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Hugo Schwyzer, expanding on my post about Julie Bindel’s research into customers of prostitutes says (emphasis his)

Many women who are uncomfortable with their male partners’ porn use (or visits to strip clubs, etc.) tell themselves (and concerned friends) that they’re grateful that their guys “don’t do anything worse.” Perhaps there are some who genuinely believe what the men in the Guardian study claim to believe: that prostitution provides a necessary sexual outlet for fellas whose supposedly insatiable needs cannot be met in any other way. This is the soft bigotry of low expectations writ large, with the twist that the most painful consequences affect those who hold these assumptions — rather than those about whom the expectations are held.

It’s worth noting that the two men quoted in the Bindel piece use the second and third person to describe what “you” or “a desperate man” might do. Perhaps this is a way of claiming cover under the myth of male weakness without risking the sobriquet of a potential rapist. On the other hand, perhaps these lads don’t use the first person because in their hearts, they know it isn’t true.

He said it here.

And of course it isn’t true! As Hugo nicely puts it, lust is not a catalyst for rape although anger is.*

And as Hugo points out, there’s a benefit (an unfortunately patriarchal one, incidentally) to men when they exploit the social expectation that we’re uncontrollable animals who’d drink out of toilets if the water didn’t get up their noses and who’d lick their butts if they could only reach them, and who’d have sex with thing that moved. (Or, more precisely anything that can’t move fast enough!)

The social downsides for men, however, are disproportionately large.

Anyway, Hugo closes with an interesting sentence that I’d like to riff on briefly.

Until we dismantle the narrative of uncontrollable male sexual desire we cannot build a just and safe world for all.

I’m going to go all radical and say the problem isn’t the narrative of uncontrollable male sexual desire. It’s the narrative of men’s sexual desire period! Because there is no narrative of men’s sexual desire that’s anything other than “uncontrollable.” Just as there’s no narrative of women’s sexual desire as anything but a) non-existent, b) broken, damaged, “wild,” or “crazy.” Oh, or c) displaced into desire for “closeness” or “procreation.”

In other words the narrative of men’s and women’s sexuality is almost nonexistent outside the dominant paradigm of men as the obligate and reflexive “sex class” and women as the disinterested and unmotivated no-sex class.

I agree absolutely with Hugo that until we subvert that dominant paradigm we can’t begin to build a just and safe world for all.

* Assertion of privilege would be another big catalyst that I’d argue is distinct from anger.)

When someone refers to a sex-workers customer as someone who “uses prostitutes” it implies a certain instrumental relationship towards the sex worker. One that, frankly, makes me at least a little uncomfortable.

Question: How do the same people who speak disapprovingly of the “use” of prostitutes speak about their own employment of…

• Doctors
• Hair dressers
• Massage therapists
• Plumbers
• Accountants
• Nanny

• Gardeners

and, especially,

• housecleaners?

Because, just in general, I’ve noticed that proper-minded people rarely speak of “using” doctors to check an unexplained cough, mole, or lump. Nor do you hear people speak of “using a plumber” to replace a broken toilet or leaky faucet. Nor do they talk about “using” a massage therapist when they need a kink in their back worked out.

Oddly you often will hear the same people say that they “use” a housecleaner, gardener, or pool-boy to keep their home in order.

I’m sure it’s just a quirk, sort of like the business in gendered languages like French or German where I’m perpetually assured it’s agreed it doesn’t mean anything.

I dunno. I was walking home from the grocery store thinking about this article in The Guardian about “why men use prostitutes.”

It’s a creepy article, mostly because of the alternately dreadful, desperate, self-deluding, and alienating things the customers say about what they know and how they feel about the (mostly) women they hire.

But it’s also creepy because of that “use prostitutes” thing the author and many of her compatriots do.

It’s an interesting article, and that’s just a minor quibble. But… I dunno. I mostly don’t like it when people talk about themselves or other people “using” people when they really mean they hire them to perform services. If the people themselves say “well yes, I use prostitutes” that’s one thing.

Update: Eh, maybe not so random usage. The report’s authors also uses phrases like “... had bought women in prostitution in the year before being interviewed.” With the extravagantly patriarchal implications that merely by hiring someone to do something sexual you’re buying an entire human being. Not a good thing.

Wow, the twittersphere was just all aflutter about some college student asking the President if he’d considered legalizing prostitution and/or drugs as a way to stimulate the economy. That was, what, three days ago and it’s still getting retweeted.

Anyway, I thought Matthew Yglesias put the reaction nicely in perspective (emphasis mine.)

I think it’s obvious you can’t end the recession by legalizing prostitution and drugs. But at the same time, it should also be obvious that there are real economic costs associated with the prohibition of these activities and politicians ought to actually justify asking people to bare those costs. This is particularly pressing because the laws in question are so selectively enforced. Elliot Spitzer had his political career derailed by prostitution, but he’s not in jail. Does Obama think the world would be a better place if Spitzer were serving hard time? What about Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana? For that matter, does Obama think the world would be a better place if he’d been caught using drugs back in the day and sent to jail?

Presumably not. But to have laws on the books that the national elite fully intends never to apply to themselves or their families is ridiculous. I don’t want to see hookers and blow available for sale at the corner store, but there’s enormous scope for the reform of our policy in this area.

He said it here.

That’s a classic example of what I called (beginning in the days before Twitter) a twits vs substance problem. It’s not that drugs or prostitution is right or wrong (you can still be a twit about something that’s completely legal… see Britney Spears 24-hour marriage, for instance.) It’s that generally speaking the tut-tutting is done by people who don’t think the item in question is all that serious on the nominal behalf of… other people who also don’t take it terribly seriously in their own lives.

It’s like what Paul Graham says in Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age about swearing: grownups swear around each other but pretend not to in front of children; meanwhile children swear around each other but pretend not to in front of adults.

Speaking for myself I don’t think it would be a good thing if Barack Obama had gone to jail for smoking marijuana or whatever when he was a young man. I don’t even think it would be a good thing if Sen. Vitter was jailed for paying sex workers to make him wear diapers. (I don’t think he should be a United States Senator, at all, but that’s not why.)

Meanwhile, though, as Yglesias says, the race to publicly pretend to be maximally concerned makes it very difficult to be meaningfully concerned, which in turn makes it very difficult to enact and enforce meaningful policies.

Another way to look at Levitt and Dubner on prostitution in their clunky sequel to Freakonomics: when you’re totally mired in the bogus First Rule of Desire in particular and the dominant “no-sex” class paradigm in general you’re going to miss the most important piece of information in your hard research (pdf) on prostitution in general and your latest column in particular: prostitution is becoming a niche activity.

A decline in the prostitution market to 20% of it’s 19th- and early-to-mid 20th-Century levels, and a shift in requested prostitution services from historic mainstream acts (PIV intercourse in particular but also oral) to relatively marginal higher-risk and fetish/kink activities is not “more of the same.” It’s not “market segmentation.” It’s not “value-added” or “working smarter, not harder.”

The story in Levitt and Dubner’s column about the woman who flies to Texas to do “erotic” things to a guy with his briefcase is emblematic not of advances in prostitution. (I’ll give you a nickel if I can’t find an example of similar fetish-serving sex work any time between, say, 1809 and 1959.) It’s emblematic of all that’s left! (And not to put too fine a point on it, but if the gentleman in question joined one of the kinky-centric equivalents to Match.com he’d almost certainly find someone closer with sharable interests.)

And where did all that demand for prostitution go?

Well, an important part of it has come from not so much the sexual revolution as the feminist revolution: as women have gained in social, economic, and political stature and as they’ve gained access to reproductive health choices the significance of their sexual choices has diminished, given them a lot more (if still not enough) room to not only say no and mean it but also to say yes. Funny, as Echidne hints, what not having to worry about being stoned to death (most places) can do for one’s libido.

Something else that’s happened since prostitution’s “heyday” in the 19th and early 20th centuries is that masturbation is no longer considered some kind of death sentence either literally in the criminal sense, morally in the philosophical or religious sense, or medically in the erstwhile-mainstream-quackery sense. Funny how we see that big drop off in demand for commercial intercourse when sex for men — with others or by yourself — is no longer a sin, a crime, or a cause of tuberculosis, insanity, or cancer. (Or, my favorite, as bad for the health as losing a pint of blood… each time.)

So yeah, we still see a lot of prostitution where the acts in question are non-routine acts, and we still see prostitution in areas where masturbation is more stigmatized. But in general while we do still see it we’re seeing it more as a niche market than a major activity.

Levitt and Dubner… completely miss all this in their analysis in part.

\* Or, more precisely, based on Levitt’s original research with Sudhir Venkatesh, the bottom falls out of the market for core, non-risky, non-fetish prostitution but that’s largely beside the point: the market for those kink/fetish activities will continue to shrink as well as those activities become more popular in mainstream partnerships.