Chester Brown, Paying For It

Book Review
Hugo Chesshire
 Chester Browns Paying For It is essentially an argument for the decriminalization of

prostitution, based largely on Browns experiences of prostitution from the perspective of a john.

His sampling of a very small facet of prostitution (and an even smaller facet of sex work in

general) places him at the bottom of a well from which he can only see the small patch of sky

that is high-priced escort work, missing the dark clouds of human trafficking, organized crime,

violence, rape, and substance abuse entirely. Brown preaches a liberal perspective and advocates

full decriminalization, even more so in his appendices, but his evidence for doing so is cherry-

picked. When he tries to address counter-arguments, he seems facetious and ill-informed.

The graphic novel documents Browns experiences as a john, beginning with his

revelation that romantic love is overrated at best and socially destructive at worst, after which he

resolves to avoid romantic relationships in the future. Frequenting prostitutes would be an

obvious choice for fulfilling his sexual urges, but he wrestles with a host of problems and

stigmas. His internal struggles are of a typically Western middle-class nature in this respect,

superficially concerned with morality or ethics at best and much more worried about practicality

or social approval (Brown 2011, 27-30). Eventually he overcomes his inhibitions, and, out of

ignorance as much as anything else, seeks street-walking prostitutes on his bicycle. He never

finds one, however, and abandons this brief pursuit in favour of escorts and call girls he

discovers through advertising.

Brown takes a liberal perspective on prostitution. He believes that sex workers can

choose their profession (or not), arguing from a classical-liberal rational-choice position. This

holds that a human being is homo economicus a rational utility maximizer; a being carefully

examining the choices in front of hir and selecting that which will best satisfy hir want-needs.

This perspective is probably best-known from neoclassical economics, wherein it is supposed

1
that humans in the free market will choose to purchase products and services, or sell their labour,

based on the choices available to them. The choices they make will be those they deem best; all

human action is rational as it aims at some end (von Mises 1996, 19). Since everything produced

requires the production of something else to be foregone, somebody must decide what is to be

foregone and what it is foregone in preference to; the decider ought to be the individual actor

rather than a collective body which can only interfere with and override rational, individual

choice. The right and just thing for such bodies to do is to stand aside and allow individual

choice (read: the market) to reign supreme (Hazlitt 1979, 108).

According to this perspective, sex workers including prostitutes engage in their

chosen professions after having made a rational choice based on the available options (Jeffreys

2009, 19-20). Since a sex worker has volunteered for hir job, it would be as nonsensical to pity

hir as it would be to pity a dentist or a lawyer. Each of these individuals assessed the options

available to them and made a choice that would best satisfy their want-needs, whether that

entailed the study and practice of dentistry or law, or making oneself sexually available to other

people in exchange for money. Consequently, as a john, Brown doesnt feel pitiable, and while

he admits some prostitutes might be pitiable, many or most are not (Brown 2011, 54-55).

Like many followers of the liberal perspective, Brown also believes that violence in

prostitution is greatly overestimated (Brown 2011, 178). Like any libertarian, he seems to believe

that the biggest problem is state interference, reflecting a radical libertarian view that the state is

the greatest and worst purveyor and perpetrator of violence in society. Reflecting on his own

experiences, he knows that he is not a violent person and has not engaged in a violent act against

any prostitute (although it should be noted that according to some definitions, retaining the

services of a prostitute constitutes a violent act in and of itself), and that none of the prostitutes

2
he frequented seemed to have been victims of violence. Even if violence were a problem in

Browns liberal fantasy, he believes that decriminalization would be the solution; legal

prostitutes would be unafraid of the police, and an unregulated sex industry would mean that an

underclass of unlicensed prostitutes would not exist to become victims of violence and yet

remain unable to complain about it. For Brown, decriminalization is almost a panacea to end all

the problems of prostitution: violence, robbery, abuse, substance addiction, disease, and fear of

the law. Jeffreys (2009, 183-188) notes that even in legal regimes that decriminalize or legalize

prostitution, there is still violence and harm to women. Brown does not address this, perhaps

because it is outside the scope of his experience. The prostitutes he spoke to would be highly

unlikely to tell him a client of their fears or health problems which stemmed from their work,

and Brown does not appear to have been a prostitute himself.

Browns work is interesting as a memoir, but as a sociological study or a tool for the

advocate, it is much less so. All the prostitutes he encounters are escorts or call girls who charge

a relatively high price for their services, who may have no pimp, who are much less likely to be

the victims of violence or suffer from drug addiction, and (at least for the better-paid workers)

may have sufficient cultural capital to make prostitution a genuine choice. By this, it is meant

that the sort of john willing and able to pay up to several hundred dollars an hour for the services

of a prostitute and many higher-priced escorts ask for a minimum of several hours expects

someone not only physically attractive and sexually skilled, but well-spoken, well-dressed, and

socially glib, someone who could move unquestioned through the lobbies of the 4- or 5-star

hotels they may be rendezvousing in. The women who Brown actually holds a conversation with

seem to be reasonably intelligent and educated. Such women probably have other prospects

realistically available to them. They may have chosen prostitution because it pays them a lot of

3
money yet requires relatively little time, or perhaps because they genuinely enjoy it. Browns

mistake, however, is to extrapolate from this cherry-picked sample and draw conclusions he feels

are applicable to the entire sex industry, or at least, to all prostitution. For example, street

workers are far more likely to encounter violence and crime, yet Brown never encounters any

(Weitzer 2010, 9-10).

The radical feminist response is that the liberal perspective understands choice but takes

no account of constraint (Jeffreys 2009, 26-27). Firstly, it forgets the social environment in

which prostitution exists, one in which the equal rights of women have been formally recognized

for considerably less than a lifetime and before which women were legally subservient to men in

all aspects of life. The legacy of that treatment still exists, with women greatly under-represented

politically and holding a greatly inferior number of high offices, earning considerably less than

men for the same work, performing more unpaid labour than men, and being much more likely to

live in poverty (UNPAC 2011). The de jure abolition of patriarchy has not yet wholly prevented

its de facto continuation.

Prostitution, in the feminist construction, is overwhelmingly something that is done to

women and is a continuation of historical patterns of violence towards and exploitation of

women. Brown is adamant that johns need not necessarily exercise any power over prostitutes, or

necessarily indulge only their own sexual pleasure at the expense of the prostitute, or necessarily

engage in violence; violence itself may be highly abnormal in prostitution (Brown 2011, 178,

235). Again, his argument is coloured by his highly selective sampling of the sex trade. Brown

himself may never have been violent, but in the book, he does not speak to a single other john,

and in all his agonizing over whether or not to become a john, research into the incidence of

violence against sex workers is never undertaken (he does, however, conduct internet research

4
into the performance of the prostitutes he contemplates hiring). Furthermore, despite his heady

talk of consent and choice, Browns rhetoric reveals a consistent treatment of women as sexual

objects for male pleasure. By a third of the way through the book, it is clear that he is becoming

something of a connoisseur of prostitutes,* and he not only starts to make comparisons and

critiques of these women but moves from his initial position of tipping as a matter-of-course to

tipping only for exceptional service (Brown 2011, 77). At one point, he seems annoyed that a

prostitute did not give him her full attention, with an attitude reminiscent of what one would

expect if he had been confronted with an indifferent waiter or store greeter (Brown 2011, 156).

Why would anyone do something zie does not enjoy or does not consider ideal, if rational

choice informs individual decisions? The socialist and feminist critiques reply that these choices

are highly constrained, since workers in general and female workers in particular are more likely

to suffer poverty, marginalization, and violence, and especially those on the lower-earning end of

the scale: streetwalkers, bar or casino prostitutes, massage parlour workers, etc. Women in these

lines of work are, in Weberian terms, likely to have had far fewer life-chances than those in high-

priced escort work, or in well-paid professions outside the sex trade. The choice that they

make may be between degrading minimum-wage work, a lifetime on meager handouts from a

grudging austerity state and the accompanying stigmatization (neither of which pays enough to

live comfortably on), or sex work. For most women, the third choice is not a palatable one,

doubtless including the women charging $20-50 for oral sex, running the risk of violence,

robbery, rape, arrest and disease, but desperate circumstances often cause moral codes to be

overridden. For comparison, nobody would take the prevalence of cannibalism and infanticide
*
It should be noted that being a connoisseur of other human beings is morally repugnant and reminiscent of
practices such as chattel slavery, a point which seems almost entirely lost on Brown.

As an aside, my casual conversations with wait staff seem to indicate that tipping inversely correlates to wealth,
social class, and inability to empathize with workers who depend on tips financially. The same transition might be
observed in Brown at least with regard to the last factor.

5
during famines as an indication that cannibalism is a rational choice undertaken by an informed,

rational and deliberative individual in order to satisfy want-needs, or even that there was ever a

perception of choice for the individual at all.

This critique stems from a socialist approach to sex work. The choice to enter sex work

is like the choice to enter any other line of work in that it is necessarily constrained by economic,

political and social pressures. Sex work, like most other forms of work in the capitalist economy,

is inherently exploitative. The creation of surplus-value realized as profit relies upon a

worker being paid less than the value of the goods or services zie can produce. In essence,

everyone who works for somebody else is getting ripped off to some degree, whether it is by a

pimp or an entrepreneur. So long as this exploitation persists, genuine choice cannot be exercised

in choosing work, or in choosing to work. For example, the neoclassical discourse on the early

industrial revolution holds that the peasantry of England came to work in the factories and mills

because those factories and mills offered higher wages and steadier, more reliable employment

than toiling in the fields. The peasants who came to work in industry exercised a rational choice

aimed at satisfying their want-needs. However, the socialist analysis is that the enclosure

movement made farming and animal husbandry increasingly untenable as a way of life; the move

into factories was not driven by choice but by desperation. In the same way, a single mother with

only a high-school diploma may be unable to provide for her children with either minimum-wage

work (almost certainly all she could hope for in an era of educational credentialism and

normalized high-single-digit unemployment percentages) or welfare payments. The choice of

prostitution is really no choice at all, merely the most palatable one of a host of unsavoury

prospects, including homelessness, starvation, or seeing ones children become Crown wards.

6
 Brown fatuously rejects this argument, however. In his appendix, as a response to Sheila

Jeffreys argument that choice is not an appropriate word where the only other option is low-

paid, marginal work, he asks why anyone would not choose sex work if this were true (Brown

2011, 239-240)? This harkens back to Thomas Hobbes, who contended that a choice would be

valid and should be honoured even if the only alternative was death in short, do this or I will

kill you contains a legitimate choice, and the chooser ought to honour his agreement to

perform whatever act was demanded even if another option (such as escape) later presents itself

(Leviathan ch. 14). However, the choice may still be unpleasant or immoral, and none of the

alternatives presented at the time might be acceptable if additional and plausible additional

options were to be presented. To return to the matter of infanticide and famine, if the choice were

between killing and eating ones child or starving to death, one might choose the former, but it is

also plausible that a third alternative might arise (e.g. the availability of bread), and if it did, this

dilemma would be resolved; given any other choice, one would choose neither to starve to death

nor to kill and eat ones own child.

The worst example of Browns thinking is in his argument on human trafficking. He

states that most people who are trafficked want to be trafficked, in that people want to come from

poor countries to rich ones (Brown 2011, 243). This seems to be a ridiculous and downright

monstrous argument, on the scale of radical libertarian arguments such as those that claim people

without health insurance should be allowed to suffer and die if they should become ill, that

people should be allowed to send their children to work if they want to, or even that people

heavily in debt should be sold into slavery to repay that debt. Brown is either genuinely or

willfully incognizant of the fact that human trafficking contains a severe moral hazard: the

trafficked person is desperate and poor, has few or no legal recourses for maltreatment, may be

7
extremely isolated due to language and cultural barriers, might have a family held hostage in

their home country, and so on.

Brown seems to think that most human traffickers are rather like licensed taxicab drivers.

This is, quite simply, another libertarian fiction. He contends that the proportion of trafficked

women who are prostituted may be as low as 4% (ibid.). Deceptively, this is the only figure that

he mentions; the UNODC, however, believes that the majority of trafficked women are destined

for prostitution, and the US State Department reports that in 2003-2004, somewhere between

700,000 and 900,000 people were trafficked across international borders (Jeffreys 2009, 157,

160). Jeffreys research also shows that, even according to traditional definitions of violence

that may not include emotional and psychic trauma, trafficked women suffer from threats,

violence, life-threatening conditions, rape, disease, permanent disfigurement, and murder

(Jeffreys 2009, 161-162). Browns dismissive, blas attitude towards these facts is disingenuous

and disturbing.

Browns work comes across as arrogant, self-absorbed and ignorant. His arguments are

self-serving and he allows his personal experiences to override hard data. He believes he has

found a solution, and preaches it to his friends; sadly, he has not even found the real problems.

The book is a libertarian fantasy worthy of Murray Rothbard himself, inhabiting a fantasy realm

of choice, free agency and rational individualism, blithely ignorant of social, political, historical

and economic reality.

8
 Bibliography
Brown, Chester. (2011). Paying For It. Montral: Drawn and Quarterly.

Hazlitt, Henry. (1979). Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand
Basic Economics. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Jeffreys, Sheila. (2009). The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade.
New York: Routledge.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan.

Weitzer, Ronald. (2010). Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry. New
York: Routledge.

Von Mises, Ludwig. (1963). Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (4th ed.). San Francisco:
Fox & Wilkes.

United Nations Plan for Action Committee Manitoba. (2011). Women & the Economy. Retrieved
from http://www.unpac.ca/economy/unpaidwork.html on February 12, 2012.