Another week, another online virginity auction. The Romanian teenager Alina
Percea talked cheerfully to a celebrity magazine about the successful sale
of her virtue to the highest bidder. Presumably she was inspired by the
recent success of Natalie Dylan, a 22-year-old Californian who raised £2.5m
(£1.57m) for hers. Alina, alas, didn’t do quite so well: going, going, gone
for a mere £8,800.
Still, Percea’s chutzpah was greeted with nearly Benny Hill levels of
enthusiasm in Britain. She rather fancied her winning bidder, we were told,
a 45-year-old businessman who paid for her to fly to Venice.
“I thought the money would go higher, but I’m happy,” trilled the enterprising
young student.
Over in the States, the response was far more prudish. “My skin crawls,” wrote
one Huffington Post blogger.
Well, the US is certainly more short-tempered when it comes to selling sex
online. Last week the classifieds website Craigslist finally bowed to
pressure from antivice campaigners and removed the erotic services section
from its pages in America.
Since June last year, police in 40 states have used adverts in this section of
the site to conduct antiprostitution stings. Female officers posed online as
prostitutes to catch out male clients, while male officers posed as
customers to catch women selling sex. There have been hundreds of arrests on
both sides; the state of Illinois even threatened to file a lawsuit against
Craigslist, claiming it was the single largest source of prostitution in
America.
There is no doubt such sites are often distasteful and may lay vulnerable men
and women open to harm. But I can’t help feeling the Americans are
overreacting. Certainly in Britain the attitude is more relaxed – so far,
I’m told, craigslist.co.uk’s erotic services section hasn’t triggered a
single complaint. The consensus seems to be that online flirtation can take
many forms and if some consenting adults take it further than others, well,
that’s their business. Besides, is there really that much difference between
posting a photo in hope of drinks and dinner on match. com and the more
direct approach employed by those who use the erotic section of Craigslist?
That’s certainly what I felt, so I decided to sign up last week to see what
all the fuss was about. Was the craigslist.co.uk erotic services section
really that degrading? To judge by its popularity, perhaps not: about 650
new advertisements are posted there daily, if last Wednesday is anything to
go by. One self-styled “gorgeous young blonde” promised “my looks will
seduce you, my services and skills will please you. One hour of fun with me
is £100 only”. Another flashed, “Special girl available now”, further
elaborating that she is “a Caucasian goddess with skills and an independent
entertainer providing a NO RUSH, sensual encounter”.
I was astonished at the directness of some of the posts. Prostitution may be
legal here, unlike in America – where it is outlawed in most states – but
English law bans soliciting in a “public place”. This is the reason brothels
here are advertised as saunas, and girls offer sensual massages, not sex.
Craigslist says it “blocks ads that in our experience have a high likelihood
of violating our terms of use” – which include a bar on pornography – but
this clearly does not rule out expressions such as “I’m the best in town”,
as well as other far more obvious suggestions.
I had to edit my entry twice, as a lot of words seemed to be banned by
Craigslist, including “naughty” and “discreet” – perhaps they are too
suggestive – so I ended up with: “SEXY FUN-LOVING BLONDE. Pretty, slim,
English blonde. Seductive, adventurous and mischievous. I offer a great
sensual massage with no strings fun. Charlottex.” Tame by the standards of
what I suppose I must call the competition, it took no longer than 10
minutes to compose.
Then there was the photo. Most girls seem to use underwear shots or topless
images that range from mildly titillating to obscene. I wanted to use an
image that would generate interest but by no means show my face. Since I
don’t have any racy underwear pictures to hand, The Sunday Times helped me
out by sending a photographer. Posing in nothing but underwear as if
inviting a man for sex was distinctly uncomfortable: it gave me a foretaste
of how degrading this sort of thing can be.
I got my first response within 20 minutes of posting, in a call to my mobile.
Martin claimed to be 45 and new to the scene. He had a girlfriend, but had
decided to try Craigslist “to learn new tricks”. He asked whether I was free
that evening. “How much do you usually pay?” I asked. “Between £80 and £90,”
he said. I tried to push him up a little, but he was quick to inform me
there’s a recession on and prices have come down. He then asked if I’d do
overnight stays. For one of those, he would be prepared to pay £400.
Keen to learn a little more about the men who use these services, I asked them
a few more questions. Perhaps my journalistic skills aren’t as subtle as I’d
like to think because several callers were jumpy and two promptly put the
phone down.
Still, I got a good idea of what many of them seek from sexual services.
Charles, a polite 38-year-old, wanted a naked massage. “Not necessarily
something sexual; I just want to feel naked and have a chance to talk,” he
said. For that he was willing to pay up to £80. Andreas was married but had
no sex life. He wanted to know if I practised domination and anal sex.
Another man, bored in a hotel room, was disappointed when he found out I
didn’t have tattoos.
In total, I received six phone calls, two e-mails and two inquiries by text
over a three-hour period – and I’m sure there would have been more, but the
turnover on the site means you have to keep reposting your ad to get a flow
of responses. Still, given that the going rate seems to be £100 per hour per
visit, my free listing generated a potential £1,000 in earnings.
While the thought of my putative clients’ sexual demands physically repulsed
me, morally and intellectually I still found it hard to see that the men who
replied to my ad were doing anything wrong. As long as the girl is willingly
providing her services and not in any danger, surely it’s better for a man
to find satisfaction through an unambiguous business transaction than by,
say, wooing a stranger in a bar under false pretences or getting tangled in
the messy emotions of an affair?
Anna Bowden of Eaves, a London charity that provides housing for vulnerable
single women, including prostitutes, strongly disagrees. “If you see the
emotional and mental harm that sex work does to women long term, you’d know
that we need to curb demand,” she says. “Adverts on websites and local
newspapers which clearly indicate sexual services increase demand and are
unacceptable.”
As for the women behind the ads, according to Sara Walker from the English
Collective of Prostitutes, they are not the fresh college students or bored
housewives up for an opportunistic bit of fun, and perhaps some extra cash,
that they might initially seem. “Most women on these websites are not
working alone. Even if the ad shows a single woman, most are with some sort
of escort agency or work with a friend,” she says. “Women turn to
prostitution through desperation. A website like Craigslist won’t tempt
anyone to try it out of the blue. It doesn’t work like that.”
Still, the ease with which I set up my own ad on Craigslist and got
£1,000worth of business that very afternoon suggests that some out-of-work
women with children to feed and bills to pay – or even just shoes to buy –
might be tempted to dabble. It’s not just Craigslist they can turn to,
either. Adverts for sexual services proliferate on sites such as
adultwork.co.uk. One of the UK’s largest erotic websites, it features
sections for different services. Users can click on escorts, webcam, phone
chat or SMS chat. There’s also a picture section and one for movies, where
men and women offer to reveal images in exchange for money. On the day I
looked, Adultwork’s escort section carried advertisements for more
than 9,000 females and nearly 6,000 males available in the UK.
Last year, as part of an investigation into trafficked women for News at Ten,
the ITN reporter Chris Rogers placed a fake advert for a brothel on
Adultwork. Within two hours he’d received 400 bookings – enough to generate
£40,000 of takings. In a single week, his fake brothel received more than
1,000 e-mails and phone calls from men in Manchester alone. Rogers tells me
that the whole production team was shaken by the findings.
“Every man who called or e-mailed to make a booking appeared cool, calm and
collected, as though they had done this many times before,” he says. “They
knew exactly what they wanted, and how the process worked. I was sickened
and fed up speaking to these men who paid for women like meat from a
butcher.”
Whether advertising for sex is morally acceptable or not, it’s interesting
that the government continues to turn a blind eye to soliciting. The Home
Office simply claims that a ban on advertising sexual services online and in
local newspapers wouldn’t be effective. A spokesman said: “The vast majority
of adverts don’t explicitly state that sexual services are available,
referring to massages and saunas, making it extremely difficult to prove
that a business is operating as a brothel.”
But it’s common knowledge that terms such as “massage”, “in-calls” and “hourly
rate” refer to sexual services. Besides, as I quickly noted on Craigslist,
some adverts are even more blatant. “Special offer this week only: bareback
me for £100” seems to be a fairly clear proposition in one ad on Adultwork.
Perhaps the Home Office doesn’t understand the term “bareback”.
There is a precedent, of course. In 2001, “carding” in telephone boxes was
banned – although it seems this wasn’t a move to crack down on soliciting
itself, but simplya government initiative to clean things up because the
cards, advertising sexual services, were offensive and undesirable and
created a bad impression on foreign visitors. In 2002 police clamped down
with a series of sting operations. Online ads evidently don’t provoke the
same sort of hostility in the civil service breast.
Perhaps, then, we need a jolt, as America received just over a month ago with
the arrest of Philip Markoff, aka the “Craigslist killer”. Markoff, a
23-year-old medical student, has been charged with the murder of one woman
and the armed robbery of another, after he met them through postings on the
Craigslist erotic section.
Of course, banning ads won’t end the world’s oldest profession. I note that
the erotic services section of craigslist.com has now been replaced with a
new “adult” category, where posts will be individually vetted by staff. The
new section is already bustling with postings that look strikingly similar
to the old ones, only shorter. “Hot sexy girl, call me,” invites one New
York ad. “I’m an exotic dancer, moonlighting as an escort, call me,”
suggests another. Plus ça change . . .
As for me, my experience online has taught me something important: yes, I
still feel we shouldn’t be told to stop advertising something when there’s a
clear demand and willing supply, but I am less swift to sneer at American
“prudishness”. Directly negotiating money for sexual acts over the phone
made me want to squirm and put the phone down as quickly as I could. I
wouldn’t ban selling sex online – even if such a thing were possible – but I
wouldn’t wish it on anyone as a career.
