Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Spitzer and prostitution
If, on the other hand, like Spitzer you have status by the bucketful, then it's a very different problem that prostitution solves. Casual sex partners for these men are readily available, but the women are liable to want more than casual sex, of course. They'd like to convert the casual sex into a relationship. And they have a lever with which to do this: the threat to tell the wife -- with a hefty dose of exaggeration to make out that the full-blown affair they're after has already come into being.
Hence the old adage that paying a prostitute is not so much paying a rent for temporary use of her body than it is paying her to go away afterwards.
With prostitution, men are of course happy to be relieved of any pretence they might have to make to a casual sex partner that the sex is anything other than casual. But that's not a desire for some different form of sex. It's just a desire for less hassle, and to be allowed to be honest. The feminist myth that prostitution is exploitation by men of women -- rather than the reality that it is exploitation of men by women -- extends to imagining that men want through prostitution some sort of overtly exploitative interaction that they can't get normally. They want nothing of the kind. Such notions are complete baloney.
Extra-pair sex with novel sexual partners is exactly what it seems. It's sex. It's as simple as that.
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