Women for sale: has paying for sex become more acceptable than ever?

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/20...titution/print

You get an interesting perspective on changing social attitudes towards sex from the bottom of an 18ft (five-metre) fireman's pole used by lap dancers as part of a complicated choreographed display. Oscar Owide, proprietor of the Windmill Club in Soho, is distracted by how to achieve the best lighting on the girl in black knickers who is descending head first from the top of pole, gripping on with her thighs, dancing upside down with her arms.

"It's ever so difficult to do that," he says, and asks a waiter to get the spotlight changed so her performance is less hidden by shadows. When a flattering pink ray has been switched on to the dancer, Owide, who has been running Soho clubs for decades, reflects on how much more open society has become to this form of entertainment.

His clients no longer need to hide the fact that they visit nude dance clubs, he says. Most of the stigma has disappeared and a night out at a lap-dancing club now qualifies as respectable corporate entertainment (with receipts provided so expenses can be recouped from the company). There is no prostitution here, but clients can stay until 5.30 in the morning, watching individual erotic dances from workers at £20 a go.

By midnight, a cashier is busy processing debit card payments from men who want a solo dance from one of the 30 or so women who are waiting in their knickers and bras by the bar. A well-spoken man wonders aloud if he can leave his Bar Council membership card as security. To the right a young man sits in a booth by himself, his suit jacket off and top buttons undone, his legs splayed wide apart so there is space for a woman in a black thong and suspenders to touch her toes and wobble her naked buttocks no more than 10 centimetres from his face.

An observer of the mutating sex industry in Soho for most of his life, Owide has an unexpectedly censorious view on the sex scandal of the week: Wayne Rooney's alleged liaison with a sex worker. He isn't shocked in the least by the fact that Rooney slept with a prostitute, but he disapproves deeply of Rooney's decision to be unfaithful to his wife when she was pregnant.

Clearly Owide's views are shaped by his long involvement in what he describes as "the business", but his position chimes with the broader response to Rooney's behaviour. There has been indignation at his betrayal of his wife, a lot of outrage that an expensively educated girl like Jennifer Thompson would decide to become a prostitute, and considerable bafflement that an England footballer can't get as much sex as he wants for free. There has been much less moralising about the central transaction: Rooney's readiness to employ a prostitute.

So far, Rooney's sponsors are apparently ready to overlook the event, dismissing it yesterday as a "private matter", indicating that in the hierarchy of corporate morality use of a prostitute is viewed as a much lesser evil than taking drugs. When Kate Moss was filmed taking a line of coke it had an immediate impact on her advertising contracts.

Does this indifference suggest that prostitution no longer disturbs anyone very much? Has the explosion in the easy availability of internet porn, men's magazines, stag nights, lap-dancing clubs and sex tourism begun to erode our perception of prostitution as an enduring taboo?

Club-owners like Owide are seeing a stark shift in attitudes, but campaign groups, academics, prostitute collectives and men who use prostitutes notice it too. Research documents highlight the difficulty of grasping any accurate statistics about the prevalence of prostitution in the UK. Home Office papers cite 1990 research which suggests that there might be about 80,000 prostitutes in the UK, and a more recent calculation that there could be between 876,900 and 2.4 million men who pay for sex – stressing that the data is unreliable.

However, a 2005 study estimated that the numbers of men buying sex had doubled in a decade, an increase prompted by " a greater acceptability of commercial sexual contact".

Premier League footballers exist in a bubble, behaving in a way only distantly connected to normal life. Ex-footballers this week have described how girls routinely target players, hiding in their rooms. "There were nights we went to the strip club and there was loads of money flying around and all the girls were going the extra mile just for the cash," one player recalls.

Even beyond the cash-laden world of the Premier League, there is no shortage of supply. During the 1990s, the number of men paying for sex acts in the UK is estimated to have doubled. It has never been difficult to find an escort, but men who have used prostitutes recently describe how technology has made things dramatically easier. In just the same way that the internet has simplified the way we buy flights and books, finding someone to pay for sex has become a headache-free process online.

"Before you'd have to look for coded messages in the lonely hearts columns or in the newsagents' window: women who wanted to meet 'generous gents' was a signal that they were looking to be paid. On the internet it's much easier to find where to go and there's no pretence; you have greater choice," Peter, 54, a volunteer charity worker, (who, like most men interviewed for this piece, did not want his full name printed) says.

The new availability of free internet porn can also have the effect of stoking an appetite, he adds. "The analogy might be, I suppose, that it's like watching Match of the Day, and then being inspired to go out and play football, and try out something you've seen."

Websites where men can post reviews of named, and often pictured, prostitutes are easily accessed through Google. Speaking openly about using prostitutes remains unusual but the anonymity of the web means users can be as frank as they like in their discussions. (A typical exchange on a site yesterday runs: "Natasha can be particularly recommended for her figure and her oral technique." "Natasha isn't particularly busty. Only a C cup." "True true, but I'm willing to overlook a shortcoming if the remainder is exceptional.")

The lap-dancing industry is at pains to make a distinction between what they provide and the illegal sale of sex in massage parlours, but for men who go to their clubs, the line is often more blurred. For a generation of men in their 20s and early 30s, strip clubs have become an unremarkable, fairly uncontroversial nightclub option – forcing them to reassess their own attitudes towards the exchange of money for titillation.

Harry, 26, an advertising executive, visited a brothel twice on a recent holiday in Greece. "Most guys have gone to a strip club and have probably had their fair share of dating and casual sex or whatever," he says. "There's not a great divide between strip clubs and brothels. And I think that's why people like us would consider it, because it doesn't feel like a massive departure."

His attitude was also shaped by his frequent use of online dating organisations. "I've been using internet dating sites quite a lot recently and the mindset is very similar. You meet up with people with no real anticipation of anything happening, and you end up having casual sex because it's easy. So there's a sort of laziness to it. It doesn't really mean anything, it's ready and accessible – and that's exactly how it felt in this place in Greece," he says.

Dan, 28, an online marketing executive, visited strip clubs while he was abroad and came away unsettled by the experience. "I was on holiday, it was fun. It wasn't that big a deal. I didn't feel I was part of that exploitation," he says. "It wasn't sexy. It was just so transactional. Everything that that kind of intimacy shouldn't be. And obviously you know what it is, it's just business, business, business – but it was almost like a vending machine …"

Peter Stringfellow, owner of Stringfellows, another central London table dancing club, also makes it clear that there is nothing to connect prostitution and the light entertainment his club provides, but agrees that taboos around his industry are disappearing. The people who visit his clubs are now "affluent and successful – doctors, lawyers, people travelling on business, City workers." "Professor Stephen Hawking has been to the club and I've had a few drinks with him. My view is that if Professor Stephen Hawking has been, then the door is wide open for anyone in the world," he says.

Women's groups are split on how to respond to the growing indifference towards the idea of women selling their bodies – for sex and pornography.

Niki Adams, of the English Collective of Prostitutes, says she welcomes what she sees as a widening acceptance of women working in prostitution because she believes it will "reduce the stigma discrimination that many sex workers face", and because it means that the public are now viewing this as a "reasonable" employment choice.

But other feminist organisations warn that an emerging readiness to portray women who sell their bodies as making empowered choices is very misleading, while anti-pornography campaigners are uneasy about the long-term consequences of this increasing acceptance of pornography and lap dancing.

"It has never been easier or more acceptable to buy or sell women's bodies for sex acts," says Kat Banyard, author of the Equality Illusion, a portrait of modern feminism. "The scale of prostitution, pornography and lap-dancing industries is unprecedented. Much of this is driven by the development of technology. Now porn can be acquired cheaply, immediately and anonymously in your bedroom.