Call Girls: Private Sex Workers in Australia
by Roberta Perkins and Frances Lovejoy
UWA Press, HK$258
In any serious consideration of Call Girls: Private Sex Workers in Australia, it's important to note that Roberta Perkins is a transsexual. How a man who has had an ornamental approximation of a vagina constructed from mutilated penile tissue can in any way purport to understand what it is to be a woman is not only a monumental insult to women, but farcical. And at no point in this book does Perkins sound like anything other than what he is: a dangerously disturbed man.
'Far removed from the moralising 'victim' stereotypes,' reads the back cover, 'Call Girls ... will surprise and change the preconceived notions of many readers.' Other than the fact that notions are, by definition, preconceived, the only people who could possibly be surprised by this book are: (a) those who believe the fundamental dissociation, reductionism and exploitation implicit in prostitution cannot, in any way, be rightly classified as legitimate work; and (b) those who believe sex acts between adults and children under 12 are uniformly 'negative' experiences.
'From a modern feminist perspective the term 'prostitute' then reflects a positive attribute,' Perkins and Frances Lovejoy write, 'referring as it does to those women who chose independence over being controlled by men ... Politically inclined sex workers have recently reappropriated the words 'prostitute' and 'whore' as a means of empowerment.'
What the authors fail to mention is that the word 'prostitute' doesn't mean empowerment in any language. The definition? According to the Oxford English Dictionary: To 'sell (one's honour etc) unworthily, put (abilities etc) to wrong use, debase'. Its synonyms? Abuse, cheapen, corrupt, demean, devalue, misapply, misemploy, misuse, vitiate and whore. Like blacks who refer to themselves as 'niggaz', women who interpret the word 'prostitute' as positive have not only normalised unacceptable abuse, but continue to perpetrate it.