Sex with another person is physically and emotionally nothing like masturbation, and some people don't have the social skills to find a partner. At least not a convenient one when they don't want a relationship, or an attractive one when they aren't attractive themselves.

I also know a man who hired two prostitutes because he knew he'd never get his girlfriend to agree to a threesome. It was scummy of him, yes, but understandable: he wanted to experience a threesome once in his life, he didn't want to dump his girlfriend, and being neither gorgeous nor charming he couldn't easily find two women for a one-night stand. I think getting the prostitutes was an unethical choice, but it wasn't an incomprehensible one.

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I'm a huge supporter of legalized prostitution, but that's just me.

Masturbation /= sex with a partner. I've had a few people try to make me think masturbation is just as good as sex. Well, it's not. At least not for me.

The person visiting the prostitute doesn't want to deal with finding someone to have a relationship with or doesn't want to deal with all that comes with a relationship (which could be for a variety of reasons). I mean, come on, what's wrong with that? How is this unhealthy in any way?

Another bonus of a (really good) prostitute - it's more than just the sex. It's someone who is interested (even if they're being paid to do it, that can be overlooked) in you. Someone who will coo all over you or give you conversation or whatever it is you need. This might seem shallow to some, but I expect for others, it fills whatever need they have. And it doesn't linger with them 24/7 (like a relationship would) which might just be what they're interested in.

Plus, if prostitution was legalized and regulated and all that.. it might just be a safer alternative to random one night stands. You know they're clean (or far more likely than random bar chick). Sure, you're paying them, but at a bar you'd be (likely) buying them drinks and yourself drinks... And they're not going to stalk you in the morning.

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The bit about pooping is kinda funny but it pretty well fails to capture why people REALLY get colonics. There are two main reasons I can think of: 1) cleaner anal sex and 2) new-age medicine theories about "cleansing". Not that either of those make it "necessary" but, really, when you get right down to it, very little that we do is STRICTLY necessary! I think it's a lousy analogy.

Whoa, my captcha was "plymouth february". It KNOWS me!!

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The desire to seek a prostitute is beyond weird??

*slowly counts to ten*

Okay, Figleaf, you must know I disagree MAJORLY here. And I will be honest: this post pisses me off, a lot. But I will reserve further comment until after I've slept (if I comment at all).

Btw, over at Sex in the Public Square there is a thread going on about that. You might like to get involved.

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oh yeah...

and this sentiment?

"does not give you license to call ALL prostitutes and colonic providers along with All their respective clients, in your own words: disgusting, depraved, demeaning, lame, impatient, incompetent, or asocial."

Dead on. In fact, that shit REALLY offends me.

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Wow the button pushing of this topic reveals a lot about people as they respond reflexively and rationalize their views. Fascinating.

Hey, what ever happened to those ancient days of 'free prostitution' in the temple as a civic duty.

o_O spectacle & tone, hee hee.
Oh magic Captcha who will win the Stanley Cup?

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Speaking from near total ignorance here:

Are there really people whose sole job is giving colonics? I would have thought they would either be self-administered or given in the course of providing health care treatment, by someone whose job involved doing other things most of the time.

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First of all, I appear to be on reCaptcha's shit list as well as everyone else's. Instead of anything clever it just says "Agnes There!" (Update: Worse, because I inserted multiple links my own blogging software threw me into moderation with the flag "Unapproved!!!")

I'm responding as another commenter because, well, there's a lot of different people saying much the same thing and so rather than rephrase things for each individual I'm going to try to either dig myself out or, very likely, dig myself deeper. Here goes.

First of all, Amber, you remember when you took me to that place with the great breakfast burritos I mentioned that I was trying to reconcile what I felt was a big disconnect between the very real attitude advances women are going through in terms of agency, interest, and expression on the one hand, and the majority of men who, stuck wherever we largely are conceptually, see all that and say only "yeah, yeah, show me your tits?" Well, this post is, in part, an expression of frustration with all that.

And now, not just for Amber but for everybody: Today a friend of mine in class, who's working at a copy center to help pay for school, said it was slow so she was doing homework the other evening, and a customer came in and asked her, evidently dead seriously, why she was bothering to study when someone with her looks and body should just forget all that and find a sugar daddy. But here's the thing, it's not like she's fucking stupid, right? She's passing her college courses, right? And she's got a mirror and knows what she looks like. And she's even in a communications/gender-studies/sex-ed class where this week everyone's busy putting together their own, and answering other's, audience survey forms for presentations next all next week about cool, cool stuff like the benefits of anilingus, the history of the condom, intro's to Seattle's Center for Sex-Positive Culture a.k.a. The Wet Spot, and where the instructor's been using sex toys as the subject of all her examples of speech presentations, right? So it's not like my friend's either dumb or disinterested in sex. And yet. And yet... somehow this lard-assed grandpa's supposed to be clueing her in to a possibility she might not have already chosen to pursue if she were so inclined? Sorry, that's not cool, that's not disabled-in-a-world-with-no-acceptance, and that's not edgy-something-one's-partner-won't-do. That's just lame.

I mean, fucking hell, it's not even like the guy just asked her if she'd like to stop doing her homework for a few minutes, put up the "back in two minutes" sign on the door, and have sex with him. For pay or not for pay. Nor did he make inquiries into her attitudes about sex, her interests, her potential partners, or how often she was already having sex with friends, acquaintances, and compatible friends-of-friends, alone or in combination, without anyone having to pay her anything. Hell, he didn't even ask her if she wasn't already a prostitute! No, instead he opined that, with a body and face like hers an education was a waste of effort... as if she couldn't have both! Which, she says, she didn't appreciate.

So before responding everybody hold that thought for a second as well. Next item: Lately there's been yet another round of calls amongst international feminist legal scholars to once again pull out the tired old, boring old, and wrong old idea that it's simply inconceivable that any person, anywhere, at any time, could possibly be a prostitute on purpose; that each and every prostitute on the whole planet earth has no, zero, none agency and is therefore automatically and irrefutably "trafficked" and "prostituted."

Now, since I happen to know a number of women who are or have been sex workers who were *neither* "trafficked" or "prostituted" I happen to think the idea that *all* sex workers are captive thralls is bullshit. And yet there incontestably *are* trafficked and enslaved sex workers -- every couple of months out here on the west coast, anyway, another underground, illegal, unlicensed, and unregulated brothel with pretty unambiguously trafficked and uncompensated sex workers gets busted. Which means some subset of customers of prostitutes are knowingly purchasing the services of coerced sex workers and *don't care.*

So hold *that* thought too. And yet... and yet... there's still that perpetually percolating notion out there that nobody in his or her right mind would willingly become a prostitute because prostitution is somehow the worst possible job on the planet, something so odious, so vile, so instinctively demeaning, that it could *only* be coerced. Thus, for instance, the agitation to have it all defined as, well, coerced. But that's obviously bullshit.

First it's bullshit because, in fact, as we know, plenty of people don't agree it's the worst job at all, right? People we know. People I and other commenters in this thread so far know personally, have met, have had long conversations with, and have no reason at all to believe they're any happier or more unhappy than any other self-employed professional.

And second it's bullshit because there are in fact jobs that, if the standards sought by prostitution opponents were applied, would appear even further down the list. If I offended any colonics workers I apologize but I was getting a little bored with my other preferred comparisons: boiler-room phone sales and agricultural stoop labor -- one of which is clearly emotionally draining the other is physically draining. And yet one almost never hears opponents of prostitution agitating for the dignity of agriculture workers, and never for the dignity of boiler-room operators. Or, I might add, the dignity of those who's job it is to sluce and vacuum other people's colons.

And so I'm saying (but evidently not too well) is that *if* sex work is really that bad then other jobs, colonics workers in this case, must be *even worse.* Of course if prostitution *isn't* really that bad -- an argument you've probably noticed I make rather frequently -- then everything I said about colonics changes as well.

And the final point I'm going to ask you to hold on to for a moment, is that I think the notion that ugly people, fat people, old people, disfigured people, or disabled people can't find partners is kind of out of line. The first time I ever went to the Center for Sex Positive Culture, for a group discussion of body image, I met an extremely pleasant group of people of literally all shapes, sizes, ages, physical conditions, gender orientations, preferred-partner counts, and kinks, who spoke both about the difficulties they faced in the outside world and the great sex with varied and non-judgmental partners they were finding *for free* in the community the Wet Spot has created. And for that matter, it being 11:22 PM on a Thursday Night, the regular Thursday night Grind ought to be in full swing right this second. Which means that any of the differently-abled people some commenters have expressed concern for had previously joined the center and attended its brief but comprehensive orientation that includes express language about policies regarding tolerance and diversity, then they could go in (most areas are wheelchair accessible) and feel pretty welcome. And, more to the point, get together with each other or other CSPC members and dance, converse, make out, or fuck each other silly either in public in one of the main rooms or else in one of the smaller, more private enclosed spaces about the premises. All for about $65 a year and, I think, a $15 cover charge. (Quick aside: CSPC is *definitely* not for everyone -- a fair number of younger people characterize it as a place where old people have sex, and a fair number of other people have a hard time with their extremely earnest approach to things, and others have difficulty with their strong BDSM emphasis. But what can I say, it's a chartered 503(c) non-profit community center that just happens to have an extraordinary number of well-used hardpoints in the ceiling and walls so you're going to get a little bit of that. But at least in Seattle there are a number of smaller venues that cater to more specific, less diverse preferences and those are great too.)

So. I've asked you to hold a ton of things and I appreciate your patience. I'll take them off your hands though not necessarily in the order I handed them out in, and, I hope, in the process you'll at least better understand where I was coming from when I wrote this seemingly galvanizing and divisive post.

1) Whereas the customers of some sex workers may be perfect, adventurous gentlemen many of them aren't. They don't particularly value the service sex-workers provide, they don't particularly respect sex workers, and they have opinions about sex workers that, ahem, may have more in common with the bitterest prostitution opponents than with the often progressive practitioners who may feel I was singling out them, their friends, or their select customers.

2) There's an assumption that, somehow, non-Barbie/non-Ken types must seek out prostitutes because no one else will have sex with them. There's a similar assumption that there are just some things that... what... no "good" woman (at least) wants to do and... what?... no woman period would do except for money. Please! As I'm writing some of them are doing it right now. Without having to pay anyone but the great volunteers at the check-in/ticket counter.

2b) Maybe instead there's some kind of assumption that non-Kens aren't so much unable to find willing sex partners as unable to hook up with Barbies without paying them. Well, that's entirely possible but *extremely* different from the previous assertion that they need prostitutes because no one else will have sex with them *at all.*

2c) Oh yeah, and leaving aside "teh disabled" for a minute, if there are actually plenty of people in the world who are capable

3) Possibly due to more focus on male customers than female sex workers, there's another move underway to demonize prostitution in a way that denigrates, alienates, and denies the agency of numerous autonomous prostitutes. These opponents seem so motivated by panic about patriarchy and misogyny that they may be attributing more power and authority to sex-worker's customers than reality supports. And while I think authors of those initiatives really do mischaracterize the situation it's *still* the case that an extraordinary number of (mostly) men purchase the sexual services of (mostly) women they know to be coerced. And don't care.

3a) *If* one is going to argue that sex work is demeaning (as I do not) then out of a sense of both consistency and decency one ought to acknowledge that other jobs are even more demeaning (which I don't think they are.)

3b) Rather than mischaracterize what's still (in my past experience) the bulk of customers as arrogant exercisers of macho, masters-of-their-destiny, patriarchal privileged types I thought it might be more productive to mock, socially castigate, and just generally recognize their marginality rather than centrality.

4) And finally, whereas I've acknowledged there are men and women who are perfectly content to do with a transfer of money from men to women exactly the same things they already enjoy doing for free can I just say cool, good for you, sounds like fun, odd how the fund transfers always seem to go one way when we know desire goes both ways but, still, what the heck? Nothing I've said in the original post and this even longer reply except maybe my little quip from two seconds ago about how money seems to flow only one way applies to you. Really. I don't mean you.

So there. I'm with a lot more caveats than I started with I'm still sticking to my guns: a society organized such that some people feel obliged to pay other people for sex -- and, to consider paying someone else a discount in order to knowingly have sex with a coerced individual -- is, well, sorry, *weird* considering how other existing social organizations allow people to do much the same things for free.

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figleaf:

of course not all clients are wonderful. Indeed, some are assholes. This, however, is true of people in general, not just those who pay for sex. Honestly, do YOU not have to deal with assholes, ever, in your daily or professional life? And yes, there are people unwillingly forced into prostitution, and there are people who go, knowingly, to those people: They are assholes.

Now, as for your mention of the "social club", that is all fine and good...unless you work 70 hours a week, or could get fired if your membership is discovered, or have a condition which prevents you from attending such places, or are very shy or socially awkward, or live in a place where such places do not exist.

And the attitude of the older man towards your friend, while odious, could be more of a generational thing that outright mean sexism. MANY people habor the idea that pretty girls don't/shouldn't have to work (even women) and that the height of success is finding a man to take care of you. The idea of the posh living well-kept wife or mistress is nothing new. Also, the tone of that question leaves me asking is it so horrible if an intelligent, educated woman decides to use her body or sexual skills instead?

People who pay to rape trafficked or forced prostitutes? Yeah, weird and creepy as hell. But frankly, I can't call anyone who thinks everyone who buys sexual services is "weird" any sort of ally at all.

But then again, that's just one whores opinion.

[Hi Ren, thanks for coming back! "Also, the tone of that question leaves me asking is it so horrible if an intelligent, educated woman decides to use her body or sexual skills instead?" If I left that impression then I was being even less inarticulate than usual because I was trying to leave exactly the *opposite* tone. So yikes! Y'know that old quote-unquote "joke" that "you can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think?" Whatever generational stuff was going on (there aren't *too* many generations older than me that are still alive, by the way) when that guy spoke to my classmate, his general tone wasn't just that she should become a prostitute -- which would be fine -- but that *because* she could become a prostitute any other use she put her mind to was a waste. Which would suggest that *he* rather than *I* have a problem with intelligent, educated prostitutes.

And here's the deal: rather than put up with the rather concerted and relentless movement to say "that guy's all patriarchal, fucked up, and misogynist... I know, let's condemn *prostitutes*" I just got this total brain reversal and decided to kind of put the problem where the *problem* is and say instead "that guys' all patriarchal, fucked up, and misogynist... let's condemn... guys like him! And it's not just him. Over the last 45 years or so, including a couple of weeks ago from someone unrelated to the guy I've been ranting about, I've overheard too many other men make similar comments about hot-bodied women they know nothing else about being "made for one thing only but she's throwing it away on..." as if there was *no other choice.* And you know what? Which, I might add, makes those guys and the well-intentioned folks who can't accept prostitutes could ever do what they do willingly, *birds of a feather.* --fl]

[Oops, one other thing: "...unless you work 70 hours a week, or could get fired if your membership is discovered, or have a condition which prevents you from attending such places, or are very shy or socially awkward, or live in a place where such places do not exist." No, I *totally get* that prostitution can genuinely help alleviate a serious problem inside the system, but that doesn't stop me thinking it's a *fucked up system.* I mean it's like car alarms and security-guards make sense in a system where pharmacy-grade cocaine, say, costs $7.00 per ounce to manufacture but costs maybe $800/ounce and so people gotta steal to support their demand for it, but that doesn't stop me from thinking *that's* a fucked up system too. I can't blame alarm makers or security guards for the system, and I can believe they do a great job, but if it wasn't for the system even though they might still be securing and guarding things their jobs wouldn't look like what they have to do now at all at all. --fl]

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I liked my clients a lot (except for the occassional ass). I did not see them as losers, but simply men. Some had sexual needs; most were married and wanted a bit of romance and personal attention back into their lives. Time with me was like time at a spa.

It's nice that you support sex workers, but to call their clients losers (what you're essentially doing) insults the sex worker.

Sex work has a huge variety of experience. Some of it is as simple as providing sex on request. Some of it is as intense as anything in a therapist's office. Some of it is like the best date you've ever been on. Some of it is like the dirtiest, raunchiest time you've ever had in bed! Some is catering to special needs -- physical or sexual. And for sex workers who voluntarily chose the job, whatever happens is a matter of mutual consent between two people.

Does the motivation of the client matter? Only if he intends harm. He is a human. His motivations may be complex or simple but they are his own; just like your own inexplicable motivations for writing this post.

This post is insulting to me because I do not consider myself someone to have dealt with shit. I dealt with human beings -- the majority of whom I liked very much.

This is enourmously insulting to my clients -- the majority of whom were decent humans and good company to have. They were NOT shit.

I'm not the only girl with simliar experiences. There are quite a lot of us out there. You've worked hard to dismiss all this in one sweepingly ignorant post.

[Thank you (sincerely) for letting me off with sweeping ignorance, because the cure of ignorance is education, and -- major brain farts not withstanding -- I'm paying major attention to what you and everyone else has to say. Thanks, Amanda. --fl]

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I have to ditto what Amanda so eloquently said.

The majority of my clients have been interesting, amusing (and that's laughing with, not laughing at), often arousing, occasionally completely thoughtful, sometimes completely strange, and charming more often than I would have expected going in. There are quite a few of them I wouldn't mind chatting with over coffee in different circumstances.

Many of them have work hours and/or travel schedules that make it difficult, if not impossible to date. Some are sweet but introverted and aren't sure where to start. Some are older and don't want to start over, some are younger and loaded with classes, and more than I would have expected call between relationships - especially after having gotten out of long, intense kinky relationships that leave them wanting strange things that can be emotionally risky. Like certain forms of mental and emotional sadism.

Knocking sex worker patrons for buying sex, kink, and intimacy reminds me strikingly of knocking psychologists' clients for paying someone to listen to their problems and provide perspective instead of "just getting real friends." For similar reasons, sometimes the distance money brings helps.

[Hi Sabrina. I just had a big realization. While I'm not sure it's as necessary to make non-transactional hetero connections as some people think (and certainly wouldn't be as big a problem if so many men didn't use words like "whore" and "slut" to characterize women when they do), I have absolutely no problem at all with patrons buying sex, kink, or intimacy. That part's fine. What bugs me, though, is when men, whether through resentment, self-loathing, or contempt for "easy" women, deprecate service providers. Which, if I believe what I keep hearing, must happen only outside of sex-worker's hearing. But not so much outside of my hearing. Again, perhaps it's all some kind of self-serving fascade but I *can* say that moving forward when I hear other men, or women for that matter, deprecating prostitutes I'm *not* going to let it go. Which, I feel guilty for saying, I've done in the past. --fl]

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