Bludging sex - what's wrong with the pimp?

The character of the pimp provokes special legal and political outrage and disgust. Pimps have been cast as parasitic and wretched, and judges have described them as “evil” and as having “sunk as low it is possible for a man to sink”. While male clients have rarely been targeted by the criminal law, offences such as men “living on the earnings of prostitution” have typically carried heavier penalties than the offences aimed at prostitutes themselves, such as soliciting. Why the discrepancy? I examine the common hatred of the pimp and how this hatred translates into law. I argue that the pimp is despised for two primary reasons. First, because he exploits his fellow man’s “need” for sex. And second and more perhaps more importantly, because he disrupts the mythology that prostitution is natural and inevitable by virtue of his economically interested presence. In making this argument, I will make particular reference to the role of Stephen Ward in the Profumo affair in the early 1960s.