‘Calls for prostitution to be criminalised are based on lazy and outdated stereotypes’

There are many misconceptions about prostitutes, who are often depicted as drug addicts touting for business on the streets. Here, Broadstairs writer and dominatrix Melissa Todd dispels some of the myths about sex workers - and their punters..

. Have you noticed how, when the newspapers run a story about prostitutes, they illustrate it with a woman in a short skirt, bending to talk through an open car window? As if it were 1983. As if sex workers didn’t arrange all their hookups indoors, online, as we all do; indoors, where it’s warm, dry and safe.



No, the myth of the streetwalker continues to prevail, the bedraggled, bestockinged street walker, facing nightly violence and torrential downpours to get her heroin fix. For the woman bending over the car is always skinny, pale and intense, the universal visual shorthand for smackhead. It’s out-moded and lazy and it matters, because people tend to think in metaphors.

Although how we manage to square this image with the story of the Onlyfans model who’s making £2 million a month selling her farts in a jar I’m not certain: the human brain is so wonderfully capable of self-deception, is it not? Truth is that sex workers are of course heroin addicts, and millionaires, and fat, thin, male, female and everything in between: they are everything humans can be, being a microcosm of society at large. But I don’t want to write about sex worker stereotypes today. Instead, I want to talk about punter stereotypes.

Punters have possibly a worse reputation even than sex workers: they are seen as inevitably male, violent, selfish, psychotic, probably murderers and rapists, but anyway definitely dodgy, destroying family life for a quick thrill, objectifying women, responsible for rising rates of violence against women and teenage girls’ low self-esteem. Well, doubtless some are. Statistically it seems likely.

But let me tell you about Andrew. Andrew’s dad developed dementia and had to go into a care home. His dad had lived in his house for 70 years; it’s wedged tight with memories.

If you’ve ever had to sort through someone’s life you’ll know how gruelling it can feel. So, once a month Andrew pauses his work to visit me. He brings wine.

We chat about his endless chores. Then I sit up straight and slip into my role. I drag him over my knee to wallop him with hand and slipper, while he squirms and squeals and promises to behave better.

Often he cries. Tears mean a gold star for me. Andrew wants to cry: he yearns for the relief tears bring, easing the lump that’s wedged tight in his chest all day long from sorting old photographs and war medals.

Afterwards we drink more wine and he tells me how his dad seemed the last time he saw him, how the light is fading from his eyes, how guilty his only son feels. Andrew isn’t married and has no one else to tell. But when he comes to visit me he needn’t cope with anything: someone else is in charge.

Don’t we all occasionally yearn for that? He’s so grateful for the tiny portion of help I can offer. We hug when we say goodbye. When MPs and lefty media outlets call for prostitution to be criminalised I think about Andrew, and wonder how he’d cope without the tears only I can provoke.

But of course the MPs aren’t thinking of me, or him. They’re thinking of a scrawny teenager bending over a car which contains a violent thug, risking her life for a fix. Those people do exist.

We’re all capable of addiction and violence. But they’re so far from being the whole story as to be irrelevant. And they’re certainly not a problem to be fixed with further legislation.

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