Rupert Everett introduces his Channel 4 documentary, Love for Sale , with an explanation. This misogynistic and ignorant introduction sets a tone that persists throughout the first episode. While the series claims to explore how and why prostitution happens, the reality of servicing strange, often violent men, day in and day out and of being physically used and abused as a means of survival is glossed over.
If there were no male demand for paid sex, there would be no prostitution. Another unaddressed truth is that prostitution is not and has never been about female desire or fulfillment.
Rather, it exists because of male power and entitlement. When writer and exited prostitute, Rachel Moran , who authored a powerful memoir detailing her seven years as a prostitute in Dublin, speaks with Everett, he is dismissive. It exists nowhere in history or in our current world. What he is defending is institutionalised oppression. He sells sex because he has no other choice.
Often the very men who pay for sex. Everett wants to sell a notion of prostitution as glamorous, sexually liberating, and economically empowering, but reality gets in the way.
As though living in a world wherein a teacher must resort to selling sex on the side in order to survive is a great social achievement.
