Prostitution - whose choice is it?

[Nordic]

Ok. Well I think ideally it could be/should be. I haven't actually done it. But I'm open to it under the right circumstances but those are, honestly, rare.

When I was in high school in the 70s I moved to a big dusty military town and there was an area filled with street hookers. My neighbor, who seemed very straight-laced at first glance, took me down there to show me around, and found it entertaining to pull up and stop and have them swarm around the car, aggressively trying to get our business. I was horrified. It had a big affect on me. I saw a girl who looked about 15 who was terrified and who, from a shy distance, begged me for help. She was practically in tears and was wanted us to use her or else she was going to get in some kind of trouble. My friend who was driving raced away without even noticing her, but she has haunted me to this day. Sometimes I see her face.

[identity]

I should clarify that my previous post should not be taken as any kind of defense of prostitutes or of the men and women who avail themselves of their services. In fact, I have nothing to do (as far as I am aware) with either of these groups of people, nor do I foresee having any. I neither defend nor condemn any of them. But I do take issue with those who, in the name of one "campaign of action" or another, have no qualms about shutting down open discussion of all they gray areas, and insist on framing everything in black-or-white terms so they can simply get on with their campaign. "Who cares if anyone in Afghanistan poses a threat to us? We need to bomb them, NOW!" I am generally wary of counsels of perfection and of those who think they know what's best for other people.

Surrogate sex partner inspires story, film

Cohen Greene.jpg

In 38 years as a surrogate partner - a profession formerly known as a sex surrogate - Cheryl Cohen Greene has helped all kinds of clients. She's worked with couples, with married men and single men, with disabled people, with men in their 60s, 70s and 80s who have never had sex.

One of her clients, the poet and journalist Mark O'Brien, was stricken with polio at 6 and spent most of his life in an iron lung. In 1986, when O'Brien was 36 and a virgin, he hired Cohen Greene as his surrogate partner. They met six times and remained friends until O'Brien's death in 1999.

Their story is now an independent film, "The Surrogate," which premieres Jan. 23 at the Sundance Film Festival. Starring John Hawkes ("Winter's Bone") as O'Brien and Helen Hunt ("As Good as It Gets") as Cohen Greene, it's adapted from a 1990 article, "On Seeing a Sex Surrogate," that O'Brien wrote for the Sun magazine of North Carolina.

Written and directed by Ben Lewin, "The Surrogate" was filmed in Santa Monica last spring on a $1.3 million budget. Cohen Greene, a paid consultant, spent a week on the set in May and plans to attend the world premiere at Sundance. "I haven't seen the whole film," she says. "But it's pretty frank from what I can tell."

O'Brien was also the subject of a 1996 Oscar-winning documentary short, "Breathing Lessons" by Jessica Yu.
At 67, vibrant and attractive, Cohen Greene still works as a surrogate partner, seeing clients in her Berkeley studio. She's married to her second husband, Bob Greene, and has a daughter, 46, and son, 43, from her first marriage.

Born and raised in Salem, Mass., she moved to Berkeley in 1968, and says her work as a surrogate grew from her years as a volunteer with the San Francisco Sex Information hotline. "It was fascinating to listen to people and not be judgmental, to learn about myself and see what buttons got pushed. ... Up until then I'd never even met gay or bisexual men or women."

In the early '60s, William Masters and Virginia Johnson, best-selling authors of "Human Sexual Response," started training surrogate partners at their research institute in St. Louis. Cohen Greene learned the Masters and Johnson approach from a Berkeley sex therapist. It incorporated the "sensate focus" method of sensual touch and genital exploration with verbal feedback.

Eighty-five percent of her clients are men. Their issues include premature ejaculation, impotence, lack of desire or sexual inexperience. Cohen Greene says their concerns are often rooted in early trauma or shame. Clients are referred by psychotherapists who work with sexual dysfunction, and after each visit Cohen Greene calls the referring therapist to report on her session.

A gradual process

Her first client, in 1973, was a truck driver. "I'll never forget him. He was about 5 foot 4 and I'm 5 foot 8. He knew he was my first client, and he was so understanding. I had this book, 'Understanding Human Sexual Inadequacies,' in one hand ... and I was just kind of going, 'OK, it says here ...' "

Most clients require six to 10 sessions. "It's a gradual process of increased intimacy," Cohen Greene says. The first session is half talk. After getting acquainted they go into the bedroom, undress and lie down for relaxation breathing and sensual touch. Before the last session, Cohen Greene will usually, but not always, have intercourse with a client.

Keeping a sense of humor in the process is important, she says. "People take sex so seriously, and when you go in with that kind of attitude it's not fun. It's not sexy."

Many surrogate partners are trained by the International Professional Surrogates Association in Los Angeles (http://www.surrogatetherapy.org), which has its own code of ethics and provides psychotherapists with referrals to surrogate partners. Although the American Psychological Association "does not have a position on the use of sexual surrogates," according to Deputy Executive Director Kim I. Mills - there is also no government regulation, no licensing - Berkeley psychotherapist Rob Hopcke says referring a client to a surrogate partner is "standard treatment" among mental-health professionals who work in the field of sexual dysfunction.

Disabled clients

When Cohen Greene met Mark O'Brien, she had already seen several disabled clients - men with spina bifida, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis and quadriplegia. From the beginning, she was drawn to his caustic wit and nimble mind, his longing for connection.

"He told me nobody had ever touched him other than to bathe him, dress him or do a medical procedure. He said that he felt like he was on the outside of a fine restaurant, looking in the window. Everybody in there is having a feast, but he'll never be able to taste that food."

Living alone in a Berkeley apartment, O'Brien wrote his poems and stories holding a mouth stick between his teeth and tapping on a computer keyboard. He was 4 feet 7 and 60 pounds, paralyzed except for one muscle in his right foot, one in his neck and one in his jaw. With the help of an attendant, he could get out of his iron lung and into an electric gurney - enclosed in a plastic bubble - that allowed him to navigate the streets of Berkeley.

Sexual curiosity

Once, Cohen Greene says, "I was exploring and touching Mark. And when I got to his chest I kissed him on the top of his chest. He started to cry. He said nobody had ever kissed him like that before.

"There's a huge population of people with genetic or acquired disabilities who never have a chance to be intimate with someone. Everything is addressed but their sexuality even though their sex drive and sexual curiosity are just as intense as everybody else's."
In the period following their six sessions, Cohen Greene saw O'Brien only occasionally. "He didn't want to become attached, and I understood totally," Cohen Greene says. "He knew I was married, had a family. He didn't want to put himself in a situation that was unobtainable."

A year after they concluded their work, O'Brien called Cohen Greene with good news. "When I work with people, the intention is always to transfer what we do together to a relationship they can develop in the future. I used to think, 'How is Mark going to meet anybody?' And then it happened.

"He had a Web page for his poetry and journalism, and a wonderful woman named Susan found him that way and connected with him. I met her and I was really thrilled. "Mark told me, 'I was able to say to her when I met her, 'You know, I'm not a virgin.' "

[identity]

Warning: Wall o' text ahead. Enjoy!

On Seeing A Sex Surrogate
by Mark O'Brien

In 1983, I wrote an article about sex and disabled people. In
interviewing sexually active men and women, I felt removed, as though I
were an anthropologist interviewing headhunters while endeavoring to
maintain the value-neutral stance of a social scientist. Being disabled
myself, but also being a virgin, I envied these people ferociously. It
took me years to discover that what separated me from them was fear —
fear of others, fear of making decisions, fear of my own sexuality, and
a surpassing dread of my parents. Even though I no longer lived with
them, I continued to live with a sense of their unrelenting presence,
and their disapproval of sexuality in general, mine in particular. In my
imagination, they seemed to have an uncanny ability to know what I was
thinking, and were eager to punish me for any malfeasance.

Whenever I had sexual feelings or thoughts, I felt accused and guilty.
No one in my family had ever discussed sex around me. The attitude I
absorbed was not so much that polite people never thought about sex, but
that no one did. I didn’t know anyone outside my family, so this code
affected me strongly, convincing me that people should emulate the
wholesome asexuality of Barbie and Ken, that we should behave as though
we had no “down there’s” down there.

As a man in my thirties, I still felt embarrassed by my sexuality. It
seemed to be utterly without purpose in my life, except to mortify me
when I became aroused during bed baths. I would not talk to my
attendants about the orgasms I had then, or the profound shame I felt. I
imagined they, too, hated me for becoming so excited.

I wanted to be loved. I wanted to be held, caressed, and valued. But my
self-hatred and fear were too intense. I doubted I deserved to be loved.
My frustrated sexual feelings seemed to be just another curse inflicted
upon me by a cruel God.

I had fallen in love with several people, female and male, and waited
for them to ask me out or seduce me. Most of the disabled people I knew
in Berkeley were sexually active, including disabled people as deformed
as I. But nothing ever happened. Nothing was working for me in the
passive way that I wanted it to, the way it works in the movies.

In 1985, I began talking with Sondra, my therapist, about the
possibility of seeing a sex surrogate. When Sondra had originally
mentioned the idea — explaining that a sexual therapist worked with a
client’s emotional problems concerning sex, while a surrogate worked
with a client’s body — I had been too afraid to discuss it. I
rationalized that someone who was not an attendant, nurse, or doctor
would be horrified at seeing my pale, thin body with its bent spine,
bent neck, washboard ribcage, and hipbones protruding like outriggers. I
also dismissed the idea of a surrogate because of the expense. A few
years earlier, I had phoned a sex surrogate at the suggestion of another
therapist. The surrogate told me that she charged according to a sliding
scale that began at seventy dollars an hour.

But now my situation had changed. I was earning extra money writing
articles and book reviews. My rationalizations began to strike me as
flimsy.

[...]

One day, I finally said to Sondra I was ready to see a surrogate. About
a week later, my phone rang during my morning bed bath. It was the voice
of a woman I had never heard before. “Hello, Mark! This is Cheryl.”

I knew that it was the surrogate. She didn’t have to tell me.

“I could see you March 17 at 11 o’clock,” she said. “Would that be good
for you?”

“Yeah, it would be. But I’m busy right now. Could you call me back this
afternoon when I’ll be by myself?”

Now that I had decided to actually see a surrogate, I had another
problem: where would I meet her? I didn’t have a bed, just an iron lung
with a mattress barely wide enough for me. When Cheryl called back, she
asked if I could come to her office, which is up a flight of stairs. I
told her that would be difficult. Finally, we agreed to meet at the home
of one of my friends. I was terribly nervous when I asked Marie whether
I could use her place. I had visited her often in her spacious living
room, which contains a double bed. Marie, who uses a wheelchair, had
made the cottage she and her lover share completely accessible. It was
also within walking distance (or wheelchair-pushing distance). When I
told her about Cheryl, she readily agreed.

As the day approached, I became increasingly apprehensive. What if
Cheryl took one look at me — disabled, skinny, and deformed — and
changed her mind? I imagined her sadly shaking her head and saying, “Oh
no, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. . .” She would be polite, but she would
flee from me.

On the phone, Cheryl had explained that she would interview me for the
first hour of the session; then, if I agreed, we would do
“body-awareness exercises.” I was too scared to ask what this meant, but
said I would give it a go.

When March 17 arrived, I felt unbearably nervous. I had to remind myself
repeatedly that we were just going to talk about sex; in the second
hour, we would do those “body-awareness exercises,” whatever they were,
but only if I wanted to do them. Vera, one of my morning attendants,
dressed me, put me in my wheelchair, and pushed me to Marie’s cottage.
Vera tried to reassure me, but it didn’t help. I felt as though I were
going to my own execution.

We arrived at Marie’s place at 10:45. The door was locked and no one was
home. Vera sat on a bench in the yard, lit a cigarette, and chatted
amiably as I sweated out the minutes. An eternity passed: seven or eight
minutes. Then I heard the buzzing sound of Marie’s electric wheelchair.

Once inside, Vera put a sheet I had brought with me on the double bed.
Then she lowered me onto it. The bed was close to the floor, unlike my
iron lung. Since it’s difficult for me to turn my head to the left, Vera
pushed me over to the left side of the bed, so that Cheryl could lie
next to me and I could still see her. Then Vera put the hose of my
portable respirator near my mouth, in case I needed air. I thought it
likely because I’d never been outside the iron lung for an hour without
using the portable respirator. I was all set. I glanced at the
noncommittal green numerals flashing on the nearby digital clock: 11:04.
Cheryl was late.

Marie talked with Vera as I waited. 11:07. 11:11. Oh God, would she ever
come? Perhaps she had found out what an ugly, deformed creep I am and
was breaking the appointment. 11:14. Oh God. A knock on the door. Cheryl
had arrived.

I turned my head as far to my left as I could. She greeted me, smiling,
and walked to where I could see her better. She doesn’t hate me yet, I
thought. She pulled a chair up to the bedside, apologized for being
late, and talked about how everything had gone wrong for her that
morning. Marie went out the door with Vera, saying that she would return
at one. Cheryl and I were alone.

“Your fee’s on top of the dresser,” I said, unable to think of anything
else to say. She put the cash into her wallet and thanked me.

She wore a black pantsuit, and her dark brown hair was tied behind her
head. She had clear skin and large brown eyes and she seemed tall and
strong, but then I’m four foot seven and weigh sixty pounds. As we
talked, I decided that she was definitely attractive. Was she checking
out my looks? I was too scared to want to know.

Talking helped me to relax. She told me that she was forty-one, married
to a psychiatrist, and had two teenaged children. She was descended from
French-Canadians who had settled in Boston. “Boston?” I said. “That’s
where I was born.” After talking about Boston for a while, I asked
whether she was Catholic, like me. She told me she had left the Catholic
Church during her adolescence, when her priest condemned her sexual
behavior.

I began to tell her about my life, my family, my fear of sexuality. I
could see that she was accepting me and treating me with respect. I
liked her, so when she asked me if I would feel comfortable letting her
undress me, I said, “Sure.” I was bluffing, attempting to hide my fear.

My heart pounded — not with lust, but with pure terror — as she kneeled
on the bed and started to unbutton my red shirt. She had trouble
undressing me; I felt awkward and wondered if she would change her mind
and leave once she saw me naked. She didn’t. After she took my clothes
off, she got out of bed and undressed quickly. I looked at her full,
pale breasts but was too shy to gaze between her legs.

Whenever I had been naked before — always in front of nurses, doctors,
and attendants — I’d pretend I wasn’t naked. Now that I was in bed with
another naked person, I didn’t need to pretend: I was undressed, she was
undressed, and it seemed normal. How startling! I had half-expected God
— or my parents — to keep this moment from happening.

She stroked my hair and told me how good it felt. This surprised me; I
had never thought of my hair, or any other part of me, as feeling or
looking good. Having at least one attractive feature helped me to feel
more confident. She explained about the body-awareness exercises: first,
she would run her hand over me, and I could kiss her wherever I wished.
I told her I wished that I could caress her, too, but she assured me I
could excite her with my mouth and tongue. She rubbed scented oil on her
hands, then slowly moved her palms in circles over my chest and arms.
She was complimenting me in a soft, steady voice, while I chattered
nervously about everything that came to mind. I asked her if I could
kiss one of her breasts. She sidled up to me so that I could kiss her
left breast. So soft.

“Now if you kiss one, you have to kiss the other,” she said. “That’s the
rule.”

Amused by her mock seriousness, I moved to her right breast. She told me
to lick around the edge of the nipple. She said she liked that. I knew
she was helping me to feel more relaxed, but that didn’t make her
encouragements seem less true. I was getting aroused. Her hand moved in
its slow circles lower and lower as she continued to talk in her
reassuring way and I continued my chattering. She lightly touched my
cock — as though she liked it, as though it was fine that I was aroused.
No one had ever touched me that way, or praised me for my sexuality. Too
soon, I came.

After that, we talked a while. I told her about a woven Guatemalan
bracelet a friend had given me for this occasion. She asked me whether I
had any cologne; I said I did, but that I never wore it. That we could
be talking about such mundane matters right after an intense sexual
experience seemed strange at first. Another lesson learned: sex is a
part of ordinary living, not an activity reserved for gods, goddesses,
and rock stars. I realized that it could become a part of my life if I
fought against my self-hatred and pessimism.

I asked Cheryl whether she thought I deserved to be loved sexually. She
said she was sure of it. I nearly cried. She didn’t hate me. She didn’t
consider me repulsive.

She got out of bed, went into the bathroom, and dressed. By then it was
nearly one. Taking an appointment book out of her purse, she told me
that next time she wanted us to work on having intercourse. She asked me
whether I had been afraid to see her that day; I admitted that I felt
spasms of deep terror. She said it had been brave of me to go through
with the session despite my fear.

The door opened. It was Marie and Dixie. They asked me about the
experience. I told them it had changed my life. I felt victorious,
cleansed, and relieved.

Dixie pushed me back to my apartment, through the quiet neighborhood of
small, old houses and big, old trees. It was a warm day, which I hadn’t
noticed on the way over. I asked Dixie about her first sexual
experience. When she described it, I felt admitted to something from
which I had always felt excluded: the world of adults.

Back home, Dixie put me into the iron lung and set up my computer so
that I could write. Pounding the keys with my mouthstick, I wrote in my
journal as quickly as I could about my experience, then switched off the
computer and tried to nap. But I couldn’t. I was too happy. For the
first time, I felt glad to be a man.

When I saw Cheryl the second time, two weeks later, I felt more relaxed
and confident. We chatted briefly, but there was no formal interview.
After pulling down the window shades, she undressed me with more ease
than before. I felt less afraid and embarrassed. As I watched her
undress, I anticipated the sight of her breasts. There they were, full
and rounded. Before she could even get into the bed, I had climaxed. I
felt angry at myself for being unable to control the timing of my
orgasms but Cheryl said she would try to stimulate me to another orgasm.
I didn’t believe that she could arouse me again, but I trusted her more
now and let her try.

She lightly scratched my arms, which, to my surprise, I liked. I spent a
lot of time kissing and licking her breasts. I asked her to rub the
eternally itchy place behind my balls, which she said was called the
perineum. The use of such a dignified Latin word to name a place that
didn’t even have a name, as far as I had known, struck me as funny. I
screamed with delight as she rubbed me, surprised that my body could
feel so much pleasure. Then, I felt a warmth around my cock. I realized
that Cheryl wasn’t beside me anymore.

“Know what I was doing?” she asked a few seconds later. “No.”

“I was sucking you.”

It wasn’t long before I had another erection. Aroused and more
confident, I said I wanted to try to have intercourse with her, so she
quickly scrambled into place over me, her knees by my side. I breathed
more rapidly, filled with anticipation, a feeling of this is it. She
nearly stepped on my feet, which rattled me a little. Reassuring me, she
held my cock and rubbed it against her, but when she tried to place it
inside her, I panicked. For reasons I still don’t understand, I felt
that I couldn’t fit. Perhaps I feared success. Perhaps intercourse would
prove I was an adult, something I had never been willing to acknowledge.
Perhaps it would suggest that I could have had intercourse long before,
if I hadn’t contracted polio, if I hadn’t been so fearful, if. . . . I
did not want to contemplate this long chain of ifs.

I insisted to Cheryl that I couldn’t fit into her vagina. She said that
couldn’t be. Then suddenly I came again — outside of her.

I felt humiliated. Cheryl asked me if I had enjoyed myself. I said, “Oh
yes, up to the anticlimax.” She assured me that she had enjoyed it,
which cheered me somewhat. And it was still pleasant for me, lying
beside her, the two of us naked. I told her I wanted to recite a poem
I’d memorized for this occasion, Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more
temperate; Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s
lease hath all too short a date; . . . I stumbled through it, forgetting
phrases, stopping, starting again, but I made it to the end: As long as
men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life
to thee.

Cheryl said that she was touched, that it was sweet of me to recite the
poem. I felt glad that I was now a giver of pleasure, not merely a
passive recipient.

An attendant came and took me home. I ate supper, exhausted and
contented. But the next day I worried: why had I panicked? Would I ever
be able to have intercourse with Cheryl? With any woman?

Marie told me that she couldn’t let me use her house for the next
appointment because she and her lover were going out of town. So I
called Neil, a disabled playwright who lives in a large apartment
building in my neighborhood. Although I hadn’t known him long, he
readily agreed. But he told me that his mattress was on the floor of his
bedroom. That worried me because this would make it difficult, perhaps
impossible, for an attendant to lift me back into my wheelchair.

On the day of the appointment, Dixie took me to Neil’s building. Neil
has a rare disabling condition which impairs his speech, but allows him
to stand and hop about on one foot. There he was, standing on one foot
beside his wheelchair, which he had parked outside the building’s
entrance. Upon seeing us, he plunked himself into his wheelchair and led
us to the elevators. Once inside the apartment, Dixie pushed me into the
bedroom and eyed the mattress with skepticism, saying that she could
easily put me on it but feared that she would hurt her back lifting me
later. After a minute of mutual indecision, she picked me up from the
wheelchair and set me down on the mattress. After she made sure that I
was comfortable, she and Neil left.

I lay there looking at Neil’s clock and wondering whether Cheryl would
ever arrive. Neil had told me he would wait for Cheryl outside the
building to give her the keys. What if Neil had become bored waiting and
left? Was Cheryl coming at all? After waiting for forty minutes, I heard
some noise in the outer room. It was Cheryl, who apologized for being
late.

As Cheryl undressed me and herself, I noticed that I wasn’t becoming
aroused. I felt proud of my self-control and began to think of myself as
a mature, sophisticated man, accustomed to being in a bedroom with a
naked woman.

She got into the bed with me and began to stroke my thighs and cock. I
climaxed instantly. I loathed myself for coming so soon, in the
afterglow of my man-of-the-world fantasies. Undismayed, Cheryl began to
stroke me, scratch me, and kiss me slowly. Reminding me of our previous
session, she assured me that I could have a second orgasm. She said that
she would rub the tip of my cock around her vagina. Then she would put
it into her. I couldn’t see what was going on down there and I was too
excited to sort out the tactile sensations. Suddenly, I had another
orgasm.

“Was I inside of you?” I asked. “Just for a second,” she said. “Did you
come, too?” She raised herself and lay beside me. “No, Mark, I didn’t.
But we can try some other time if you want.” “Yes, I want.”

After she got off the mattress, she took a large mirror out of her tote
bag. It was about two feet long and framed in wood. Holding it so that I
could see myself, Cheryl asked what I thought of the man in the mirror.
I said that I was surprised I looked so normal, that I wasn’t the
horribly twisted and cadaverous figure I had always imagined myself to
be. I hadn’t seen my genitals since I was six years old. That was when
polio struck me, shriveling me below my diaphragm in such a way that my
view of my lower body had been blocked by my chest. Since then, that
part of me had seemed unreal. But seeing my genitals made it easier to
accept the reality of my manhood.

Cheryl was still dressing when Dixie came into the apartment. Dixie
dressed me and, lifting me with surprising ease, got me back into the
wheelchair. Cheryl told me she would be out of town for a couple of
weeks. She looked at her schedule book. “How would the twenty-ninth be
for you?”

“It’s OK with me,” I said. “I’ll just have to check with Neil or Marie
to see if I can get a place.” “Well, just leave a message on my
machine.”

Having failed for a second time to have intercourse worried me. I became
obsessed with this failure during the three weeks between appointments.
What was wrong with me? Was I afraid that having intercourse represented
aggression against women? Was it my lack of experience, or was it
something deeper than that, something I could never figure out?

Before my next appointment, I was visited by Tracy, a former attendant
who had worked for me in the early eighties while she studied at
Berkeley. I had tried not to fall in love with her back then, but she
was just too appealing. Young, bright, and pretty, she understood me
thoroughly and was the wittiest person I’d ever known. Tracy was
involved with another man; she maintained a warm friendship with me, but
she made it clear that she was not interested in a romantic
relationship. I felt awkward: I had told her that I loved her in a state
of terrified, embarrassed passion a few years earlier.

I was waiting for Tracy in my wheelchair when she entered my apartment.
She leaned over so that I could kiss her cheek.

Then she kissed mine.

“I love you,” I said. “I love you,” she replied cheerfully.

We went to a cafe and talked about her boyfriend and my experiences with
Cheryl. She said that she felt proud of me for having the courage to see
a surrogate. I felt terrific talking with her and tried to prolong the
conversation by asking her everything I could think of about her
graduate studies, her boyfriend, her parents, her brothers, her past,
and her plans for the future. Eventually, though, we both ran out of
words. She wanted to see other friends in Berkeley, so she took me back
to my apartment.

After Tracy left, I was saddened by the undeniable knowledge that she
felt no sexual attraction for me. Who could blame her? I was seldom
attracted to disabled women. Many young, healthy, good-looking men had
been drawn to Tracy, who was in a position to pick and choose. My only
hope seemed to be in trusting that working with Cheryl would help me in
the event that I should meet someone else as splendid as Tracy.

The next time I saw Cheryl, she said that this time, she would minimize
the foreplay and get on top of me as soon as I told her I was becoming
aroused. She had the mirror with her again and held it up to me before
she got into the bed. This time, I climaxed at seeing myself erect in
the mirror. Cheryl got into the bed and adjusted herself so that I could
give her cunnilingus. I had to stop it after a minute or so because I
began to feel as though I were suffocating. But I had wanted to do
something to give her pleasure, so I asked her whether I could put my
tongue in her ear. She said no, she disliked that, but it was good that
I asked.

“Some women like it. I just happen to hate it. Different women react
differently to the same stimulus. That’s why you should always ask.”

When she started stroking my cock, I told her to get on top. Quick. I
was feeling the onset of an erection. She got over me and with one hand
she guided me into her.

“Is it in?” “Yes, it’s in.”

I couldn’t believe it. Here I was having intercourse and it didn’t feel
like the greatest thing in the world. Intercourse was certainly
pleasant, but I had enjoyed the foreplay — the kissing, the rubbing, the
licking — more. Too soon, I came. She kept holding me inside her. Then a
look of pleasure brushed lightly over her face, as though an all-day
itch were finally being scratched. Letting me go, she put her hands down
on the bed by my shoulders and kissed my chest.

This act of affection moved me deeply. I hadn’t expected it; it seemed
like a gift from her heart. My chest is unmuscular, pale, and hairless,
the precise opposite of what a sexy man’s chest is supposed to be. It
has always felt like a very vulnerable part of me. Now it was being
kissed by a caring, understanding woman and I almost wept.

“Did you come?” I asked her. “Yes.”

I was exultant. She got out of the bed and went into the bathroom.
Hearing her pee made me feel as though we were longtime lovers, familiar
and comfortable with each other’s bodily functions. When she came out of
the bathroom and began dressing herself, I asked her if she thought I
should buy a futon so that I could have sex in my apartment.

“I don’t know if I should get a futon now or wait . . . till something
comes up.”

“You may want to get one now because you never know when something will
come up. And if you wait till then, by the time you get the futon, it
might be all over.”

I asked her whether she thought we should have another session. She said
she would do whatever I thought best. “Do you think there’s anything to
be gained from another time?” she asked.

“No,” I said, relieved that I would not have to spend any more money. I
had just enough to buy a futon. And besides, I’d had intercourse. What
was there left to do? Later that year, I bought the futon, dark blue
with an austere pattern of flowers and rushes.

I began this essay in 1986, then set it aside until last year. In
re-reading what I originally wrote, and my old journal entries from the
time, I’ve been struck by how optimistic I was, imagining that my
experience with Cheryl had changed my life. But my life hasn’t changed.
I continue to be isolated, partly because of my polio, which forces me
to spend five or six days a week in an iron lung, and partly because of
my personality. I am low-key, withdrawn, and cerebral.

My personality, it may be said, is a result of my disability, because of
which I have spent most of my life apart from people my own age.
Whatever the cause, my isolation continues, along with the consequent
celibacy. Occasional visitors sit on the futon, but I’ve never lain on
it.

I wonder whether seeing Cheryl was worth it, not in terms of the money
but in hopes raised and never fulfilled. I blame neither Cheryl nor
myself for this feeling of letdown. Our culture values youth, health,
and good looks, along with instant solutions. If I had received
intensive psychotherapy from the time I got polio to the present, would
I have needed to see a sex surrogate? Would I have resisted accepting
the cultural standards of beauty and physical perfection? Would I have
fallen into the more familiar pattern of flirting, dating, and making
out which seems so common among people who have been disabled during or
after adolescence?

One thing I did learn was that intercourse is not an expression of male
aggression, but a gentle, mutually playful experience. But has that
knowledge come too late?

Where do I go from here? People have suggested several steps I could
take. I could hire prostitutes, advertise in the personals, or sign up
for a dating service. None of these appeal to me. Hiring a prostitute
implies that I cannot be loved body and soul, just body or soul. I would
be treated as a body in need of some impersonal, professional service —
which is what I’ve always gotten, though in a different form, from
nurses and attendants. Sex for the sake of sex alone has little appeal
to me because it seems like a ceremony whose meaning has been forgotten.

As for the personals and dating services, sure, I’d like to meet people,
but what sort of ad could I write?

Severely disabled man, 41, living in iron lung he can escape but twice a
week seeks . . .

Which brings up the question — what do I seek? I don’t know. Someone who
likes me and loves me and who will promise to protect me from all the
self-hating parts of myself? An all-purpose lover-mommy-attendant to
care for all my physical and emotional needs? What one friend calls a
“shapely savior” — a being so perfect that she can rescue me from the
horror that has been imposed upon me and the horror I’ve imposed upon
myself? Why bother? I ask myself. I don’t. Not anymore. Which leaves me
where I was before I saw Cheryl. I’ve met a few women nearly as
wonderful as Tracy, but they haven’t expressed any romantic interest in
me. I feel no enthusiasm for the seemingly doomed project of pursuing
women. My desire to love and be loved sexually is equaled by my
isolation and my fear of breaking out of it. The fear is twofold. I fear
getting nothing but rejections. But I also fear being accepted and
loved. For if this latter happens, I will curse myself for all the time
and life that I have wasted.

Do these people deserve our condemnation because they have bought/sold sexual intimacy? Or was the tawdry exchange legitimized, somehow, by being framed as "therapy"? And, as Nordic has suggested, might not many such encounters not explicitly framed as "therapeutic," nevertheless be equally so?

[jakell]

And I don't do "bro code" and am pretty insulted you would accuse me of that.

There is no 'bro code', just like there was no romantic blindness about prostitution here. It's a suggestive phrase that you are meant to tacitly support by claiming that you are not part of 'it'.

Don't be insulted though, it's just a vehicle. Once you have kindly supported the notion, then you will be told that it's not you, it's those 'other guys'.

[parel]

Sorry the OP disappeared. I spat the dummy one day and felt uncomfortable about my story being out there. Asked them to pull it but did not realise it would leave replies. Will try to restore.

BKS 'exploitation' is an unacceptable term in a discussion about sex work. I never said anything about sucking a 1000 dicks whyever that keeps coming up. If it pertains to a trafficking scenario, that's not what I'm on about. And not what the guys who are speaking about their family and friends in sex work are on about either.

Good discussion though.

Enjoying it.

[brekin]

And I don't do "bro code" and am pretty insulted you would accuse me of that.

There is no 'bro code', just like there was no romantic blindness about prostitution here. It's a suggestive phrase that you are meant to tacitly support by claiming that you are not part of 'it'.
Don't be insulted though, it's just a vehicle. Once you have kindly supported the notion, then you will be told that it's not you, it's those 'other guys'.

Yeah, I think these threads could be productive, but you can spend so much time equivocating, self-testifying, having to answer to questions that are on topic but completely out of the scope of the thread, resist being put into various ideological camps, only to spend more time escaping from them, it all comes down to one long loyalty oath. An oath to some nebulous ever shifting ideology. And really, the majority of RI posters (I'm going to guess) are easy prey for this because they are probably (guessing again) pastey white, males, with well meaning concepts of progressiveness matched with fears of elite class conspiracy laden worldviews. So, while in actuality they probably have little power or influence over anyone other than their small circle of intimates, in theory they could belong to the same cabal running the world if they had gone to a different boarding school.

It reminds me a lot of General Semantics and levels of abstraction. We can really only speak to our own individual experience and those we have been effected by directly, and even that imperfectly. Politics are personal and especially with a subject like this, which runs the gamut from empowered courtesan to sexual slave there can't be any one solution. Even if most prostitutes are somewhere in the middle of "exploited person with little options" I don't think prostitution is really ever going away. That leaves it in the reform, legislate, regulation arena and that is sticky in itself. If you think of prostitution as a form of slavery then any call to reform it is seen as an endorsement and strengthening of the patriarchal, misogynistic power structure. If you don't think it is (or is for all sex workers) and look to it as an occupation for many, no matter how imperfect at present, then any attempt to further stigmatize the profession or clientele is seen as a class struggle over autonomy.

I was reminded of the kerfuffle over Jada Pinket Smith and husband boycotting the Oscars and former co-star, Janet Hubert, with Will on Fresh Prince of Bel Air, when she pointed out the hypocrisy of the Smith's suddenly getting political and race consciousness:

In her latest rant, the TV actress recalled an incident 20-something years ago while she was still on “Fresh Prince” when she asked Smith to help the cast band together to get higher wages from the network, like they did on “Friends.”
She claims the star’s response was “my deal is my deal, your deal is your deal,”

http://www.thewrap.com/fresh-prince-of- ... s-boycott/

Sadly, I think that is what it comes down to most times and why systemic change doesn't happen. My deal is my deal, your deal is your deal. Often we want our deal to be the law of the land because that is what would best serve our priorities and reinforce our ideologies. And for every Spike Lee, there are 100's, possibly 1000's of Will Smith's.

[jakell]

Out of curiosity I did a search on the term 'bro code' on RI, just to see if it really is a solid concept that has a pedigree.

Turns out it has only appeared in the last few weeks so it looks like it is a case of meme creation that people are meant to join in with.

[Heaven Swan]

Brekin wrote:

Yeah, I think these threads could be productive, but you can spend so much time equivocating, self-testifying, having to answer to questions that are on topic but completely out of the scope of the thread, resist being put into various ideological camps, only to spend more time escaping from them, it all comes down to one long loyalty oath. An oath to some nebulous ever shifting ideology.

There's a richness in hearing people's personal experience that I like as well as hearing (and sharing) ideas and views they have come to through life experience combined with study and research. When they work these discussion boards remind me a bit of feminist consciousness-raising, the personal is political and all that.

What doesn't work are veiled and overt personal attacks- I mean what's the point? No one has to participate in a thread they don't like. For me the questions are a way of going deeper and illustrating a point, not a way of pressuring someone to pretend they think or feel something they don't. I mean, do posters here really have time for that? Again no one is forced to post or read.

[Heaven Swan]

Jakell wrote:

Out of curiosity I did a search on the term 'bro code' on RI, just to see if it really is a solid concept that has a pedigree.

Turns out it has only appeared in the last few weeks so it looks like it is a case of meme creation that people are meant to join in with.

I may have made up the term bro code, at least I hope I'm that creative. It's something I've observed over the years. But seriously, you've never heard the saying 'bros before hos"?

I head a radio show once where a man, a feminist ally, was talking about being with a group of males. When he suggested that they tone down the misogynist talk about all the hos, one of them threatened to kick his ass. That's an example of the bro code.

Anyway, bro code tends to come to mind around this site. There was a thread about misogyny that was referenced in the "What gender are you? " thread. If you take a look at it you'll see male posters ganging up on female ones to silence feminist talk (bro code in action). They apparently did such a good job that a large number of females stopped posting here, leaving a skewed demographic.

[brekin]

Brekin wrote:

Yeah, I think these threads could be productive, but you can spend so much time equivocating, self-testifying, having to answer to questions that are on topic but completely out of the scope of the thread, resist being put into various ideological camps, only to spend more time escaping from them, it all comes down to one long loyalty oath. An oath to some nebulous ever shifting ideology.

There's a richness in hearing people's personal experience that I like as well as hearing (and sharing) ideas and views they have come to through life experience combined with study and research. When they work these discussion boards remind me a bit of feminist consciousness-raising, the personal is political and all that.

What doesn't work are veiled and overt personal attacks- I mean what's the point? No one has to participate in a thread they don't like. For me the questions are a way of going deeper and illustrating a point, not a way of pressuring someone to pretend they think or feel something they don't. I mean, do posters here really have time for that? Again no one is forced to post or read.

Yes, I would just add is that a lot of "consciousness-raising" can come across unfortunately as subtle and overt personal attacks. That is where some of the blow back can come from. The presumption is that a person is deficit of certain knowledge that you have and they need to be educated up to your level (speaking generically, not you in particular). Which may be true. But with most isms the problem is that is it is framed (intentional or not) often as their ignorance, or lack of intensity, or disagreement over tactics, is contributing or exacerbating the isms.

No one wants to be cast as the bad guy, either through their ignorance or supposed maliciousness. [Especially if they are sharing personal stories and their personal experiences.] But one is, basically, if they don't agree with someone who belongs to the group in question or an "advocate" for the group. And the group can be extrapolated out to be basically all women, a race, etc. if one so chooses. So, the choice is then, for the out group in need of conscious raising, to strike the begging pose, accept your culpability in your ignorance and allow us to raise your consciousness. Or if you disagree, you don't really "understand the problem", which really translates as "you can never experience what I, or my group has". Which, of course the latter is completely true, but doesn't preclude understanding (as opposed to experiencing) the problem and recognizing something needs to be done.

And sadly, these threads in general, here, there, everywhere, often need a useful idiot to outrage peoples sensibilities for the thread to progress. When one is not forthcoming, (and there is no shortage in the cyberworld of them), one will be produced. When these ones are picked off, those still standing will start to see their differences of opinion as somehow no long minor and there will be as much vitriol and blood spilt over whether to call it "prostitution" or "sex work".

This is just what I've noticed on this forum, and I'd say this forum is actually pretty enlightened in comparison to most others when it comes to these topics. But still, for some reasons stated above and others not, gender related things on RI are the "religion & politics" at the family reunion. Not to dissuade such topics or to say you have any responsibility in it, this is just the way these things seem to play out. Wheeehhhhhh!

[Heaven Swan]

Brekin wrote:

Yes, I would just add is that a lot of "consciousness-raising" can come across unfortunately as subtle and overt personal attacks. That is where some of the blow back can come from. The presumption is that a person is deficit of certain knowledge that you have and they need to be educated up to your level (speaking generically, not you in particular). Which may be true. But with most isms the problem is that is it is framed (intentional or not) often as their ignorance, or lack of intensity, or disagreement over tactics, is contributing or exacerbating the isms.

That's not what consciousness-raising is (but of course how would you know?). Consciousness raising is discussing personal matters with the aim of raising ones consciousness of systemic political oppression. The raising of consciousness comes from examining and speaking about one' s own experiences and listening to the experiences of others, not from being schooled or instructed by someone else.

In feminist consciousness raising, each woman speaks of things that they till then considered sad personal personal problems. On hearing that her sisters all have slight variations on the same problems, the awareness of societal oppression emerges.

[jakell]

Jakell wrote:

Out of curiosity I did a search on the term 'bro code' on RI, just to see if it really is a solid concept that has a pedigree.

Turns out it has only appeared in the last few weeks so it looks like it is a case of meme creation that people are meant to join in with.

I may have made up the term bro code, at least I hope I'm that creative. It's something I've observed over the years. But seriously, you've never heard the saying 'bros before hos"?

I head a radio show once where a man, a feminist ally, was talking about being with a group of males. When he suggested that they tone down the misogynist talk about all the hos, one of them threatened to kick his ass. That's an example of the bro code.

Anyway, bro code tends to come to mind around this site. There was a thread about misogyny that was referenced in the "What gender are you? " thread. If you take a look at it you'll see male posters ganging up on female ones to silence feminist talk (bro code in action). They apparently did such a good job that a large number of females stopped posting here, leaving a skewed demographic.

Not a phrase I've heard in Britain, it seems like you are describing dumb male behaviour, but suggesting that non-dumb males are also (strongly?) susceptible to it.

I hadn't really thought of RI as a home for sexism, but your final paragraph seems to strongly imply that.

[American Dream]

Big up to Laura María Agustín:

Sex as work and sex work: a marxian take



In this essay, Laura Agustín discusses among other things, sex in relationships as work and sex work as reproductive labour and a job.


An army colonel is about to start the morning briefing to his staff. While waiting for the coffee to be prepared, the colonel says he didn’t sleep much the night before because his wife had been a bit frisky. He asks everyone: How much of sex is ‘work’ and how much is ‘pleasure’? A Major votes 75-25% in favor of work. A Captain says 50-50%. A lieutenant responds with 25-75% in favor of pleasure, depending on how much he’s had to drink. There being no consensus, the colonel turns to the enlisted man in charge of making the coffee. What does he think? With no hesitation, the young soldier replies, ‘Sir, it has to be 100% pleasure.’ The surprised colonel asks why. ‘Well, sir, if there was any work involved, the officers would have me doing it for them.’

Perhaps because he is the youngest, the soldier considers only the pleasure that sex represents, while the older men know a lot more is going on. They may have a better grasp of the fact that sex is the work that puts in motion the machine of human reproduction. Biology and medical texts present the mechanical facts without any mention of possible ineffable experiences or feelings (pleasure, in other words), as sex is reduced to wiggly sperm fighting their way towards waiting eggs. The divide between the feelings and sensations involved and the cold facts is vast.

The officers probably also have in mind the work involved in keeping a marriage going, apart from questions of lust and satisfaction. They might say that sex between people who are in love is special (maybe even sacred), but they also know sex is part of the partnership of getting through life together and has to be considered pragmatically as well. Even people in love do not have identical physical and emotional needs, with the result that sex takes different forms and means more or less on different occasions.

This little story shows a few of the ways that sex can be considered work. When we say sex work nowadays the focus is immediately on commercial exchanges, but in this article I mean more than that and question our ability to distinguish clearly when sex involves work (as well as other things) and sex work (which involves all sorts of things). Most of the moral uproar surrounding prostitution and other forms of commercial sex asserts that the difference between good or virtuous sex and bad or harmful sex is obvious. Efforts to repress, condemn, punish and rescue women who sell sex rest on the claim that they occupy a place outside the norm and the community, can be clearly identified and therefore acted on by people who Know Better how they should live. To show this claim to be false discredits this neocolonialist project.

Loving, with and without sex

We live in a time when relationships based on romantic, sexual love occupy the pinnacle of a hierarchy of emotional values, in which it is supposed that romantic love is the best possible experience and that the sex people in love have is the best sex, in more ways than one. Romantic passion is considered meaningful, a way for two people to ‘become one’, an experience some believe heightened if they conceive a child. Other sexual traditions also strive to transcend ordinariness in sex (the mechanical, the frictional), for example Tantra, which distinguishes three separate purposes for sex: procreation, pleasure and liberation, the last culminating in losing the sense of self in cosmic consciousness. In the western romantic tradition, passion is conceived as involving a strong positive emotion toward a particular person that goes beyond the physical and is contrasted to lust, which is only physical.

It is, however, impossible to say exactly how we know which is which, and the young enlisted man in the opening story might well not understand the difference. Sex driven by surging or excess testosterone and sex as adolescent rebellion against repressive family values cannot be reduced to a mechanical activity bereft of emotion or meaning; rather, those kinds of sex often feel like ways of finding out and expressing who we are. And even when sex is used to show off in front of others, or to affirm one’s attractiveness and power to pull, ‘meaningless’ would seem to be the last thing it should be called. Here it is true that one person may not only lack passion but totally neglect another’s feelings and desires, but just as often this other person is engaged in the same pursuit. The point is that reductions like lust and love don’t go very far towards telling us what is going on when people have sex together. Moreover, while real passion is meant to be based on knowing someone long and intimately, a parallel story glorifies love at first sight, in which passion is instantly awakened – and this can occur as easily at a rave or pub as at the Taj Mahal.

Part of the mythology of love promises that loving couples will always want and enjoy sex together, unproblematically, freely and loyally. But most people know that couples are multi-faceted partnerships, sex together being only one facet, and that those involved very often tire of sex with each other. Although skeptics say today’s high divorce rate shows the love-myth is a lie, others say the problem is that lovers aren’t able or willing to do the work necessary to stay together and survive personal, economic and professional changes. Some of this work may well be sexual. In some partnerships where the spark has gone, partners grant each other the freedom to have sex with others, or pay others to spice up their own sex lives (as a couple or separately). This can take the form of a polyamorous project, with open contracts; as swinging, where couples play with others together; as polygamy or temporary marriage; as cheating or betrayal; or as paying for sex.

The sex contract

Even when love is involved, people may use sex in the hope of getting something in return. They may or may not be fully conscious of such motives as:

• I will have sex with you because I love you even if I am not in the mood myself

• I will have sex with you hoping you will feel well disposed toward me afterwards and give me something I want

• I will have sex with you because if I don’t you are liable to be unpleasant to me, our children, or my friends, or withhold something we want

In these situations, sex is felt to be and accepted as part of the relationship, backed up in classic marriage law by the concept of conjugal relations, spouses’ rights to them and the consequences of not providing them: abandonment, adultery, annulment, divorce. This can work the opposite way as well, as when a partner doesn’t want sex:

• I will not have sex with you, so you will have to do without or get it somewhere else

The partner wanting sex and not getting it at home now has to choose: do without and feel frustrated? call an old friend? ring for an escort? go to a pick-up bar? drive to a hooker stroll? visit a public toilet? buy an inflatable doll? fly to a third-world beach?

People of any gender identity can find themselves in this situation, where money may help resolve the situation, at least temporarily, and where more than one option may have to be tried. Tiring of partners is a universal experience, and research on women who pay local guides and beach boys on holidays suggests there is nothing inherently male about exchanging money for sex. That said, our societies are still patriarchal, women still take more responsibility for maintaining homes and children than men and men still have more disposable cash than women, making the overtly commercial options more viable for men than for others.

We don’t know how many people do what, but we know that many clients of sex workers say they are married (some happily, some not, the research is all about male clients). In testimonies about their motivations for paying for sex, men often cite a desire for variety or a way to cope with not getting enough sex or the kind of sex they want at home.

• I want to have sex with you but I also want it with someone else

This is the point in the sex contract many have trouble with, the question being Why? Why should someone with sex available at home (even good sex) also want it somewhere else? The assumption is, of course, that we all ought to want only one partner, because we all ought to want the kind of love that is loyal, passionate and monogamous. To say I love my wife and also I would like to have sex with others is to seem perverse, or greedy, and a lot of energy is spent railing against such people. However, there is nothing intrinsically better about monogamy than any other attitude to sex.

If saving marriages is a value, then more than one sex worker believes her role helps prevent break-ups, or at least allows spouses to blow off steam from difficult relationships. Workers mean not only the overtly sexual side of paid activities but also the emotional labour performed in listening to clients’ stories, bolstering their egos, teaching them sexual techniques, providing emotional advice. Rarely do sex workers position clients’ spouses as enemies or say they want to steal clients away from them; on the contrary, many see the triangular relationship – wife, husband, sex worker – as mutually sustaining. In this way sex workers believe they help reproduce the marital home and even improve it.

Sex as reproductive labour

In support of the idea that sex reproduces social life, one can say that people fortunate enough to experience satisfying sex feel fundamentally affirmed and renewed by it. In that sense, a worker providing sexual services does reproductive work. Paid sex work is a caring service when workers provide friend-like or therapist-like company and when they give a back rub – whether the caring is a performance or not. The person providing the caring services uses brain, emotions and body to make another person feel good:

• Leaning over to comfort a baby

• Leaning over to massage aching shoulders

• Leaning over to kiss a neck or forehead or chest

• Leaning over to suck a penis or breast

If the recipient perceives the contact as positive, a sense of well-being is produced that the brain registers, and the individual’s separateness is momentarily erased. These effects are not different simply because the so-called erogenous zones are involved rather than other parts of the body. In this sense, sex work, whether paid or not, reproduces fundamental social life.

The argument against sex work as reproductive labour is that sexual experiences, while sometimes temporarily rejuvenating, are neither always felt as positive nor essential to the individual’s continued functioning. Humans have to eat and keep our bodies and environments clean but we don’t have to have sex to survive: the well-being produced by sex is a luxury or extra. Sex feels as essential as food to a lot of people, and they may be very unhappy without it, but they can go on living.

Sex as a job

The variability of sexual experience makes it difficult to pin down which sex should properly be thought of as sex work. My own policy is to accept what individuals say. If someone tells me they experience selling sex as a job, I take their word for it. If, on the contrary, they say that it doesn’t feel like a job but something else, then I accept that. What does it mean to say it feels like a job? There are several possibilities:

• I organise myself to offer particular services for money that I define

• I take a job in someone else’s business where I control some aspects of what I do but not others

• I place myself in situations where others tell me what they are looking for and I adapt, negotiate, manipulate and perform – but it’s a job because I get money

There are other permutations, too, of course. All service jobs involve customer relations, which are eternally unpredictable. Some clients are able to specify exactly what services they want and make sure they are satisfied, but some cannot and may end up getting what the worker wants to provide. To imagine that the worker is always powerless because the client pays for time makes no sense, since all workers jockey for control in their jobs – of what happens when and how long it takes. This is a simple definition of human agency. And it’s important to remember that a very large proportion of sex work is spent on selling: the seduction and flirtation necessary to turn atmosphere, potentiality and possibility into an exchange of money for sex.

Furthermore, although we like to think about the two roles, salesperson and customer, as separate, in the sexual relation roles can be blurred. Theorists want to think about the worker doing something for the client or the client commanding the worker to act. But carrying out a command does not exclude doing it one’s own way, nor, for that matter, enjoyment, feelings of connectivity and the reproduction of self.

Non-partner sex in the home

Many would like to believe that non-commercial (or ‘real’) sex takes place in homes, while commercial sex lurks in seedy other places. However, sex outside the partnership easily takes place while one of the partners is not there. This can be sex that is ordered in and paid for or adulterous, promiscuous, play or non-monogamous sex. Sometimes the non-partner is considered ‘almost one of the family’ – a live-in maid or nanny. Other times the non-partner is someone who’s come to perform some other paid job – the proverbial milkman or plumber. There’s also sex in the home online, via webcam, or over the telephone, as well as images or objects that enhance a sexual experience in which no partner is necessary at all. The sex industry penetrates family residences in many ways and cannot be, by definition, the family’s Other.

Most commentary on how the sex industry is changing focuses on the Internet, where apart from more conventional business sites, sexual communities form and reform continuously. Social networking sites like Facebook provide spaces where the commercial, the aesthetic and the activist intersect and overlap, also complicating the traditional divide between selling and buying. Chat and instant messaging provide opportunities for people to experiment with sexual identities including commercial ones. Much of all this is unmeasurable, taking place on sites where all participants are mixed together, not sorted into categories of buyers and sellers. Statistics on the value of pornography sold on the Internet focus on sites with catalogues of products for sale, but the sphere of webcams, like peep shows of old, blurs the wobbly line between porn and prostitution.

Although, some (like my colleague Elizabeth Bernstein 2007) claim that sex workers offering girlfriend-like experiences are a manifestation of post-industrial life, I am not convinced. Sex worker testimonies from many periods reveal the complexity always waiting to happen when brief encounters are repeated, when clients seek again someone with whom they felt a bond as well as a sexual attraction. Nor am I convinced that the experiences of upper-class clients patronising courtesans, geishas or mistresses are inherently different from the socialising of working-class men and women in ‘treating’ cultures. Instead, it is clear that the lines between commercial and non-commercial sex have always been blurry, and that middle-class marriage is itself an example.

Scholars of sexual cultures won’t get far if they follow dogma that considers marriage to be separate and outside the realm of investigations of commercial sex. In societies where matchmaking and different sorts of arranged marriages and dowries are conventional, the link between payment and sex has been overt and normalised, while campaigners against both sex tourism and foreign-bride agencies are offended precisely because they see a money-exchange entering into what they believe should be ‘pure’ relationships. We have too much information now about non-family forms of love and commitment, non-committed forms of sex and non-sexual forms of love to hold on to these arbitrary, mythic divisions, which further oppressive ideas about sexually good and bad women. We know now that monogamy is not necessarily better, that paid sex can be affectionate, that loving couples can do without sex, that married love involves money and that sex involves work.

I see no postmodern crisis here. Some believe that the developed West was moving in a good direction after the Second World War, towards happier families and juster societies, and that neoliberalism is destroying that. But historical research shows that before the bourgeoisie’s advancement to the centre of European societies, with the concomitant focus on nuclear families and a particular version of moral respectability, loose, flexible arrangements vis-à-vis sex, family and sexuality were common in both upper- and working-class cultures (Agustín 2004) . In the long run it may turn out that 200 years of bourgeois ‘family values’ were a blip on the screen in human history.

Sex, equality and money

Understanding professional sex work has not been made easier by making ‘equality’ the standard for gender relations. We can only really know whether sexual experiences are equal if everyone looks and acts the same, which is not only impossible but repressive of diversity. In sexual relations, equality projects run into the problem of dissimilar bodies, different ways of exhibiting arousal and experiencing satisfaction, not to mention differences in cultural background and social status. Those who complain about other people’s perversity and deviance are accused in return of being boring adherents of repressive sex.

In terms of the work of sex, we run into a further difficulty vis-à-vis equality, the cliché that sees participants taking either an active or a passive role and identity. But many people, not just professional sex workers, know that the work of sex can mean allowing the other to take an active role and assuming a passive one as well as taking the active role or switching back and forth. Sometimes people do what they already know they like, and sometimes they experiment. Sometimes people don’t know what they want, or want to be surprised, or to lose control.

For some critics, the possession of money by clients gives them absolute power over workers and therefore means that equality is impossible. This attitude toward money is odd, given that we live in times when it is acceptable to pay for child and elderly care, for rape, alcohol and suicide counselling and for many other forms of consolation and caring. Those services are considered compatible with money but when it is exchanged for sex money is treated as a totally negative, contaminating force - this commodification uniquely terrible. Money is a fetish here despite the obvious fact that no body part is actually sold off in the commercial sex exchange.

Sex work and migrancy

In many places, migrant women and young men do most of the paid sex work, because: there are enormous structural inequalities in the world, because there are people everywhere willing to take the risk of travelling to work in other countries and because social networks, high technology and transportation make it widely feasible (Agustín 2002). Migrants take jobs that are available, accept lower pay and tolerate having fewer rights than first-class citizens because those are less important than simply getting ahead. Even those with qualifications for other jobs, whether as hairdressers or university professors, are glad to get jobs considered unprestigious by non-migrants. While many view migrants in low-prestige jobs as absolute victims too constrained by forces around them to have real agency, social gain or enjoyment, there are other ways to understand them (Agustín 2003).

Critics hold that migrants who work in private homes reproduce the social life of their all-powerful employers but accomplish little on their own behalf. This is strange, because low-prestige workers who are not migrants are acknowledged to gain a connection to society, knowledge of being a useful economic actor and more options because of having money.

“We look at migration as neither a degradation nor improvement . . . in women’s position, but as a restructuring of gender relations. This restructuring need not necessarily be expressed through a satisfactory professional life. It may take place through the assertion of autonomy in social life, through relations with family of origin, or through participating in networks and formal associations. The differential between earnings in the country of origin and the country of immigration may in itself create such an autonomy, even if the job in the receiving country is one of a live-in maid or prostitute” (Hefti 1997).

One of the great contradictions of capitalism is that even unfair, unwritten, ambiguous contracts can produce active subjects.

Ways forward

I have proposed the cultural study of commercial sex (Agustín 2005), in which scholars are free of the constraints of the traditional study of prostitution, where ideology and moralising about power, gender and money have long held primacy. Cultural study does not assume that we already know what any given sex-money exchange means but that meaning changes according to specific cultural context. This means we cannot assume there is a fundamental difference between commercial and non-commercial sex. Anthropologists studying non-western societies consistently reveal that money and sex exchanges exist on a continuum where feelings are also present, and historians reveal the same about the past (for example, Tabet 1987 and Peiss 1986).

Sex and work cannot be completely disentangled, as the officers knew and the enlisted man would some day find out.


Laura Agustín is the author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (Zed Books 2007) and recently participated in a BBC World Debate on Human Trafficking held in Luxor, Egypt. She has been studying sex work since the early 1990s and blogs several times a week at The Naked Anthropologist.

Originally published at The Commoner in their Winter 2012 edition.

[brekin]

Brekin wrote:

Yes, I would just add is that a lot of "consciousness-raising" can come across unfortunately as subtle and overt personal attacks. That is where some of the blow back can come from. The presumption is that a person is deficit of certain knowledge that you have and they need to be educated up to your level (speaking generically, not you in particular). Which may be true. But with most isms the problem is that is it is framed (intentional or not) often as their ignorance, or lack of intensity, or disagreement over tactics, is contributing or exacerbating the isms.

That's not what consciousness-raising is (but of course how would you know?). Consciousness raising is discussing personal matters with the aim of raising ones consciousness of systemic political oppression. The raising of consciousness comes from examining and speaking about one' s own experiences and listening to the experiences of others, not from being schooled or instructed by someone else.

In feminist consciousness raising, each woman speaks of things that they till then considered sad personal personal problems. On hearing that her sisters all have slight variations on the same problems, the awareness of societal oppression emerges.

Well, I guess now everyone is invited to conscious raising. Maybe that is the problem? Easy to have consensus until you dialogue with everyone else.

Consciousness raising (also called awareness raising) is a form of activism, popularized by United States feminists in the late 1960s. It often takes the form of a group of people attempting to focus the attention of a wider group of people on some cause or condition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_raising

Thanks for pointing out my error, though, and proving me right. I mean how would I know about conscious raising? I'm just a silly man.

[Heaven Swan]

Consciousness raising (also called awareness raising) is a form of activism, popularized by United States feminists in the late 1960s. It often takes the form of a group of people attempting to focus the attention of a wider group of people on some cause or condition.

Not sure where you got that paragraph Brekin, but it's incorrect.

And by saying "How would you know?" (About consciousness raising), I simply meant that you would not have had the opportunity to participate in feminist consciousness raising. There was no put down implied.

Another movement that uses sharing personal experience is AA and 12 step programs but the goal is to heal and evolve individually and become aware of personal addictive patterns.

All I'm saying is that I enjoy, learn and evolve from hearing peoples experiences on message forums such as this.