I just don’t get why an intelligent girl with a good family and boyfriend would start to sell her body. She was so honest and let me look for a few seconds into her soul, and I saw who she is and I don’t think she wants this. I want to help her, but to her I was just another bad guy who paid for that and don’t deserve her respect. I want to understand why is she doing this.
“Sell her body“? Do you mean she started doing sex work? You mean she chose an extremely lucrative job with shorter hours than most, extreme flexibility and no boss? Sounds pretty damned intelligent to me; in fact, it’s the career I chose as well, and I’m generally considered to be reasonably intelligent. Now, if you meant something more literal, like selling blood or eggs or some other part of her body, I stand corrected; however, something tells me that you just mean she became a whore. She chose one job over the other options available to her, for the same sorts of pragmatic reasons anyone chooses his or her job over the others available at the time.
You say she “let you look for a few seconds into her soul”; I’m not sure what sort of mystical or pharmaceutical process was involved there, but I can assure you that unless you are The Shadow or Dr. Strange or something, I sincerely doubt it was her soul you saw. To be honest, it sounds to me what you were seeing was the constellation of your own needs you projected onto her. You seem to have some sort of guilt (“I was another bad guy who paid for that”) about a simple business transaction, and you appear to load sex down with all sorts of Deep Meaning and metaphysical weight that it simply does not have, except in the minds of people conditioned from an early age to believe a load of rubbish about how something even dogs and chickens engage in is somehow a “sacrament” when highfalutin’ monkeys with notions do it.
You’re probably thinking about now that I’m an incredible bitch, and that I’m being very mean to you. On the contrary; I’m doing you the great favor of trying to wake you up to the fact that sex is nothing more than a biological activity, and that the only “meaning” and “sacredness” it has is that which we choose to invest in it. Eating can be a rich and wonderful bonding experience and the center of powerful rituals…or it can be a mundane thing one does because one is hungry. And nobody pretends that the latter somehow “violates” or “degrades” the former, nor that there’s anything wrong with cooking or serving food for pay. Nobody would say a waitress is “selling herself”, or pretend that a diner is “bad” for buying a hamburger. And nobody, but nobody would pretend that there is some deep psychological motive behind a cook working as a cook, nor state that he could tell in a few seconds that said cook “really didn’t want to do this”. Sex work is work, nothing more or less, and sex workers have the same range and complexity of feelings about it as other people have about their jobs.
(Have a question of your own? Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)
I looked back at your ‘Scrambled Eggs’ post Maggie.
While the risk of death from hyperovulation is low the risk of side-effects is not. And one side-effect is infertility. In other words, today’s egg donors are often tomorrow’s clients.
You rightly insist that those who presume to speak out about sex work should ask sex workers about it first. Maybe you should do the same regarding egg donors. Unless the women who run that website are atypical or lying there is very little ‘informed’ about consent for egg donation.
BTW, here’s the text of a rejection letter some US clinics have recently begun issuing to prospective egg donors. Note that the woman who received it had previously been accepted and donated eggs. The fact is there is very little follow-up of the long term mortality risk of hyperovulation and the figures you quote in ‘Scrambled Eggs’ reflect ignorance, not research.
“You’re probably thinking about now that I’m an incredible bitch, and that I’m being very mean to you.”
If he does think that, then I question why he even bothered to write to you in the first place, because this response is downright restrained, compared to how you could have responded to this ridiculously florid question. He would know that if he’d read your blog for any appreciable length of time. What in the world could he have been expecting?
I know when I was working as a line cook that I hated what I was doing and was concerned about the damage the job was doing to my body, by working in high temperatures, receiving cuts and burns, but I doubt anybody when they considered my position thought I needed to be saved and taught to do something which might have paid much less
Superstition on display.
A woman is either in charge of her body–unless it somehow causes harm to another, say a prostitute not revealing she AIDS to a client–or she is not.
I don’t think that it is religion itself that is responsible for the deeply emotional aura surrounding the act of intercourse. Religion just provides a wide open highway over which to route those intense feelings. The feelings themselves arise from the deeply rooted behaviors that surround reproductive biology. Men do not want to have sex with women who have numerous other sex partners as much as they want monogamous ones. Our penises are designed something like a toilet plunger, with a flared collar and an outflow channel designed to suck out any seminal fluids we find in the vaginas of our partners. This implies that we don’t want semen there, and are prepared to remove it if we find it. Men therefore aren’t fully opposed to sex with promiscuous women, but simply devalue it compared to sex with a biologically equal but monogamous partner.
The real male outrage surrounding sex work comes when males realize the economic power that such women have when they are allowed to earn money freely by supplying commercial sex. Men hold many of the power positions in both the church and law enforcement. I think that they feel uniquely threatened and demeaned when they realize that women selling promiscuous sex experiences can easily earn several times as much money as they themselves do. This is what really drives the many efforts to criminalize and crack down on women who create for themselves such lucrative jobs, utterly outside the control of other men.
Good article, you showed all the points of how the projections of one person places on another in there own mind set. I am allways grateful when an intellegent person simplifies it to the root of the whole picture.