On Thu, 8 Dec 2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Why is "sex" always treated as so extra-special when considered in the
> context of the commodity form?
In part for the same reason that that paying our friends seems weird: the advent of the impersonal market created a new realm of the personal as its antipode. When you mix them, it seems to us to soil the realm of true feelings.
Whereas before the rise of modern capitalism, everyone mixed money considerations into marriage, and friendship was normally mixed with business. As Bacon sums up the old ideal at the end of his essay on Friendship "Tere is little friendship in teh world, and least of all between equals . . .That that is, is between the superior and inferior, whose fortunes may comprehend the one the other."
Now, after capitalism and bureaucacy has made possible and precipitated out the truly impersonal, it made possible the personal. It was first articulated by the romantic reaction that still shapes our world (and which we often call the Enlightenment). Now we feel exactly the opposite of Bacon. We feel that relations are more true and more personal the more they are between equals, and the more our interaction is free of constraint and obligation. And money seems to soil all that.
And since romantic sexual love is the thing we worship most of all, the secular visitation and salvation from the hell of everyday life, soiling that strikes us as sacrilege.
Of course there are bad reasons too why people are so weird about sex and money (puritanism, hypocrasy, etc.) But I thought I'd just take out a moment to point out the other side. I'm all for treating sex workers as workers in every sense of the term and with every protection. But it's not an accident that most of us on this list don't spend much on whores.
We may now return to our normally scheduled telethon in support of polymorphous perversity.
Michael