But mostly you don't speak. To get you in the spirit of things there might be a hardcore video blaring from a TV set. In the back of your mind self-disgust mingles with the conviction that you're not that bad, she's had to sleep with worse. Prostitution is a degrading experience for both parties. As a punter, it's not good for your self-esteem, and costs quite a lot. More likely than not, you've got problems. And more likely than not, so does she. A prostitute on Berwick Street once told a friend that he reminded her of her ex-boyfriend and as "a treat" she didn't make him use a condom. He was drunk, of course, and wildly frightened afterwards. Was this her revenge? Was she messed up? Did she have HIV? Did he now?

There are few totally happy addicts; we tend to feel like outsiders, which makes us do what we do. But when I went to AA I saw a room full of people just like me. I was all alienated, and suddenly here were these people telling me that they felt exactly as I did. They described the five, ten, 15 minutes before the drink or drugs or poker game or woman when you go mad, when you think, I can't not do this. They described the state of mind, the "I shouldn't do this", the breathlessness when it's happening and the pathetic shameful emptiness afterwards. They described mulling over the potential consequences - and doing it anyway. They described feeling unique and isolated. After a while I realised the most shameful truth of all: I
wasn't different at all.