There’s a totally gross article by Minette Marrin in The Times this week about the world’s oldest profession.
Minette Marrin is not my favourite journalist in the world for reasons completely unrelated to feminism: a few years ago she wrote a piece in The Times about fox hunting, in which she denounced the “ritualistic slaughters” practised by Jews and Muslims, drawing parallels with fox hunting and claiming that it was only political correctness that stopped people from speaking out against Kosher and Halal traditions. I wrote a VERY angry letter, which The Times to their credit printed, but evidently Marrin is still writing for them, and writing some pretty vile stuff at that:
Right up and down the scale, a man can rent a girl a great deal better and more cooperative than the woman he lives with. She will be probably be much more sexually experienced and more accomplished than most wives too. In plain English, or so I am told by perfectly nice men, prostitutes tend to be better at it. They tend to be younger and more energetic. They are also prepared to do things which her indoors might draw the line at.
[my emphasis]
Ew.
This whole article seems to rely on two assumptions:
As Kate Atkins from Guilford says:
Where do women feature in all of this? I am sorry to remind you of this, but women like sex too! I know, shocking isn’t it? And I, for one, resent Marrin’s representation of all wives resembling dowdy, Laura Ashley-wearing house frous, hindering their husbands’ “would-be-installing-a-sex-swing-in-the-guestroom-if-you-weren’t-in-the-way” tendencies
