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Review: The Sex Myth by Brooke Magnanti
By Helen Lewis Published 25 April 2012
The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong
Brooke Magnanti
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 272pp, £14.99
Brooke Magnanti is one of our best-known female scientists – albeit not for her research. Accounts of her time as a high-end sex worker, published under the nom de plume Belle de Jour, were made into a glossy TV series fronted by Billie Piper. Her new book, The Sex Myth, attempts to join her two lines of work, cutting a useful, Ben Goldacre-ish furrow into areas where sexuality meets public policy.
Magnanti pulls apart the canards in the government’s review into the “sexualisation of childhood”, led by the Mothers’ Union president, Reg Bailey. She zaps away a widely cited claim that lap-dancing clubs in Camden led to a 50 per cent rise in rape. At her hands, zombie statistics get a brutal comeuppance. A chapter on the wild exaggeration of sex trafficking builds on work by the Guardian’s Nick Davies.
These are all fascinating but the book does not quite hang together. This is principally because, as well as a dissection of bad social science, it is a pro-prostitution-and-porn polemic. Even if you are sympathetic to her arguments about the weak evidence for the harm they do – and I am – melding these two approaches makes for one unsatisfactory encounter.
First, because she introduces an irritating Aunt Sally: the feminists. Magnanti cheerfully generalises about them in exactly the way she claims they do about sex workers. The feminists hate porn. The feminists hate prostitution. The missing word is “some”. (Incidentally, Magnanti refuses to talk to me, citing an online argument I can neither find nor remember.)
Her lack of nuance in engaging with critics and unwillingness to see her own viewpoint as anything other than objective are weaknesses. She is upset that the Secret Diary of a Call Girl TV series was “accused of glamourising sex work”. Her distress is baffling: it’s bleedin’ obvious that it did. It was a glossy star vehicle.
The most important flaw, however, is that Magnanti is not as careful in deploying research to advance her arguments as she is in debunking the statistical sleight of hand of others – particularly on prostitution. The Magnanti who debunks Bailey would sneeringly gut the Brooke who writes about sex workers.
Take the centrepiece of her argument on prostitution: a pair of studies of sex workers, the first by Suzanne Jenkins of Keele University and the second by Eaves, a charity, and London South Bank University. The second study was the more negative of the two about the effects of sex work on prostitutes, finding physical, mental or sexual health problems in lots of cases. Magnanti criticises this because “the sample they’ve recruited is not representative of UK sex workers overall”. It focuses too heavily on streetwalkers, a minority who have “more chaotic” lives.
“As a former statistician dealing with population-based data,” she says, “I know that one of the most important criteria for an acceptable study is to make sure the sampled population reflects the status of the population as a whole. If this is not done, the results are not reliable.”
The Keele research, on the other hand, is commended for “turn[ing] almost everything we know about sex work on its head”: a third of the respondents had degrees, 85 per cent of the women were aged 26 or older and a top answer to “How long do you plan to do escort work for?” was “I have no plans to stop”. Magnanti praises it for using “not simply street-based women, either, but women, men and transgendered sex workers in all areas of the business”.
Case closed. Except the word used to describe the sex workers in the Keele study was “escorts”, which usually means those who advertise themselves on the web or with agencies. Not streetwalkers. A look at the original study reveals that Jenkins confined her research “to sex workers who advertise their sexual services via websites as escorts”.
The Eaves research may well be skewed in favour of the experiences of streetwalkers. But the Keele study is skewed against them. Neither is representative of the industry as a whole, yet Magnanti mysteriously claims the one that supports her views is.
The error rather bulldozes her argument and undermines the book. If you’re going to be a smart arse – and she is, relentlessly – make sure you’re right. Magnanti, although fascinating on the misuse of statistics generally, does seem to have come a cropper when using them to push her own agenda.
Tags: Books
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About Helen Lewis
Helen Lewis is deputy editor of the New Statesman. She tweets @helenlewis
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10 comments
new statesman complicit in belle de jour's great tax fraud hoax. once-respected journo's manipulated easier than a photoshop image.
why do supposedly authoratitive publications credulously regurgitate the fraudulent conspiracies of a few class-a addled predators?
why are you all so dumb as to fall for the oldest trick in the book? historically used to protect royalty, here used to garner huge financial advantages; the old-switcharoo, the decoy-doppelganger, the stooge, the fall-guy, the body-double;
surely the real Belle's more globally-renowned cameo role as the whore of Babylon, that battered and worn rusty signpost to the times of Revelation, is of a greater social and national interest. Ask magnanti what she knows of the approaching comet, she knows the truth, but she fails to deliver what is required of her. Belle, brooke and their team of parasites are just awaiting the nation's true verdict on their ignornat unevolved predatory consciousness, which will reach fever pitch after the approaching equinox and what is due to emerge from the milky way (an illusion of perspective) below the constellation of Cepheus
new statesman complicit in belle de jour's great tax fraud hoax. once-respected journo's manipulated easier than a photoshop image.
why do supposedly authoratitive publications credulously regurgitate the fraudulent conspiracies of a few class-a addled predators?
why are you all so dumb as to fall for the oldest trick in the book? historically used to protect royalty, here used to garner huge financial advantages; the old-switcharoo, the decoy-doppelganger, the stooge, the fall-guy, the body-double;
surely the real Belle's more globally-renowned cameo role as the whore of Babylon, that battered and worn rusty signpost to the times of Revelation, is of a greater social and national interest. Ask magnanti what she knows of the approaching comet, she knows the truth, but she fails to deliver what is required of her. Belle, brooke and their team of parasites are just awaiting the nation's true verdict on their ignornat unevolved predatory consciousness, which will reach fever pitch after the approaching equinox and what is due to emerge from the milky way (an illusion of perspective) below the constellation of Cepheus
new statesman complicit in belle de jour's great tax fraud hoax. once-respected journo's manipulated easier than a photoshop image.
why do supposedly authoratitive publications credulously regurgitate the fraudulent conspiracies of a few class-a addled predators?
why are you all so dumb as to fall for the oldest trick in the book? historically used to protect royalty, here used to garner huge financial advantages; the old-switcharoo, the decoy-doppelganger, the stooge, the fall-guy, the body-double;
surely the real Belle's more globally-renowned cameo role as the whore of Babylon, that battered and worn rusty signpost to the times of Revelation, is of a greater social and national interest. Ask magnanti what she knows of the approaching comet, she knows the truth, but she fails to deliver what is required of her. Belle, brooke and their team of parasites are just awaiting the nation's true verdict on their ignornat unevolved predatory consciousness, which will reach fever pitch after the approaching equinox and what is due to emerge from the milky way (an illusion of perspective) below the constellation of Cepheus
new statesman complicit in belle de jour's great tax fraud hoax. once-respected journo's manipulated easier than a photoshop image.
why do supposedly authoratitive publications credulously regurgitate the fraudulent conspiracies of a few class-a addled predators?
why are you all so dumb as to fall for the oldest trick in the book? historically used to protect royalty, here used to garner huge financial advantages; the old-switcharoo, the decoy-doppelganger, the stooge, the fall-guy, the body-double;
surely the real Belle's more globally-renowned cameo role as the whore of Babylon, that battered and worn rusty signpost to the times of Revelation, is of a greater social and national interest. Ask magnanti what she knows of the approaching comet, she knows the truth, but she fails to deliver what is required of her. Belle, brooke and their team of parasites are just awaiting the nation's true verdict on their ignornat unevolved predatory consciousness, which will reach fever pitch after the approaching equinox and what is due to emerge from the milky way (an illusion of perspective) below the constellation of Cepheus
helen Lewis talks garbage. she has been fooled like every other so-called investigative hack. you are all muppets you fleet street coke-heads. you are all a bunch of R-souls, so easily fooled, and now you regurgitate the same old bovine faeces without a single conscious thought.
how did magnanti glean so many stories from '14 months' "work". you lot are so dumb. instead, read 'FOURTEEN YEARS TAX FREE CASH INCOME'
hELEN lEWIS, go down the tatto parlour and get 'I AM A MUG FOR THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS' tatooed on your unedifying visage.
New Statesman, just another male bovine excrement regurgitating tool of the whorocracy.
Helen Lewis just another misguided unintelligent mutant without any original thought or capacity for deduction.
now you have a nice juicy slab of hearty offence, you can remove the tame spam from the bottom of this column
Moderator, please remove these comments below as a) they are offensive b) they are spam c) they are clearly the ramblings of a schizophrenic d) you should have removed them earlier. e) nobody cares about prostitutes and their victims anyway
moderator
please remove the offensive comments below as they seemingly amount to spam and it is particularly insensitive to bring any discredit upon one of our oldest professions at a time when there are many international visitors in town whose confidence in their services needs to be upheld.
you see, nobody even gives a damn about your pathetic little books. no one defends, no one supports. you are just another attention seeking whining little ego. if you hadn't tried to mislead the daughters of our nation, you would be laughable. but you are not even that.
tescos bargain bin 50p. thats when you know you're one of life's failures.
and BTW just incase you think i don't know, i have known the real belle de jour for twenty years. i went to her first wedding, i was godfather to one of her kids, all before we realised what the hell she was really up to.
needless to say we have not spoken to her since and never will. magnanti is just riding the whore of babylon's gravy train, and the very idea that you can try to sound intellectual when you are a mere HOOKER is the funniest and most laughable concept encountered in the last 2 millennia.
you are all sad little acolytes of the whore of babylon, entrapped in the gratuitous glorification of your lowest chakra. pitiable little wretches is ALL YOU WILL EVER BE.
Why everything you believe from the Magnanti is WRONG! she is not even the real belle de jour, that is her diminutive hawaiian chum, 5 foot tall, bloated, pudgey, arrogant, crooked, deceiving, disgusting, abhorrent, mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.
the only cancer research magnanti knows is how to spread their particular cancer to the next generation. you are all mugs for believing any old tosh served up by the whorocracy, and when the waves roll in and send you all to kingdom come i will say 'i told you so'.
why you even waste everyone's time with the lies of this doppelganger-decoy i will never know, but then you obviously can't find anything of any real value to talk about.
i say we have a public cruicifixion for de jour and magnanti after it becomes clear that they could have spoken up to save lives but never did (see millennium mysterium - the truth about belle de jour the whore of babylon)