A female friend who works as a sex worker tells me clients have often asked her questions like "What part of the experience do you love the most?" to which she honestly answers "getting paid." What seems fairly obvious to me, is apparently not to men. They apparently actually believe sex workers are not stuck in their miserable jobs, but rather LOVE the work....Maybe it's true for like 0.01% of sex workers, but I would guess most people would rather just spent time working on something a bit more meaningful whether it is raising their children or volunteering for a better world or writing a novel.
This particular male delusion is really several delusions. The broader one is that everyone in this capitalist system is in some kind of romantic relationship with their job. I was sold this nonsense for years by the education system- which was supposed to empower me to do work that I loved. Yes, I love some aspects of being a doctor, but let's be real. If I fill in any more paperwork I'm going to just start calling myself a secretary. If I had stayed in the US, I could call myself transport and nursing as well, as hospitals have discovered doctors can make cheap labor given that their salary doesn't necessarily have to change based on the amount you work them...A job is a job, and calling it a career or profession is sometimes a way to sell you on the idea that you need to work harder for less money. I've never met a research professional in the health sciences who makes overtime. Not once. This supposedly blue collar benefit might help with what are pressing issues for people like childcare- or would be if such high end professions actually used a workforce no made up of rich people and desperate immigrants willing to put up with nonsense.
Another side of believing sex workers love their work is an oversimplification and really distortion of the complex relation of women and sex. Or anyone and sex for that matter...no one can admit that we live in a world where survival sex is probably at least as common as romantic sex; and a lot of what people think of as romantic sex actually is not. I was reminded of that when I watched the miserable movie "Shes Pamim" recently. I have no idea why the movie won so many awards. After I saw it I was worried that as a secular Israeli I'm going to be raising a child in a culture almost as destructively misogynistic as ISIS. The main character of the movie is an insecure teenage girl who walks around dressed like a hooker, and acting like she has lost her mind. She fucks anything male, or rather, let's it fuck her. Endless sex scenes involve absolutely no pleasure for her, rather her manipulation, humiliation and degradation. I felt like I might as well have been on a trip either backwards in time to the 14th century, or northward in space above the Golan heights to a place where women were ultimately only some kind of currency because they were there to be used as a sexual outlet. The main character claims she likes it; but she never has an orgasm, and looks absolutely miserable in the sex scenes. I wonder if the film was made to scare the hell out of people like me...scare us until we sign our daughters up for religious school- because frankly even 16th century Jewish values start to look feminist next to this nonsense....and they also look feminist next to secular "modern" men asking my sex worker friend what she "loves" about her job.
But maybe that is the delusion that keeps men visiting prostitutes. Maybe if they understood that this is just backbreaking, annoying degrading work; less different than say being an exploited migrant laborer, they might rethink how they spend on sex.
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