Wealth & Money Quote by Brendan Behan

Behan’s line lands like a pub-side jab that’s too crisp to be accidental: it flips the moral ledger. Prostitution is supposed to be the shameful, transactional version of sex; “free” sex gets to masquerade as pure, romantic, unbought. He reverses the con. The punchline is economic, but the real target is social hypocrisy: we tolerate all kinds of bargaining so long as it’s disguised as love, courtship, or respectability.

The wit works because it collapses two currencies into one. Money is the obvious cost, but Behan points to the hidden price tags attached to “free” sex: dinners, drinks, emotional labor, jealousy, gifts, social obligation, the slow accrual of leverage, the unspoken “after this, we’re something” contract. In that sense, paying cash becomes almost honest. It’s not a defense of prostitution so much as an accusation aimed at everyone else for pretending their transactions aren’t transactions.

Context matters. Behan came out of mid-century Ireland and Britain, worlds saturated with Catholic sexual guilt, class performance, and harsh legal and social policing of desire. As a dramatist with a rebel’s sensibility, he loved puncturing sanctimony with a grin. The line’s cynicism is also a kind of realism: intimacy is rarely free, and the supposedly “moral” economy of sex often extracts more - in time, power, and self-respect - than the stigmatized one we pretend to condemn.