Chester Brown, Paying For It

Book Review
Hugo Chesshire

Chester Browns Paying For It is essentially an argument for the decriminalization of prostitution, based largely on Browns experiences of prostitution from the perspective of a john. His sampling of a very small facet of prostitution (and an even smaller facet of sex work in general) places him at the bottom of a well from which he can only see the small patch of sky that is high-priced escort work, missing the dark clouds of human trafficking, organized crime, violence, rape, and substance abuse entirely. Brown preaches a liberal perspective and advocates full decriminalization, even more so in his appendices, but his evidence for doing so is cherrypicked. When he tries to address counter-arguments, he seems facetious and ill-informed. The graphic novel documents Browns experiences as a john, beginning with his revelation that romantic love is overrated at best and socially destructive at worst, after which he resolves to avoid romantic relationships in the future. Frequenting prostitutes would be an obvious choice for fulfilling his sexual urges, but he wrestles with a host of problems and stigmas. His internal struggles are of a typically Western middle-class nature in this respect, superficially concerned with morality or ethics at best and much more worried about practicality or social approval (Brown 2011, 27-30). Eventually he overcomes his inhibitions, and, out of ignorance as much as anything else, seeks street-walking prostitutes on his bicycle. He never finds one, however, and abandons this brief pursuit in favour of escorts and call girls he discovers through advertising. Brown takes a liberal perspective on prostitution. He believes that sex workers can choose their profession (or not), arguing from a classical-liberal rational-choice position. This holds that a human being is homo economicus a rational utility maximizer; a being carefully examining the choices in front of hir and selecting that which will best satisfy hir want-needs. This perspective is probably best-known from neoclassical economics, wherein it is supposed 1

that humans in the free market will choose to purchase products and services, or sell their labour, based on the choices available to them. The choices they make will be those they deem best; all human action is rational as it aims at some end (von Mises 1996, 19). Since everything produced requires the production of something else to be foregone, somebody must decide what is to be foregone and what it is foregone in preference to; the decider ought to be the individual actor rather than a collective body which can only interfere with and override rational, individual choice. The right and just thing for such bodies to do is to stand aside and allow individual choice (read: the market) to reign supreme (Hazlitt 1979, 108). According to this perspective, sex workers including prostitutes engage in their chosen professions after having made a rational choice based on the available options (Jeffreys 2009, 19-20). Since a sex worker has volunteered for hir job, it would be as nonsensical to pity hir as it would be to pity a dentist or a lawyer. Each of these individuals assessed the options available to them and made a choice that would best satisfy their want-needs, whether that entailed the study and practice of dentistry or law, or making oneself sexually available to other people in exchange for money. Consequently, as a john, Brown doesnt feel pitiable, and while he admits some prostitutes might be pitiable, many or most are not (Brown 2011, 54-55). Like many followers of the liberal perspective, Brown also believes that violence in prostitution is greatly overestimated (Brown 2011, 178). Like any libertarian, he seems to believe that the biggest problem is state interference, reflecting a radical libertarian view that the state is the greatest and worst purveyor and perpetrator of violence in society. Reflecting on his own experiences, he knows that he is not a violent person and has not engaged in a violent act against any prostitute (although it should be noted that according to some definitions, retaining the services of a prostitute constitutes a violent act in and of itself), and that none of the prostitutes 2

he frequented seemed to have been victims of violence. Even if violence were a problem in Browns liberal fantasy, he believes that decriminalization would be the solution; legal prostitutes would be unafraid of the police, and an unregulated sex industry would mean that an underclass of unlicensed prostitutes would not exist to become victims of violence and yet remain unable to complain about it. For Brown, decriminalization is almost a panacea to end all the problems of prostitution: violence, robbery, abuse, substance addiction, disease, and fear of the law. Jeffreys (2009, 183-188) notes that even in legal regimes that decriminalize or legalize prostitution, there is still violence and harm to women. Brown does not address this, perhaps because it is outside the scope of his experience. The prostitutes he spoke to would be highly unlikely to tell him a client of their fears or health problems which stemmed from their work, and Brown does not appear to have been a prostitute himself. Browns work is interesting as a memoir, but as a sociological study or a tool for the advocate, it is much less so. All the prostitutes he encounters are escorts or call girls who charge a relatively high price for their services, who may have no pimp, who are much less likely to be the victims of violence or suffer from drug addiction, and (at least for the better-paid workers) may have sufficient cultural capital to make prostitution a genuine choice. By this, it is meant that the sort of john willing and able to pay up to several hundred dollars an hour for the services of a prostitute and many higher-priced escorts ask for a minimum of several hours expects someone not only physically attractive and sexually skilled, but well-spoken, well-dressed, and socially glib, someone who could move unquestioned through the lobbies of the 4- or 5-star hotels they may be rendezvousing in. The women who Brown actually holds a conversation with seem to be reasonably intelligent and educated. Such women probably have other prospects realistically available to them. They may have chosen prostitution because it pays them a lot of 3

money yet requires relatively little time, or perhaps because they genuinely enjoy it. Browns mistake, however, is to extrapolate from this cherry-picked sample and draw conclusions he feels are applicable to the entire sex industry, or at least, to all prostitution. For example, street workers are far more likely to encounter violence and crime, yet Brown never encounters any (Weitzer 2010, 9-10). The radical feminist response is that the liberal perspective understands choice but takes no account of constraint (Jeffreys 2009, 26-27). Firstly, it forgets the social environment in which prostitution exists, one in which the equal rights of women have been formally recognized for considerably less than a lifetime and before which women were legally subservient to men in all aspects of life. The legacy of that treatment still exists, with women greatly under-represented politically and holding a greatly inferior number of high offices, earning considerably less than men for the same work, performing more unpaid labour than men, and being much more likely to live in poverty (UNPAC 2011). The de jure abolition of patriarchy has not yet wholly prevented its de facto continuation. Prostitution, in the feminist construction, is overwhelmingly something that is done to women and is a continuation of historical patterns of violence towards and exploitation of women. Brown is adamant that johns need not necessarily exercise any power over prostitutes, or necessarily indulge only their own sexual pleasure at the expense of the prostitute, or necessarily engage in violence; violence itself may be highly abnormal in prostitution (Brown 2011, 178, 235). Again, his argument is coloured by his highly selective sampling of the sex trade. Brown himself may never have been violent, but in the book, he does not speak to a single other john, and in all his agonizing over whether or not to become a john, research into the incidence of violence against sex workers is never undertaken (he does, however, conduct internet research 4

into the performance of the prostitutes he contemplates hiring). Furthermore, despite his heady talk of consent and choice, Browns rhetoric reveals a consistent treatment of women as sexual objects for male pleasure. By a third of the way through the book, it is clear that he is becoming something of a connoisseur of prostitutes,* and he not only starts to make comparisons and critiques of these women but moves from his initial position of tipping as a matter-of-course to tipping only for exceptional service (Brown 2011, 77). At one point, he seems annoyed that a prostitute did not give him her full attention, with an attitude reminiscent of what one would expect if he had been confronted with an indifferent waiter or store greeter (Brown 2011, 156). Why would anyone do something zie does not enjoy or does not consider ideal, if rational choice informs individual decisions? The socialist and feminist critiques reply that these choices are highly constrained, since workers in general and female workers in particular are more likely to suffer poverty, marginalization, and violence, and especially those on the lower-earning end of the scale: streetwalkers, bar or casino prostitutes, massage parlour workers, etc. Women in these lines of work are, in Weberian terms, likely to have had far fewer life-chances than those in highpriced escort work, or in well-paid professions outside the sex trade. The choice that they make may be between degrading minimum-wage work, a lifetime on meager handouts from a grudging austerity state and the accompanying stigmatization (neither of which pays enough to live comfortably on), or sex work. For most women, the third choice is not a palatable one, doubtless including the women charging $20-50 for oral sex, running the risk of violence, robbery, rape, arrest and disease, but desperate circumstances often cause moral codes to be overridden. For comparison, nobody would take the prevalence of cannibalism and infanticide
*

It should be noted that being a connoisseur of other human beings is morally repugnant and reminiscent of practices such as chattel slavery, a point which seems almost entirely lost on Brown. As an aside, my casual conversations with wait staff seem to indicate that tipping inversely correlates to wealth, social class, and inability to empathize with workers who depend on tips financially. The same transition might be observed in Brown at least with regard to the last factor.

during famines as an indication that cannibalism is a rational choice undertaken by an informed, rational and deliberative individual in order to satisfy want-needs, or even that there was ever a perception of choice for the individual at all. This critique stems from a socialist approach to sex work. The choice to enter sex work is like the choice to enter any other line of work in that it is necessarily constrained by economic, political and social pressures. Sex work, like most other forms of work in the capitalist economy, is inherently exploitative. The creation of surplus-value realized as profit relies upon a worker being paid less than the value of the goods or services zie can produce. In essence, everyone who works for somebody else is getting ripped off to some degree, whether it is by a pimp or an entrepreneur. So long as this exploitation persists, genuine choice cannot be exercised in choosing work, or in choosing to work. For example, the neoclassical discourse on the early industrial revolution holds that the peasantry of England came to work in the factories and mills because those factories and mills offered higher wages and steadier, more reliable employment than toiling in the fields. The peasants who came to work in industry exercised a rational choice aimed at satisfying their want-needs. However, the socialist analysis is that the enclosure movement made farming and animal husbandry increasingly untenable as a way of life; the move into factories was not driven by choice but by desperation. In the same way, a single mother with only a high-school diploma may be unable to provide for her children with either minimum-wage work (almost certainly all she could hope for in an era of educational credentialism and normalized high-single-digit unemployment percentages) or welfare payments. The choice of prostitution is really no choice at all, merely the most palatable one of a host of unsavoury prospects, including homelessness, starvation, or seeing ones children become Crown wards.

Brown fatuously rejects this argument, however. In his appendix, as a response to Sheila Jeffreys argument that choice is not an appropriate word where the only other option is lowpaid, marginal work, he asks why anyone would not choose sex work if this were true (Brown 2011, 239-240)? This harkens back to Thomas Hobbes, who contended that a choice would be valid and should be honoured even if the only alternative was death in short, do this or I will kill you contains a legitimate choice, and the chooser ought to honour his agreement to perform whatever act was demanded even if another option (such as escape) later presents itself (Leviathan ch. 14). However, the choice may still be unpleasant or immoral, and none of the alternatives presented at the time might be acceptable if additional and plausible additional options were to be presented. To return to the matter of infanticide and famine, if the choice were between killing and eating ones child or starving to death, one might choose the former, but it is also plausible that a third alternative might arise (e.g. the availability of bread), and if it did, this dilemma would be resolved; given any other choice, one would choose neither to starve to death nor to kill and eat ones own child. The worst example of Browns thinking is in his argument on human trafficking. He states that most people who are trafficked want to be trafficked, in that people want to come from poor countries to rich ones (Brown 2011, 243). This seems to be a ridiculous and downright monstrous argument, on the scale of radical libertarian arguments such as those that claim people without health insurance should be allowed to suffer and die if they should become ill, that people should be allowed to send their children to work if they want to, or even that people heavily in debt should be sold into slavery to repay that debt. Brown is either genuinely or willfully incognizant of the fact that human trafficking contains a severe moral hazard: the trafficked person is desperate and poor, has few or no legal recourses for maltreatment, may be 7

extremely isolated due to language and cultural barriers, might have a family held hostage in their home country, and so on. Brown seems to think that most human traffickers are rather like licensed taxicab drivers. This is, quite simply, another libertarian fiction. He contends that the proportion of trafficked women who are prostituted may be as low as 4% (ibid.). Deceptively, this is the only figure that he mentions; the UNODC, however, believes that the majority of trafficked women are destined for prostitution, and the US State Department reports that in 2003-2004, somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000 people were trafficked across international borders (Jeffreys 2009, 157, 160). Jeffreys research also shows that, even according to traditional definitions of violence that may not include emotional and psychic trauma, trafficked women suffer from threats, violence, life-threatening conditions, rape, disease, permanent disfigurement, and murder (Jeffreys 2009, 161-162). Browns dismissive, blas attitude towards these facts is disingenuous and disturbing. Browns work comes across as arrogant, self-absorbed and ignorant. His arguments are self-serving and he allows his personal experiences to override hard data. He believes he has found a solution, and preaches it to his friends; sadly, he has not even found the real problems. The book is a libertarian fantasy worthy of Murray Rothbard himself, inhabiting a fantasy realm of choice, free agency and rational individualism, blithely ignorant of social, political, historical and economic reality.

Bibliography
Brown, Chester. (2011). Paying For It. Montral: Drawn and Quarterly. Hazlitt, Henry. (1979). Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics. New York: Three Rivers Press. Jeffreys, Sheila. (2009). The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade. New York: Routledge. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Weitzer, Ronald. (2010). Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry. New York: Routledge. Von Mises, Ludwig. (1963). Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (4th ed.). San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes. United Nations Plan for Action Committee Manitoba. (2011). Women & the Economy. Retrieved from http://www.unpac.ca/economy/unpaidwork.html on February 12, 2012.