I confess this is partially a product of my battles with anxiety. Those who know me well on here will attest to the difficulties I have with imperfect analysis — usually rush to make my persona 100 percent ideal.
I did tell myself to relax after this though ( :
I guess I didn’t want to be known as the entitled patriarchal bohemian in the future. Nonetheless, the record can stand — unless Charles has an objection. After all, it’s his blog — not mine.
]]>You’re free to delete this distracting exchange — with Aster’s >consent.
Nick,
I’d really prefer that he didn’t; Aster wrote powerfully and well on a subject that was bothering me as well as I read your comments, but which I did not feel I had a sufficiently well-developed perspective on to comment articulately at length at the time. If you’re a bit embarrassed about what you said earlier here in light of subsequent conversations and contemplations elsewhere and being called out on it here, I recommend you simply take the licks you were dealt and chalk it up to experience. Your previous expression of a partially ill-informed but correctable position based on good intentions was a positive contribution to the thread in giving Aster a good opportunity to say things that needed to be said somewhere. There’s something to be said for attention to original thread topics, but only insofar as it facilitates conversations that need to be had, rather than preventing them.
]]>Well, I already agreed you with. That’s why I mentioned not blaming people for making a living — later on, a wise friend reminded me of all the work that goes into it. Those comments above don’t reflect my best — written hastily and without enough sustained reflection.
Charles,
You’re free to delete this distracting exchange — with Aster’s consent.
]]>Please understand that prostitution is work. It often took me two hours to prepare myself and my apartment to receive an incall client when I worked in San Francisco. Hair and nail care, beauty products, vitamin supplements, drycleaning, throwaway thigh highs, and cab fare get expensive very quickly- and this keeping in form can take a lot of time. Plus, escort-style sex can easily take a physical toll. Try spending a few hours in a corset, push-up bra, and 4″ pumps and you’ll see what I mean. And then look at the price tags for the slutware- I spent a lot of time scrounging for once-used and discount clothes in San Francisco.
I’m not saying it wasn’t worth it- for if you care about what you do and enjoy it, and you’re free, then stress and trouble is just part of the job. But it is a job. I would certainly very much prefer a society which rewarded more interesting people than the corporate status-seekers. But if you admire sex workers, I think you should be aware that treating us as businesspeople is necessary for the respect which is a prerequisite to friendship. And while there are certainly many kinds of success, success as a category is sexy. It was very hard for me to learn this, but the truth is that if you wish to understand and respect sexuality one must understand and respect wordly success- even in the context of a world which so unjustly and irrationally distorts the concept.
One of the ways by which patriarchy harms women is the creation of a moral metaphysic which divides females into ‘good’ wives and ‘available’ whores. This does all sorts of bad things, but one which is particularly offensive to sex workers is the notion that sex workers are simply ‘loose’ women which men have some greater degree of ‘right’ to have. It is hard to express how demeaning it feels to have a potential client call you on the phone and then try to tell you that ‘love ought to be free’, and I imagine every sex worker with even moderate experience has learned to personally hate that line. Imagine how it would be received if you tried walking into a restaurant with a similar argument- and then consider how much more personal sexual service can feel. A lot of men think that when a woman becomes a prostitute this means that she’s lost some degree of right to her personal boundaries. A lot of rapes begin this way.
I know you don’t intend to do harm, and I know your respect for sex work is sincere, but I don’t think you realise how entitled these kind of words can come across. And there’s a history- and I do mean a history- a long tradition of male poets and authors painting the beauty of a prostitute who makes an unsustainable exception for their sake. I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that the sex workers in these stories often wind up very tragically and beautifully dead. That’s not exactly empowering- it’s actually yet another version of the same game which puts a man’s story in a woman’s mouth(+). I’ve found real romance in sex work, but after a certain number years as a woman it started to become clear to me that these romanticisms were written from someone else’s perspective, and needed to be changed if they were to work for me. Some versions of the tradition can get pretty ugly- the Beatniks, for instance, had a ‘code of honour’ which made it a virtue to pay a sex worker as little as possible, by any means neccesary. But if to them it was hipster cred, to sex workers it’s exploitation and fraud. One of the reasons so many sex workers sadly lack the spiritual beauty they ought to have is because years of dealing with this &#@% can really get to you. Wishing away the economic aspect of life, as Rand understood, implies that someone is expected to give something for nothing. And whatever Christians say, this is not a formula for genuine love.
Sexuality is among other things a matter of expense and effort. That’s precisely why it’s so unfair when society sets tacit sexual-appearance requirements for nonsexual female employment- it’s asking for someone to do extra and irrelevant work just to get in the door. One of the first things I noticed when I came to New Zealand was that women working behind shop counters were usually not wearing makeup- New Zealand certainly has its own patterns of sexism, but this still says a great deal. I’m not saying the expectations are fair for men either- when I was a guy I utterly loathed the expectation that men become suit-and-tie cybermen. But if someone chooses to spend special time on their appearance it’s just that- a choice, with a cost, which should be acknowledged and not taken for granted. One doesn’t expect people to live for others in an individualist society. TANSTAFL- even if Heinlein was a total hypocrite on the issue when it came to women.
And again, what I write here is from the experiences of my own mistakes. For me, it was feeling entitled to advice and training. It didn’t work. I learned. That’s unfortunately how people do learn, and improve. I know I have much work to do.
(+) There’s another version of this in a lot of Pagan goddess worship, when male authors worship woman as the ‘giving tree’ of fertile Mother Nature, spilling forth indiscriminate and unmeritied love. Real women have interests, pains, and passions- and they have consciousness and purpose. I find images which reflect this far more respectful of women than smiling abstractions placed on green pedestals.
]]>Another thing about prostitution: people charge a lot and end up only seeing CEOs or middle brow managers or someone similar to pay high costs of living. It seems there’s a pecking order. I once ran across an ad for a supermodel quality esque escort who was also highly educated — a nice integration of what evolutionary biology has driven men towards and intellectual flair ~ although, I hope she isn’t unhealthily underweight.
300 dollars an hour…
I don’t blame her for making a comfortable living. Still: there should be discounts for broke Bohemians ( :
Escorts are missing out on us. It’s much more cost effective to go swinging at those prices.
Alas, I intend to stay culturally Bohemian but become not so broke in the future. I’ve had enough of the “poor man’s” romanticism.
]]>As for Gus, I have similar issues with his understanding of egoism. Nonetheless, he has a pretty interesting article:
http://www.dizerega.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/LIBUNITY%20copy.PDF
And no other classical liberal thinker is making the claim that liberal democracies are not states — whilist trying to move towards non-coercive voluntary democratic polities.
]]>I don’t know what I think about prostitution right now.
What I previously wrote in celebration of prostitution was meant more than I’ve meant anything else I’ve ever tried to say. But it was also written in sheltered ignorance- not that I wasn’t previously aware of the sexism and exploitation, but it just wasn’t emotionally real to me. I’ve since seen some unpleasantness in New Zealand and it is simply impossible for me to regard sex work, or sexuality, or human nature, in the same way as I once did. But I would prefer to reserve my judgement on the issue until I’ve been able to make a second try at the Life.
I do think that the orthodox Randian opinion of prostitution is usually ignorant and deeply classist. One would expect at least more nuance from a philosophy so deeply grounded in romanticism. I deeply respect a refusal to compromise one’s values, but a linear equation of prostitution with compromise is unimaginative. In this world, where courting less than ideal circumstances is for most a necessity, it reeks of privilege and double standards. This is especially true if we remember that Rand herself started out as an actress, in a time when the formal separation of prostitution and the theatre was a fairly recent phenomenon.
On Gus diZerega (sorry to jump threads, but ’tis related)-
I’m still a regular reader of Gus’ blog, but I liked him much better before he got his current gig on Beliefnet. He is a very intelligent, perceptive, and original writer, and he has a wonderful aesthetic sensibility that I wish was more often conjoined with careful analysis. On political issues I’m generally in close agreement with him.
I tend to agree with him on the facts and science surrounding environmental issues (he helped nudge me out od the standard Randian stance), but I strongly disagree with the morality and sense of life he brings to them. And he’s recently been beating up on a straw image of ‘sociopathic’ egoism which is blatantly unfair to real egoist philosophers. He seems to think that Evangelical tartuffes are Randians or Stirnerites at heart- which is simply absurd given the hyperaltruistic cultures and institutions which the Falwells and Robertsons of the world come from.
And as a former (?) Pagan, I find much of what he describes as a Pagan worldview to more accurately reflect the stance of his conservative Gardnerian Wicca, which he correctly sees as very close to the traditional teachings of the prominent religions which have been dominant in most pre-Enlightenment societies. The trouble is that I see moral pluralism as inherent in polytheism- or, more precisely, I think that polytheism shows us that the Divine (if there is any such thing) is prior to human moral concepts, and that if there is any Divine, any ethical quality of religious experience is something we bring to that experience. In any case, there are any number of ancient and modern Paganisms whose practice is contrary to conventional altruism- or indeed to any ethics I could imagine intelligently defending. One can find a god in any deep human experience, and the claim that these experiences point to an eternal and crowning morality feels more theosophical than Pagan.
DiZerega draws his Paganism close to mainstream religions at the price of drawing a sharply dualistic line between the Divine and secular worldliness- to the point of making sheep and goat divisions between good (altruistic) and bad (egoistic) Pagans and joining with Christians to advocate the social exclusion of practitioners of individualistic witchcraft(!!!). This seems characteristically Christian, and while most Pagans I’ve met have come from (often abusive) Christian backgrounds, I think it’s fair to say that quite a number would differ with this dualism and that more than a few would disagree with the altruism. DiZerega’s views on the relation between spirituality and reason, or spirituality and commerce, are also hardly intrinsic to Paganism. I have known many people who have described Pagan religious experiences, and they are as different as the world’s gods.
Gus clearly articulates the principle of the separation of spirituality and public reason and as such I fully respect his right to his beliefs. But I wish he would more clearly distinguish his own orientation from Paganism as such. Not all goddess are mother goddesses. Not all Pagan worship is centered on nature. Not all spiritualities emphasise community. Indeed, in some polytheisms, such partiality has been considered both discourteous and extremely imprudent.
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