fucking for a fee
shades of camille paglia, galing! this that jeg has to say re tv dancers wiggling their butts at leering middle-aged DOMs on noontime shows, contradicting a comment that it’s “sexploitation writ large in the light of day.”
Not one to pass on the chance to defend scantily-clad women, I asked why is it sexploitation. Those dancers were not being coerced. They freely chose their profession and are being paid for it. And with that I think it is time to come to the defense of what is called the World’s Oldest Profession, the prostitutes, those purveyors of venereal services that society has maligned; indeed our legal system considers their profession illegal. A prostitute is here defined as one who engages in sexual services for a fee.
The way I see it, if the prostitute is an adult who has freely chosen to engage in sexual services for a fee, she is not being exploited. Mind you this isnt condoning the practice of white slavery, wherein the women arent free. That is deplorable. Our prostitute is a businesswoman, rendering a service for which there is a demand and the State has no right to stop her from plying her trade.
It is only through some sort of superiority complex that members of society, including feminists ironically, assume that the prostitute is being exploited. They lament the plight of the poor hooker, forced by poverty into a demeaning existence. But the prostitute doesnt see her job as especially demeaning, at least those Ive spoken to. It’s their profession. They have considered the pros and cons (short hours and high pay vs. harrassment by cops, the dangers of being in a vulnerable state with strangers, and the judgemental derision of society at large) and still choose to ply their trade. If the cons outweigh the pros, they are free to look for another profession.”
indeed. the racy dyke-bitch radical anti-feminist feminist scholar paglia would ask, who is really sexploiting whom?
conventional feminist wisdom has it that the DOM producers-hosts of the noontime show — who can’t do without the sexy props and wiggling butts because it sells and it’s fun, the daily dose that keeps them going, coming — are sexploiting the girls, as in, treating them like sex objects and making money on them.
i think sexploitation is a two-way street. are not the girls — who willingly play sexy props for a fee, wiggling their skimply-clad butts at men because that’s what men like, what’s the harm, let them look, we’re looking good — also exploiting the men?
which is, yes, breeding ground for prostitutes-in-the-making, girls who find that they enjoy dancing, flirting, making eyes at and turning on men. it’s like they have a gift for sex the way others have a gift for math, or music.
and, yes, it’s not too many steps away from going professional, fucking for a fee. foreplay and fucking as art. sex as performance art. it can be.
what’s interesting is that the demands on the time and energy of a prostitute is no longer limited to sex. at least in new york when wall street was crashing, men mostly just wanted needed to talk, unload, despair, in private/with a hooker, before going home.
ganyan din siguro dito sa atin. i wonder how our sex workers like it. okay lang, nakakapahinga sa sex, or would they always rather fuck than talk? i suppose the educated ones would sometimes rather talk than fuck? but maybe that’s just me. and paglia. haha.
hot quotes from paglia’s intro to her impressive tome Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, 1991:
The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man’s cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God’s enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough. The Bible defensively swerves from God’s true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent.”
Daemonic archetypes of women, filling world mythology, represent the uncontrollable nearness of nature. . . . The primary image is the femme fatale, the woman fatal to man. The more nature is beaten back in the west, the more the femme fatale reappears, as a return of the repressed.”
Feminism dismisses the femme fatale as a cartoon and libel. If she ever existed, she was simply a victim of society, resorting to destructive womanly wiles because of her lack of access to political power. The femme fatale was a career woman manquee, her energies neurotically diverted into the boudoir. By such techniques of demystification, feminism has painted itself into a corner. Sexuality is a murky realm of contradiction and ambivalence.”
Mystification will always remain the disorderly companion of love and art. Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be “fixed” by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature’s fascism is greater than that of any society.”
The femme fatale is one of the most mesmerizing of sexual personae. She is not a fiction but an extrapolation of biologic realities in women that remain constant. The North American Indian myth of the toothed vagina (vagina dentata) is a gruesomely direct transcription of female power and male fear. Metaphorically, every vagina has secret teeth, for the male exits as less than when he entered. The basic mechanics of conception require action in the male but nothing more than passive receptivity in the female. Sex as a natural rather than social transaction, therefore, really is a kind of drain of male energy by female fullness. Physical and spiritual castration is the danger every man runs in intercourse with women. Love is the spell by which he puts his sexual fear to sleep. Woman’s latent vampirism is not a social aberration but a development of her maternal function, for which nature has equipped her with tiresome thoroughness. For the male, every act of intercourse is a return to the mother and a capitulation to her. For men, sex is a struggle for identity. In sex, the male is consumed and released again by the toothed power that bore him, the female dragon of nature.”
The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms. I will speak at length of the beautiful boy, one of the west’s most stunning sexual personae. However, the danger of the homme fatale, as embodied in today’s boyish male hustler, is that he will leave, disappearing to other loves, other lands. He is a rambler, a cowboy and sailor. But the danger of the femme fatale is that she will stay, still, placid, and paralyzing. Her remaining is a daemonic burden, the ubiquity of Walter Pater’s Mona Lisa, who smothers history. She is a thorny symbol of the perversity of sex. She will stick.”
The woundlike rawness of female genitals is a symbol of the unredeemability of chthonian nature. In aesthetic terms, female genitals are lurid in color, vagrant in contour, and architecturally incoherent. Male genitals, on the other hand, though they risk ludicrousness by their rubbery indecisiveness (a Sylvia Plath heroine memorably thinks of “turkey neck and turkey gizzards”), have a rational mathematical design, a syntax.”
Our lives as physical beings give rise to basic metaphors of apprehension which vary greatly between the sexes. Here there can be no equality. Man is sexually compartmentalized. Genitally, he is condemned to a perpetual pattern of linearity, focus, aim, directedness. He must learn to aim. Without aim, urination and ejaculation end in infantile soiling of self or surroundings. Woman’s eroticism is diffused throughout her body. Her desire for foreplay remains a notorious area of miscommunication between the sexes.”
No woman has to prove herself a woman in the grim way a man has to prove himself a man. He must perform, or the show does not go on. Social convention is irrelevant. A flop is a flop. Ironically, sexual success always ends in sagging fortunes anyhow. Every male projection is transient and must be anxiously, endlessly renewed. Men enter in triumph but withdraw in decrepitude. The sex act cruelly mimics history’s decline and fall. Male bonding is a self-preservation society, collegial reaffirmation through larger, fabricated frames of reference. Culture is man’s iron reinforcement of his ever-imperiled private projections.”
Freud thinks primitive man preened himself on his ability to put out a fire with a stream of urine. A strange thing to be proud of but certainly beyond the scope of woman, who would scorch her hams in the process. Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on.”
Historiography’s most glaring error has been its assertion that Judeo-Christianity defeated paganism. Paganism has survived in the thousand forms of sex, art, and now the modern media. “
On the streets of every city, prostitutes, the world’s oldest profession, stand as a rebuke to sexual morality. They are the daemonic face of nature, initiates of pagan mysteries. Prostitution is not just a service industry, mopping up the overflow of male demand, which always exceeds female supply. Prostitution testifies to the amoral power struggle of sex, which religion has never been able to stop. Prostitutes, pornographers, and their patrons are marauders in the forest of archaic night.”