John Roughan: Tempting to duck prostitution debate as Choudhary did

28.06.2003

Well, can you credit it? New Zealand has legalised prostitution on the vote, or non-vote, of its first Muslim MP. That will have made a cute snippet in newspapers around the world. It might even help to defuse the clash of civilisations

At the very least it means the name of Ashraf Choudhary will forever be associated with a fairly daring legislative breakthrough that he did not support, or oppose. On the evidence of his first year in Parliament he might not be remembered for much else.

Since an extraordinary maiden speech - his tribute to the efforts a poor Pakistani village had made for him, never imagining perhaps that he might one day become a list MP in New Zealand - he has disappeared from public view.

Now we know why. We should have some sort of recall mechanism for legislators who cannot make up their minds. But I shouldn't be too hard on him. This whole prostitution debate was one I would like to duck, too.

It's another of these subjects that leaves me with a sense that I'm calling forlornly across the gender divide.

If you have come across the surprising number of pages of lurid classifieds in a well-known weekly tabloid, or cleared away web-spam, you may have noticed there appear to be next to no prostitutes for women, which probably means there is not much demand for them.

It seems to be a one-way trade. Men buy sex, women don't. Why is that?

And don't tell me it is yet another manifestation of the subjugation and exploitation of womankind. If women wanted to be buyers in this market there would be, I am sure, no shortage of sellers.

There must be something intrinsically different in the make-up of men and women that leads so many men to buy loveless sex with a complete stranger while women don't.

Or could it be that women can find that sort of sex pretty readily, for free, if they want it, and men cannot, or not as readily? The whole sex industry is based on the much higher premium women place on intimate contact, and I am not talking about money.

It sometimes seemed the entire prostitution debate was conducted between women. Apart from the sponsor of the bill, Tim Barnett, men seemed more inclined to shuffle awkwardly and let it be known that they, for one, would never pay for it.

The women on one side of the argument regarded prostitution as always, and inevitably, a form of rape. They believed very few women would enter the business voluntarily, therefore they must have been kidnapped, abused and kept at work by shady characters who terrorised them.

Or else they were feeding a drug habit, or couldn't find any other employment, or at least none that paid as well. At that point the definition of rape was being stretched far beyond my ken.

Women on the other side of the argument were mostly prepared to believe the worst pictures painted of "paid rape" but they were resigned to the existence of the oldest profession and decided the best the law could do was to decriminalise the trade.

Hookers, they said, might more readily seek help, especially from the police, if they were not incriminating themselves.

It has been an absurdity that the law made criminals of women who offered sex for sale but not the men who bought it. However, there were two possible solutions to that. The other, to have also criminalised the buyers, was put to Parliament and rejected.

It might have been quite effective. No doubt the ancient transaction would have found ways around the law but the criminal risk might have deterred those "respectable" clients prostitutes often mention in interviews.

Parliament either did not believe so, or was acting on a more liberal instinct than the debate suggested. It was acting perhaps on a realisation that private, consensual sexual dealings in their mystery and variety are beyond legislative control.

The most perceptive comment to my mind came from a veteran prostitute on the morning after the vote. She told Linda Clark on National Radio there is a difference between having sex and making love. She knew which she was selling.

Nobody who has been in love needs to go anywhere near a prostitute to know what she means. Whatever happens in a commercial arrangement could not possibly compare.

And surely nobody in love could harbour much resentment of an industry offering a shallow imitation of the act that, between mutual lovers, becomes a complete, delirious merger, beyond sex, beyond self.

That, I think, is what the man who made the most interesting contribution in Parliament, United Future's Paul Adams, was on about when he confessed, "I love sex ... a man loves sex but my wife enjoys love-making, and there's a vast difference."

He took an awful lot of cheap shots for that, some from women who declared they liked sex too. But I am sure they knew what he meant.

"Women," he went on, "love to be loved and unfortunately, because of what is a moral decline in our nation, that is an art which we men are beginning to lose ... "

He opposed the bill, believing that the lure of prostitutes contributed to male confusion of sex for love. I doubt it.

Some poor sad specimens might look for love in brothels but not for long. The sex trade is probably no more or less than the name suggests, a service to those who have got nothing better. And the providers? Whenever they spoke for themselves they did not sound like helpless victims of exploitation, or much concerned about their legal status for that matter.

Whatever had happened in Parliament this week, they would have gone right on plying their trade. But at least the law looks less of an ass.