Window on the BBC’s World
norman dennis, 6 December 2004
I rarely listen to Radio 5, but I happened to turn it on just before midnight last Saturday (4 December) to see if I could catch the score for the Sunderland v West Ham game. The announcer was just letting people know what the next discussion would be. His exact words were: “Does anybody in this day and age actually think prostitution is wrong?” I can spot a joke as well as the next man, and he was not joking.
Only a few years ago it would have been inconceivable that the question could be anything but “Does anybody in this day and age think that prostitution is right?” For of course wives and mothers thought it was wrong for their husbands and sons to go cottaging, kerb crawling or frequenting brothels. Fathers and mothers would have been horrified at the thought of their daughters or sons being prostitutes. In that recent innocent age, children would have hardly been able to grasp that their fathers might be using prostitutes or their mothers paying for the services of a gigolo.
So have we really sunk so low that the BBC is correct in its casual assumption that hardly anybody in this country today believes that prostitution is wrong? Has William Blake’s prophecy come so close to fulfilment in 2004, “The harlot’s cry from street to street/Shall be Old England’s winding sheet”?
Or was it just that BBC moderators and commentators, circulating within their narrow media coteries, have come to believe in TV’s own world of ridiculously unrealistic “realism”, according to which England is populated almost exclusively by foul-mouthed and promiscuous male and female louts?
TV seems to have a mission to make bad behaviour seem not only normal, but morally neutral. Ordinary people end by feeling that all their equally decent friends, neighbours and relatives must be exceptional relics stranded in some time warp, and that they themselves must be social and psychological freaks.
The tragedy is, life imitates art. What begin as a fiction ends as fact, especially when there are vast funds from licence money, virtually a poll tax, to freely play with every year, and the medium is as powerful as modern television.
I fear that I was one of those caught up in the ‘progressive normalisation’ of views. Indeed an advocate of the same.
That is until my children arrived and I realised the true nature of the terrible responibility they bring.
My partner, a stunning Thai woman that is to all appearances a devoted wife and mother. I could not have been happier.
That is until I found she was entertaining former ‘clients’ to make more money. She did the same in Thailand and I knew this. But there she faced the daily struggle of finding enough to live on. I am not poor (nor am I a man lacking in affection ni a slouch in bed) so what I understood to be an activity based on finantial need was based on….what?
She sees absolutly no contradiction in her activities, a fact that staggers me. I worship the ground this woman walks on yet since this discovery I find a vast blankness between us.
She is as attentive and as caring as any man could hope a wife to be and I have no difficulty is remaining 100% faithful to her.
Is that fear/aversion/distaste of prostitution bourne of the same we feel for incest? The controling father that abuses his teenage daughter out of a need to assert that control rather from sexual need?
I dont have an answer save an overwhelming conviction that its wrong. Not logical? Since when has human emotion been logical?
Now I cannot leave without the fear of what someone might be doing with her.
And yes, TV trivialises these very fears. The ‘not sophisticated’ label is enough to dismiss all the ‘moral’ codes that have repeatedly been shown to work.
I have no answer to this problem. I only know it hurts.
Oh, how I’ve been waiting for someone more articulate than I to say these things. I long ago gave up watching television in a fury at what I consider to be the immoral rantings of “modern progressives”.
Than you for putting my anguish into words.
The real killer here is the progressive normalisation of such beliefs amongst the educated, so much so that it becomes synonymous with ‘sophisticated’ opinion. Spend an evening with an average group of university-educated 20-somethings (of which I am one, if dissenting!) and you find such views to be the norm. Even those who demur slightly, harbouring suspicions that prostitution might not be so rosey in practice, will soon backtrack to “it’s their choice” if challenged.