Q & A (October 2012)

Why do we never get an answer
When we’re knocking at the door
With a thousand million questions
About hate and death and war?  –  Justin Hayward

Please email maggiemcneill@earthlink.net if you have a question you’d like answered; I’m a bit slow with my correspondence lately but I should still be able to answer you within a few days.

I’m twenty-seven years old and I’ve been fantasizing about visiting prostitutes for at least ten years.  The problem is that I live in a country where buying sexual favors is much more stigmatized than selling them.  Indeed, the common view seems to be that prostitution is morally equivalent to rape and that anyone who buys sexual favors has a deficient sense of empathy.  Though I vehemently disagree, it has an unconscious effect on me and I’m worried that I would begin to feel guilty over what I’d done.  What is your advice?

As you know from reading my blog, the idea that paying a person for a service somehow harms that person is ludicrous in the extreme.  However, the human mind being what it is, I understand your concern.  My suggestion is that you travel as soon as you can to a fairly-affluent country where sex work is either decriminalized (New Zealand, NSW Australia) or very nearly so (Germany) and hire a native girl (not a foreign one).  That way, you can head off any of the possible guilt-trips right from the beginning by demonstrating to yourself that the lady is neither desperate, nor criminalized, nor “trafficked”.  And by going to another country you dramatically reduce the chance that anyone in your own will find out about it.

I am a 22-year-old European boy who fell deeply in love with an Australian girl last December, but she broke up with me a few weeks ago because she wants to open a high class escort agency and said that she needs to be an escort herself for a while first.  She says has always been a “sex-person”, but had a troubled past and has gone through depression; she is also very immature for 21 years old (she plays with soft toys and watches cartoons) and is very shy, insecure and innocent.  I won’t stop her because it is her life and I don’t judge this industry, but I really think this is the wrong choice for her because I’m worried that she’ll get sucked into this environment and lose herself.

Like practically everything else in the world, escorting is not right for everyone; some women thrive in the trade, and others view it as a job no better and no worse than others, but for some women it is a really bad idea.  Generally, these are women with negative, moralistic or overly-romanticized views of sex, because they feel degraded by the work; from what you’re saying, though, it doesn’t seem as though your lady has any of those issues.  This isn’t to say she’ll like the work; it’s entirely possible the reality will be nothing like her fantasy and she’ll quit in under a week (a young friend of mine had a similar reaction to the realities of stripping).  But it’s also possible she may find it very satisfying and it may even help her to overcome her shyness and insecurity.  The only way for her to find out if she likes it or not is to try it, so you’re wise not to obstruct her.

I understand that you’re concerned for her; it’s normal for a man to feel protective of a woman he loves.  But at the same time, it’s possible you might be infantilizing her a bit.  You say she’s had a troubled past, and has gone through depression, but that could be said of many people (including me, and I still watch cartoons even though I’m old enough to be her mother).  The popular wisdom is that damaged people should wallow in their pain forever, but that’s self-destructive nonsense; the only hope of escaping the past is to live in the present and look toward the future.  Even if she’s as fragile as you think, the only way to get stronger is to go out into the world, face its challenges and either overcome them or fail and learn.  The only cure for innocence is experience, and a sheltered child never grows up.  Furthermore, she’s in no more danger of getting “sucked into” anything as an escort than she is in many another high-paying field that nobody would think twice about her entering (such as modeling or sales); sex work is a lot more mundane than people think, and there really aren’t any mysterious tentacles waiting to drag unwary ingénues down into the abyss.

There’s one more thing I have to say:  you won’t like hearing it, but it’s necessary.  And that is, it may be time for you to move on.  From your words I’m guessing that this is the first time you’ve really been in love, and that means you’re in the grip of some of the most powerful brain chemicals Nature devised to get us to do her bidding.  I know that right now you believe you’ll never feel like this about anyone else, and that if you let her go you’ll never be happy again; I know it because I’ve felt the same way before, and so have most people.  But the truth is, it really does get better, and in a few months you’ll have a much clearer perspective on her, your own feelings about her, and the difference between the two.  It’s even possible that she may change her mind and come back to you, but at that point you really need to try to be as logical as possible and ask yourself if you really want to stay with a fickle woman who will probably keep you on an emotional roller-coaster for years to come.