No one has ever died from a lack of sex. Yet, according to the actress Emma Thompson, the NHS should recommend it to improve everyone’s health because sex is “so good for you”.
Speaking at a screening of her 2022 film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande — about a widow who hires a handsome young man to give her the orgasm she’s apparently been missing for decades — Thompson mused: “What if when you’re unwell, you can’t make connections, but you need sex? You need sex because it’s part of our health plan, if you like. It should really be on the NHS.” She then admitted that some of her friends even hire escorts for this purpose.
It’s hardly surprising that Thompson struggles to grasp the difference between wanting and needing. When jetting off from film sets to join climate protests, the actress sails above the estates and alleyways where consent is sold by the hour to pay for heating, food or drugs.
But unlike in her film, where a woman’s use of a male prostitute is portrayed as a quirky form of self-care, the vast majority of sex buyers are men, and the transaction is rarely tender or empowering. Oddly, it doesn’t seem to have registered to Thompson that what’s “good” for one person might come at the cost of another’s dignity. Her view is entirely that of the buyer’s, of the “service user”. But Thompson stresses she is all ears. “Sex workers are a little more vocal now,” she says, “and very strong on what they think needs to happen — and they’re the people we need to listen to.”
It’s easy to say we should “listen to sex workers” when you imagine they’re all dominatrices with podcasts; the depressingly more numerous teens locked in flats above chicken shops aren’t so easy to hear. And, unsurprisingly, women brutalised by the sex trade don’t tend to moonlight as industry advisors on film sets. These are worlds that never meet.
The framing of sex as a human right has been aired everywhere from incel forums to NGOs, and it’s being taken seriously. Tlaleng Mofokeng, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, has long argued that sexual pleasure is a human right. To that end, she believes all forms of prostitution should be fully decriminalised. It sounds broadly progressive — until you ask who’s expected to provide it. Of course, it’s never rich men volunteering to “service” lonely pensioners. It’s nearly always women: poor women, abused women, addicted women. The women who would never be invited to sit around a dinner table with Thompson.
A cynic might suggest that the actress has settled on a conveniently sexy “girlboss” cause. Ultimately, it is perhaps unsurprising that in an industry where the casting couch was venerated and women are forbidden from ageing, what passes for female empowerment is aping or excusing the worst excesses of male behaviour.
But sex is not something that can be extracted from people’s bodies. It isn’t healthcare, nor a prescription for loneliness. And it certainly isn’t a product to be dispensed to the entitled. For those cosseted by fame and flattery, who mistake indulgence for insight, the notion that some things — some people — should never be for sale must seem quaint to the point of being passé.
Thompson may believe that renting a body is empowering. But one suspects she wouldn’t want her daughter earning a living by providing sex for the therapeutic good of lonely men. That sort of job, it seems, is reserved for other people’s children.