Meeting on "The oldest profession"

We had our Ideas Cafe discussion a couple of days ago.  We never got to spying as prostitution was such a hot topic for everyone.

Nobody at the meeting was against legalizing prostitution.

John said that even in high school, he and his friends realized that any girl, no matter how unattractive, can have sex anytime they want because there is such an overwhelming difference in sex drive between the two genders. It is just a matter of biology that males want sex more than females and that sets up a supply demand unbalance that naturally opens up for trading sex for money or other favors.

During the discussion, it occurred to me that the word prostitution no longer just mean trading sex for money but have become a stigmatized word.  It represents an unwilling participation of an activity in order to earn money.

We use the term "prostituting ourselves" to describe such an unwilling activity even if it has nothing to do with sex.

In our reading group, we are reading Judith Butler's "Undoing Gender" and there she pointed out that we are constrained by the social norms around us, a lot of it existed before we came to this world.  The notion of the two genders with nothing in between is one of these norms, causing gays, lesbians, intersex, and transgender individuals to be automatic outcasts because of these existing norms.  We are constantly working within these norms to become socially accepted.

A similar thing seems to be happening here with prostitution.

Our existing social norm excludes exchanging sex for money as an acceptable practice.

We hold the ideal that love and mutual acceptance is a necessary part of sex and that anything else is degrading and unacceptable.

While we all like to have gourmet meals, is there no room for other ways to satisfy our hunger before the next gourmet meal?

Discussion about sex always seem to divide the group along gender lines, with females insisting that there should be no sex without love and the males agreeing, but.....

There is an acceptance within the group of "sex therapy workers" who work with sexologist to help patients with sexual issues. 

So if you have an eating disorder, you should be able to get help. But if you are just hungry.....

We all think of ourselves as sensible and reasonable individual having rational thinking and discipline over our bodies and actions.  However, I understand that those who elect to go through a gender change and subject themselves to hormone injections undergo personality changes.  Some expressed surprise at how much hormones have changed their outlook and urges.

These are perhaps the only people that have experience both the female and male perspectives before and after the gender change while the rest of us are only guessing what it is like being the other gender.

If it seems like I am blaming hormones for all of man's sexual transgressions, I am not.  Men needs to keep their sexual urges in check but women also needs to understand that this control requires fortitude and just outlawing or stigmatizing sex without love may not be the practical solution.

After all, I am sure that the catholic church does not condone transgressions of priests against their celibate vows and yet it happens with alarming frequency but one seldom hears similar issues with nuns.

Then there is the implication of paying for a service of any kind. 

In Michael Sandel's book "What money can't buy", he raised the seldom thought of idea of going to one's mother-in-law's place for Thanksgiving dinner but then pay her cash for the dinner afterwards as an appreciation of such a great meal.

The Thanksgiving dinner was an act of kindness, social acceptance, expression of love, and everything else that will be destroyed by turning it into a commercial transaction by paying for it or even by a gift of money.

By the same token,  the sexual act involves intimacy that conveys acceptance into the participants' private realms, expressions of trust, and usually, approvals from the most inner selves of those involved. 

Offering to pay for this turns it to a commercial transaction making it arguably worse than paying one's mother-in-law after Thanksgiving dinner.

So it is complicated.

Are we carrying sexual stigma baggage from past generations?

Are we idealizing the sex act to the point that we exclude all other biological considerations?  Rafi's response to Jerry's characterization of sex being a holy form of union is wondering whether other animals feel the holiness and how are we biologically different than the other animals?

Is it time to change our social attitude and norms towards sex ?

How do we experience the perspective of the other gender without getting a full dose of hormone injections?