What struck me when I first saw Ana was her beautiful smile that didn’t just light up her face, it lit up the entire café where she worked as a waitress. I was on holiday in Spain and she was glad to practise the English she had learned during a six months stay in London. I asked her if she had been a student, and she leaned over and whispered: ‘No. I work in the oldest profession.’ 

She moved off between the tables and I wondered if I had misheard. Slim and self-confident, she looked less like a prostitute than any girl I knew. Then, of course, what does a prostitute look like? The first thing that came into my mind was the movies – Charlize Theron in Monster? Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour? Then it hit me: Ana bore an uncanny resemblance to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.

Next day, I went back to the café. It wasn’t busy and over cups of coffee in small hot glasses, Ana said she wasn’t sure why she had shared her secret but, yes, it was true. She had read in a magazine article that girls were earning £2,000 a month in London as ‘escorts’ and she needed £10,000 ‘to buy a new smile.’ She had always had terrible teeth, black, stunted, broken. She felt so miserable boys avoided her and that made her even more depressed. I like sex, she said, and I needed new teeth. She shrugged and her full lips peeled back to reveal the full splendour of the dentist’s artistry

There were so many things I wanted to ask, like isn’t it just too horrible going to bed with an endless string of strangers? How do you decide how much to charge? And what if a man is violent? Or too ugly? Or wants to do things you wouldn’t normally want to do? She must have read my mind, or my embarrassment, because she had also considered those same things before she left for London. But new teeth was her obsession and getting them was more important than the morals of what she was planning to do. ‘I think lots of girls are curious about what it must be like to be a prostitute, and I don’t feel ashamed that I did it.’

Ana had used the words morals and ashamed. It got me thinking again about Pretty Woman. In the movie, Richard Gere is an unprincipled businessman, while Julia Roberts plays the hooker with a heart of gold, decent, honest and driven to prostitution – like Ana – by circumstances; in fact, they may even have been the same circumstances, before Julia climbs into bed that first night, we see her flossing her teeth.

People generally confuse morals with ethics. Morals are rules imposed on us from outside, from society and religion. Ethics are internal values, our own conclusions about what is right and wrong, and inspire virtue, kindness, common human decency. The prostitute working to care for her child, or pay for her mother’s operation, is more moral than the banker, to use the present bogey man, who manipulates share prices, sells faulty products and takes mouth-watering bonuses in failing banks.

Prostitution is nearly always the result of poverty. But in Belle de Jour, Luis Buñuel turns the rule upside down. Catherine Deneuve, as Séverine, is married to a doctor with whom she is unable to be intimate. She is that obscure object of desire, a beautiful woman who secretly enjoys the attention of men and has erotic dreams laced with scenes of bondage and sadomasochism. Séverine is drawn to work afternoons between two and five in a high-class Paris brothel, not by poverty, but the enigmatic pleasure of doing wrong.

Not every woman is a potential prostitute, but prostitution, according to Georges Bataille, is the logical consequence of the female attitude – the way Séverine takes care of her appearance, her cologne, the way she dresses, normally in white with white underwear, make her prey to men’s desire. The question is, having sprayed out her scent, under what circumstances, or at what price, does a woman yield? Is prostitution just another tool, deeply hidden, in every woman’s vanity case? Is the oldest profession the oldest profession because it has a logic women have always understood? And if prostitution is the oldest profession, then morality is the stick men reach for to beat women when they fail to meet male expectations.

The Oldest Profession? What do you think?

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