--- Luke Weiger <lweiger at umich.edu> wrote:
> Michael Dawson claimed that no sane person would pay
> for sex.
. . . Dawson probably does, too--it's just
> not the sort of thing
> many are willing to volunteer amongst polite
> company.
As I've been insisting, it's sort of an arbitarry line to draw between people who are employed as sex workers, e.g., as prostitutes, porn actors, escorts, and the like, or even pro Dom(mes) (who, it seems, almost never have plain sex with their clients),a nd the rest of us. Aren't the women for women diamonds are a girl's best friend being paid for sex? Aren't the guys who buy their dates an expensive steak dinner and an evening on the town in the hopes . . . . -- aren't they paying for at least the prospect of sex? And who among us guys hasn't done that. Often. (If in some cases long ago.) Be honest now! To yourself if not to the list.
As so often in these analyses, Posner's ruthlesss economic analyses of technically noncommercial sexual interactions in Sex and Reason are refreshingly disillusioning.
Commodification makes a difference, perhaps. But then the difference isn't paying for/being paid for sex, but paying or being paid for it in a commodity or a commercial context.
As to Luke's comments below. It is likely that commercial sex work is harder for women, sociobiologically, than for men. But that doesn't mean the analogies aren't valid. It might be possible to make some forms ofa lienated activity nicer, but the fact is, under real world conditions, commercial sex work, however awful, is not obviously inherently more awful than a lot of alternatives that are, however they might be ideally, nonetheless in fact soul-killing and oppressive, dangerous and boring, humiliating and disgusting. And hell on women.
I accept the point of Leigh's story about the mod-level whore who can't cherry pick her clients. But neither can the Maids for Hire or Wal*Mart workers Barbara Ehrenreich writes about so eloquently in Nickled and Dimed say no to exploitative demands made my their employers. The additional level of horribleness imposed by the fact taht women may be inclined, biologically, not to engage in frequent anonymous sex with partners they don't like seems trivial in comparison with what the whores share with other wage slaves.
jks
>
> I mostly second Dwayne's, Dennis', and Justin's
> comments on porn. However,
> I think Dwayne overlooks perhaps the most important
> >
> Justin's comparison of sexual exploitation with
> nonsexual forms of
> exploitation that are arguably just as bad or worse
> isn't completely
> compelling. Many forms of alienated labor (e.g.
> lawerying) wouldn't be all
> that disagreeable if not for some combination of
> soul-crushing hours and
> shit pay. But I suspect turning even just a few
> tricks a week for lots of
> dollars would still be pretty bad for most women.
> (Since Justin shared a
> bit of well-founded speculation on evolutionarily
> rooted sex differences, it
> seems fair to point out that most sociobiologists
> would probably agree that
> it's unsurprising that most human sex work is done
> by women, who are likely
> generally less psychologically well-suited to the
> work of fairly frequent
> and anonymous sex than men would be.)
>
> -- Luke
>
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