Back in the days when I was living with a male partner, we used to go sometimes to stay with his father, who lived alone with his dog on a quiet street somewhere in the North of England. He had a joke he liked to tell and he told it to me often. It went like this:

Winston Churchill once asked a woman, “Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?” And the woman replied, “My goodness, Mr. Churchill. Well I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course… To which Churchill replied, “Ok, would you sleep with me for five pounds?” The woman said, “Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?” After which came the punchline: “Madam, we’ve already established what kind of woman you are. Now we are simply haggling over the price.”

I had thought a lot about this joke and the purpose of its repeated telling. I suppose it was to remind me that in his view, all women were for sale to men, it was just that some of us (me) had ideas above our station. (Quick aside: the apple never falls far from the tree. Reader, I left him.)

It was attending the launch of Julie Bindel’s newest book: The Pimping of Prostitution, and hearing the testimony of three women who feature in it that brought this memory back to me. Because as with rape, which — although committed by a minority of men — serves to keep all women under control by limiting their behaviour and freedom and keeping them in a state of fear, so prostitution serves to uphold the idea of male entitlement to, and dominion over, women’s bodies. In other words, if one of us can be bought and sold, so can we all.

To hear sex trade survivor testimony is to feel sick to ones stomach. I will not tell any woman’s specific story here because they are not my stories to tell. They belong to her, to share or not on her own terms, because if there is one thing those women are now due it is some damn respect. But I learned how an ordinary twelve hour shift might look for a woman working in a legal brothel under decriminalisation, of how a woman sold into prostitution while still a child managed to survive and eventually thrive, and how a woman working for decades to support other prostituted women saw the sex trade disproportionately damage women of colour. And every single story I heard, I felt right in the guts.

Because the stories were of how men treat women and girls they believe don’t matter; the shunned, the addicted, the poor and the choiceless. Men have never raped and murdered prostituted women because of the job they do or its level of legality, they do it because they want to rape and murder women. Prostituted women are simply easier to access, vulnerable, and less likely to inspire sympathy and police protection. Laws relating to prostitution might be good, bad, or both, depending on the circumstances, but it is always the male buyers and pimps that put women in danger. Decriminalisation, with its root in harm reduction, is the legislative equivalent of looking desperately around the room at anything but the elephant. What it is not is some magic bullet that will cause male buyers and sellers to suddenly see prostituted women as full human beings who actually matter. “But imagine if she was your wife, or your daughter,” some say in an effort to appeal. In other words, imagine she was one of the few women that were actually worth anything. For many this will always be too much of a leap.

‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,’ so said Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch. The campaign for decriminalisation provides the perfect foil for those who can’t bear to look at it, give voice to it, or who believe this hatred to be so inevitable that the only possible solution is to work with and around it. But we cannot afford to be either morally or intellectually lazy: either all women are equal human beings or we are not.

Which brings us to the idea of morality. Abolitionists are, say the pro prostitution lobby, judgemental and uptight. We are moralistic. To which I counter, so what? We are all of us constrained by some kind of moral code and presumably even the most enthusiastic pro prostitution lobbyist would draw the line somewhere. Perhaps they might draw the line at age? Is it wrong to buy and sell girls under the age of 18? How about 16? 14? Or perhaps they may draw the line at perceived vulnerability. Is it wrong to buy and sell women with learning disabilities, for instance? Who perhaps cannot understand fully what is happening to them? What about women who don’t speak the language of the country in which they are being sold well, and so are unable to negotiate terms with punters or brothel owners? I would argue that my own position is simply more logically consistent. I believe it is wrong to buy and sell human beings for sex under any circumstances. Poverty, addiction, and a lack of available choices make everybody vulnerable.

So what of the right to sell ones labour? Everybody buys and sells their time, bodies, and effort, say the pro lobby. What’s the difference between sex work and any other work? McDonalds workers burn their arms, builders wreck their backs; why the distinction? To which I would ask if they had always been this emotionally dishonest and invite them to think of a girl they thought mattered: a daughter perhaps, or a niece, or grandchild. What experience would they rather she had? A day spent flipping burgers in hot fat that jumps out and sears her arm? Or a day that sees her parading in lingerie in front of a group of men she finds physically repulsive and that discuss her body in the crudest of terms, and where she is damaged internally from many hours of the kind of rough, painful intercourse so many of these punters demand? She will leave one job with a scar on her arm. She may leave the other with post traumatic stress disorder.

You see this is a moral argument. Not because the women and children compelled to sell sex are immoral and deserving of criminalisation — they are not. But because the people who abuse, exploit, and profit off the back of them are. To the self described sex workers who claim to love their jobs and to feel empowered by them, I say this with the greatest of respect: it is not all about you and your individual choices. The sex trade is one that inflicts unimaginable horrors on too many girls and women, that is built on the commodification and marketisation of female bodies, and so props up the insidious idea that all women exist in sexual servitude to men and that all men are entitled to pay to do whatever they like to women they believe don’t matter. In this way it affects us all.

The sex trade cannot be made safe by deregulation when the problem is male violence. And so the question is not how we might change the law in order to try to manage this violence more effectively, but how we might take an industry that perpetrates these outrages against us and burn it to the ground.