I always assumed it was merely a vehicle for small-time criminals to roll chumps. "What are you going to do, call the cops? You called an *escort service*."
I seem to recall that I had a friend who worked for an escort service where sex was explicitly disallowed. (Not kink, I think.) But obviously they're not all like that.
As a famous blogger, you shouldn't have to pay for anonymous sex -- women should be lining up outside your door, just so they can tell people they got Ogged.
That's how it works for me: I just put up a post saying that I want to have sex, give the basic body type, etc., that I'm looking for, and tell everyone that the slot will be filled on a first come, first served basis.
If it's sex you want, I should think you would get in touch with a prostitute rather than an escort. Right? I'm seriously not getting the motivation behind this post -- my understanding of escort services is that like massage parlors, many but not all are fronts for prostitution -- but how is this noteworthy?
Sooo, in Berlin? My friend? As a favor to a friend of his let a friend of a friend of hers stay for a few nights at his place. The person, we'll call him Xavier, was also attending the Goethe Institut, but only for four weeks, in the afternoon. When Xavier left, I met him, a friend of his also named Xavier, the friend of my friend, a different friend of hers, and a dude from Slovenia at a beer garden, where I learned that the second Xavier and a friend of his had hired two prostitutes on Oranienburgerstraße and been taken back to the apartment one of them kept for business purposes ... and it was right across the street from the Goethe Institut! Those places aren't (I assume) cheap. Apparently Xavier2 and his friend were utterly trashed and got up to nothing.
The two guys I'm calling Xavier did actually have the same name in real life.
Didn't ogged once remonstrate with profgrrrrl for wearing too-high boots? Or something like that?
I'd suggest that if ogged really wants to find out if they sex him up, he should make the call, and liveblog it, and let us know if it really is a "GFE", but I suspect it's been so long since he had a GF that he wouldn't be able to tell; plus, I'd find suggesting that the littlest bit distasteful.
Girl Friend Experience. I've done some research but never dived in. If I had unlimited funds, who knows?
They often seem to want references from previous sex care providers you have retained. I dunno what you do for references if it's your first time seeking professional help.
There's more or less no way that can be true, no? "Girlfriend" for an hour is completely meaningless. (And if not, that's really, really depressing.) Since he probably actually misses the girlfriend part, this is probably not the way to go.
31: Haven't you heard of Viagra? Besides, it seems as if most of the professional athletes are on steroids and those nasty drugs kill libido. It's like that Jefferson Airplane song: "One pill makes you larger/One pill makes you small..."
The scene involved several shadowy half-personages floating around the perimeter whose involvement was, but whose named specificity was not, important. Why you gotta hassle me so?
Isn't Viagra kinda dangerous if you take it every day?
Can be taken daily, but like anything else some people are more susceptible to side effects than others. There's leeway in the dosage, can vary from (as I recall) 25mg to 100mg tablets. They're something like 8 or 10 bucks a pill, so there's this, cutters so you can get a prescription for 100mg pills, then cut them into 25mg dosages to save money.
There's an episode of Big Love where Bill is pounding so much Viagra trying to keep up with the three wives thing that he starts having problems with his vision.
uhh--yeah. Into a dumpster filled with exploited victims, self-loathing losers, wasted lives, and tawdriness.
It is a revolting sight down there, but the good news is that there's almost no danger of falling in by accident.
I mean, you're not suggesting that you're actually *attracted* to that sort of squalid filth, are you?
Sexual predation on girls who are being exploited as much by their johns as by their pimps? Touching another person whose feelings towards you range anywhere from boredom on a good day to utter disgust and loathing combined with fear on the bad days?
You're talking about lives wasted, lives ruined, lives stunted warped and miserable. It's a sickening prospect indeed.
But surely you're not saying something in all this actually *attracts* you? Or that the world-wide exploitation of women is something you think is good fodder for fantasy, or for jokes?
If you like the kind of sex you sometimes get with one night stands - and I do - the right kind of whore (in the right kind of market) will certainly give you a night to remember. From my limited experience, I can only give you a few tips:
- You should find someone who operates without a pimp
- You should find someone who will actually enjoy having sex with you
- You should hire her for the whole night (it may cost)
- For peace of mind afterwards, and for both of your sakes, you absolutely must practice safe sex. (I suppose you're only likely to get the choice in foreign locations, where the culture may be different, and condom use is not considered mandatory.)
The plusses? The existential adventure. It's very exciting, and the sex can be great for both of you. The minuses? It's very exciting (i.e. terrifying). It's also more than a little bit sleazy and no one (apart, perhaps from a few close male friends) will ever approve. Good or bad, it is undeniably part of what life has to offer.
45: Can we expand this to a general principle that it's immoral for anyone to use another person's labor power and keep the profits for themselves? Or to ask anyone to work in unsafe conditions or with unreasonable customers?
right, but this is someone who thinks they can recommend a practice by saying "Good or bad, it's undeniably part of what life has to offer".
as is putting your hand in a running garbage disposal. As is stealing twinkies from the 7-11. As is--well, you can continue the list.
If there are any things it is wrong, inconsiderate, self-destructive, or merely juvenile to do, then they too are undeniably part of what life has to offer.
you're going to have to try harder than that if you really want to burnish your jenseits von böse street cred.
49: Yeah, fine, the sex trade is bad. I'm reading Marx currently, about the early days of capitalism (currently being replayed in the Third World, to our benefit), and it doesn't seem to me that prostitution is qualitatively worse than what the capitalists would do to everyone if the state didn't step in.
Maybe this means that we should legalize and regulate the sex trade -- but maybe that would be impossible, because it would mean recognizing that the majority of us end up selling our bodies and letting someone else take the majority of the revenue our bodies produce.
Maybe this means that we should legalize and regulate the sex trade
I think this may be a good idea from a harm-reduction point of view. Doesn't change the fact that anyone having sex with a prostitute is overwhelmingly likely to be deluding himself if he thinks she's having a good time.
I think prostitution should definitely be decriminalized, but the only people I've known who've worked as prostitutes or strippers/lap dancers have been either junkies or messed up women who were sexually abused as kids, or both! the exacta of sex workerdom. no, I guess I did meet one woman who seemed like a no-nonsense businesswoman about the whole thing, and made $50,000 tax-free per year. of course, it may be that we just didn't know each other well enough for me to hear about the sexual abuse part. we only met twice.
49, 50: Based on what I've read from sex workers, it's not total self-deception. Some prostitutes, escorts, whatever they prefer to call themselves, like their work. Some don't. For some, it's a trap, for some, it's better than retail. I suggest Real Live Nude Girl by Carol Queen as a starting point. I know I've talked with escorts; I recall thinking at the time that they liked their job better than I liked mine.
That said, we live in a sexist culture that's deeply confused about sex, so it's easy to over generalize in any direction and it's usually an exploitation of power to hire sex workers. I suggest self-reflection and research in place of certainty.
I recall thinking at the time that they liked their job better than I liked mine
This impression is definitely out there, at least in interviews and things I've read. But I'm suspicious of it, because sex workers must internalize a lot of defensiveness, so they're quite unlikely to admit (even to themselves) that they feel exploited or used, and if, like alameida says, a lot of them were abused, their "liking" of the job isn't necessarily a healthy thing. But then you get into issues of autonomy and choice and paternalism, so it gets a little hairy.
I'd like to reclaim the word "hairy" from the forces of pejoration, but the fact is that whenever I see a guy in the locker room who's as hairy as I am, I think, "that's just never attractive."
By the way, Adam, I think most of these escorts work independently, so they don't share their revenue with anyone.
59: It gets hairy 'cause it's a little true for everybody, and a lot true for some people, and a little true for everybody in all careers. Almost everybody only does thier job 'cause they're paid to, and almost everybody tries to find a job that they can enjoy well enough that combined with being paid, it's a nice enough life. Our culture loves to economically exploit people into doing its scut work. Prostitution is worse than most jobs in this regard, because we, as a culture, are very very messed up about sex, about gender, and about power. But it's not unlike other jobs.
So saying, 'I think a lot of prostitutes are victims, to a greater or lesser degree, of false consciousness' is true, but not necessarily the last word on the subject.
One acquaintance who used to be a stripper to pay for college noted that there's a non-insignificant percentage of women who get into it intending to do it for a short period of time (just to make some quick cash, to put yourself through college, etc.) but end up getting sucked in, either through drug use or simply because the first 'real' job after college probably doesn't pay as well as stripping. And those were women that weren't abused or junkies going in. Nasty profession.
NBarnes, I'm inferring the following argument from what you've said: Lots of people hate their jobs, or do it only for money. We only treat prostitution differently because it involves sex. This is implies that sex is somehow a special case. But it's been a pretty good-sized project of the forces of goodness for the last few decades to demythologize sex, and to put it on the shelf next to most other human activities: to show that it's not a special case. So our response to prostitution is, at least formally, not clear.
61: So if Democrats supported legalizing prostitution, they could play it as supporting entrepreneurship! (I know that not all prostitutes have pimps, but I was responding to kid bitzer's comment, in which pimps were part of the exploitation.)
The job nature of prostitution means that, if prostitutes hate their jobs, they're just like lots of people. My ultimate job was so terrible that I didn't sleep well for about 18 months, and I finally made a big financial sacrifice and took early retirement to maintain my sanity, such as it is. I was seriously in danger of picking up a felony assault beef.
Likewise, it doesn't prove that prostitutes don't enjoy it just because they're paid. If they do enjoy it some, it just means that they have an OK job, which lots of people do, but not most. It doesn't mean that they're living a life of ecstasy in fairyland.
I've never understood the argument that strippers were mostly abused in childhood, so stripping is abusive. For one thing, a lot of the same people who say that also say that most women were abused in childhood. And on the other hand, what's happening now doesn't cause past events.
Portland, OR, is the stripper capital of the universe and I've met a moderate number of strippers socially. (Reed girls sometimes work as strippers, rather than as waitresses for 25% of the pay. Go figure.). Some really do enjoy the attention and their ability to manipulate men. Some frame it in an avant-garde post-modern liberationist way. Some have artistic or comedic pretensions. For many it's just a better-paying job than anything else they could get. My guess is that a better-than-average stripper makes more money than an entry-level lawyer and probably enjoys it about as much. (Taking debt into consideration, my guess is that most MDs are 35 or so before they're financially better off than fairly successful strippers.)
Strippers always have to deal with the fact that a new person they meet will reject them, once they find out that they're strippers. In super-hip Portland, that's not much of a problem; in the slacker world, strippers are the queens and duchesses because they're not broke.
It's not a lifetime career, though I have met a 40-year-old stripper. Quite a few were financing school, one of them law school. A lot probably go into the restaurant biz. (The whole restaurant biz is riddled with drugs and alcoholism, as is the music biz.) I think that quite a few marry clients or whatever you call them, on the basis of a shared realism about life.
64: Tim, I'm not one of those people that say that 'sex is just another thing'. Sex is clearly important to humans and 'means something' in ways that most other human activities do not. However, I think our culture regards sex in ways that are unhealthy and... divergent from the ways that sex is authentically special.
Also, I tend to believe that sex is important and special to almost everybody, but differently important and special to almost everybody. The way I feel about sex and the way I relate to it is very different in important ways from how other people around me do; lots of people that agree that sex is special and important may not agree about a lot else about it.
I think there's a lot of tendancy to over-generalize about sex. I think a lot of people universalize aspects of their sexual experience in error. And I especially think that it's almost always a mistake to talk about how someone else experiences sex and their own sexuality, and moreso when talking about groups of people. And so I don't like to make generalizations about prostitutes, but prefer rather to talk about specific examples of sex workers talking about their own experiences.
Not that long ago I was offered 5K a month by an out of town business man who was in the city 2 or 3 times a month. I have to admit I considered it. After taxes on my tuition remission, I take home quite a measly salary for NYC, I have debts, etc. But prostitution is not just like any other job, and shrugging, lots of people are exploited, hate their jobs, etc. seems silly to me, until we are getting down to really ruthless levels of exploitation. Sex is intimate and personal and central to self and identity, and even though its meaning might be understood differently by different people, I'd be surprised if there were anyone for whom selling it was not qualitatively different from any other sort of labor. You might be willing to deal with that and try to isolate its effects for the money, but it's not the same.
I have never had any interest in prostitutes, nor very much in strippers. For me it is as simple as not wanting anyone who doesn't want me. That level of role-playing would be intolerable at home, unspeakable. I have been told, I think by Amanda, that my attitude shows a lack of respect of controlling personality or something.
I think that both prostitutes and johns are living in the realization that normal ways of sexual relating (marriage, dating, transgressive orgies, hooking up, singles bars) are not working for them. So they figure something else out.
As I've said, sexual happiness is regarded as the norm, but it really isn't.
No actual skeletons in my closet regarding prostitution. Strippers, yes.
52: You're right, of course. I should have gone with something along these lines:
"It's the business of very few people to be independent: that is a right of the strong. And whoever attempts it—even with the best right to it, but without being compelled to—shows by that action that he is probably not only strong but excessively daring. He is entering a labyrinth; he is increasing a thousand-fold the dangers which life already brings with it, not the least of which is the fact that no one's eyes see how and where he goes astray, gets isolated, and is torn apart by some cavern-dwelling Minotaur of conscience. If such a person comes to a bad end, that happens so far away from men's understanding that they feel nothing and have no sympathy—and he cannot go back any more! He can't even go back to human compassion."
adam--are you sure it was the horse first, then the sister?
I thought it was the sister first, then the horse.
(Tragedy always repeats itself, first as sistery, then as horse?)
I am not talking about the woman here, and with a friendship and mutual desire it would be good sex and gift, and nothing wrong with that. But otherwise it is just jacking off in somebody else's body, and that would digust me about myself. I never seem able to manage the necessary objectification.
I have or had degrees, much lesser, of the same problem during casual sex. Objectification, role-playing, politeness, kindness...emotional constraint during physical intimacy seemed...I don't know.
maybe because it gives voice to the megalomaniacal fantasies of every two-bit banana-republic dictator who fancies himself a welt-historischer demi-god?
maybe because our country is currently run by a couple of them?
you know--the old restraints are gone. Quaint customs. Mere personal virtue. We, the few, strong, daring ones don't need to chain ourselves to mere convention (or mere Conventions)--indeed, we would be wrong to chain ourselves. We would be wronging: ourselves!
Cheap thugs always like this stuff. And it is scary that they're in power.
You know, these days it's not difficult to find blogs written by women who work as escorts.
I will say that while this: Sexual predation on girls who are being exploited as much by their johns as by their pimps? Touching another person whose feelings towards you range anywhere from boredom on a good day to utter disgust and loathing combined with fear on the bad days?
certainly describes a fair amount of the sex workers out here, it certainly doesn't match what little I know about the realities of the high end of the market.
Most people outgrow the Nietzsche phase once they turn 20. The rest grow up to give embarassing talks at Rutgers.
I agree with Tia. I can imagine a possible world where a bad day at the sex worker job was nothing more and nothing less than a bad day at the lawyer job, but that possible world is one in which sex has no meaning at all, or at least no more meaning than a usual profession has. Not so sure that would be a very pleasant world, come to think of it, but it doesn't look much like the one we have now.
As Josh notes, the high end of the market's much, much different from the low end. I've known three graduate students--two (gay) males, one female--who supplemented their income working as escorts/performers-in-light-"homemade"-bondage-videos-for-personal-consumption. (A phenomenon which has been discussed here, or hereabouts, recently, I think.) Both males loved their work, but as highly-educated, young gay males in the Los Angeles area, they got to choose their clients. (One even got paid to spend a summer in Italy.) I never talked to the female about it, however, she always sounded excited before heading off to a client's house.
I'm really disagreeing now. I don't know any prostitutes, but I knaow that some strippers actually do like their jobs.
A lot of stuff is really hard for me to understand, but to me having sex with a succession of random strangers met in bars is about as hard to understand as prostituting oneself. One of Heidi Fleiss's sex workers was quoted something like "Hey, I like to screw, and if I'm getting paid, that's better yet". She was very high-end, of course.
"Nothing more and nothing less than a bad day at the lawyer job": my own bad job wasn't a lawyer job, but I ended up angry and stressed all day, every day, for about 18 months, to the point that I was acting out destructively after work, and also feared that I would do something on the job to get me fired, or even prosecuted. Many non-sex-worker jobs have very, very high negatives.
I was surprised she still had that post up, actually, I thought she would have deleted it after the fact. I know, I know, I'm projecting my middle class, patriarchal false consciousness on to her. Sorry.
I can imagine a possible world where a bad day at the sex worker job was nothing more and nothing less than a bad day at the lawyer job, but that possible world is one in which sex has no meaning at all, or at least no more meaning than a usual profession has.
The meaninglessness of paid sex doesn't entail that sex has no meaning at all.
There's plenty of sex workers who'd dispute the thesis that paid sex is meaningless. Again I recommend Carol Queen's writing on the subject as a starting point.
I don't find dance performance mutually degrading, from ballet to Fosse to Cunningham, and I should be able to imagine a continuum...
I don't find massage mutually degrading, and I should be able to imagine a continuum...
So unless someone can help me with a clear qualitative difference somewhere along the line of a pleasurable massage, a handjob, blowjob, penetration...
I must presume the problem is mine, and likely sexist.
The meaninglessness of paid sex doesn't entail that sex has no meaning at all.
Not quite what I said. Part of the reason, aside from the exploitation aspect, that we have a problem with thinking of prostitution as just like any other job is that we treat sex specially. Even if we're not all religiously-prudey about it, we might think that it's an important part of our lives, or love, or part of our identity.
I was postulating that in order for sex work to be as unproblematic as working as a barrista (my original post didn't say totally meaningless, just as meaningless as most jobs), that sex would have to become much, much less important. I am unconvinced that that would be a good thing.
bob--
sounds like you are trying to talk yourself out of a reasonable position by means of a bad argument. You're better off with the reasonable position.
Sex is different. (related to the "meaningfulness" Cala has adverted to). As a result, it can be degrading in a way few other things can be.
Everyone not in the grips of an ideology knows that. It's hard to say why it's different; it's hard to measure the dimensions and degrees of its difference.
Those degrees and dimensions differ for different people, making it all the harder to figure out why and to what extent sex is different. It's all very confusing, and it would certainly be nice to get clearer about it.
But your line of thought in 101 will not get you clearer about it.
I mean, I can hold my breath for one minute without much effort. I can hold it for three minutes without suffering permanent ill effects. "So unless someone can help me with a clear qualitative difference somewhere along the line" between one minute and one hour, then my belief that there's something different about not breathing for an hour must be based on...sexism?
Look: there's a reason why nearly everyone has a deep intuition that sex is not on the same continuum as a casual handshake. And it's not sexism. (Don't trust me--ask the commenters who have been the most vocal on this point.)
I'm not saying its forever shrouded in inscrutable mystery. I'm just saying that you seldom get the correct explanations by rejecting the observed data.
I am glad this isn't posting from my usual ip so that I can say that my one experience of prostitution, which I entered into out of curiosity and a frank desire for the money and a sense that if freely entered into, blah blah blah, how bad can it be? Kind of convinced me (and yeah, anecdotal sample of one) that there may well be no such thing as workable prostitution.
The problem I ran into was that, despite the client being pretty nice, I felt compelled to give him his money's worth: in other words, to act like the perfect girlfriend. Which is not only extremely tiring, but also kind of awful. And then of course the client really likes you because, after all, you're so nice and agreeable and pleasant and yadda yadda, and this means you have to continue to be nice and agreeable and pleasant (if you want to continue the relationship) or else figure out a reason not to do it again.
So yeah, it wasn't the sex per se; it's more all the other things that, i think inevitably, are bound up in sex. Issues of trust, intimacy, desire, all that stuff. Very hard to negotiate honestly or fairly, especially when you throw all sorts of other realities about gender roles and male/female relationships into the mix. I'm sure there are women who find it just a job, or who find it enjoyable even in some respects, and I can see how the Annie Sprinkles and Suzie Brights of the world could see it as a kind of teaching vocation, but most of the time that's not how it's working.
103: Look: there's a reason why nearly everyone has a deep intuition that sex is not on the same continuum as a casual handshake. And it's not sexism.
Bullshit. Our rather prudish attitudes towards sexuality are driven almost entirely by "morality" and commodification. I do not mean prostitution; I mean the commodification of virginity, the judgement of emotional attachment by the size of the stone in the ring or the gifts that precede it, the judging of women as Madonna or whore ["the girl you don't take home to mother"] that is so built into our culture.
Is sex always different from a casual handshake? No, tho' it can be, much in the way that an intimate conversation is different, or an in-joke is different. One can choose casual sex, the zipless fuck, fuck-buddy-no-strings-attached; one can choose something else that one invests with more import. It can mean something, it can mean nothing, depending on circumstance and perception.
Is your basic street hooker being exploited and abused? I'd say that she [or he] is, about 99.9% of the time - drug addicts, runaways, people with fragile grasps on reality, people under duress, people with baggage who sell themselves because they see no other way to survive. Is every person who sells bodily favours exploited? Not at all. There is a vast difference between the street hooker and the high-end callgirl. She [or he] who can choose and refuse clients, who is paid well, who has other options, and has chosen to be a sex worker is not really different from the programmer who sells her skill, the lawyer who sells her expertise. What is different is society's attitude. Does a het male gynecologist slaver over every vagina he examines? Of course not; he partitions his "work" and "personal" lives; it is entirely possible for a sex worker to do the same.
The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.
Wikipedia on "zipless fuck," coined by Erica Jong. Jong explains, "when you came together, zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. For the true ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never got to know the man very well."
Also, since my post failed I'm dying to know who this is aimed at:
In an effort to curb malicious comment posting by abusive users, I've enabled a feature that requires a weblog commenter to wait a short amount of time before being able to post again. Please try to post your comment again in a short while. Thanks for your patience.
Also, it looks like the page that takes you to doesn't have the Secret Wolfson Hack enabled.
I think upthread there was some equation of one night stands with meaningless sex--I just wanna say that in my own life, I don't see it that way. I still fondly remember trying to toss blueberries into the belly button of my second ever one night stand and eating them out; with all the good ones there's been a lot of mutual tenderness and care and humor. I've never had any sex that I'd describe as meaningless.
I think it's too simple to just say that all our attitudes about sex are due to sexism or religion or patriarchy or whathave you. Obviously it's hard, if not impossible to distinguish what is and what isn't, but there's surely a difference between mutually consensual meaningless sex, and sex that happens as a transaction. There's also all the overhead involved with sex--pregnancy, disease risk, penetration, etc--most of which obviously falls on the woman in a sex-for-money situation, even if sexism were completely out of the picture.
Offhand, I'd say that 111 and 127 demolish kid bitzer argument in 103 that sex is 'special'.
Also, I have especial distaste for the statement, 'there's a reason why nearly everyone has a deep intuition that sex is not on the same continuum as a casual handshake'. For starters, you qualify it as 'nearly everyone', which leaves some people... what? I never claimed that everybody shoud want to sex or buy sex. I never claimed that everybody could buy or sell sex and be happy with the experience and themselves. I'm saying that some people report (and it's an objective fact that they report this) that their experience of selling sex has not been as degrading, humiliating, or otherwise as negative as you think it... is? Ought to be? Is for them because you know better than to believe their self-reporting? If your statement is non-universal, and you admit that it is not, I'm not sure what your point relative to the larger discussion is.
And then we move on to the phrase 'deep intuition'. I'm quite confidant that we could find other 'deep intuition'-based policies. We could take polls and find out if disgust at homosexuality is a cultural trait or 'deep intuition'. Or perhaps if traditional gender roles are a social construct or if 'deep intuition' tells us they are innate.
97: Read that post more carefully. I never said I had done it; merely that I was thinking about it.
Sorry if my comment implied that you had. I just couldn't resist the reference given the topic. I think you should delete that post, given the small chance of losing anonymity.
I do believe some people could like it OK, have it as an acceptable job, etc. I'm just saying I know people who would have said all that at the time, but were really drug addicts, messed-up people etc. actually, I do know a woman who used to act in porn and work in live peep shows in SF, and who really thought it was fun, sexy and great. I wasn't thinking about her when I wrote the comment above. she is just a healthy person who likes kinky sex. irritatingly much, maybe, to where she's talking about her sex life all the time, but that's not unhealthy, it's just boring.
While Teo is out searching the laundromat for punani like De Leon searching for the Fountain, multiple women on this site alone have been offered substantial sums of money for sex by (guessing from the tone) people who were not all that unattractive.
This is why men kill themselves at 4 times the rate of women.
to say that 103 contained an 'argument' would, I think, be going a bit too far. It merely tried to highlight the plausibility of a premise.
That sort of thing happens pretty often when you get close to argumentative bedrock. It's very hard to argue that the experience of pain is intrinsically bad, but if you encounter someone who is trying to talk himself into the view that pain is really a good thing, it's worth reminding him that it hurts a lot. That's not an argument either, but it's worth saying.
Appeals to intuition are, of course, notoriously dodgy and subject to abuse. Even as I wrote it, I was aware that 103 could be parodied by replacing 'sex' with 'race', or 'gender', or many other things where we have come to distrust what once seemed obvious intuitions. But the fact that some alleged intuitions are the result of racism/homophobia etc. doesn't mean that all of them are.
And in general I'll take a widely shared intuition over an apriori argument any time. Zeno had some great arguments that motion is impossible, and most of us have no more than the intuition that they've somehow, not sure how, just gotta be wrong. They are.
Does 127 demolish my view? You might want to ask the author. I think she makes a good case that 1) the intuition that sex is especially fraught, charged, meaningful is *not* merely an artifact of sexism and 2) that we might profitably look for the origins of its special status in the differential burdens and risks it imposes on women.
That looks like the right direction to me, though it would take a long time to unpack all the complications. Here's one: the risks and burdens of, e.g. pregnancy, can actually be lowered now, and for that I say hooray. But I suspect that the complex swirl of emotional issues surrounding sex--trust, power, intimacy, vulnerability--is not changed overnight with as much ease.
Does 105 demolish your view? It is certainly another story of someone who thought it would all be easy, and then it wasn't easy after all. I think that's the common experience. Maybe not universal, but very common.
Again--how impressed should we be by the reports of exceptional experience? I'm interested in the 99.9% of the time; you can have the 0.1.
Maybe there are some people who thrive on arsenic. I would tend to be skeptical of the reports, but maybe there have been a few cases of people who ate it and prospered. Still when you see a bunch of kids saying "hey gang, I've heard it's really fun eating arsenic and let's all try some, okay?" then you sort of shake your head and think "hooboy. This isn't going to work out well in the long run."
Legislation, morality, education and advice all have to be pitched towards the 99.9%. Especially when our egos would like to flatter us that we are each part of that special, privileged, 0.1%. Every teenage kid thinks he's the special exception that drives better when he's drunk. Every one thinks he'll be able to smoke a few cigarettes, but not get hooked. We'd all like to think that the downsides are only for others, especially if we can be daring, counter-cultural and Nietzschean while we're doing it.
But for the vast majority of people, those vanities are going to wind up being false.
Remember where this started: someone said "hey, kids, I just found out that all of the cool kids are hiring prostitutes and I'm thinking that sounds like fun too!"
And my advice was: don't do it, counselor. The odds against you are real long. The chances of its winding up badly--for you, for her, for everyone affected--are real high.
Now some of you seem to want to hold onto the possibility of unicorns, and you seem to think that second hand reports of unicorns demolish my arguments (even though most of the first-hand reports on this thread have gone "I thought it was a unicorn but it didn't turn out so well").
But you know what? I actually don't mind that much if there are exceptional, anomalous cases, so long as no one is holding them up as attractive, aspirational paradigms for the rest of us.
Back in 92, Cala pointed out that maybe quasi-humans with a fairly different make-up from ours could do sex-work as a mere day-job, but it wasn't clear that we'd want to be creatures like that. That's about how I feel about the reported unicorns. Maybe there are already some people, in this actual world, for whom sex-work is not exploitation. But I suspect we might not want to be those people. And they certainly should not be used as the basis for advice to others.
For the vast majority of women, prostitution is a horrible racket. For the vast majority of men, getting involved in prostitution will be a step into degradation. That's the basis of my advice. Unicorns don't demolish it.
oh--and clearly to get to the bottom of this, we'd all have to be a lot clearer (than I've been) about "meaningfulness", and what sorts of things have it and in what ways. Sorry.
Yup. I came into this thread to make fun of Anonymous Customer for thinking that the prostitutes he hired were having a great time, and nothing's changed my mind about it. I don't have a strong opinion as to whether prostitution is necessarily a uniquely horrible experience for the woman or if it can be no worse than any other job (well, I have strong opinions, but they vary on a moment by moment basis). But 105 gives a reason for what I think of someone who's hiring a prostitute:
The problem I ran into was that, despite the client being pretty nice, I felt compelled to give him his money's worth: in other words, to act like the perfect girlfriend. Which is not only extremely tiring, but also kind of awful. And then of course the client really likes you because, after all, you're so nice and agreeable and pleasant and yadda yadda, and this means you have to continue to be nice and agreeable and pleasant (if you want to continue the relationship) or else figure out a reason not to do it again.
A woman not under duress, getting into it partially to make a point about how bad can it be, and the best it gets under those circumstances is kind of awful. If you're hiring a hooker, you're either pathetically deluded about thinking she's enjoying herself; you enjoy having sex without giving a damn whether your partner wants to be there; or you're enjoying the fact that she'd rather not be there.
Now 105 didn't sound like the experience was an absolute nightmare for her, but I'd really rather masturbate than have sex with someone who was thinking about me that way.
I'd just repeat that prostitution, from either point of view, might be an OK choice for someone whose other options, for whatever reason, aren't that good either. It's not something to be recommended to up and coming young people of good family, but most people aren't up and coming young people of good family. There seems to be a tendency here to put prostitution in a category by itself among the not-so-good things of the world, as an abomination rather than just a sin (as our Christian friends sometimes put it).
There are also intermediate forms which are common enough but somehow less abominable, e.g. the golddigger and the trophy wife. High-end prostitutes used to be called courtesans, and they didn't stand on streetcorners waiting for random strangers.
As I understand there is a small amount of legit first person literature on the subject (i.e. not male fantasy), and it's not all victim literature. Though having been a prostitute is not something anyone is going to brag about, especially if they've gone on to respectability, and probably most testimony is from the rehab / repentance angle.
I agree with LB that prostitution is not "necessarily a uniquely horrible experience", and with JE that it "might be an OK choice for someone whose other options, for whatever reason, aren't that good either".
Sounds right--there are lots of other wretched existences in the world, and compared to some of them, prostitution of the gilded cage variety looks pretty good.
And I certainly agree that you have to assess your choices against your options. A friend of ours, a Bengali woman who grew up in Dhaka, has argued in print that practically all of the sweat-shops that exploit young girls still provide a better life for them than the options they had back in the village--marriage at puberty, early pregnancy, no autonomy of any kind, ostracism at widowhood, etc. etc. etc. Moderately bad things look good when compared to horrible things. But moderately bad things are still not to be celebrated, endorsed, or encouraged.
I don't think being a prostitute is even a sin, much less an abomination. But I think that the business as a whole is still exploitative, sexist, demeaning, and pernicious. Maybe we can point to particular individuals, particular couples, particular transactions, that had no consequences, or at least no immediate ones. But the system as a whole has lots and lots of consequences, and they are almost uniformly harmful ones.
kid bitzer, while I've enjoyed and am pretty sympathetic to your comments on this thread, (I think) ogged meant not that he would ever do it, or even that it sounded like fun; just that the fact that it was available as a possibility, though a dangerous, self damaging possibility, felt dizzying and bizarre, in the same way your ability to take your own life does.
Also, I'd like to point out that as much as our attitudes toward sex may be constructed (and honestly, I'm not sure how true that is, or how useful a frame that is; is there any human culture which values bodily integrity so little that a penis or a finger in an orifice is not a big deal, in some sense? I'd like someone to point me to a sex worker writing that their experince of having sex for money was not emotionally different from their past as a barista, in ways that implicated their feelings about their body, about intimacy, etc. Please note that this is not a claim that sex work is uniformly horrible. I thought about doing it), at least to that extent, and probably more, the desire for a prostitute is also socially constructed. Prostitution is taking place in a context where we understand sex to ideally be mutual; the active desire for non-mutual sex isn't neutral. The sense of ownership, and therefore, even under the most happy smily circumstances, the tinge of degradation, is hot. I'm quite sure that anyone who'd buy sex from me would have some kind of corruption of the innocent fantasy going on. Men who buy time with prostitutes are buying the privilege of being lied to and flattered (or I guess, with a domme, maybe the reverse). I suppose that there are a few people who are really hard up just for skin contact, but I don't know how you would disentangle that from from the cultural construct that men should want objectified women.
Where angels fear to tread: aren't lying and flattering a part of many, many dating experiences? And relationships? And marriages? Certainly prostitution is not the ideal, but compared to actuality it seems less awful than compared to an ideal. At least a john does not have to talk about starting a dog shelter.
The problem I ran into was that, despite the client being pretty nice, I felt compelled to give him his money's worth: in other words, to act like the perfect girlfriend. Which is not only extremely tiring, but also kind of awful.
Drawing once again on my vast reservoir of experience ...
... My paid-for partner thought it was hilarious to have me give her - how can I put this? - oral pleasure. We didn't have much language in common, so she indicated her preference mainly by pushing my head southwards. And I thought: this is really something I'd rather not do, not tonight, but fair's fair ... and I suspect the combination of reluctance and willingness on my part may even have added to the fun, from her point of view.
Sample of one, obviously.
I'm not especially promiscuous, and as with many others, what I think about promiscuity is this: your experience is enlarged, but at the same time experience makes you stale. This is likely even more of a loss for the prostitute - who's promiscuous by definition - the gradual smothering of a certain aspect of life.
Anonymous Client: drawing also from personal experience of a different sort --- you will almost certainly never know if these girls actually enjoyed having sex with you. You'd probably be astonished (if not hurt) by what they have to say about you off the clock. Just so's you know.
I don't want to rag on Anonymous Client too much--paying for sex once doesn't make you uniquely evil, and sharing the story is appreciated--but I can't resist playing a little. Using my supernatural powers of guessery, I dismiss the Thai angle and say that his escort was...Ukranian.
Offhand, I'd say that 111 and 127 demolish kid bitzer argument in 103 that sex is 'special'.
Actually, my 127 was intended to agree with him that sex--because it involves, among other things, physical penetration and necessary intimacy--is "special." The arguments that "any service job" involves x, y, or z are well and good, but they overlook a pretty fundamental distinction between sex and other forms of labor.
I think LB's 136 gets it mostly right. The flip side of what LB says about clients means that, for the prostitute, she's either doing intimate business (and running some risks, among them rape, which no one here has acknowledged, I don't think) with someone who sees her as basically a thing, or else with someone who is buying not only sex but also, whether he realizes it or not, some pretense of liking/affection/intimacy. That's a pretty fucked up situation to be in, and potentially v. dangerous. Isn't categorizing other people as things basically sociopathic? And haven't we all run into a situation where someone who was under a misapprehension about the true nature of your affection/liking for them got suddenly very angry when they realized that they were wrong?
132: Alternatively, the fact that more than one woman on this board has been offered money for sex tells you a hell of a lot about the relative entitlement of men and the relative vulnerability of women.
John, I think your cynicism is confused and wrong. There are some marriages which are basically prostitution, but they're not most of the ones in the contempory United States. Not everyone's relationship is so dishonest; that woman in the bathroom who was caught on tape had extremely kind words for her husband. Lying isn't as essential to dating as you make out, either; the guy did want to start a dog rescue; he so maintained after I asked for honesty as compensation for my trouble, when he knew he had no chance with me and when I was not flattering him in any sense. Maybe he mentioned it to make himself attractive, but I don't think he just read it in Where the Red Fern Grows, or even if he did, he didn't have to; I totally would have fucked him, dog rescure or no dog rescue, if he hadn't had a girlfriend.
Of course no relationship is free of any kind of dishonesty; just the other day I held off telling Clementine that her 98 dollar Anthropologie shirt was fugly until I'd convinced her/she'd decided to return it, but it's different to decide, because of your regard for the other guy or a personal valuation of peace to lie or just to decline to say something than it is to have to lie, in a situation which calls for the freedom to be honest when necessary as much as sex does, because you're being paid. If you all have dating relationships in which you're constructing really elaborate fictions over long periods of time, as opposed to declining to mention someone to protect someone's feelings or choosing to let something go to perserve tranquility, I suspect you're doing something wrong, or, if y'all insist on humility, I'll put it this way: there is a whole universe of people who are not doing that, and enjoying it heartily. That people have fucked up ways of interacting when money isn't involved doesn't mean that money doesn't introduce something that is inherently, structurally fucked up.
149: I don't regard my doctor as a 'thing', even though our contact may be intimate. I'm buying a service and the doctor is the agent of that service. We both go away satisfied (and the doctor perhaps also to make jokes about TUBEs and LUVs, etc.).
What I was expecting from my hooker - before the event - was this: fairly awkward sex, likely to be terminated early, payment rendered, contact promptly closed. And an interesting story. And my friends sniggering ...
What I got was this: much better sex than I expected; if the apparent reciprocity was simulated, it was simulated to a high standard, with general good humour and a relaxed attitude all round. And an interesting story. And my friends sniggering ...
Nonetheless, the risks of being a prostitute are as you describe.
Tia, a lot of people live in a less favorable world than yours. Not all, maybe not most, but a lot.
And people less cynical than me sure do complain a lot about their disappointments and betrayals. Of course, when they're happy they're usually less voluble, so I'm getting a skewed sample. But if people want me to stop being cynical, they should only express happy thoughts.
As far as sex being special and something different, I more or less agree, but then, I'm a puritanical cynic. During my time at the fringes of cafe society, I saw people repeatedly jumping into wild and crazy dating experiences which were hazardous and demeaning, or dating people who could afford to "be nice to them", and I ended up not feeling that the one additional step to prostitution would be a big one.
yeah, I should make it clear that my point was not to go beating on ogged, whom I don't know, nor to scare him straight. (I mean, I assumed he was. This was a female escort, right?)
and I realize that my intervention in this conversation has been a long demonstration of missing the joke, being humorless, judgemental, sanctimonious, censurious, pompous and moralistic.
I actually am capable, on other occasions, of light banter and airy persiflage. Witty repartee. Believe it or not.
teo's still in the trainee period, and he has to log a bunch of volunteer hours before he's licensed. I am already known to do pro bono work for people who work in animal welfare; it's a tax write off.
167: I'm instinctively on the "bad idea" side of this one. This is described as a rather severe case. Should we analogize to The Last Picture Show (bad!) or Fanny Hill (good!)?
I'll vote bad idea. Even if the guy enjoys it and doesn't panic or weird out, he's going to be hard put to repeat the experience if he decides he wants to.
166: Are threesomes by defintion orgies? I've seen that use before a couple of times (footnotes: "Packet Man" and Kael's review of Blow-Up), but I always figured orgies should be more social.
I don't think that two couples doing synchronized intercourse would count either. I think that you need an odd number. Maybe if it were three women and one guy that would count, especially if the women were bi.
What if the parties to the two couples switched off occasionally? What if there were eight couples? I think you just want an odd number to increase the odds that someone will be left out in the cold.
Now some of you seem to want to hold onto the possibility of unicorns, and you seem to think that second hand reports of unicorns demolish my arguments (even though most of the first-hand reports on this thread have gone "I thought it was a unicorn but it didn't turn out so well").Now some of you seem to want to hold onto the possibility of unicorns, and you seem to think that second hand reports of unicorns demolish my arguments (even though most of the first-hand reports on this thread have gone "I thought it was a unicorn but it didn't turn out so well").
In case this is meant to include me: I'm not trying to hold onto the possibility of unicorns, and I don't think that second-hand reports of unicorns demolish your arguments. I will simply repeat what I said before: it is trivially easy to find a wide variety of blogs written by people who have first-hand experience with this sort of thing. I don't read them, so I have no idea what position in this argument they'd support; I do find it interesting, though, that no one's really evinced much interest in what they have to say.
Unicorns do indeed exist, Ben, and as Stub points out, we make interesting sex toys! It's all in the horn me thinks...ahem...
Ziplessness is our speciality - we don't tell tales and we don't expect to be loved. That's why people hire us - we're uncomplicated and suspending our own needs is part of the deal.
But I must correct you on one point - I'm real and not a bit purported. You can pinch me and see...for a suitable fee of course! ;-)
Erm, looking at your blog, you've been doing this for about a month? I mean, interesting and all, but not really the gritty realist perspective on what prostitution is like, is it?
More, descriptions on the left and a much larger blogroll by category on the right. The knowledge that there exist "john blogs" is something I could have done without. I assume that anyone who cares about finding more such blogs can do so h/hself.
130: No apology needed, I just wanted to stress that point. I did think about taking that post and the other one down, but in the end I think that the convos were excellent and that it's a very interesting topic. Those, combined with my sense of the importance of historical and textual records, mean I'm going to leave it up, come what may. (Which recognizing that is one reason I never followed up on whether I'd done it or not; the other is that I think it's more interesting to leave it an open question.)
151: Problematic. We are, generally speaking, *very* careful to distinguish between intimate medical exams and intimacy. Your doctor talks to you about specifically non-intimate things during those exams; you and he avoid eye contact; the focus is very heavily on emphasizing the ways that intimate exams, especially if they involve penetration, are *medical*, not personal. Prostitution does precisely the opposite.
134: I've pointed you by name at least one first-hand account of, written by, a unicorn. There are others past that one if you keep looking. I cannot force you to believe in unicorns, I can only say, 'Look, a book written by an entity that claims to be a unicorn!' and assert that also read other things by putative unicorns.
Again, I assert the objective fact of the existance of some women who found prostitution to be somewhere between tolerable as a job and desirable as a career. You have my cites. Feel free to comment on them, rather than blithely wave them out of existance.
But, please, keep in mind that it's not my experience that you're dismissing. In your haste to denounce prostitution as demeaning and awful for all involved, you are neatly disposing of these accounts as inconvient to the case you're trying to make. At that point, I suspect, you are neatly making the transition from 'perhaps mistaken' to 'actively sexist'.
It seems to me that while you make a strong case, when you are not theorizing that disconfirming evidence doesn't exist, you lack the experience with the issue that someone who's actually sold their body might bring to the issues. As I said (in my very first post in this thread, none the less), I suggest that you spend more time reading the accounts of women who have actually done what you're talking about and gone on to tell of their experiences.
189: All true, but doesn't this show that people can manage their feelings independently of physical intimacy? The first ten years of my sexual life were more or less free from one night stands. They're something I've learned to do, and I guess it was the same for my partners. It's a different kind of activity. I don't think it's about objectification. It does involve communication (almost all non-verbal ... and mostly in the dark ...)
I agree, Anonymous Client, most of us can certainly manage our feelings independent of physical intimacy. That's one reason why several courtesans I know don't do 'f*ckbuddy' arrangements. I'm one of those myself - if I'm paid, it helps me distance myself and focus on the client and the job in hand. Ahem. ;-)
Lizard Breath - I think you need to work on the interpersonal skills a little. Toothpaste and respect are useful things when dealing with ladies. John Emerson - if you read the 'Auction results' you can see how many nights I've booked to date, so that will help you decide whether I expect much business. The English Courtesan may have to spank you both at this rate, only sadly she doesn't do 'spankbuddy' either. :-)
This is certainly a fascinating debate. Although I am indeed a relative newbie to this, I think maybe whether you regard yourself as (and/or are) exploited depends on the prices you charge, the number and type of clients you see and whether you have other options. If you see one or two clients only a month, are well rewarded for it and have a day job and other possible options, then it's more of a choice than enslavement. If however you've been lured to the UK by the promise of a 'decent' job, are paid a pittance if at all, and have no way out, then the reverse applies...
This blog started with ultra-earnest appreciations of Mr. Rogers, and now when a real-life prostitute shows up and makes jokes about her job, we're all rolling our eyes and thinking, "how tame."
In all due respect, E.C, I wouldn't pay those prices for an 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, even if I had the money. I'm nowhere near as heterosexual as that. But hey, if you've found your prey species, fatten up on them.
As for LB, she as well as she wants with the ladies without brushing.
I think this is one of those instances of the employment of the word "about" to avoid making a statement that can easily be refuted or engaged with. Objectification is something that necessarily happens during the process. Whether or not it is "about" objectification--who even knows what that means?
Or, since I am reading about material and formal and final causes, I'm noticing that perhaps that was too teleological. I should have said, "I think this is one of those instances of the employment of the word 'about' that avoids making a statement that can easily be refuted or engaged with," maybe.
I do like The EC's rosy cheeks. And I think I remember that there was an escort a while back who got written up in Slate or Salon who was charging something over 10 grand per night, with a two night minimum, so, you know, EC is a bargain.
And if you really want to market yourself to the rich, you have to be expensive. My friend worked for a while as a math tutor to the children of Upper East Siders, and sometimes they expressed disappointment that his rate was only 75 an hour. Another math tutor he knew made a point of raising his rates if anyone else raised theirs, so he'd always be the poshest game in town. The commodity fetishists of the world don't like their whores or their math tutors cheap.
Okay, 206 made me break down and click through (from work, which feels like a bad idea). Sadly, I saw no rosy-cheeked photo. I saw nothing but an eyeball.
207 is exactly right. Mercedes did the same thing when Lexus first appeared; rather than lowering prices in order to compete that way, they raised prices to distinguish themselves as the true luxury brand.
So, I'm wondering, what's wrong with EC that she comes so cheap?
Thanks, Mike. Off the top of my head, thus likely to be wrong, the final cause is the finished sculpture while the formal cause is something like the design.
(It wasn't meant to be a funny joke or anything, it's just that Tia listed three of the four Aristotelian causes and I wanted to impress her with my erudition.)
There is one group of professionals who manage to engage in a form of intercourse for money with multiple clients without the legal issues and social stigma that we associate with prostitution. This intercourse is often intimate and personal and central to self and identity (to use Tia’s phrase from 74) as well as deeply penetrating. Some people do in fact argue that those who patronize these professionals should instead use a spouse or intimate friend, who would do it for free either out of mutual pleasure or a sense of mutual obligation. Indeed, some people share this kind of intercourse with casual acquaintances or even random strangers, although this is not considered socially acceptable in various circles. Still, not everyone has an appropriate spouse or intimate friend available, and even those who do often find it useful to engage a professional for this kind of service.
Although the basis for these relationships is professional, and the intercourse would not continue without the payment except in unusual circumstances, I think that many of these professionals do genuinely like and sympathize with most of their clients, particularly the regulars. Certainly these professionals do have clients they actively dislike from time to time, and they are well trained to control the expression of their feelings within the context of the professional relationship, but that doesn’t mean that all interactions with them are simply with a professional façade that is completely disconnected from their true feelings. Many of the people who go into this profession do so because they are genuinely interested in interacting with people in this way, and enjoy their work. And a façade is easiest to maintain if it is not too far away from the truth. Much of the best flattery consists of selective sharing of genuinely positive feelings.
There is a vast middle ground of willingness to engage in intercourse that falls in between the extremes of actively not wanting to be there but concealing it behind a professional façade, on the one hand, and being so enthralled by the connection that one is willing to cast aside any thought of compensation or professional boundaries to indulge in it for purely mutual pleasure, on the other. That is why I think that LB’s 136 and B’s 149 present a false dichotomy - certainly for the professionals I have in mind, and probably for a number of those in the original context. The choice shouldn’t have to be between “don’t believe anything she says - it’s all a façade and she’s miserable being here” and “believe everything she says about how awesome you are, you credulous fool.” (But I do want to recognize what NMUS said in 105 which started that subthread off - if you feel you have to maintain a façade that’s too far away from reality, that takes a lot of emotional energy and can wind up feeling icky. I wonder how that experience would have gone for you if you hadn’t felt so much pressure to live up to an unsustainable ideal, or felt freer to share some of that conflict with him at the time.)
One thing about the professional nature of these relationships is that payment does make the relationship more assymetrical than an equivalent free relationship: the relationship is more about meeting the client’s needs than the professional’s, and the payment is partially compensation for that imbalance, as well paying for the professional’s time and expertise. The professional should still be able to set appropriate boundaries on the relationship and limitations on the client’s expectations as needed to maintain his or her personal integrity and space.
Now I realize that the parallel is not exact, as there are differences in the educational requirements, professional regulation, social status, cultural context, and so on between the two professions involved. Still, if your argument against prostitution could be transformed into an argument for why you shouldn’t pay your therapist just by choosing a different dictionary definition of the word intercourse, you *might* want to re-examine the cultural basis of your assumptions.
By the way, I wanted to do a post to brag about this, but I keep not succeeding in uploading the screenshot I took, so you should all just go look at this Scrabble game and notice that in the top half of the board you find the words "cured," "globed," and "recork." I made all those words on a single turn.
I don't think so, homo ignoramus. The final cause is the "for the sake of which," so what the statue is for: appreciation, or beautification, or edification, or what have you.
The final cause of a natural object - a plant or an animal - is not a purpose, plan, or “intention.” Rather, it is whatever lies at the end of the regular series of developmental changes that typical specimens of a given species undergo. The final cause need not be a purpose that someone has in mind. I.e., where F is a biological kind: the telos of an F is what embryonic, immature, or developing Fs are all tending to grow into. The telos of a developing tiger is to be a tiger.
Hey, glad to see you mcmc, and I assure you that I did the google currency conversion before posting my comment, and she's still cheaper than the escort I remember reading about.
I think he says somewhere that the formal cause of the statue is its shape.
I think he also says that for living things the formal and final causes overlap. What childhood is for is the development of the form of the adult. But formal causes and final causes should be distinct for artifacts.
Yeah, sure, if the client had near-infinite amounts of money, but still, that's an awful lot of cash. I guess I'm wondering about the differences between the 10k escort and, say, the 2k escort.
This blog started with ultra-earnest appreciations of Mr. Rogers, and now when a real-life prostitute shows up and makes jokes about her job, we're all rolling our eyes and thinking, "how tame." Ogged wept.
That seems wrong. You should be weeping because a real-life prostitute shows up and makes jokes about her job, and we manage to make it boring.
225- FL, see 207, and wonder about the difference between the $75 math tutor and the $200 math tutor. (Answer: Probably none, but in realms where non-experts have difficulty directly evaluating quality, price itself is often used as a proxy. And for people who only want the best...)
From your link, Ogged: "Clearly the statue enters in the explanation of each step of the artistic production as the final cause or that for the sake of which everything is done."
A reworking of 229: the main difference between the $10,000 hooker anwd the $2,000 hooker is that the $10,000 hooker will not have been purchased by the guy who can only afford the $2,000 hooker.
Ok, god damn it, so I've been reading a lot of escort ads in the past few days, and there really is a difference between 2k escorts and 10k escorts and the difference is class, specifically, education. EC touts her education and the one I'm thinking of called herself the "educated escort," and said she had an Ivy league degree.
I mean, we're just thinking of fucking, but high end escort do a lot of escorting, so it might well matter to some clients that the woman they bring isn't dumb or uneducated.
That's it, teo and I are retroactively charging for all past freebies (there was a clause in the contract that enumerated your obligation to stay on my good side. teo's good side doesn't matter). We're putting a lien on your check. How much is University of Pennsylvania at Blue Ball paying these days?
Clearly the statue enters in the explanation of each step of the artistic production as the final cause or that for the sake of which everything is done
Final causes are always nested, so the statue can be the final cause in one context, but is not the final cause of itself.
204: In my experience there's communication - 'going on', if you prefer that prepositional construction - between sexual partners, even during casual sex where the partners don't know each other well. That must be about recognition of common, uhm, something or other.
I'm not aware of any 'objectification' on and off switch. I don't think empathy automatically vanishes in certain contexts, which isn't to say that I'm not comparatively empathy deficient without realising it. But something tells me I'm not going to be my own best witness here.
I did entertain the idea of a stripper sent to your bedside, but Ben's mom was booked. The thought of you looking utterly mortified amused me to no end, though.
This would have been great, not least because my mom and ex were both there around the clock. "I can't sit up, honey, and you'll have to get creative with the catheter, but otherwise, go to town."
Weep not, oh Great and Worthy Ogged, for thou art correct, and the cheeks are rosy! That's with reference to 206, 208 etc. I felt I should clarify that in case you're still weeping. :-)
Lizard Breath, I've just been reading the bios and goodness me, it turns out that you're a girrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl!
I always thought it was only boys who had lizard breath. Am I being a tad sexist and if so, might one of the gentlemen like to correct me? Bends over... :-)
Livvy xxx
P.S. Does Mr. Wolfson really use Troll Unguent and if so where?
The first link for the four causes says that efficient cause is the only cause that remotely resembles a Humean cause, but My/les
'weekend at' Bur/nye/at said that efficient cause is actually the least like Humean cause. About then I decided I didn't really understand Aristotle. The wikipedia article on Efficient Cause is one of those horrible philosophy wikipedia articles you read about, which reminds me I have to go grade. (Actually most of my papers are much better than that.)
192, 249: EC -- I do apologize for being brusque above. It just seemed that your experience in prostitution wasn't all that representative of the norm. As you said:
A perfect Friday-night post.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:21 PM
I always assumed it was merely a vehicle for small-time criminals to roll chumps. "What are you going to do, call the cops? You called an *escort service*."
Posted by NL | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:24 PM
for you, or for teo?
Posted by yoyo | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:27 PM
Shanah Tovah. Oh wait, wrong thread.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:27 PM
GFE? "Girl For Escort"?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:28 PM
Never mind-just found it.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:30 PM
Shanah Tovah. (This is most definitely the right thread.)
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:33 PM
I seem to recall that I had a friend who worked for an escort service where sex was explicitly disallowed. (Not kink, I think.) But obviously they're not all like that.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:37 PM
"Sex you up" is contraindicated, for Color Me Badd reasons.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:39 PM
Dan Savage describes it for a chapter in Slouching Toward Gomorrah.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:41 PM
[Jokes about delivery, take out, and Chinese predacted.]
Everyone knows not to call Chinese escort services. Because, you know, half an hour later you're horny again.
Testing, testing...
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:41 PM
As a famous blogger, you shouldn't have to pay for anonymous sex -- women should be lining up outside your door, just so they can tell people they got Ogged.
That's how it works for me: I just put up a post saying that I want to have sex, give the basic body type, etc., that I'm looking for, and tell everyone that the slot will be filled on a first come, first served basis.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:42 PM
Welcome to 5767, bitches.
"Predacted" is a great word.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:45 PM
If it's sex you want, I should think you would get in touch with a prostitute rather than an escort. Right? I'm seriously not getting the motivation behind this post -- my understanding of escort services is that like massage parlors, many but not all are fronts for prostitution -- but how is this noteworthy?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:49 PM
Sooo, in Berlin? My friend? As a favor to a friend of his let a friend of a friend of hers stay for a few nights at his place. The person, we'll call him Xavier, was also attending the Goethe Institut, but only for four weeks, in the afternoon. When Xavier left, I met him, a friend of his also named Xavier, the friend of my friend, a different friend of hers, and a dude from Slovenia at a beer garden, where I learned that the second Xavier and a friend of his had hired two prostitutes on Oranienburgerstraße and been taken back to the apartment one of them kept for business purposes ... and it was right across the street from the Goethe Institut! Those places aren't (I assume) cheap. Apparently Xavier2 and his friend were utterly trashed and got up to nothing.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:49 PM
14: maybe the point is that you don't have to sully yourself by consorting with any old streetwalker, or trouble yourself to actually find one.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:50 PM
Why not refer to the prostitutes Xavier as well, for symmetry?
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:53 PM
as Xavier
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:54 PM
16: It's a class thing, for sure.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:56 PM
tell everyone that the slot will be filled on a first come, first served basis
You make quintuple entendre look so effortless.
Posted by Hamilton Lovecraft | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:57 PM
The two guys I'm calling Xavier did actually have the same name in real life.
Didn't ogged once remonstrate with profgrrrrl for wearing too-high boots? Or something like that?
I'd suggest that if ogged really wants to find out if they sex him up, he should make the call, and liveblog it, and let us know if it really is a "GFE", but I suspect it's been so long since he had a GF that he wouldn't be able to tell; plus, I'd find suggesting that the littlest bit distasteful.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 7:58 PM
20: What do you mean?
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 8:00 PM
Girl Friend Experience. I've done some research but never dived in. If I had unlimited funds, who knows?
They often seem to want references from previous sex care providers you have retained. I dunno what you do for references if it's your first time seeking professional help.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 8:01 PM
and let us know if it really is a "GFE",
There's more or less no way that can be true, no? "Girlfriend" for an hour is completely meaningless. (And if not, that's really, really depressing.) Since he probably actually misses the girlfriend part, this is probably not the way to go.
Ogged, you really need to rent Fearless.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 8:10 PM
I still think everyone in your story should be called Xavier, especially the dude from Slovenia.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 8:11 PM
Ogged, you really need to rent Fearless
Does this bear some obvious relation to the topic at hand, or is this like your Apt Pupil obsession?
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 8:15 PM
It's not clear to me why Ben introduced so many characters in 15 who didn't end up having anything to do with the story he wanted to tell.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 8:15 PM
13 gets it exactly right. Apples and honey all up in the hizzy.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 8:34 PM
Guess what? You can also get dope delivered to your door!
Whatta country!
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 8:41 PM
And Heidi Fleiss is setting up a brothel in Nevada for us ladies. No outcall, tho'...
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 8:56 PM
I fear the stamina problem will be insurmountable, DE.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 9:04 PM
31: In that video, it's the man who's being the ice queen!
ha!
ha
um
Posted by Stub | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 9:10 PM
Ogged, obviously, you want to pay me as a Research Assistant to discover the answer to these questions.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 9:24 PM
31: Haven't you heard of Viagra? Besides, it seems as if most of the professional athletes are on steroids and those nasty drugs kill libido. It's like that Jefferson Airplane song: "One pill makes you larger/One pill makes you small..."
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 9:36 PM
Research Assistant in charge of satisfying Purely Academic Curiosities.
Posted by redfoxtailshrub | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 9:53 PM
Isn't Viagra kinda dangerous if you take it every day?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 9:54 PM
That sounds like a question for your Research Assistant to investigate.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 10:11 PM
It's not clear to me why Ben introduced so many characters in 15 who didn't end up having anything to do with the story he wanted to tell.
To set the scene.
I actually think this is where ogged wants to reconsider girl27's application of yore.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 10:18 PM
So why didn't you name any of them except for the two Xaviers?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 10:20 PM
The scene involved several shadowy half-personages floating around the perimeter whose involvement was, but whose named specificity was not, important. Why you gotta hassle me so?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 10:22 PM
I bought a bedside table from craigslist today and finally, finally there are drawers in my room!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 10:23 PM
Why you gotta hassle me so?
Don't worry about it, man. L'shanah tovah.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 10:25 PM
Isn't Viagra kinda dangerous if you take it every day?
Can be taken daily, but like anything else some people are more susceptible to side effects than others. There's leeway in the dosage, can vary from (as I recall) 25mg to 100mg tablets. They're something like 8 or 10 bucks a pill, so there's this, cutters so you can get a prescription for 100mg pills, then cut them into 25mg dosages to save money.
There's an episode of Big Love where Bill is pounding so much Viagra trying to keep up with the three wives thing that he starts having problems with his vision.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 10:37 PM
Ogged should call escort service and ask if they have a cancer patient discount.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-22-06 11:59 PM
""I could just step off this cliff" feeling"
uhh--yeah. Into a dumpster filled with exploited victims, self-loathing losers, wasted lives, and tawdriness.
It is a revolting sight down there, but the good news is that there's almost no danger of falling in by accident.
I mean, you're not suggesting that you're actually *attracted* to that sort of squalid filth, are you?
Sexual predation on girls who are being exploited as much by their johns as by their pimps? Touching another person whose feelings towards you range anywhere from boredom on a good day to utter disgust and loathing combined with fear on the bad days?
You're talking about lives wasted, lives ruined, lives stunted warped and miserable. It's a sickening prospect indeed.
But surely you're not saying something in all this actually *attracts* you? Or that the world-wide exploitation of women is something you think is good fodder for fantasy, or for jokes?
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 4:31 AM
Well, that seems to have ended the discussion.
Cold takeout leftovers, anyone?
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 5:58 AM
If you like the kind of sex you sometimes get with one night stands - and I do - the right kind of whore (in the right kind of market) will certainly give you a night to remember. From my limited experience, I can only give you a few tips:
- You should find someone who operates without a pimp
- You should find someone who will actually enjoy having sex with you
- You should hire her for the whole night (it may cost)
- For peace of mind afterwards, and for both of your sakes, you absolutely must practice safe sex. (I suppose you're only likely to get the choice in foreign locations, where the culture may be different, and condom use is not considered mandatory.)
The plusses? The existential adventure. It's very exciting, and the sex can be great for both of you. The minuses? It's very exciting (i.e. terrifying). It's also more than a little bit sleazy and no one (apart, perhaps from a few close male friends) will ever approve. Good or bad, it is undeniably part of what life has to offer.
Posted by Anonymous Client | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 7:21 AM
45: Can we expand this to a general principle that it's immoral for anyone to use another person's labor power and keep the profits for themselves? Or to ask anyone to work in unsafe conditions or with unreasonable customers?
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 7:25 AM
do we need to expand it to some more general principle in order for it to apply within its own domain?
oh--and anonymous client?
"- You should find someone who will actually enjoy having sex with you"
enjoy your self-deception much?
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 8:27 AM
That was, indeed, pretty funny. Wouldn't you think that 'Actually enjoying sex with you' would include 'not charging for it'?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 8:52 AM
Maybe Anonymous Client meant "someone who will actually enjoy [getting paid for] having sex with you." I mean, if you love whatcha do...
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 8:55 AM
right, but this is someone who thinks they can recommend a practice by saying "Good or bad, it's undeniably part of what life has to offer".
as is putting your hand in a running garbage disposal. As is stealing twinkies from the 7-11. As is--well, you can continue the list.
If there are any things it is wrong, inconsiderate, self-destructive, or merely juvenile to do, then they too are undeniably part of what life has to offer.
you're going to have to try harder than that if you really want to burnish your jenseits von böse street cred.
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:00 AM
49: Yeah, fine, the sex trade is bad. I'm reading Marx currently, about the early days of capitalism (currently being replayed in the Third World, to our benefit), and it doesn't seem to me that prostitution is qualitatively worse than what the capitalists would do to everyone if the state didn't step in.
Maybe this means that we should legalize and regulate the sex trade -- but maybe that would be impossible, because it would mean recognizing that the majority of us end up selling our bodies and letting someone else take the majority of the revenue our bodies produce.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:14 AM
Maybe this means that we should legalize and regulate the sex trade
I think this may be a good idea from a harm-reduction point of view. Doesn't change the fact that anyone having sex with a prostitute is overwhelmingly likely to be deluding himself if he thinks she's having a good time.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:20 AM
likely to be deluding himself
I thought one of this blog's central projects was ogged's self-delusion and our complicity in that delusion. I'm so confused now.
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:34 AM
54: See, this is the kind of innovative thinking that will help Democrats to reach out to those who are disaffected with the political process.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:36 AM
I think prostitution should definitely be decriminalized, but the only people I've known who've worked as prostitutes or strippers/lap dancers have been either junkies or messed up women who were sexually abused as kids, or both! the exacta of sex workerdom. no, I guess I did meet one woman who seemed like a no-nonsense businesswoman about the whole thing, and made $50,000 tax-free per year. of course, it may be that we just didn't know each other well enough for me to hear about the sexual abuse part. we only met twice.
Posted by alameida | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:51 AM
49, 50: Based on what I've read from sex workers, it's not total self-deception. Some prostitutes, escorts, whatever they prefer to call themselves, like their work. Some don't. For some, it's a trap, for some, it's better than retail. I suggest Real Live Nude Girl by Carol Queen as a starting point. I know I've talked with escorts; I recall thinking at the time that they liked their job better than I liked mine.
That said, we live in a sexist culture that's deeply confused about sex, so it's easy to over generalize in any direction and it's usually an exploitation of power to hire sex workers. I suggest self-reflection and research in place of certainty.
Posted by NBarnes | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:54 AM
I recall thinking at the time that they liked their job better than I liked mine
This impression is definitely out there, at least in interviews and things I've read. But I'm suspicious of it, because sex workers must internalize a lot of defensiveness, so they're quite unlikely to admit (even to themselves) that they feel exploited or used, and if, like alameida says, a lot of them were abused, their "liking" of the job isn't necessarily a healthy thing. But then you get into issues of autonomy and choice and paternalism, so it gets a little hairy.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 10:00 AM
"I suggest self-reflection and research in place of certainty."
why "in place of"? Why not "as a means of arriving at"?
That's like saying "I suggest doing lab-experiment in place of discovering scientific results."
I'm all for self-reflection and research. (And self-research, as an alternative to hiring sex-workers, for that matter).
But certainty is not always a symptom of naivete, unreflectiveness, or lack of research.
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 10:02 AM
I'd like to reclaim the word "hairy" from the forces of pejoration, but the fact is that whenever I see a guy in the locker room who's as hairy as I am, I think, "that's just never attractive."
By the way, Adam, I think most of these escorts work independently, so they don't share their revenue with anyone.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 10:07 AM
59: It gets hairy 'cause it's a little true for everybody, and a lot true for some people, and a little true for everybody in all careers. Almost everybody only does thier job 'cause they're paid to, and almost everybody tries to find a job that they can enjoy well enough that combined with being paid, it's a nice enough life. Our culture loves to economically exploit people into doing its scut work. Prostitution is worse than most jobs in this regard, because we, as a culture, are very very messed up about sex, about gender, and about power. But it's not unlike other jobs.
So saying, 'I think a lot of prostitutes are victims, to a greater or lesser degree, of false consciousness' is true, but not necessarily the last word on the subject.
Posted by NBarnes | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 10:07 AM
One acquaintance who used to be a stripper to pay for college noted that there's a non-insignificant percentage of women who get into it intending to do it for a short period of time (just to make some quick cash, to put yourself through college, etc.) but end up getting sucked in, either through drug use or simply because the first 'real' job after college probably doesn't pay as well as stripping. And those were women that weren't abused or junkies going in. Nasty profession.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 10:12 AM
NBarnes, I'm inferring the following argument from what you've said: Lots of people hate their jobs, or do it only for money. We only treat prostitution differently because it involves sex. This is implies that sex is somehow a special case. But it's been a pretty good-sized project of the forces of goodness for the last few decades to demythologize sex, and to put it on the shelf next to most other human activities: to show that it's not a special case. So our response to prostitution is, at least formally, not clear.
Is that right?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 10:14 AM
61: So if Democrats supported legalizing prostitution, they could play it as supporting entrepreneurship! (I know that not all prostitutes have pimps, but I was responding to kid bitzer's comment, in which pimps were part of the exploitation.)
Has anyone seen the Daily Show segment on pimps?
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 10:14 AM
The job nature of prostitution means that, if prostitutes hate their jobs, they're just like lots of people. My ultimate job was so terrible that I didn't sleep well for about 18 months, and I finally made a big financial sacrifice and took early retirement to maintain my sanity, such as it is. I was seriously in danger of picking up a felony assault beef.
Likewise, it doesn't prove that prostitutes don't enjoy it just because they're paid. If they do enjoy it some, it just means that they have an OK job, which lots of people do, but not most. It doesn't mean that they're living a life of ecstasy in fairyland.
I've never understood the argument that strippers were mostly abused in childhood, so stripping is abusive. For one thing, a lot of the same people who say that also say that most women were abused in childhood. And on the other hand, what's happening now doesn't cause past events.
Portland, OR, is the stripper capital of the universe and I've met a moderate number of strippers socially. (Reed girls sometimes work as strippers, rather than as waitresses for 25% of the pay. Go figure.). Some really do enjoy the attention and their ability to manipulate men. Some frame it in an avant-garde post-modern liberationist way. Some have artistic or comedic pretensions. For many it's just a better-paying job than anything else they could get. My guess is that a better-than-average stripper makes more money than an entry-level lawyer and probably enjoys it about as much. (Taking debt into consideration, my guess is that most MDs are 35 or so before they're financially better off than fairly successful strippers.)
Strippers always have to deal with the fact that a new person they meet will reject them, once they find out that they're strippers. In super-hip Portland, that's not much of a problem; in the slacker world, strippers are the queens and duchesses because they're not broke.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 10:18 AM
How many strippers have successful careers past age 35, though?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 10:20 AM
It's not a lifetime career, though I have met a 40-year-old stripper. Quite a few were financing school, one of them law school. A lot probably go into the restaurant biz. (The whole restaurant biz is riddled with drugs and alcoholism, as is the music biz.) I think that quite a few marry clients or whatever you call them, on the basis of a shared realism about life.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 10:24 AM
I'd say the upper limit is closer to 45, especially if they don't have children, but that might just reflect my own sick tastes.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 10:26 AM
Attitudes like kid bitzer's are total reaction formations.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 11:07 AM
64: Tim, I'm not one of those people that say that 'sex is just another thing'. Sex is clearly important to humans and 'means something' in ways that most other human activities do not. However, I think our culture regards sex in ways that are unhealthy and... divergent from the ways that sex is authentically special.
Also, I tend to believe that sex is important and special to almost everybody, but differently important and special to almost everybody. The way I feel about sex and the way I relate to it is very different in important ways from how other people around me do; lots of people that agree that sex is special and important may not agree about a lot else about it.
I think there's a lot of tendancy to over-generalize about sex. I think a lot of people universalize aspects of their sexual experience in error. And I especially think that it's almost always a mistake to talk about how someone else experiences sex and their own sexuality, and moreso when talking about groups of people. And so I don't like to make generalizations about prostitutes, but prefer rather to talk about specific examples of sex workers talking about their own experiences.
Posted by NBarnes | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 11:11 AM
Oh, and, thank you for the promt, Tim. That should serve as a response to 60, as well.
Posted by NBarnes | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 11:12 AM
comments like ben wolfson's are total reaction formations.
(i.e., nyah nyah back atcha).
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 11:22 AM
Not that long ago I was offered 5K a month by an out of town business man who was in the city 2 or 3 times a month. I have to admit I considered it. After taxes on my tuition remission, I take home quite a measly salary for NYC, I have debts, etc. But prostitution is not just like any other job, and shrugging, lots of people are exploited, hate their jobs, etc. seems silly to me, until we are getting down to really ruthless levels of exploitation. Sex is intimate and personal and central to self and identity, and even though its meaning might be understood differently by different people, I'd be surprised if there were anyone for whom selling it was not qualitatively different from any other sort of labor. You might be willing to deal with that and try to isolate its effects for the money, but it's not the same.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 11:28 AM
Ogged's so hairy, he ain't that hairy.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 11:44 AM
Tia, give him my number, wouldja?
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 11:52 AM
I'm not sure that everyone feels that way you do, Tia.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 12:22 PM
76: He said he wasn't into blondes.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 12:31 PM
I have never had any interest in prostitutes, nor very much in strippers. For me it is as simple as not wanting anyone who doesn't want me. That level of role-playing would be intolerable at home, unspeakable. I have been told, I think by Amanda, that my attitude shows a lack of respect of controlling personality or something.
But lying during sex sucks.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 12:42 PM
I think that both prostitutes and johns are living in the realization that normal ways of sexual relating (marriage, dating, transgressive orgies, hooking up, singles bars) are not working for them. So they figure something else out.
As I've said, sexual happiness is regarded as the norm, but it really isn't.
No actual skeletons in my closet regarding prostitution. Strippers, yes.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 12:59 PM
52: You're right, of course. I should have gone with something along these lines:
"It's the business of very few people to be independent: that is a right of the strong. And whoever attempts it—even with the best right to it, but without being compelled to—shows by that action that he is probably not only strong but excessively daring. He is entering a labyrinth; he is increasing a thousand-fold the dangers which life already brings with it, not the least of which is the fact that no one's eyes see how and where he goes astray, gets isolated, and is torn apart by some cavern-dwelling Minotaur of conscience. If such a person comes to a bad end, that happens so far away from men's understanding that they feel nothing and have no sympathy—and he cannot go back any more! He can't even go back to human compassion."
So true.
Posted by Anonymous Client | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 1:03 PM
I have a feeling that Anonymous Client has an unfortunate incident with a horse in his future, followed by an unhealthy relationship with his sister.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 1:06 PM
much better!
Now I believe everything *else* you've said, too.
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 1:06 PM
78: was he into dog rescue? That's an awful lot of money-- I'll buy some Ms Clairol.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 1:07 PM
adam--are you sure it was the horse first, then the sister?
I thought it was the sister first, then the horse.
(Tragedy always repeats itself, first as sistery, then as horse?)
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 1:08 PM
I am not talking about the woman here, and with a friendship and mutual desire it would be good sex and gift, and nothing wrong with that. But otherwise it is just jacking off in somebody else's body, and that would digust me about myself. I never seem able to manage the necessary objectification.
I have or had degrees, much lesser, of the same problem during casual sex. Objectification, role-playing, politeness, kindness...emotional constraint during physical intimacy seemed...I don't know.
More than one woman told me I wanted their soul.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 1:08 PM
Hey I read the sister's book! Who amongst you can claim such erudtion and devotion?
81 really scared me today. Damn I'm in a mood.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 1:12 PM
"81 really scared me today"
maybe because it gives voice to the megalomaniacal fantasies of every two-bit banana-republic dictator who fancies himself a welt-historischer demi-god?
maybe because our country is currently run by a couple of them?
you know--the old restraints are gone. Quaint customs. Mere personal virtue. We, the few, strong, daring ones don't need to chain ourselves to mere convention (or mere Conventions)--indeed, we would be wrong to chain ourselves. We would be wronging: ourselves!
Cheap thugs always like this stuff. And it is scary that they're in power.
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 1:26 PM
You know, these days it's not difficult to find blogs written by women who work as escorts.
I will say that while this:
Sexual predation on girls who are being exploited as much by their johns as by their pimps? Touching another person whose feelings towards you range anywhere from boredom on a good day to utter disgust and loathing combined with fear on the bad days?
certainly describes a fair amount of the sex workers out here, it certainly doesn't match what little I know about the realities of the high end of the market.
Posted by Josh | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 1:26 PM
88:Naw man, it is always about me.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 1:43 PM
true, true: where there are humans, there is variety.
But how impressed should we be by the purported exceptions?
Too much of this sounds like variations on "my aunt smoked cigarettes for 80 years and it never did her any harm."
Perhaps she did, and perhaps it didn't. That does not exculpate the tobacco industry.
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 1:45 PM
Most people outgrow the Nietzsche phase once they turn 20. The rest grow up to give embarassing talks at Rutgers.
I agree with Tia. I can imagine a possible world where a bad day at the sex worker job was nothing more and nothing less than a bad day at the lawyer job, but that possible world is one in which sex has no meaning at all, or at least no more meaning than a usual profession has. Not so sure that would be a very pleasant world, come to think of it, but it doesn't look much like the one we have now.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 1:47 PM
certainly describes a fair amount of the sex workers out here
Er, that should be out there.
Posted by Josh | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 1:51 PM
As Josh notes, the high end of the market's much, much different from the low end. I've known three graduate students--two (gay) males, one female--who supplemented their income working as escorts/performers-in-light-"homemade"-bondage-videos-for-personal-consumption. (A phenomenon which has been discussed here, or hereabouts, recently, I think.) Both males loved their work, but as highly-educated, young gay males in the Los Angeles area, they got to choose their clients. (One even got paid to spend a summer in Italy.) I never talked to the female about it, however, she always sounded excited before heading off to a client's house.
Posted by S.E.K. | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 1:51 PM
You see. McManus has just explained how sick normal relations can be.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 2:24 PM
I'm really disagreeing now. I don't know any prostitutes, but I knaow that some strippers actually do like their jobs.
A lot of stuff is really hard for me to understand, but to me having sex with a succession of random strangers met in bars is about as hard to understand as prostituting oneself. One of Heidi Fleiss's sex workers was quoted something like "Hey, I like to screw, and if I'm getting paid, that's better yet". She was very high-end, of course.
"Nothing more and nothing less than a bad day at the lawyer job": my own bad job wasn't a lawyer job, but I ended up angry and stressed all day, every day, for about 18 months, to the point that I was acting out destructively after work, and also feared that I would do something on the job to get me fired, or even prosecuted. Many non-sex-worker jobs have very, very high negatives.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 2:36 PM
Hey - ogged should offer to pay B.
I was surprised she still had that post up, actually, I thought she would have deleted it after the fact. I know, I know, I'm projecting my middle class, patriarchal false consciousness on to her. Sorry.
Posted by cw | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 2:36 PM
I can imagine a possible world where a bad day at the sex worker job was nothing more and nothing less than a bad day at the lawyer job, but that possible world is one in which sex has no meaning at all, or at least no more meaning than a usual profession has.
The meaninglessness of paid sex doesn't entail that sex has no meaning at all.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 2:37 PM
There's plenty of sex workers who'd dispute the thesis that paid sex is meaningless. Again I recommend Carol Queen's writing on the subject as a starting point.
Posted by NBarnes | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 2:56 PM
Okay. "Even if we assume that paid sex is meaningless...."
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 2:59 PM
Okay:
I don't find dance performance mutually degrading, from ballet to Fosse to Cunningham, and I should be able to imagine a continuum...
I don't find massage mutually degrading, and I should be able to imagine a continuum...
So unless someone can help me with a clear qualitative difference somewhere along the line of a pleasurable massage, a handjob, blowjob, penetration...
I must presume the problem is mine, and likely sexist.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 3:21 PM
The meaninglessness of paid sex doesn't entail that sex has no meaning at all.
Not quite what I said. Part of the reason, aside from the exploitation aspect, that we have a problem with thinking of prostitution as just like any other job is that we treat sex specially. Even if we're not all religiously-prudey about it, we might think that it's an important part of our lives, or love, or part of our identity.
I was postulating that in order for sex work to be as unproblematic as working as a barrista (my original post didn't say totally meaningless, just as meaningless as most jobs), that sex would have to become much, much less important. I am unconvinced that that would be a good thing.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 5:33 PM
bob--
sounds like you are trying to talk yourself out of a reasonable position by means of a bad argument. You're better off with the reasonable position.
Sex is different. (related to the "meaningfulness" Cala has adverted to). As a result, it can be degrading in a way few other things can be.
Everyone not in the grips of an ideology knows that. It's hard to say why it's different; it's hard to measure the dimensions and degrees of its difference.
Those degrees and dimensions differ for different people, making it all the harder to figure out why and to what extent sex is different. It's all very confusing, and it would certainly be nice to get clearer about it.
But your line of thought in 101 will not get you clearer about it.
I mean, I can hold my breath for one minute without much effort. I can hold it for three minutes without suffering permanent ill effects. "So unless someone can help me with a clear qualitative difference somewhere along the line" between one minute and one hour, then my belief that there's something different about not breathing for an hour must be based on...sexism?
Look: there's a reason why nearly everyone has a deep intuition that sex is not on the same continuum as a casual handshake. And it's not sexism. (Don't trust me--ask the commenters who have been the most vocal on this point.)
I'm not saying its forever shrouded in inscrutable mystery. I'm just saying that you seldom get the correct explanations by rejecting the observed data.
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 6:15 PM
Okay, yes, sex is different.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 8:04 PM
I am glad this isn't posting from my usual ip so that I can say that my one experience of prostitution, which I entered into out of curiosity and a frank desire for the money and a sense that if freely entered into, blah blah blah, how bad can it be? Kind of convinced me (and yeah, anecdotal sample of one) that there may well be no such thing as workable prostitution.
The problem I ran into was that, despite the client being pretty nice, I felt compelled to give him his money's worth: in other words, to act like the perfect girlfriend. Which is not only extremely tiring, but also kind of awful. And then of course the client really likes you because, after all, you're so nice and agreeable and pleasant and yadda yadda, and this means you have to continue to be nice and agreeable and pleasant (if you want to continue the relationship) or else figure out a reason not to do it again.
So yeah, it wasn't the sex per se; it's more all the other things that, i think inevitably, are bound up in sex. Issues of trust, intimacy, desire, all that stuff. Very hard to negotiate honestly or fairly, especially when you throw all sorts of other realities about gender roles and male/female relationships into the mix. I'm sure there are women who find it just a job, or who find it enjoyable even in some respects, and I can see how the Annie Sprinkles and Suzie Brights of the world could see it as a kind of teaching vocation, but most of the time that's not how it's working.
Posted by notmyusualself | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 8:14 PM
103:ok :)
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 8:15 PM
105 was posted by Gary Farber.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 8:20 PM
107: Not hard to discern, for those who bother to read his blog, where he's been writing about this for months.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 8:26 PM
97: Read that post more carefully. I never said I had done it; merely that I was thinking about it.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 8:28 PM
"Thinking about it" seems to be about where ogged is too, if kid bitzer hasn't scared him straight.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 8:42 PM
103: Look: there's a reason why nearly everyone has a deep intuition that sex is not on the same continuum as a casual handshake. And it's not sexism.
Bullshit. Our rather prudish attitudes towards sexuality are driven almost entirely by "morality" and commodification. I do not mean prostitution; I mean the commodification of virginity, the judgement of emotional attachment by the size of the stone in the ring or the gifts that precede it, the judging of women as Madonna or whore ["the girl you don't take home to mother"] that is so built into our culture.
Is sex always different from a casual handshake? No, tho' it can be, much in the way that an intimate conversation is different, or an in-joke is different. One can choose casual sex, the zipless fuck, fuck-buddy-no-strings-attached; one can choose something else that one invests with more import. It can mean something, it can mean nothing, depending on circumstance and perception.
Is your basic street hooker being exploited and abused? I'd say that she [or he] is, about 99.9% of the time - drug addicts, runaways, people with fragile grasps on reality, people under duress, people with baggage who sell themselves because they see no other way to survive. Is every person who sells bodily favours exploited? Not at all. There is a vast difference between the street hooker and the high-end callgirl. She [or he] who can choose and refuse clients, who is paid well, who has other options, and has chosen to be a sex worker is not really different from the programmer who sells her skill, the lawyer who sells her expertise. What is different is society's attitude. Does a het male gynecologist slaver over every vagina he examines? Of course not; he partitions his "work" and "personal" lives; it is entirely possible for a sex worker to do the same.
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 8:43 PM
In re "the zipless fuck". I'm not sure what that expression is actually supposed to indicate, but the image was brought to mind.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 8:57 PM
The usual quotation:
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:05 PM
What's that from?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:06 PM
Ben Wolfson is the new Apostropher, just like referring to Daniel Davies' attractiveness is the new bestiality reference.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:08 PM
114: I believe it's an Elmo quote from Sesame Street episode 1006.
Posted by Stub | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:08 PM
Wikipedia on "zipless fuck," coined by Erica Jong. Jong explains, "when you came together, zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. For the true ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never got to know the man very well."
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:09 PM
107 and 108 made my night.
Also, since my post failed I'm dying to know who this is aimed at:
In an effort to curb malicious comment posting by abusive users, I've enabled a feature that requires a weblog commenter to wait a short amount of time before being able to post again. Please try to post your comment again in a short while. Thanks for your patience.
Also, it looks like the page that takes you to doesn't have the Secret Wolfson Hack enabled.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:09 PM
The source.
(I haven't even read the damn thing. Where's your cultural literacy, people?)
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:10 PM
I think upthread there was some equation of one night stands with meaningless sex--I just wanna say that in my own life, I don't see it that way. I still fondly remember trying to toss blueberries into the belly button of my second ever one night stand and eating them out; with all the good ones there's been a lot of mutual tenderness and care and humor. I've never had any sex that I'd describe as meaningless.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:13 PM
118, what Secret Wolfson Hack? Also, that delay thing has been around since forever.
I still fondly remember trying to toss blueberries into the belly button of my second ever one night stand and eating them out;
Blueberries have genitals?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:16 PM
Blueberries have genitals?
You know that little concave bit at the bottom? Yeah.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:18 PM
Where do you think baby blueberries come from?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:18 PM
Gosh.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:19 PM
121: x=y
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:25 PM
Oh. Oh well.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 9:27 PM
I think it's too simple to just say that all our attitudes about sex are due to sexism or religion or patriarchy or whathave you. Obviously it's hard, if not impossible to distinguish what is and what isn't, but there's surely a difference between mutually consensual meaningless sex, and sex that happens as a transaction. There's also all the overhead involved with sex--pregnancy, disease risk, penetration, etc--most of which obviously falls on the woman in a sex-for-money situation, even if sexism were completely out of the picture.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 11:03 PM
Obviously it's hard
ATM
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-23-06 11:13 PM
Offhand, I'd say that 111 and 127 demolish kid bitzer argument in 103 that sex is 'special'.
Also, I have especial distaste for the statement, 'there's a reason why nearly everyone has a deep intuition that sex is not on the same continuum as a casual handshake'. For starters, you qualify it as 'nearly everyone', which leaves some people... what? I never claimed that everybody shoud want to sex or buy sex. I never claimed that everybody could buy or sell sex and be happy with the experience and themselves. I'm saying that some people report (and it's an objective fact that they report this) that their experience of selling sex has not been as degrading, humiliating, or otherwise as negative as you think it... is? Ought to be? Is for them because you know better than to believe their self-reporting? If your statement is non-universal, and you admit that it is not, I'm not sure what your point relative to the larger discussion is.
And then we move on to the phrase 'deep intuition'. I'm quite confidant that we could find other 'deep intuition'-based policies. We could take polls and find out if disgust at homosexuality is a cultural trait or 'deep intuition'. Or perhaps if traditional gender roles are a social construct or if 'deep intuition' tells us they are innate.
Posted by NBarnes | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 1:36 AM
97: Read that post more carefully. I never said I had done it; merely that I was thinking about it.
Sorry if my comment implied that you had. I just couldn't resist the reference given the topic. I think you should delete that post, given the small chance of losing anonymity.
Posted by cw | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 1:47 AM
I do believe some people could like it OK, have it as an acceptable job, etc. I'm just saying I know people who would have said all that at the time, but were really drug addicts, messed-up people etc. actually, I do know a woman who used to act in porn and work in live peep shows in SF, and who really thought it was fun, sexy and great. I wasn't thinking about her when I wrote the comment above. she is just a healthy person who likes kinky sex. irritatingly much, maybe, to where she's talking about her sex life all the time, but that's not unhealthy, it's just boring.
Posted by alameida | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 2:09 AM
While Teo is out searching the laundromat for punani like De Leon searching for the Fountain, multiple women on this site alone have been offered substantial sums of money for sex by (guessing from the tone) people who were not all that unattractive.
This is why men kill themselves at 4 times the rate of women.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 3:32 AM
I think people who talk about their sex lives all the time should be quarantined for the good of the rest of us.
Posted by Nworb Werdna | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 3:53 AM
129
to say that 103 contained an 'argument' would, I think, be going a bit too far. It merely tried to highlight the plausibility of a premise.
That sort of thing happens pretty often when you get close to argumentative bedrock. It's very hard to argue that the experience of pain is intrinsically bad, but if you encounter someone who is trying to talk himself into the view that pain is really a good thing, it's worth reminding him that it hurts a lot. That's not an argument either, but it's worth saying.
Appeals to intuition are, of course, notoriously dodgy and subject to abuse. Even as I wrote it, I was aware that 103 could be parodied by replacing 'sex' with 'race', or 'gender', or many other things where we have come to distrust what once seemed obvious intuitions. But the fact that some alleged intuitions are the result of racism/homophobia etc. doesn't mean that all of them are.
And in general I'll take a widely shared intuition over an apriori argument any time. Zeno had some great arguments that motion is impossible, and most of us have no more than the intuition that they've somehow, not sure how, just gotta be wrong. They are.
Does 127 demolish my view? You might want to ask the author. I think she makes a good case that 1) the intuition that sex is especially fraught, charged, meaningful is *not* merely an artifact of sexism and 2) that we might profitably look for the origins of its special status in the differential burdens and risks it imposes on women.
That looks like the right direction to me, though it would take a long time to unpack all the complications. Here's one: the risks and burdens of, e.g. pregnancy, can actually be lowered now, and for that I say hooray. But I suspect that the complex swirl of emotional issues surrounding sex--trust, power, intimacy, vulnerability--is not changed overnight with as much ease.
Does 105 demolish your view? It is certainly another story of someone who thought it would all be easy, and then it wasn't easy after all. I think that's the common experience. Maybe not universal, but very common.
Again--how impressed should we be by the reports of exceptional experience? I'm interested in the 99.9% of the time; you can have the 0.1.
Maybe there are some people who thrive on arsenic. I would tend to be skeptical of the reports, but maybe there have been a few cases of people who ate it and prospered. Still when you see a bunch of kids saying "hey gang, I've heard it's really fun eating arsenic and let's all try some, okay?" then you sort of shake your head and think "hooboy. This isn't going to work out well in the long run."
Legislation, morality, education and advice all have to be pitched towards the 99.9%. Especially when our egos would like to flatter us that we are each part of that special, privileged, 0.1%. Every teenage kid thinks he's the special exception that drives better when he's drunk. Every one thinks he'll be able to smoke a few cigarettes, but not get hooked. We'd all like to think that the downsides are only for others, especially if we can be daring, counter-cultural and Nietzschean while we're doing it.
But for the vast majority of people, those vanities are going to wind up being false.
Remember where this started: someone said "hey, kids, I just found out that all of the cool kids are hiring prostitutes and I'm thinking that sounds like fun too!"
And my advice was: don't do it, counselor. The odds against you are real long. The chances of its winding up badly--for you, for her, for everyone affected--are real high.
Now some of you seem to want to hold onto the possibility of unicorns, and you seem to think that second hand reports of unicorns demolish my arguments (even though most of the first-hand reports on this thread have gone "I thought it was a unicorn but it didn't turn out so well").
But you know what? I actually don't mind that much if there are exceptional, anomalous cases, so long as no one is holding them up as attractive, aspirational paradigms for the rest of us.
Back in 92, Cala pointed out that maybe quasi-humans with a fairly different make-up from ours could do sex-work as a mere day-job, but it wasn't clear that we'd want to be creatures like that. That's about how I feel about the reported unicorns. Maybe there are already some people, in this actual world, for whom sex-work is not exploitation. But I suspect we might not want to be those people. And they certainly should not be used as the basis for advice to others.
For the vast majority of women, prostitution is a horrible racket. For the vast majority of men, getting involved in prostitution will be a step into degradation. That's the basis of my advice. Unicorns don't demolish it.
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:54 AM
oh--and clearly to get to the bottom of this, we'd all have to be a lot clearer (than I've been) about "meaningfulness", and what sorts of things have it and in what ways. Sorry.
Gone on too long already.
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 6:10 AM
Yup. I came into this thread to make fun of Anonymous Customer for thinking that the prostitutes he hired were having a great time, and nothing's changed my mind about it. I don't have a strong opinion as to whether prostitution is necessarily a uniquely horrible experience for the woman or if it can be no worse than any other job (well, I have strong opinions, but they vary on a moment by moment basis). But 105 gives a reason for what I think of someone who's hiring a prostitute:
The problem I ran into was that, despite the client being pretty nice, I felt compelled to give him his money's worth: in other words, to act like the perfect girlfriend. Which is not only extremely tiring, but also kind of awful. And then of course the client really likes you because, after all, you're so nice and agreeable and pleasant and yadda yadda, and this means you have to continue to be nice and agreeable and pleasant (if you want to continue the relationship) or else figure out a reason not to do it again.
A woman not under duress, getting into it partially to make a point about how bad can it be, and the best it gets under those circumstances is kind of awful. If you're hiring a hooker, you're either pathetically deluded about thinking she's enjoying herself; you enjoy having sex without giving a damn whether your partner wants to be there; or you're enjoying the fact that she'd rather not be there.
Now 105 didn't sound like the experience was an absolute nightmare for her, but I'd really rather masturbate than have sex with someone who was thinking about me that way.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 6:24 AM
I'd just repeat that prostitution, from either point of view, might be an OK choice for someone whose other options, for whatever reason, aren't that good either. It's not something to be recommended to up and coming young people of good family, but most people aren't up and coming young people of good family. There seems to be a tendency here to put prostitution in a category by itself among the not-so-good things of the world, as an abomination rather than just a sin (as our Christian friends sometimes put it).
There are also intermediate forms which are common enough but somehow less abominable, e.g. the golddigger and the trophy wife. High-end prostitutes used to be called courtesans, and they didn't stand on streetcorners waiting for random strangers.
As I understand there is a small amount of legit first person literature on the subject (i.e. not male fantasy), and it's not all victim literature. Though having been a prostitute is not something anyone is going to brag about, especially if they've gone on to respectability, and probably most testimony is from the rehab / repentance angle.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:11 AM
I agree with LB that prostitution is not "necessarily a uniquely horrible experience", and with JE that it "might be an OK choice for someone whose other options, for whatever reason, aren't that good either".
Sounds right--there are lots of other wretched existences in the world, and compared to some of them, prostitution of the gilded cage variety looks pretty good.
And I certainly agree that you have to assess your choices against your options. A friend of ours, a Bengali woman who grew up in Dhaka, has argued in print that practically all of the sweat-shops that exploit young girls still provide a better life for them than the options they had back in the village--marriage at puberty, early pregnancy, no autonomy of any kind, ostracism at widowhood, etc. etc. etc. Moderately bad things look good when compared to horrible things. But moderately bad things are still not to be celebrated, endorsed, or encouraged.
I don't think being a prostitute is even a sin, much less an abomination. But I think that the business as a whole is still exploitative, sexist, demeaning, and pernicious. Maybe we can point to particular individuals, particular couples, particular transactions, that had no consequences, or at least no immediate ones. But the system as a whole has lots and lots of consequences, and they are almost uniformly harmful ones.
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:58 AM
kid bitzer, while I've enjoyed and am pretty sympathetic to your comments on this thread, (I think) ogged meant not that he would ever do it, or even that it sounded like fun; just that the fact that it was available as a possibility, though a dangerous, self damaging possibility, felt dizzying and bizarre, in the same way your ability to take your own life does.
How's that for charity? Boo-yah.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:02 AM
Also, I'd like to point out that as much as our attitudes toward sex may be constructed (and honestly, I'm not sure how true that is, or how useful a frame that is; is there any human culture which values bodily integrity so little that a penis or a finger in an orifice is not a big deal, in some sense? I'd like someone to point me to a sex worker writing that their experince of having sex for money was not emotionally different from their past as a barista, in ways that implicated their feelings about their body, about intimacy, etc. Please note that this is not a claim that sex work is uniformly horrible. I thought about doing it), at least to that extent, and probably more, the desire for a prostitute is also socially constructed. Prostitution is taking place in a context where we understand sex to ideally be mutual; the active desire for non-mutual sex isn't neutral. The sense of ownership, and therefore, even under the most happy smily circumstances, the tinge of degradation, is hot. I'm quite sure that anyone who'd buy sex from me would have some kind of corruption of the innocent fantasy going on. Men who buy time with prostitutes are buying the privilege of being lied to and flattered (or I guess, with a domme, maybe the reverse). I suppose that there are a few people who are really hard up just for skin contact, but I don't know how you would disentangle that from from the cultural construct that men should want objectified women.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:26 AM
Where angels fear to tread: aren't lying and flattering a part of many, many dating experiences? And relationships? And marriages? Certainly prostitution is not the ideal, but compared to actuality it seems less awful than compared to an ideal. At least a john does not have to talk about starting a dog shelter.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:54 AM
The problem I ran into was that, despite the client being pretty nice, I felt compelled to give him his money's worth: in other words, to act like the perfect girlfriend. Which is not only extremely tiring, but also kind of awful.
Drawing once again on my vast reservoir of experience ...
... My paid-for partner thought it was hilarious to have me give her - how can I put this? - oral pleasure. We didn't have much language in common, so she indicated her preference mainly by pushing my head southwards. And I thought: this is really something I'd rather not do, not tonight, but fair's fair ... and I suspect the combination of reluctance and willingness on my part may even have added to the fun, from her point of view.
Sample of one, obviously.
I'm not especially promiscuous, and as with many others, what I think about promiscuity is this: your experience is enlarged, but at the same time experience makes you stale. This is likely even more of a loss for the prostitute - who's promiscuous by definition - the gradual smothering of a certain aspect of life.
Posted by Anonymous Client | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 9:00 AM
Tia's charity gets it exactly right.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 9:01 AM
Anonymous Client: drawing also from personal experience of a different sort --- you will almost certainly never know if these girls actually enjoyed having sex with you. You'd probably be astonished (if not hurt) by what they have to say about you off the clock. Just so's you know.
Posted by not in that game | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 9:32 AM
Anonymous Client's story gets more interesting -- was he on a sex junket in Thailand or something?
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 9:38 AM
It's totally conceivable that insisting on oral sex was in fact part of the act--look, it's mutual! She wants to get off!
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 9:42 AM
I don't want to rag on Anonymous Client too much--paying for sex once doesn't make you uniquely evil, and sharing the story is appreciated--but I can't resist playing a little. Using my supernatural powers of guessery, I dismiss the Thai angle and say that his escort was...Ukranian.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 9:46 AM
"You'd probably be astonished (if not hurt) by what they have to say about you off the clock."
True of any service profession. Also true of wives and husbands.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 9:47 AM
Offhand, I'd say that 111 and 127 demolish kid bitzer argument in 103 that sex is 'special'.
Actually, my 127 was intended to agree with him that sex--because it involves, among other things, physical penetration and necessary intimacy--is "special." The arguments that "any service job" involves x, y, or z are well and good, but they overlook a pretty fundamental distinction between sex and other forms of labor.
I think LB's 136 gets it mostly right. The flip side of what LB says about clients means that, for the prostitute, she's either doing intimate business (and running some risks, among them rape, which no one here has acknowledged, I don't think) with someone who sees her as basically a thing, or else with someone who is buying not only sex but also, whether he realizes it or not, some pretense of liking/affection/intimacy. That's a pretty fucked up situation to be in, and potentially v. dangerous. Isn't categorizing other people as things basically sociopathic? And haven't we all run into a situation where someone who was under a misapprehension about the true nature of your affection/liking for them got suddenly very angry when they realized that they were wrong?
132: Alternatively, the fact that more than one woman on this board has been offered money for sex tells you a hell of a lot about the relative entitlement of men and the relative vulnerability of women.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 10:12 AM
John, I think your cynicism is confused and wrong. There are some marriages which are basically prostitution, but they're not most of the ones in the contempory United States. Not everyone's relationship is so dishonest; that woman in the bathroom who was caught on tape had extremely kind words for her husband. Lying isn't as essential to dating as you make out, either; the guy did want to start a dog rescue; he so maintained after I asked for honesty as compensation for my trouble, when he knew he had no chance with me and when I was not flattering him in any sense. Maybe he mentioned it to make himself attractive, but I don't think he just read it in Where the Red Fern Grows, or even if he did, he didn't have to; I totally would have fucked him, dog rescure or no dog rescue, if he hadn't had a girlfriend.
Of course no relationship is free of any kind of dishonesty; just the other day I held off telling Clementine that her 98 dollar Anthropologie shirt was fugly until I'd convinced her/she'd decided to return it, but it's different to decide, because of your regard for the other guy or a personal valuation of peace to lie or just to decline to say something than it is to have to lie, in a situation which calls for the freedom to be honest when necessary as much as sex does, because you're being paid. If you all have dating relationships in which you're constructing really elaborate fictions over long periods of time, as opposed to declining to mention someone to protect someone's feelings or choosing to let something go to perserve tranquility, I suspect you're doing something wrong, or, if y'all insist on humility, I'll put it this way: there is a whole universe of people who are not doing that, and enjoying it heartily. That people have fucked up ways of interacting when money isn't involved doesn't mean that money doesn't introduce something that is inherently, structurally fucked up.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 10:39 AM
149: I don't regard my doctor as a 'thing', even though our contact may be intimate. I'm buying a service and the doctor is the agent of that service. We both go away satisfied (and the doctor perhaps also to make jokes about TUBEs and LUVs, etc.).
What I was expecting from my hooker - before the event - was this: fairly awkward sex, likely to be terminated early, payment rendered, contact promptly closed. And an interesting story. And my friends sniggering ...
What I got was this: much better sex than I expected; if the apparent reciprocity was simulated, it was simulated to a high standard, with general good humour and a relaxed attitude all round. And an interesting story. And my friends sniggering ...
Nonetheless, the risks of being a prostitute are as you describe.
Posted by Anonymous Client | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 10:46 AM
Tia, a lot of people live in a less favorable world than yours. Not all, maybe not most, but a lot.
And people less cynical than me sure do complain a lot about their disappointments and betrayals. Of course, when they're happy they're usually less voluble, so I'm getting a skewed sample. But if people want me to stop being cynical, they should only express happy thoughts.
As far as sex being special and something different, I more or less agree, but then, I'm a puritanical cynic. During my time at the fringes of cafe society, I saw people repeatedly jumping into wild and crazy dating experiences which were hazardous and demeaning, or dating people who could afford to "be nice to them", and I ended up not feeling that the one additional step to prostitution would be a big one.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 11:01 AM
yeah, I should make it clear that my point was not to go beating on ogged, whom I don't know, nor to scare him straight. (I mean, I assumed he was. This was a female escort, right?)
and I realize that my intervention in this conversation has been a long demonstration of missing the joke, being humorless, judgemental, sanctimonious, censurious, pompous and moralistic.
I actually am capable, on other occasions, of light banter and airy persiflage. Witty repartee. Believe it or not.
Sorry to be a killjoy.
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 11:21 AM
Thanks for keepin' it real, Bitzer. 45 et seq. seemed to me like a necessary corrective to a skewed conversation.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 11:33 AM
Commenters who interrupt banter to wax humorless about sexual politics are abominations unto the blog, and should be whipped.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 11:59 AM
By whom?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 12:03 PM
Christ, they're going to have sex right here, aren't they?
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 12:09 PM
teo, do you ever notice how Labs takes a consistent interest in our sex life? I think he wants in.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 12:31 PM
That's what it usually means.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 12:43 PM
Have you seen my pay stub?* I don't think I can afford it.
*Not a euphemism!
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 12:44 PM
We're actually surprisingly reasonable.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 12:50 PM
teo's still in the trainee period, and he has to log a bunch of volunteer hours before he's licensed. I am already known to do pro bono work for people who work in animal welfare; it's a tax write off.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 12:51 PM
Has anyone ever suggested an Unfogged meetup/orgy?
Surely someone has. What a stupid question.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 1:06 PM
I know it's been proposed, but I can't seem to find the thread.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 1:26 PM
Surely, more people should call their cocks "pay stubs".
Posted by redfoxtailshrub | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 1:45 PM
Has anyone ever suggested an Unfogged meetup/orgy?
It's come up before.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 1:46 PM
Sort of on topic.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 3:09 PM
167: I'm instinctively on the "bad idea" side of this one. This is described as a rather severe case. Should we analogize to The Last Picture Show (bad!) or Fanny Hill (good!)?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 3:29 PM
I'll vote bad idea. Even if the guy enjoys it and doesn't panic or weird out, he's going to be hard put to repeat the experience if he decides he wants to.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:04 PM
166: Are threesomes by defintion orgies? I've seen that use before a couple of times (footnotes: "Packet Man" and Kael's review of Blow-Up), but I always figured orgies should be more social.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:10 PM
Wikipedia says four or more participants, so I guess threesomes are out. Also:
In contemporary usage, an orgy typically refers to group sex, although it sometimes refers to other activities such as dancing or violence.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:13 PM
I don't think that two couples doing synchronized intercourse would count either. I think that you need an odd number. Maybe if it were three women and one guy that would count, especially if the women were bi.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:18 PM
What if the parties to the two couples switched off occasionally? What if there were eight couples? I think you just want an odd number to increase the odds that someone will be left out in the cold.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:26 PM
Now some of you seem to want to hold onto the possibility of unicorns, and you seem to think that second hand reports of unicorns demolish my arguments (even though most of the first-hand reports on this thread have gone "I thought it was a unicorn but it didn't turn out so well").Now some of you seem to want to hold onto the possibility of unicorns, and you seem to think that second hand reports of unicorns demolish my arguments (even though most of the first-hand reports on this thread have gone "I thought it was a unicorn but it didn't turn out so well").
In case this is meant to include me: I'm not trying to hold onto the possibility of unicorns, and I don't think that second-hand reports of unicorns demolish your arguments. I will simply repeat what I said before: it is trivially easy to find a wide variety of blogs written by people who have first-hand experience with this sort of thing. I don't read them, so I have no idea what position in this argument they'd support; I do find it interesting, though, that no one's really evinced much interest in what they have to say.
Posted by Josh | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:28 PM
Unicorns could make interesting sex toys.
Posted by Stub | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:30 PM
Here's one. Take-away lesson from the first page: pretty boring.
I've seen others, but have lost track of their locations. Probably they were posted to metafilter in ages past.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:31 PM
One can follow links from commenters to that blog to other (purported) such blogs, such as.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:41 PM
Anyway, I'd be extraordinarily surprised if, at the really expensive end, unicorns didn't exist.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:42 PM
173: it's not an orgy if no one is watching.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:48 PM
A woman once asked me how many was an orgy. The answer: it's not an orgy unless there at least three times when you say, "where'd this guy come from?"
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:56 PM
It's not?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:56 PM
181 to 179, but it works for 180 as well.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:57 PM
"where'd this guy come from?"
ITYM "who'd that guy come on?".
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:01 PM
143: Tia's charity gets it exactly right.
I hadn't even made it to the point of charity -- given what we know about ogged's prudery, I assumed the post was pure chain-yanking.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 6:26 PM
Unicorns do indeed exist, Ben, and as Stub points out, we make interesting sex toys! It's all in the horn me thinks...ahem...
Ziplessness is our speciality - we don't tell tales and we don't expect to be loved. That's why people hire us - we're uncomplicated and suspending our own needs is part of the deal.
But I must correct you on one point - I'm real and not a bit purported. You can pinch me and see...for a suitable fee of course! ;-)
Livvy xxx
Posted by The English Courtesan | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:19 PM
Erm, looking at your blog, you've been doing this for about a month? I mean, interesting and all, but not really the gritty realist perspective on what prostitution is like, is it?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:27 PM
Her prices are a bit steep. "High-end" doesn't come close to expressing it. I'm not completely sure she actually expects much business.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:37 PM
More, descriptions on the left and a much larger blogroll by category on the right. The knowledge that there exist "john blogs" is something I could have done without. I assume that anyone who cares about finding more such blogs can do so h/hself.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:39 PM
130: No apology needed, I just wanted to stress that point. I did think about taking that post and the other one down, but in the end I think that the convos were excellent and that it's a very interesting topic. Those, combined with my sense of the importance of historical and textual records, mean I'm going to leave it up, come what may. (Which recognizing that is one reason I never followed up on whether I'd done it or not; the other is that I think it's more interesting to leave it an open question.)
151: Problematic. We are, generally speaking, *very* careful to distinguish between intimate medical exams and intimacy. Your doctor talks to you about specifically non-intimate things during those exams; you and he avoid eye contact; the focus is very heavily on emphasizing the ways that intimate exams, especially if they involve penetration, are *medical*, not personal. Prostitution does precisely the opposite.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 10:07 PM
134: I've pointed you by name at least one first-hand account of, written by, a unicorn. There are others past that one if you keep looking. I cannot force you to believe in unicorns, I can only say, 'Look, a book written by an entity that claims to be a unicorn!' and assert that also read other things by putative unicorns.
Again, I assert the objective fact of the existance of some women who found prostitution to be somewhere between tolerable as a job and desirable as a career. You have my cites. Feel free to comment on them, rather than blithely wave them out of existance.
But, please, keep in mind that it's not my experience that you're dismissing. In your haste to denounce prostitution as demeaning and awful for all involved, you are neatly disposing of these accounts as inconvient to the case you're trying to make. At that point, I suspect, you are neatly making the transition from 'perhaps mistaken' to 'actively sexist'.
It seems to me that while you make a strong case, when you are not theorizing that disconfirming evidence doesn't exist, you lack the experience with the issue that someone who's actually sold their body might bring to the issues. As I said (in my very first post in this thread, none the less), I suggest that you spend more time reading the accounts of women who have actually done what you're talking about and gone on to tell of their experiences.
Posted by NBarnes | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:12 AM
185: Need to work on that sales pitch, I think.
189: All true, but doesn't this show that people can manage their feelings independently of physical intimacy? The first ten years of my sexual life were more or less free from one night stands. They're something I've learned to do, and I guess it was the same for my partners. It's a different kind of activity. I don't think it's about objectification. It does involve communication (almost all non-verbal ... and mostly in the dark ...)
Posted by Anonymous Client | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 5:16 AM
I agree, Anonymous Client, most of us can certainly manage our feelings independent of physical intimacy. That's one reason why several courtesans I know don't do 'f*ckbuddy' arrangements. I'm one of those myself - if I'm paid, it helps me distance myself and focus on the client and the job in hand. Ahem. ;-)
Lizard Breath - I think you need to work on the interpersonal skills a little. Toothpaste and respect are useful things when dealing with ladies. John Emerson - if you read the 'Auction results' you can see how many nights I've booked to date, so that will help you decide whether I expect much business. The English Courtesan may have to spank you both at this rate, only sadly she doesn't do 'spankbuddy' either. :-)
This is certainly a fascinating debate. Although I am indeed a relative newbie to this, I think maybe whether you regard yourself as (and/or are) exploited depends on the prices you charge, the number and type of clients you see and whether you have other options. If you see one or two clients only a month, are well rewarded for it and have a day job and other possible options, then it's more of a choice than enslavement. If however you've been lured to the UK by the promise of a 'decent' job, are paid a pittance if at all, and have no way out, then the reverse applies...
Livvy xxx
Posted by The English Courtesan | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:10 PM
Good, LizardBreath certainly needs help in the "dealing with the ladies" department.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:12 PM
"Toothpaste and Respect" would even make a decent album title for a Liz Phair-type singer-songwriter act.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:13 PM
This blog started with ultra-earnest appreciations of Mr. Rogers, and now when a real-life prostitute shows up and makes jokes about her job, we're all rolling our eyes and thinking, "how tame."
Ogged wept.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:18 PM
In all due respect, E.C, I wouldn't pay those prices for an 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, even if I had the money. I'm nowhere near as heterosexual as that. But hey, if you've found your prey species, fatten up on them.
As for LB, she as well as she wants with the ladies without brushing.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:18 PM
I don't think it's about objectification
I think this is one of those instances of the employment of the word "about" to avoid making a statement that can easily be refuted or engaged with. Objectification is something that necessarily happens during the process. Whether or not it is "about" objectification--who even knows what that means?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:21 PM
Or, since I am reading about material and formal and final causes, I'm noticing that perhaps that was too teleological. I should have said, "I think this is one of those instances of the employment of the word 'about' that avoids making a statement that can easily be refuted or engaged with," maybe.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:23 PM
What, the efficient cause is chopped liver?
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:30 PM
What's the difference between material and efficient?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:31 PM
Look Tia, it's not about trying to avoid being refuted or engaged with.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:34 PM
Out of curiousity, are the last five comments (197+) jokes, or is there a point being made?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:36 PM
Professional whores have to wait when there are rhetorical nits to pick.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:36 PM
My point was that "it's not about objectification" didn't mean much, and in fact, objectification was going on.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:38 PM
The efficient cause of the sculpture is the sculptor. The material cause of the sculpture is the bronze.
Posted by Mike J. | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:41 PM
I do like The EC's rosy cheeks. And I think I remember that there was an escort a while back who got written up in Slate or Salon who was charging something over 10 grand per night, with a two night minimum, so, you know, EC is a bargain.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:42 PM
And if you really want to market yourself to the rich, you have to be expensive. My friend worked for a while as a math tutor to the children of Upper East Siders, and sometimes they expressed disappointment that his rate was only 75 an hour. Another math tutor he knew made a point of raising his rates if anyone else raised theirs, so he'd always be the poshest game in town. The commodity fetishists of the world don't like their whores or their math tutors cheap.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:45 PM
Okay, 206 made me break down and click through (from work, which feels like a bad idea). Sadly, I saw no rosy-cheeked photo. I saw nothing but an eyeball.
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:46 PM
And thanks, MJ. Notice how Labs disappears the moment anyone actually asks a philosophy question.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:46 PM
207 is exactly right. Mercedes did the same thing when Lexus first appeared; rather than lowering prices in order to compete that way, they raised prices to distinguish themselves as the true luxury brand.
So, I'm wondering, what's wrong with EC that she comes so cheap?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:47 PM
Thanks, Mike. Off the top of my head, thus likely to be wrong, the final cause is the finished sculpture while the formal cause is something like the design.
Oh look, there's more.
(It wasn't meant to be a funny joke or anything, it's just that Tia listed three of the four Aristotelian causes and I wanted to impress her with my erudition.)
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:47 PM
Landers, you no imagination having honkey, in the eyeball picture, you can see the top of a decidedly rosy cheek.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:48 PM
Now Labs has returned, and I am pwned. I guess this means teo and I owe him a freebie.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:49 PM
Just to put things in perspective:
There is one group of professionals who manage to engage in a form of intercourse for money with multiple clients without the legal issues and social stigma that we associate with prostitution. This intercourse is often intimate and personal and central to self and identity (to use Tia’s phrase from 74) as well as deeply penetrating. Some people do in fact argue that those who patronize these professionals should instead use a spouse or intimate friend, who would do it for free either out of mutual pleasure or a sense of mutual obligation. Indeed, some people share this kind of intercourse with casual acquaintances or even random strangers, although this is not considered socially acceptable in various circles. Still, not everyone has an appropriate spouse or intimate friend available, and even those who do often find it useful to engage a professional for this kind of service.
Although the basis for these relationships is professional, and the intercourse would not continue without the payment except in unusual circumstances, I think that many of these professionals do genuinely like and sympathize with most of their clients, particularly the regulars. Certainly these professionals do have clients they actively dislike from time to time, and they are well trained to control the expression of their feelings within the context of the professional relationship, but that doesn’t mean that all interactions with them are simply with a professional façade that is completely disconnected from their true feelings. Many of the people who go into this profession do so because they are genuinely interested in interacting with people in this way, and enjoy their work. And a façade is easiest to maintain if it is not too far away from the truth. Much of the best flattery consists of selective sharing of genuinely positive feelings.
There is a vast middle ground of willingness to engage in intercourse that falls in between the extremes of actively not wanting to be there but concealing it behind a professional façade, on the one hand, and being so enthralled by the connection that one is willing to cast aside any thought of compensation or professional boundaries to indulge in it for purely mutual pleasure, on the other. That is why I think that LB’s 136 and B’s 149 present a false dichotomy - certainly for the professionals I have in mind, and probably for a number of those in the original context. The choice shouldn’t have to be between “don’t believe anything she says - it’s all a façade and she’s miserable being here” and “believe everything she says about how awesome you are, you credulous fool.” (But I do want to recognize what NMUS said in 105 which started that subthread off - if you feel you have to maintain a façade that’s too far away from reality, that takes a lot of emotional energy and can wind up feeling icky. I wonder how that experience would have gone for you if you hadn’t felt so much pressure to live up to an unsustainable ideal, or felt freer to share some of that conflict with him at the time.)
One thing about the professional nature of these relationships is that payment does make the relationship more assymetrical than an equivalent free relationship: the relationship is more about meeting the client’s needs than the professional’s, and the payment is partially compensation for that imbalance, as well paying for the professional’s time and expertise. The professional should still be able to set appropriate boundaries on the relationship and limitations on the client’s expectations as needed to maintain his or her personal integrity and space.
Now I realize that the parallel is not exact, as there are differences in the educational requirements, professional regulation, social status, cultural context, and so on between the two professions involved. Still, if your argument against prostitution could be transformed into an argument for why you shouldn’t pay your therapist just by choosing a different dictionary definition of the word intercourse, you *might* want to re-examine the cultural basis of your assumptions.
Posted by EDguy | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:51 PM
By the way, I wanted to do a post to brag about this, but I keep not succeeding in uploading the screenshot I took, so you should all just go look at this Scrabble game and notice that in the top half of the board you find the words "cured," "globed," and "recork." I made all those words on a single turn.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:53 PM
211 looks really good in light of 209. Ow.
Also, how could any possible sexual experience be worth ten grand?
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:53 PM
final cause is the finished sculpture
I don't think so, homo ignoramus. The final cause is the "for the sake of which," so what the statue is for: appreciation, or beautification, or edification, or what have you.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:54 PM
how could any possible sexual experience be worth ten grand?
Your first name clearly isn't Sheikh.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:56 PM
EC's price is in pounds, ogged.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:58 PM
Is that right, ogged?
That link:
The final cause of a natural object - a plant or an animal - is not a purpose, plan, or “intention.” Rather, it is whatever lies at the end of the regular series of developmental changes that typical specimens of a given species undergo. The final cause need not be a purpose that someone has in mind. I.e., where F is a biological kind: the telos of an F is what embryonic, immature, or developing Fs are all tending to grow into. The telos of a developing tiger is to be a tiger.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:58 PM
EC's price is in pounds, ogged.
Hey, glad to see you mcmc, and I assure you that I did the google currency conversion before posting my comment, and she's still cheaper than the escort I remember reading about.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 2:59 PM
Money isn't the issue. The Gayatollah means that he can't conceive of a sexual experience with just one other person.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:02 PM
I think he says somewhere that the formal cause of the statue is its shape.
I think he also says that for living things the formal and final causes overlap. What childhood is for is the development of the form of the adult. But formal causes and final causes should be distinct for artifacts.
Posted by Mike J. | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:02 PM
curses, pwned again.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:04 PM
Yeah, sure, if the client had near-infinite amounts of money, but still, that's an awful lot of cash. I guess I'm wondering about the differences between the 10k escort and, say, the 2k escort.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:04 PM
Is that right, ogged?
I'm like, sure. More here.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:05 PM
This blog started with ultra-earnest appreciations of Mr. Rogers, and now when a real-life prostitute shows up and makes jokes about her job, we're all rolling our eyes and thinking, "how tame." Ogged wept.
That seems wrong. You should be weeping because a real-life prostitute shows up and makes jokes about her job, and we manage to make it boring.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:06 PM
For the record, "shape" is literally-pretty-accurate-but-still-kinda-misleading translation of "eidos."
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:07 PM
225- FL, see 207, and wonder about the difference between the $75 math tutor and the $200 math tutor. (Answer: Probably none, but in realms where non-experts have difficulty directly evaluating quality, price itself is often used as a proxy. And for people who only want the best...)
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:08 PM
From your link, Ogged: "Clearly the statue enters in the explanation of each step of the artistic production as the final cause or that for the sake of which everything is done."
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:10 PM
229: that sounds plausible, but not when Tia said it, because she's a woman.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:13 PM
A reworking of 229: the main difference between the $10,000 hooker anwd the $2,000 hooker is that the $10,000 hooker will not have been purchased by the guy who can only afford the $2,000 hooker.
Sorry, I suppose I should have said "escort".
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:13 PM
Another funny line from that Stanford article:
So true.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:14 PM
Ok, god damn it, so I've been reading a lot of escort ads in the past few days, and there really is a difference between 2k escorts and 10k escorts and the difference is class, specifically, education. EC touts her education and the one I'm thinking of called herself the "educated escort," and said she had an Ivy league degree.
I mean, we're just thinking of fucking, but high end escort do a lot of escorting, so it might well matter to some clients that the woman they bring isn't dumb or uneducated.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:15 PM
That's it, teo and I are retroactively charging for all past freebies (there was a clause in the contract that enumerated your obligation to stay on my good side. teo's good side doesn't matter). We're putting a lien on your check. How much is University of Pennsylvania at Blue Ball paying these days?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:18 PM
Clearly the statue enters in the explanation of each step of the artistic production as the final cause or that for the sake of which everything is done
Final causes are always nested, so the statue can be the final cause in one context, but is not the final cause of itself.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:18 PM
Ogged, are you hatching a plan to claim some new health crisis in order to get us to do another fundraiser to buy you another gift certificate?
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:18 PM
uh, 235 to 231, but it goes for all of you.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:19 PM
You wouldn't let a brother die with the Tivo at 1000, would you?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:22 PM
204: In my experience there's communication - 'going on', if you prefer that prepositional construction - between sexual partners, even during casual sex where the partners don't know each other well. That must be about recognition of common, uhm, something or other.
I'm not aware of any 'objectification' on and off switch. I don't think empathy automatically vanishes in certain contexts, which isn't to say that I'm not comparatively empathy deficient without realising it. But something tells me I'm not going to be my own best witness here.
Posted by Anonymous Client | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:24 PM
I thought the final cause had to be internal to the thing, but probably I'm just confused. Mostly I'm worried that Tia now owns my house.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:25 PM
I'm sorry, AC, I misunderstood. I thought you were referring to prositution when you said that. In that case, no, no necessary objectification.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:26 PM
I did entertain the idea of a stripper sent to your bedside, but Ben's mom was booked. The thought of you looking utterly mortified amused me to no end, though.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:29 PM
a stripper sent to your bedside
This would have been great, not least because my mom and ex were both there around the clock. "I can't sit up, honey, and you'll have to get creative with the catheter, but otherwise, go to town."
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:31 PM
Ogged's Mom: What are all these Hot Cops doing here?
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:38 PM
Also, do you know how glad I am not to be talking about whiteness right now? Exceedingly, if you wondered.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:42 PM
Weep not, oh Great and Worthy Ogged, for thou art correct, and the cheeks are rosy! That's with reference to 206, 208 etc. I felt I should clarify that in case you're still weeping. :-)
Livvy xxx
Posted by The English Courtesan | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:46 PM
I feel like we have a real connection here, EC.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:54 PM
Lizard Breath, I've just been reading the bios and goodness me, it turns out that you're a girrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl!
I always thought it was only boys who had lizard breath. Am I being a tad sexist and if so, might one of the gentlemen like to correct me? Bends over... :-)
Livvy xxx
P.S. Does Mr. Wolfson really use Troll Unguent and if so where?
Posted by The English Courtesan | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 3:56 PM
I thought you were referring to prostitution when you said that.
It's never going to happen again. Not after this. Uh uh.
Posted by Anonymous Client | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:09 PM
I'm sorry, AC
Only ac is ac.
The first link for the four causes says that efficient cause is the only cause that remotely resembles a Humean cause, but My/les
'weekend at' Bur/nye/at said that efficient cause is actually the least like Humean cause. About then I decided I didn't really understand Aristotle. The wikipedia article on Efficient Cause is one of those horrible philosophy wikipedia articles you read about, which reminds me I have to go grade. (Actually most of my papers are much better than that.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:12 PM
Mr. Wolfson
There you go, making unwarranted assumptions again.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-25-06 4:13 PM
192, 249: EC -- I do apologize for being brusque above. It just seemed that your experience in prostitution wasn't all that representative of the norm. As you said: