Emma Thompson calls for ‘prostitutes on the NHS’

Dame Emma Thompson has said the Government should provide prostitutes on the NHS, claiming the health benefits of sex warrant it being seen as a medical treatment.

During a question-and-answer session following a screening of her 2022 film Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, in which she portrays a widow who pays for sex, the 66-year-old also revealed that some of her friends have hired prostitutes after watching the film.

The film star made the controversial remarks despite being President of the Helen Bamber Foundation, which supports survivors of human trafficking. A United Nations report found that the most common form of human trafficking is sexual exploitation.

‘Just like accountants’

Thompson said in the interview: “You need sex because it’s part of our health plan, if you like,” adding: “It should really be on the NHS. It should. It’s so good for you.”

She also remarked favourabley on comments from her 32-year-old co-star Daryl McCormack, who plays the male prostitute in the film, who compared prostitutes to accountants: just “doing a job”.

Jenny Olson, Policy Researcher at The Christian Institute, responded: “Internationally, around two thirds of those engaged in prostitution were sexually abused as children. It’s devastating that so many of them were not rescued out of systematic abuse, and became involved in prostitution”

“Dame Emma is President of a charity which helps sex-trafficked children. Normalising the trade of people’s bodies for sex causes enormous harm, and she should have been aware of this before making such misguided comments.”

The reality

Assistant editor at The Critic, Josephine Bartosch, wrote: “unlike in her film, where a woman’s use of a male prostitute is portrayed as a quirky form of self-care, the vast majority of sex buyers are men, and the transaction is rarely tender or empowering.

“Oddly, it doesn’t seem to have registered to Thompson that what’s ‘good’ for one person might come at the cost of another’s dignity.”

J.K. Rowling commented: “When did you last meet someone who was trafficked into accountancy? In your experience, do an unusually high number of addicts and abuse survivors tend to become plumbers? Does the average quantity surveyor face a significantly elevated risk of early death because of his job?”

She added: “I don’t look down on sex workers, I look down on the trade in vulnerable people’s bodies, and on the immense arrogance and wilful blindness of privileged people who think that by reframing the sale of human bodies as ‘a job like any other’, inconvenient and ugly facts about that trade simply disappear.”