The premise is simple: you go in, order coffee, pay £60 and select an ‘escort’ from an iPad to perform fellatio on you whilst you chat with your friends. Bradley Charvet has already set up Café Pipe, a sex-work cafe in Geneva, and now has his sights set on bringing this uniquely chilling enterprise to London.

Charvet’s plans are the epitome of this year’s unique brand of hyper-modern misogyny, the year in which a misogynist and alleged rapist who bragged about his sexual aggression towards women was elected president of a world superpower. Even if such an enterprise seems unlikely to be legally viable in the immediate future; it would surely break the UK law which prohibits owning or managing brothels. The idea itself represents an alarming forewarning about what our post-Trump world has to offer for women, a menacing harbinger of what is to come.

Women being coerced into sex as anonymous men drink their coffee and laugh would be, in perhaps a less ubiquitously misogynistic universe, the stuff of heavy-handed dystopian satire, something in a Margaret Atwood novel that you’d imagine might exist in hundreds of years’ time when things eventually fall apart. But this is frighteningly real and it is frighteningly immediate. Charvet explains a system where customers receive sexual acts by the café’s workers at its bar after ordering, with some private booths for patrons. In this way, the enterprise would be open and unapologetic about what it involves. According to Charvet, thousands of men have expressed interest in the service.

What is more sinister about the commodification of women as goods and services in this way is that it should exist within a specifically degrading social setting: what the café offers is a bought-and-paid-for, under the table sex act while you’re socialising with your mates. Straight men can come here and have a coffee and a chat, united by their mutual appetite for sexual objectification. Unsurprisingly, the service is designed exclusively for cisgender men. The café embodies the ultimate capitalist fantasy of easily accessible and purchasable women whose entire vocational existence is the provision of pleasure to men, a product to be sold like coffee.

When the sex worker in question would be unable to turn down a customer without potentially losing her job, for example at a sex café where , consent becomes confused by the impact of economic coercion. The future holds the potential for a United Kingdom where soliciting sex, whether in a brothel or publicly, on the street, will not only be legalised but normalised.

In order to circumvent UK sex work law and see the café built in London, Charvet now wants to replace the human women originally designed to be involved in the service with robots, a pretty unsettling indictment of his view of women which encapsulates the postmodern, brave-new-world reality that we are hurtling towards. It’s just a shiny, futuristic variation on ancient misogyny, a latter-day evolution of the world’s oldest profession. Women, for Charvet, can very easily be usurped by fetishistic inhuman replacements who will do the job cheaper and bypass legal restrictions. In Charvet’s own words, “You could not imagine how many people are ready to give sex robots a try in 2016”.

 

Photo: Anthony Nguyen