Prostitition and property rights

Zoe Williams demonstrates the trademark triviality of the Guardian columnist in her article on prostitution. "Selling sex is bad", forsooth. Posing a question that contains its own answer, she asks "what turns a middle-class public schoolgirl into a £1200-a-night escort?"

In fact Wayne Rooney paid £2400 for a threesome. The one on the right is the public schoolgirl, but the other (is that a dog collar?) fits Williams' idea of the social milieu a hooker should come from.

Either way, their bodies and time are their property and they should be able to trade or sell both for whatever the market will bear. The public schoolgirl, who by her own estimate had scored £8400 off the England striker, cashed in further by selling the details to the press. She may have dealt the market for posh hookers a blow (sic), but that's showbiz.

I am against sex for money. It reinforces the idea that women do sex as a favour to men; and for as long as we think this, the act will always be polluted by coercion of one sort or another. The slag/stud double standard will always hold. But whether or not a young woman with some good A-levels is selling her body couldn't be less relevant: we should be pulling this tree up by the roots, not hassling one of the apples.

How old-fashioned. Although "Sex and the City" is to some extent a projection of male homosexual promiscuity onto women, there is truth in the portrayal. Any attractive woman can have as many men as she likes. Most young women play the field and notch up a far wider number and variety of "conquests" than their male peers, often on very casual acquaintance. Groupies and star-fuckers are not at all unusual.

The old lefty cry of "free love" meant freedom to fuck without social restraint; one of those social restraints is the petit bourgeois concept that sexual intercourse is "special" and should not be commercial.