On Nov 28, 2004, at 10:08 PM, Ritu wrote:
Warren Ockrassa wrote:
But when you work at any job at all you are doing exactly the same thing. You're selling your body for money. Even if your work is strictly intellectual, since there is no way to separate mind from body, you are *always* trading your body for money.
Um, no. Being gainfully employed doesn't necessarily mean that you are selling your body for money. You might be trading skills, labour, knowledge, ideas, voice, pictures of your face, etc for money, and the nature of the trade might make your physical presence necessary, but that is not trading your body for money.
Mm, that might be an issue for semanticists. To the extent that anything you produce -- your work product -- must come from your body, it seems to me that any work done is in fact the selling of one's body, however many degrees of separation might appear to obscure the effect.
Y'know, the same thing as when you walk into a pub to meet with friends, you are sharing your presence with them, not your body. And you are there because you hope to enjoy their presence, not their bodies.
But their presence comes from their bodies, as mine does mine. The two are inseparable. I cannot have a presence without a body in the same way that we cannot have daylight without a sun.
Unless your employment now makes you feel like an object, I think you might be able to see how I can question why employing a prostitute is necessarily objectifying him/her.
Well, after reading one of the mails in this thread yesterday, I wouldn't say 'necessarily', but I would still say 'highly likely'.
I won't argue there, but all my contention ever was -- and is -- is that it doesn't *necessarily* follow, so naturally I have no objection to this. ;)
So again: How does paying for sex automatically make the sex partner an object?
See above, at least for why I think that when one pays for sex, one is likely to treat the sex provider as an object.
I'd like to ask you something now - why do you think that it doesn't?
I don't think it does *automatically*, that's all I'm saying.
Have you come across any accounts from people engaged in the trade in
which they say that they don't feel like objects when they ply their
trade? Or do you have any reason to believe that a majority of the
people who visit prostitutes do not view/treat them in that manner? I am
not asking merely for the sake of being argumentative - I am curious
about your reasons for questioning the statement.
An ex of mine, someone with whom I was involved for a while, had been a male prostitute in earlier years. His reasons for doing it were a mix of the expected (earn some decent money) and surprising (it appealed to his vanity) and *really* surprising (it appealed to his sense of control over others, the rationale being that he reserved the right to refuse service to anyone). His reason for stopping was even more surprising, from my perspective: He was bored with it.
He was also the victim of a gay-bashing; it nearly killed him.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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