Can we keep defending that a woman’s body has a price? Noemí Trujillo asked herself that question not to obtain an answer, but to embark on a path. From that reflection arose a book, a manifesto, on a complex, thorny topic that seems not to matter to us much: the abolition of prostitution in Spain. Our society has accepted its existence and we take for granted that there are people who engage in prostitution. For Noemí Trujillo it matters little whether it is a voluntary act or one driven by extortion: the need to pass abolitionist laws is an imperative that cannot be postponed in Spain. Hunger for abolition: A manifesto (Destino) is an engaging, exhaustive, and didactic essay on how Spanish literature has treated the topic of prostitution. With a precise, concise, and sharp style, the writer delivers a necessary book, full of phrases and reflections that continue to awaken our conscience weeks after reading it.
We spoke with Noemí Trujillo about how Spanish writers have denounced the violence of prostitution, the impunity of the punters in Spain, and the dream of achieving abolition in our country.
*****
—There is a line in the book that keeps circling my head: “Prostitution is an anomaly.” Why do we keep tolerating it in the 21st century?
—The Spanish regulation is lax regarding pimping compared with our neighboring countries: France, Italy, Portugal, and Andorra pursue pimping in all its forms. We do not. The non-coercive pimping decriminalization in 1995 has turned our country into a large “sex supermarket.” We have two options: to remain Europe’s brothel or to attempt change. I ask the next government that emerges from the November 29 elections to facilitate the passage of two essential laws: the comprehensive anti-trafficking law and the LOASP law. From my point of view, they are complementary and inseparable. The Spanish government cannot continue tolerating the mass commercialization of sexual violence, and neither can we.
—Few characters in literature are as stereotyped as the prostitute.
—We must not forget that literature was dominated by male writers until postmodernity, and the representation of the prostituted woman has oscillated between desire and shame, on many occasions. The authors I have chosen for my manifesto diverge from these stereotyping molds. Galdós, for example, shows us, with the character Isidora Rufete in La desheredada, the violence that exists in the supposedly voluntary prostitution and how it changes the young woman’s life (for the worse). Today we could consider Isidora a “lady of the night,” an “escort” or a “sugar baby,” let us call it X. What can be read in Galdós’s novel is that allowing access to the body in exchange for money is very dangerous in the short and long term. What Galdós denounced in fiction yesterday, today the writer and survivor of trafficking and sexual exploitation Kamila Ferreira analyzes in her testimonial and non-fiction book España, la Tailandia europea, where she devotes an entire chapter to telling the reader that “once a woman enters the prostitution system, everything changes,” since she portrays prostitution “as a machine for destroying women.” I have written my manifesto to demonstrate that, for more than one hundred forty-five years, some of the best Spanish writers have denounced the violence suffered by women in prostitution.
—In our country’s literary tradition, from La Celestina, the one who promotes prostitution and corrupts young women is a woman.
—I presented my manifesto at the Ateneo de Málaga quite recently. It delighted me, since that venue was born to challenge the myths of Francoism, and presenting a book with abolitionist perspective there represented a cultural challenge to the narrative of “free choice” in prostitution. One of my moderators told me she would have liked me to write about the “mamis.” It is curious the linguistic shift from the concept of a “madame” to “mommy,” where these women, who are victims turned into agents of the pimps, adopt a falsely maternal role. My book is a critical-literary study of prostitution in Spanish literature from 1880 to 1983, and in this journey everything is much clearer than it is today. In the book María Magdalena, by Matilde Cherner, the first Spanish novel where a prostituted woman speaks in the first person, we hear her procurer speak with this frankness: “Do you think I’ll keep you here just for your pretty face?” (Chapter II of the second part). Beginning in the 1980s-1990s prostitution in our country begins to go global, and the narrative of the “free choice,” a discourse constructed and fed by the sex lobby, gains significant strength. Remember that after the decriminalization of non-coercive pimping in 1995, the consent of the prostituted person is fundamental for there to be no crime. We must build a discourse based on the “freedom” to prostitute, and the mamis play a fundamental role in this new narrative. Kamila Ferreira, in the testimonial book I mentioned earlier, describes very well the pressure exerted by the mamis on prostituted women. Ferreira is very harsh with them and considers they bear the same responsibility as the pimps; I am no judge, but I understand why she says it. Women cannot turn a blind eye when violence is being exercised against other women.
—Isn’t there a certain idealization of prostitution in our society and culture?
—There is normalization and impunity among the punters. The punters know that prostitution is based on sexism and on colonialism, and that in Spain this translates to the fact that first-world men buy the bodies of poor third-world women at a ridiculous price. In the latest CIS survey on social perception of prostitution, “68.9% of Spaniards agree or strongly agree that prostitution is a form of violence against women.” We all know what prostitution is, but as long as our laws continue to guarantee impunity for the punters, Spain will remain a destination and transit country for trafficking for sexual exploitation. The question is whether we want to live in a country with megabrothels that display signs like “airport pussies,” as happens in Germany, for example, or if we want to live in a country where we promote reducing demand and educate for free, revocable sexual consent, not corrupted by money. The abolition of prostitution in Spain may take longer or shorter, but I have no doubt it will arrive. It is the legal framework recommended by the European Parliament.
—In María Magdalena, by Matilde Cherner, the myth of voluntariness is dismantled.
—There is a concept in our society inherited from previous centuries: certain women can be prostituted and cannot escape that fate.
—True, but that idea cannot be sustained today. I write in my manifesto that “the idea that there exist B-type women who can be prostituted must be abolished.” Now, the question is how much this will be understood by Spanish politicians?
—In her work she reflects on the link between wars and prostitution.
—It is a historically well-documented phenomenon that should not surprise anyone: at the onset of the Ukraine war, for example, there was a massive outflow of women and children, and upon reaching Europe many of these women ended up in the prostitution system, in brothels in Germany. The writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte has recounted in a podcast that, while he was a war correspondent at the Sarajevo site during the Bosnian war, a woman offered him “sexual services” in exchange for a pack of cigarettes, and he handed over the cigarettes without asking for anything in return. But you do not need to be in a war context: in Ceuta, during the late June mass crossing, the prostitution mafias took little time to prostitute minors for twenty euros. Whenever there are women in a context of vulnerability, trafficking networks will try to prostitute them. That is why social change is so important, understanding that sexual consent cannot be bought and is never valid when vulnerability exists.
—In La desheredada, by Benito Pérez Galdós, we see the relationship between politics and prostitution, as relevant today as it was in our days.
—The protagonist, Isidora Rufete, receives an offer from a congressman: if she continues having sexual relations with him, he will grant her the regency of a tobacconist shop. This pattern of behavior sadly remains vigente today, and once again public money and illegal commissions are used to hire “prostitution services” and private parties. I don’t think it’s necessary to remind you of recent headlines.
—In that novel we also discover how prostitution is facilitated by economic inequality.
—This appears in almost all the works I have chosen, and today most of the women inside Spain’s prostitution system are poor migrant women.
—Gisèle Pelicot —who was drugged by her husband so that eighty men could rape her up to two hundred times over ten years—, at the start of her husband’s trial, said that the shame should switch sides. In prostitution, the stigmatized, with language, is the prostitute and not the client.
—“Whore” is the insult directed at all women when they step outside the norm, and “son of a whore” is the most Spanish insult there is. When a politician behaves badly, you don’t shout “son of a whore,” you shout “resign.” This idea is developed in a caption of the manifesto that always notes that the prostituted woman loses her name while the punter/“client”—put it between quotation marks, please, to question the category—keeps it. Abolitionist feminism focuses on the “clients” and pimps, aims to shame them; that is one of the reasons why “punters” are now called punters or prostituidores, to highlight their responsibility. The case of Gisèle Pelicot is very painful, moved the world, and brought to light that only explicit, conscious, and revocable consent can be accepted in sexual relations. Prostitution, by corrupting consent with money, nullifies it, and that’s why I defend in my literary work (in my poems, in the manifesto, in the crime novels I write in collaboration with Lorenzo Silva) that there is no consent in prostitution, not even when it is supposedly voluntary.
—In “Las medias rojas” (The Red Stockings), the pioneer Emilia Pardo Bazán asks us a question that still resonates today: is there a way for prostitutes to dress one way and for non-prostitutes to dress another?
—In ancient Rome, that was the case. In Pardo Bazán’s tale, the red of the stockings turns the daughter into a prostitute in the eyes of the father; the young woman, however, does not realize she has been recruited to prostitute herself in the Americas. In the times of Pardo Bazán, Spanish poor women from rural areas were trafficked to be prostituted in America; today it’s the other way around, but the same structure persists. The recruitment process is very well described in the non-fiction book El proxeneta (Alrevés), by Mabel Lozano, and its adaptation to the screen in the series El castillo (Movistar Plus), written by Isabel Peña and Eduardo Villanueva. Recently, actor Raúl Arévalo, who has portrayed the pimp in the series, stated in interviews: “I don’t understand someone who consumes prostitution; they can’t see the other.” These statements from men in the cultural world are very important and help raise awareness that sexual consent cannot be bought, no matter what clothes you wear.
—There is a piece of data that helps us understand why sexual exploitation remains present in our society: trafficking and prostitution are a big business; they move a lot of money.
—It is a multi‑billion‑dollar business, and the paid-sex industry has plenty of money to invest in building a narrative in favor of “free and voluntary” prostitution, aiming to identify prostitution as “a job like any other.” But no other job provides access to the body. I keep a record of prostituted-women feminicidios in our country, from the 80s-90s, when a serial killer nicknamed “Jack the Dissector of Almería” strangled prostituted women and dumped them naked in ravines and ditches, to the latest prostituition-related feminicide in a tourist apartment in Bormujos, Seville, where a 20-year-old punter killed a prostituted woman with a box cutter. Between these two cases, readers can learn about cases such as Marta Calvo, whose corpse has not yet been found, or Milena Sánchez, found dead in a habitual client’s apartment. It’s often misleadingly compared prostitution to a supermarket job, but supermarket workers do not end up dead at the hands of their “clients.” If I had studied journalism, I would have produced a report on prostituted feminicides in our country, but I studied humanities, so I wrote Hunger for abolition: A manifesto (Destino Referentes), which is a way of defending the abolition of prostitution in Spain in my own manner, using literature as a starting point. In prostitution, violence is structural and begins with the purchase of consent.
—Carmen de Burgos argued that legalization turns the State into a pimp-state.
—That is right. I go one step further. From my perspective, tolerating prostitution, as the Spanish government does, also turns the State into a “great pimp,” since it gains indirect economic benefit by collecting taxes from brothels where prostitution occurs.
—The closest approach to abolition was a decree in 1935, during the Second Republic.
—Sometimes, from regulationist sectors, abolitionist feminism is accused of wanting to return to a Franco-era law (the 1956 decree), but that is not true. Spain is not abolitionist because the Franco dictatorship prevented it: the first abolitionist decree, as you rightly say, was born in the Second Republic.
—Is silence, which Martín Santos eludes in his novel, equally complicit now as in Franco’s dictatorship?
—Médicos del Mundo (Doctors of the World) launched a campaign under the motto “The punters speak” to raise awareness that if you stay silent, even if you don’t consume prostitution, you are complicit. If you pay you are complicit, but if you stay silent as well. The aim is to end the impunity of the punters and to propose a social change where the consumption of “paid sex” is no longer normalized. For that reason, positions from the cultural world are so important.
—We’re finished. Do you feel alone in your abolitionist discourse?
—I greatly admire prominent theorists such as Ana de Miguel, Rosa Cobo, or Beatriz Gimeno, who, from philosophy, sociology, philology, and activism, defend the abolition of prostitution; as well as survivors of the prostitution system, like Amelia Tiganus or Kamila Ferreira, who have offered us their heartbreaking testimonies and which are so important for raising awareness. From the visual arts, Mabel Lozano has spent more than two decades doing extraordinary work, showing prostitution for what it is: a global business in which many unscrupulous people profit. From literature, yes, I do miss current references, and I wonder where today are Galdós, Matilde Cherner, Pío Baroja, the Cármenes of Burgos, the Martín Santoses. A lot of crime fiction is written as entertainment, and in contemporary Spanish literature the critical social discourse has been somewhat neglected. The only merit of my manifesto is that it positions itself from literature. I wish there were more. Una noche de Reyes (Destino, 2025) is my most literary dream: to win, someday, the Nadal Prize, and H hunger for abolition: A manifesto (Destino, 2026) is my most political dream: to abolish prostitution in Spain and end the impunity of “clients” and pimps. I propose in my manifesto that readers who share these principles can sign it by sharing their views on social networks. Many people write to me privately offering support and telling me they are afraid to take a public stance, afraid of being insulted or harassed in some way. I myself have asked you to block the comments on this interview. We can ask ourselves what is failing when citizens are afraid to address a topic.