joanna bujes <joanna.bujes@ebay.sun.com> wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid"> At 12:17 AM 10/23/2002 -0400, Kelly wrote: >no joanna, please answer the question. why is someone's integrity and >sensibility is even an issue worthy of bring up if they trade their skillz >at hummers for cash or pony up their cash for a hummer when it is NOT an >issue when we are talking about someone choosing to take a job as a plumber I have stayed out of this one, but this is a deep and difficult question. There was an old New Yorker cartoon that shows a puzzled looking man in  bathrobe standing at his open hotel room door, and in the hall is a sad looking fella in suit (course in them days all men wore suits), hiolding a portable typewriter. "You sent for a prostitute?" he says. One possible response is that there'[s no difference between selling sex and selling other sorts of labor power, such one's abilities asa  writer or a plumber or a lawyer. That cuts two ways: either, both are OK (the right libertarian answer) or neither are OK (the answer of the yound Marx). But this seems to miss a sense we have that there is a difference. It's related to the difference about why we think that rape is worse than other form of assault, even though it might involve less physical harm than, say,a  bad beating. One possible explanation concerns the idae that that are some goods that because of thes ort of goods they are are intrinsically non-marketable. We think it's OK to sell CD and toothpaste and cars. If there's a problem with that it's because of the consequences of having a market economy, not because it's somehow damaging to the toothpathe or CDs are cars to sell them. Labor power of the prdinary sort is a lot more problematic, but ina society of petty commodity producers,w here no one is exploited, maybe even that's OK. Sex, however, is more like medical care; it's not the sprt of thing that ought to be distributed to the highest bidder. Possibly because it's, at least as we see it, a form of intimacy that goes very deep, touches on what resonate most in our lives. That's why rape is sucha  deep violation. It's hard to express thr specialness of sex without sounding trite or waxing poetic. Even where it doesn't involve love it ought to involve mutual lust ! an! d physical attraction. But selling it removes the mutuality; the prostitute has sex with people she doesn't even desire merely because they pay her--at the best, it's a free choicve. AT thew orst, it's slavery. >or to hire a plumber. we can wax eloquently about programmers' creativity >even in the face of a shite class society that sucks the life out of em and >not worry one whit about their integrity or sensibility for choosing to >work they chose, but we need to worry about prostitutes and the people who >frequent them. I don't know what "hummer" means, (btw, Joanna, a "hummer" is a euphemism for a blowjob, maybe it's one of the Southernisms I picked up growing up down South.) but in the context of this discussion, I'll assume it has something to do with sex. Formally, there's no difference between selling your brain (as I do every day) and selling sexual services. Marx began an essay on money and alienated labor by writing "Money is the pimp between man and the object of his desire." He saw the parallels too. Historically, there is the difference that while we are all wage slaves, we do not all sell or buy sexual services, yet. In the context of this discussion my only argument was that prostitution was not a form of liberation for anybody. </BLOCKQUOTE> <hr size=1>Do you Yahoo!? <a href="http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ ">Y! Web Hosting</a> - Let the expert host your web site