dicks and dough

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Mar 19 11:14:14 PST 2002



>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

I don't think it's a bourgeois illusion to find it easier to sell labor power in such predominantly mental labor as law, education, writing, etc. than to sell the same in prostitution proper. Prostitution proper, with an exception of well-run upscale businesses, must come with a large variety of occupational hazards, especially in nations where prostitution is illegal -- risks of rape & other kinds of assault (especially in the case of streetwalkers), of control by organized crimes, of harassment & extortion by the police, of STDs, of social ostracism, and so on.

Other kinds of work in the sex industry -- e.g., stripping, modelling, working in a topless bar -- probably aren't as physically taxing as prostitution and may very well beat, say, data entry work, secretarial work, etc. (not to mention physically taxing non-sex work) in many women's calculation.

And yet other kinds of work in the sex industry -- say, editing _Playboy_ -- can't be so different than doing the same in non-sex industries. Compare telemarketing, making phone calls on behalf of a collection agency, etc. with working a sex phone line. Most likely, the latter is on the average more pleasant than the former. -- Yoshie

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