Interview With A Call Girl: “You’re Being Raped For Money”

Allow us to climb up on our high horse for just a moment to tell you about an interview in the UK Guardian with a woman in her 50s who works as a prostitute. It's all tied to the the return of "Diary of a Call Girl", the Billie Piper TV drama that caused such a ruckus a few months ago because it seemed to glamorize hookers. Nothing in the interview is particularly new or insightful—but it's still remarkable in that even though we've come across a lot of anti-sex work screeds, this is one might be the most biased and inflammatory one yet.

Now, no one is saying that Billie's high class trick turner is a completely accurate portrayal of what prostitution is all about, or that the business isn't filled with its share of exploitation horror stories. But it's difficult to take an article about sex work seriously when it starts off with a wildly ignorant assertion like "It is hard to understand why a woman who isn't a drug addict would become a prostitute." If you can't accept that someone would voluntarily enter the sex trade and not immediately destroy their life, the conversation pretty much stops there. "Karen", the subject of the interview, claims she was sexually abused, addicted to alcohol and drugs, poor and alone. But maybe it never occurs to those who wag their fingers at sex workers that the reason marginalized women end up as prostitutes is because the profession itself is so marginalized. Treat them like outcasts, and that's exactly what you'll get.

· "Emine Saner interviews a prostitute about what her life is really like" (guardian.co.uk)

Previously: Billie Piper Answers The "Call Girl"