Modern Love

Two articles in the British papers today about women and sex. One is about rich women, one is about poor women. I wonder if the British have a different attitude to women and sex depending on their social status? Let's see.

In Inside the sex club for girls, the Times talks at great and tedious length about rich women who frequent a sex club "for women" (it appears to be mostly sapphic, but with a number of brought-along men who do not always play by the club's rules), where they can buy such extras as a weekend at a fully-equipped dungeon for three thousand pounds. It's called Killing Kittens, which gave me a start for a momentI thought it was for killing kittens, not for kittens who are killing.

The clientele, defined as 'single women and couples from the AB demographic' (PDF), are good looking, and rich.

“It’s also not about walking into a club and seeing a famous person. It’s about women — not alpha females who storm up to men — but feminine and sensual ones who cango and dance around in their underwear and drink with no pressure and no expectations, just free to feel sexy and have fun.”

The Killing Kittens website captures Sayle’s sales pitch: there’s her skimpy, Janet Reger-designed underwear range, Naughty Janet; there’s a “Dungeon Break” in a West Yorkshire mansion costing £3,000 to get manacled up in a fully equipped dungeon for the weekend; a “Kidnap Experience” — very popular, apparently — offering an adrenaline-inducing “real-life kidnap scenario” lasting up to 12 hours, with an optional transgender makeover — for £3,500; and a “Mini Mile-High Experience” for an hour’s satisfaction in a private jet for about the same price.

"So," the Times asks rhetorically, "who is this attracting? The liberated female sexual elite or the more ordinarily desperate and seedy? "

It's attracting the sort of tossers who can blow £3,000 on a cheesy scenario out of Eyes Wide Shut, Times. Rich women. The article talks several times about private schooling and 'filthy rich', 'posh' and 'elite elite'.

On the other hand, Who says sex workers want to be saved in the Guardian, discusses a proposed new law to fine johns who frequent prostitutes, because those prostitutes *might* be slaves.

Under the proposal, anyone who buys sex or other erotic services from someone who is "controlled for another person's gain" could be fined and receive a criminal record. Ignorance of the circumstances would be no defence. Harriet Harman, the minister for women, believes the proposed legislation will help stamp out sex trafficking, which she has described as a "modern-day slave trade". Yet if speakers at a panel debate this week on sex trafficking held at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts are to be believed, most sex workers – including migrant ones –do not see themselves as slaves, and few want to be "saved" by the likes of Smith and Harman. Scaring away potential punters will only rob those who work within the sex industry of their livelihood. (And this includes everything from charging for sex to pole dancing, providing attentive dinner company and selling erotic lingerie, literature or DVDs.)
Laura María Agustín.... says, "this is state feminism which has nothing to do with gender equality. It's about the state identifying a proper way for its citizens to behave and defining millions of women as victims."
Anyone who does not comply with the political elite's officially sanctioned lifestyle is seen as deviant. In relation to sex, non conformists become defined either as victims or perpetrators, as abused or abusers.

So poor women should become wards of the state, stripped of free will, just in case it is not free will, in case someone non-governmental is 'controlling' them. Got it.

It appears that rich women can and do choose who they have sex with, and - odd this -the government does not attempt to treat them as basket cases who cannot possibly have the nous to be living this lifestyle of their own free will.

Slavery, human trafficking, rape, abduction, kidnapping - all of these things are already illegal. The British government is always keen to show that, if laws aren't working, the best thing to do is to pass a newer, stupider law that covers the area the old law already covered. It's time it reconsidered that.

And as for the rich women in their club houses, I don't think we need any more laws either (not that the government was proposing any). We just need to start heeding my friend Mick's advice.




Eat the rich