Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

I’m reposting my response to a multitude of heated comments to my previous post which mostly inadvertently, has ticked off a lot of people I like quite a lot and almost always whole-heartedly support. 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, since at least last summer I’ve been 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© 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, a target=”_blank” href=“http://www.google.com/search?q=define:weird”>weird considering how other existing social organizations allow people to do much the same things for free.