dicks and dough

joanna bujes joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com
Tue Mar 19 10:00:10 PST 2002


At 12:13 PM 03/19/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>Also, I wanted to plug the documentary _Live Nude Girls Unite!_
>(written and directed by Julia Query and Vicky Funari):
><http://www.livenudegirlsunite.com/film.html>. There is another
>interesting movie (fiction) about the sex industry (this one set in
>an upscale brothel in Manhattan): _Working Girls_ (Dir. Lizzie
>Borden, 1987). Worth checking out.
>- --

Yeah, thanks. I saw "Working Girls" and liked it; what I liked about it was that it was just about "work." Morality seemed to play no part...duh...it was work...so you "naturally" accept the fact of alienation.

And yet....when I was in my twenties, I had a female lover who proposed that we go into "sex work": the idea was for the two of us to have sex in front of a male customer who would just watch for $60/hour. I have to admit, I thought about it. I was making $12/hour at the time, writing accounting procedures for a multi-national corporation. But I couldn't do it. It seemed that what I would be paid to do would be to not only "work" but also to pretend I was enjoying myself while working...which was too much to ask.

I wouldn't exactly call this a moral issue... just an issue of at what level can you stand to tear yourself up into separate pieces and at what level you can't. I mean, if the only way I could feed my kids would be prostitution, I'd do it. But I wonder to this day why it's so much easier to sell my brain (which I do, every day) than my body... The ultimate bourgeois illusion?

Joanna



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