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Flesh Trade: Tales From The Sexual Underground
Britain has some of the most draconian laws covering sexual behavior of any developed democracy. It also has the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in any Western country and tops the European league table for sexually transmitted infections. Yet the majority of the nation and its media still seems unable to deal with the notion of sex."Flesh Trade" author Bruce Barnard talks with those who are a part of the British sex industry and those who oppose it. He goes beyond the PR machine to bring a unique, unprecedented and highly entertaining hands-on look at a world of secret sex parties, swingers, black market traders, VD clinics, film censors, 12-step self-help groups, gay chat lines, and marathon porn-watching sessions.
191 pages, Paperback
First published November 15, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 2, 2015
[Please note – rude things are mentioned here including one use of the c word which I thought was funny]
Remorseless humour may be the only way the sex trade can be written about – the awful mixture of the possibility of bliss, probability of loneliness and certainty of exploitation for everyone involved gives it a unique piquancy. But o the laddishness of this author. It’s like a 191-page tiresome article in one of those mags like Nuts or Zoo
Here’s Bruce describing himself on p81 :
I’m three stone overweight, bald, have a number of badly inked tattoos, and tend to become struck mute when I’m not attached to the umbilical cord of my laptop…. I wanted to get behind the PR campaign, and tear apart the UK sex industry like a bucket of fried chicken, until all that was left was a pile of bones, connective tissue and gristle.
So, thickly coated with the oozing jokiness, blokiness, affability, knee-jerk humour, endlessly gurgling wit and banter of Bruce Barnard, the reader is rewarded by some flashes of real humour* and by the sometimes eye-opening (but not too eye-opening, you might get something in it) accounts of the behaviour here delineated.
For instance? Well, since you asked.
After attending a couple of sex parties, interviewing performers, and observing the filming of a gay porn movie in France Bruce decides that he needs to get more hands-on experience in the sex biz, but being the guy he is (see above) he decides phone sex is the only way to go. As a straight guy, he thinks ah, I’ll be a sex phone worker for a few weeks. Ladies will ring me up and talk dirty. It will be fun!
He finds out that there’s no such thing as a straight male sex phone worker. Women don’t require such a service. If there was any market at all, you can be sure the ultra-capitalist sex biz would have spotted the market. But it doesn’t exist.
This tells you something about the difference between male and female sex lives right there. I wish I knew what it says, but it surely says something.
Anyway, he decides he will be gay for pay & gets taken on by a gay phone sex company, and he describes how difficult or easy it was accommodating the various types of callers – The Regular (these guys are not going to fall for your chitchat about the new line of Prada suits which you undertake to try to drag out the call - the longer the better, heh heh); The Silent Type (occasionally these turn out to be anxious young guys who just want to talk to another gay man about being gay); The Cranks (these want to rant about gays going to hell, and the phone sex companies LOVE them, because the longer they rant, the more money the company makes); and the occasionally really odd one.
During one shift I took a call from a softly spoken man, and during the small talk I noticed that there was someone else listening in on another line. I asked who it was , and he happily confirmed that his wife was on the bedroom extension.
So the wife liked to listen to her husband describing the gay sex he’d like to have with an anonymous guy on a phone line.
And what's wrong with that?
The nasty side of the biz is not glossed over. There’s a chapter called “M.B.S.“ which stands for manager boyfriend syndrome. Bruce attends an amateur porn shoot (foot fetishist) at which a row erupts between the female performer and the manager-boyfriend, and the guy starts hitting the woman. It’s a vile little scene and Bruce acknowledges that it’s one repeated throughout the porn biz. At this point his joviality fades away completely.
Okay, moving on…. I would like to tell you all about the bukkake party chapter, it would have you coughing your Dr Pepper all over your keyboard, but… my powers of description are defeated and my brain is struggling to cope with the whole concept. According to Bruce, some women enjoy this as much as the “performing” males. I really do find this hard to believe.
This book also provides some explicit revelation about Chuck Berry, which go way beyond his ding-a-ling.
*
*When the case came to trial, the court recorder had to read out a list of all the seized titles. She could hardly keep a straight face. When she got to Hungry Cunts you could see the jury looking at the floor to stop themselves laughing.
Remorseless humour may be the only way the sex trade can be written about – the awful mixture of the possibility of bliss, probability of loneliness and certainty of exploitation for everyone involved gives it a unique piquancy. But o the laddishness of this author. It’s like a 191-page tiresome article in one of those mags like Nuts or Zoo
Here’s Bruce describing himself on p81 :
I’m three stone overweight, bald, have a number of badly inked tattoos, and tend to become struck mute when I’m not attached to the umbilical cord of my laptop…. I wanted to get behind the PR campaign, and tear apart the UK sex industry like a bucket of fried chicken, until all that was left was a pile of bones, connective tissue and gristle.
So, thickly coated with the oozing jokiness, blokiness, affability, knee-jerk humour, endlessly gurgling wit and banter of Bruce Barnard, the reader is rewarded by some flashes of real humour* and by the sometimes eye-opening (but not too eye-opening, you might get something in it) accounts of the behaviour here delineated.
For instance? Well, since you asked.
After attending a couple of sex parties, interviewing performers, and observing the filming of a gay porn movie in France Bruce decides that he needs to get more hands-on experience in the sex biz, but being the guy he is (see above) he decides phone sex is the only way to go. As a straight guy, he thinks ah, I’ll be a sex phone worker for a few weeks. Ladies will ring me up and talk dirty. It will be fun!
He finds out that there’s no such thing as a straight male sex phone worker. Women don’t require such a service. If there was any market at all, you can be sure the ultra-capitalist sex biz would have spotted the market. But it doesn’t exist.
This tells you something about the difference between male and female sex lives right there. I wish I knew what it says, but it surely says something.
Anyway, he decides he will be gay for pay & gets taken on by a gay phone sex company, and he describes how difficult or easy it was accommodating the various types of callers – The Regular (these guys are not going to fall for your chitchat about the new line of Prada suits which you undertake to try to drag out the call - the longer the better, heh heh); The Silent Type (occasionally these turn out to be anxious young guys who just want to talk to another gay man about being gay); The Cranks (these want to rant about gays going to hell, and the phone sex companies LOVE them, because the longer they rant, the more money the company makes); and the occasionally really odd one.
During one shift I took a call from a softly spoken man, and during the small talk I noticed that there was someone else listening in on another line. I asked who it was , and he happily confirmed that his wife was on the bedroom extension.
So the wife liked to listen to her husband describing the gay sex he’d like to have with an anonymous guy on a phone line.
And what's wrong with that?
The nasty side of the biz is not glossed over. There’s a chapter called “M.B.S.“ which stands for manager boyfriend syndrome. Bruce attends an amateur porn shoot (foot fetishist) at which a row erupts between the female performer and the manager-boyfriend, and the guy starts hitting the woman. It’s a vile little scene and Bruce acknowledges that it’s one repeated throughout the porn biz. At this point his joviality fades away completely.
Okay, moving on…. I would like to tell you all about the bukkake party chapter, it would have you coughing your Dr Pepper all over your keyboard, but… my powers of description are defeated and my brain is struggling to cope with the whole concept. According to Bruce, some women enjoy this as much as the “performing” males. I really do find this hard to believe.
This book also provides some explicit revelation about Chuck Berry, which go way beyond his ding-a-ling.
*
*When the case came to trial, the court recorder had to read out a list of all the seized titles. She could hardly keep a straight face. When she got to Hungry Cunts you could see the jury looking at the floor to stop themselves laughing.
January 7, 2021
An interesting delve into the grassroots sex industry in early 2000s Britain. Reading this now, it serves as a pretty interesting time capsule when cassettes were still a favourite for the average Joe's porn consumption and the recording of much of the content - at least, in the UK - took place casually in Pubs and friends of friends' houses, and so on. Perhaps it still does, perhaps tapes are still popular; I think the landscape has changed quite dramatically in the last 15 years.
Bruce's writing can be entertaining and keeps the constant flow of sordid material he's covering digestible, although he often manages to make even the most explicit of situations somehow more filthy with his choice of language.
The sort-of gonzo approach is interesting. A stand-out moment has to be when Bruce is being watched by a homosexual porn actor as he's railing another guy, having previously admitted that straight men are his turn-on. Bruce clearly makes his best attempts to ingratiate himself into this culture whilst being careful to remain on the fringes of the industry as a person. No-one's expecting, or even wants, him to star in a porno flick himself; taking on the role of phone sex worker is probably the farthest you could reasonably expect the man who was married at the time to go and makes for an interesting personal experience insight from him.
For the most part, he represents the views of those interviewed well and narrates with a sort-of honest sarcasm that seems genuine though the author clearly expresses an authority on their own moral take on porn for the better part of the book. Speaking of the moral element: I do think that Bruce's take here can fluctuate and sometimes contradict itself, for the sake of humour or for a poignant segment.
As I said at the beginning, whilst it is interesting I think now it is most interesting for its purpose as a time capsule of the recent yet somehow so drastically different sex industry and consumption of modern Britain.
Bruce's writing can be entertaining and keeps the constant flow of sordid material he's covering digestible, although he often manages to make even the most explicit of situations somehow more filthy with his choice of language.
The sort-of gonzo approach is interesting. A stand-out moment has to be when Bruce is being watched by a homosexual porn actor as he's railing another guy, having previously admitted that straight men are his turn-on. Bruce clearly makes his best attempts to ingratiate himself into this culture whilst being careful to remain on the fringes of the industry as a person. No-one's expecting, or even wants, him to star in a porno flick himself; taking on the role of phone sex worker is probably the farthest you could reasonably expect the man who was married at the time to go and makes for an interesting personal experience insight from him.
For the most part, he represents the views of those interviewed well and narrates with a sort-of honest sarcasm that seems genuine though the author clearly expresses an authority on their own moral take on porn for the better part of the book. Speaking of the moral element: I do think that Bruce's take here can fluctuate and sometimes contradict itself, for the sake of humour or for a poignant segment.
As I said at the beginning, whilst it is interesting I think now it is most interesting for its purpose as a time capsule of the recent yet somehow so drastically different sex industry and consumption of modern Britain.
April 2, 2025
There are a couple of good articles in this. Most notably the British bukkake one, but the majority of the rest of the book is idle filler. One chapter where the author claims a guy broke out into some domestic abuse right in front of him feels an outright lie and the final chapter, just describing porn he’s watching over a 24 hour period, is outright excruciatingly boring.
January 4, 2023
For the sake of full disclosure this was written by a good friend of mine who I was at University with. By turns funny, lurid and insightful Barnard brings a strong sense of the absurd to this gonzo examination of the British porn industry as it was at the early part of the century. Some sections are hard to stomach, but the writing is superb throughout and grounded in the everyday realities of the subjects.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews