Photo by Flickr user Reset Reboot. Used under a Creative Commons license.

I really had planned to drop the Spitzer/prostitution business with the last post but Twisty Faster of I Blame The Patriarchy has come out of her semi-hiatus to weigh in with the usual predictably unpredictable twists. The latest?

If you’re thinking you’re gonna take me to school … about how “sex work” is noble and should be a legal, legitimate profession, la la la, read this first: at issue is not the objective act of boinking. Until you factor in patriarchy and its wacko concepts of property and gender, sex is just a thing, like eating a couple of Cheez-Its, or going to the movies. But in a patriarchy, all women belong to the sex class, and are defined in terms of men. Men, on the other hand, belong to the default human class, and get to define themselves (and everything else).

Read the quote in context here.

Most of the time you get the impression that heterosexual sex just squicks her but her point that thanks to the terms set by the dominant paradigm, outside of patriarchy sex would just be sex but getting outside of it is incredibly difficult. Ok, ok, she says it would be impossible and, thus, the impression that heterosexuality squicks her. (I would note, though that she sometimes implies patriarchy would exist if there were no men on earth so maybe “patriarchy” isn’t the best term.)

At any rate, having just spent waaayyy too long looking at the relatively small handful of straight male escort ads available on Google and having been frequently surprised by the sensible and level-headed support information on those sites, I’ve concluded that at least small-p patriarchal values have way more to do with why women aren’t at least as likely to hire male prostitutes as men are to hire women. Seriously.

And yet they/you don’t. Neither do men seem to often offer their services nor do women often seem to seek it. And yet by every common measure used to justify male prostitution — from “getting exactly what you want” to “paying them to go away” to “ensuring no entanglements” — it ought to be the other way around. I went virtual “globetrotting” last night on the hookup site for married people I mentioned the other day and I was struck how over and over married women in their 20s, 40’s, 60’s, and in between who seemed perfectly presentable were repeating variations on “I want more than a lifetime of sex in the missionary position,” and other lamentations of predictability, boredom, and interest not in escape but in safe, dependable, but erotic distraction. (And if there are married women should feel that way there are no doubt also single women who do as well.)

While every sentence that has ever been written about how men should communicate their wants and needs to their partners instead of visiting prostitutes is equally true of women and theirs, the fact remains that gazillions of people aren’t having those communications.** And yet something permits men to hire escorts in a way that women aren’t.

So, sorry, if it’s not about lack of means, method, or opportunity then there’s something else getting in the way. And I think Twisty, and Amanda Marcotte, and others have a point that the biggest thing getting in the way… what explains the male->female vs female->male imbalance… starts with “p” and ends with an “atriarchy.”

Anyway, you may not believe in it, nor do you have to, but if you believe in the legitimacy of sex work as a profession and, especially, as any kind of social good at all? You want to find a way to normalize sex-worker rights? And whether you believe in it or not I swear we as a society also need to start understanding, and dealing with, not the relative excess of male customers and female providers but the relative dearth of female customers and male providers.

I’d be delighted to have further conversations about this (although I’m a little burnt out on the topic just this moment.) But I’m pretty sure I could defend this position all day. If I had to. Which I don’t think I would because, the more you think about it the more interesting implications sift out. (Give yourself a week to get over some of your social conditioning about constructed gender stereotypes and when you come back it might start to look I’m making the case too timidly.)

[** Note: In her book Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic IntelligenceRelationship therapist Esther Perel makes an excellent case for why we don’t communicate our sexual needs more easily in our long-term partnerships: for better or worse the exclusivity of our relationships leave us so invested — socially, emotionally, psychologically, reproductively, economically, domestically, and physically — that the boat-rocking risks of authentic vulnerability of authentic sexual need can become unaffordable. Pretty brilliant insight. Even better, Perel offers strategies for stabilizing relationships without compromising anyone’s integrity. —fl]