Only Losers Dine At Le Cirque: The Stigma on Sex Work Customers
It was a letter to Savage Love that made me think of it. As it so often is.
The inquisitor had a fetish for being shampooed; didn’t know how to find a female partner who would play along; and had been trying — unsuccessfully — to pay hair salons to give him the pleasure. Dan’s response (apart from “Get some social skills”) was, I thought, very sensible:
Find a sex worker.
It’s advice I think a lot of sexually dissatisfied people would benefit from. If there’s a special kind of sex that you really love and haven’t been able to find — or there isn’t, but you’re just not getting laid at the moment — paying a professional would seem, if you can afford it, to be a fairly obvious solution.
But it’s also advice that a lot of people reject out of hand. Not only do they reject it — they’re offended at the very suggestion. “I’m not going to pay for it.” “What kind of loser has to pay for it?”
Part of it is a moral issue. Many people believe that prostitution, even among completely consenting adults, is immoral on the face of it. And part of it is an understandable emotional barrier: if what you want it not just sex but sex with someone who loves you and vice versa, then a pro isn’t going to do the trick. (Sorry for the pun.)
But for plenty of people, it seems to be simply a matter of pride. Being able to get a sex partner is proof of manliness, womanliness, coolness, evolutionary fitness, whatever. If you “have to pay for it,” it means you can’t get it on your own, which de facto makes you a loser.
Let me use an analogy I stole from Carol Queen (conflict of interest alert: she wrote about it in my book “Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients”).
Does paying a restaurant to feed you a meal make you a loser? Whether you eat out every night or only do it as an occasional treat; whether you’re looking for a special meal you can’t get elsewhere or simply want the convenience of getting dinner without any hassle . . . does it make you a loser? A pathetic nobody who can only get fed if he pays someone to do it?
You can argue that sex is different. But food — especially providing other people with food, and the experience of cooking and/or eating together — is a powerful, complex, culturally rich experience that’s loaded with emotional implications. And yet we have no shame at all about paying for it.
Come to think of it, I could easily imagine an alternate reality in which paying for sex is an openly practiced, completely accepted part of the economy and the culture . . . but paying for food is considered shameful at best and immoral at worst, an illegal black market economy in which the providers, no matter how skillful they are at their craft, are defamed, marginalized criminals, and the customers are mocked into thinking there’s something sordid and pathetic about what they do.
“I’m not going to pay someone to cook for me. What kind of loser has to pay for a meal?”
If that doesn’t make sense when it comes to food, then why does it make sense when it comes to sex?
If you don’t want to see a sex worker, of course you shouldn’t see a sex worker. Not everyone likes going to restaurants, either. But I’ve never understood the sex-positive attitude that embraces and celebrates sex workers while still looking down on their customers. There are lots of reasons people pay for sex — they’re partial to a particular kind of sex that not many people enjoy, they’re in a place in their lives where a relationship isn’t a good idea, their dating life is in a dry spell, they enjoy a variety of partners, etc. It doesn’t make them losers. If you’ve ever paid for sex, or if you pay for sex now, there’s no reason to think that it makes you a loser. And if you’ve never paid for sex, there’s no reason to think that it’ll make you a loser if you decide to try it out.
This entry was posted on Thursday, 23 August 2007 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Thursday, 23 August 2007 at 6:54 pm Iamcuriousblue wrote:
“Come to think of it, I could easily imagine an alternate reality in which paying for sex is an openly practiced, completely accepted part of the economy and the culture . . . but paying for food is considered shameful at best and immoral at worst, an illegal black market economy in which the providers, no matter how skillful they are at their craft, are defamed, marginalized criminals, and the customers are mocked into thinking there’s something sordid and pathetic about what they do.
‘I’m not going to pay someone to cook for me. What kind of loser has to pay for a meal?’”
The anti-restaurant thing isn’t actually as far-fetched as you’d think. There’s a group of British anarchists who have published a very elaborate tract called “Abolish Restaurants“. They seem to be dead serious. Their arguments about restaurant work, interestingly, come across like many of the feminist arguments against sex work – restaurant worker’s are terribly exploited, they fundamentally hate their customers, and the only way to solve it is to get rid of restaurants entirely as part of a larger transformation of society.
Its probably not an argument most people would entirely buy, even if there’s a lot of truth about non-so-great labor conditions in the food service industry. On the other hand, it seems like a lot of people buy these arguments about the sex industry, even though its not inherently worse than a lot of other industries as far as the percentage of workers who are subjected to exploitative working conditions go. Hence, customers, who “drive demand”, end up being demonized.
Of course, the perception that anybody who pays for sex is a “loser” is even a more basic kneejerk reaction than assumptions about the nature of sex work. There’s a ready assumption that if one is even halfway well-adjusted that one can find a partner who can satisfy all of your legitimate needs. (And if you can’t readily find a partner who can satisfy a particular need or desire, then there’s something wrong with your needs and desires.) Such, of course, is not the reality, for a lot of people, for all manner of reasons. “Paying for it”, whether its as simple joining a porn site or elaborate as having an escort for a whole night, is simply a way of bridging that gap.
on Friday, 24 August 2007 at 8:02 am C4bl3Fl4m3 wrote:
This reminds me of a sci-fi/fantasy story my ex-girlfriend told me about. (I so wish I remembered the name of it.) It was about someone getting dumped into a different time and place, as sometimes happens in sci-fi. The person was walking down the street and saw lots of people having public sex… in the park, where ever. Sexuality was a healthy, normal part of people’s lives and no one had a problem with it. So the main character walked into a shop, bought a sandwich and sat down on a bench to eat it. And while they were eating it, people stopped and stared, shocked. The cops were called and the person was treated like a horrible criminal. They were locked up and the food was confiscated, scarfed down behind the doors of the police cruiser, in secret and in shame.
Turns out in their society, sex was just fine but EATING and FOOD was extremely loaded, to the point of being culturally taboo. People ate in their houses alone and felt terribly guilty about eating at all.
I wish I could remember the name of this story. Perhaps I’ll point her over to this post and have her comment on it with the name. She’s French, so there’s a chance that the story’s in French and not translated.
on Thursday, 6 December 2007 at 10:11 pm Are You a Sex Addict (Part 1) | Blowfish Blog wrote:
[…] And as I’ve written before in this blog, I don’t consider the mere fact of hiring sex workers to be unhealthy. I know it’s scorned and condemned by our culture; but unless hiring sex workers is getting in the way of your pursuit of romantic relationships (that is, assuming you want a romantic relationship), or unless you’re spending more on sex workers than you can afford, I don’t see why this is automatically a sign that you have a problem. In fact, I think it can be a sign of a very healthy attitude towards sex: it shows the ability to know what you want, and to openly and unashamedly seek it out from someone who’s willing to give it to you. […]
on Thursday, 24 January 2008 at 4:22 pm Being Amber Rhea » Blog Archive » links for 2008-01-24 wrote:
[…] Only Losers Dine At Le Cirque: The Stigma on Sex Work Customers | Blowfish Blog “‘I’m not going to pay someone to cook for me. What kind of loser has to pay for a meal?’ If that doesn’t make sense when it comes to food, then why does it make sense when it comes to sex?” (tags: sexwork society stigma stereotypes sex Reference) […]