Let's Talk About Sex (Again)

Yesterday's post about recent sex research didn't quite come out of nowhere. The impetus was a conversation among friends over the weekend about female sex workers, including strippers. Some of us thought that just about anyone who worked in this field was a victim of some circumstance or another - drug addiction, sexual assault or just old-fashioned low self-esteem. My view was that, while these kinds of victims might be over-represented in the sex trade as compared to other fields of work, it's a mistake to view the people who make up that industry in such a uniform way. That women might have any number of reasons for getting into the business, and that many of them might throw a good and proper spazz if they were presumed to be helpless victims. After all, pity, when misplaced, is just well-intentioned condescension. 

The research I referred to in yesterday's post seemed to posit an alternative explanation for why at least a small percentage of women might get into sex work - namely, because being the object of desire is a potential turn-on. This dovetails a little too nicely with the male-fantasy view of female sex workers, and I don't think this theory represents a majority, or even a big minority, of women in the business. But it at least offers some reasonably scientific ammunition for the argument that women can find some form of empowerment, or at least control, in the sale of their own bodies.

But if I believe in this argument, then surely I can't have a problem with Natalie Dylan (not her real name), a 22-year-old American college student who's auctioning off her virginity online. And yet, this kind of grosses me out in a way that the business of ordinary strippers and hookers doesn't. Why is that?

Is it because of the money involved? So far, the top bid for Dylan's hymen is a staggering $3.8 million U.S. dollars, an amount that goes beyond what even the highest-priced call girls could make in a lifetime. But if I can believe that a woman can be in complete control of her choice to sell her body for a few hundred dollars per hour, how can I begrudge a woman who gets a better price?

A Salon writer wrestles with similar questions in this post, which is well worth reading.

As for me, I think I can identify what does make this feel different than the more familiar permutations of the sex trade. Mainly, Dylan's own explanation of the auction as empowering reeks of confused, youthful idealism. No matter how much she thinks she's turning the tables on the odd male obsession with virginity, it doesn't change the fact that whoever ends up with the winning bid is buying the patriarchal ideal of the untouched innocent, not the empowered woman. Her rationalization of this stunt as a feminist move simply doesn't hold water.

By comparison, the typical prostitute-john relationship at least contains a certain level of honesty. A man buys sex from a woman, knowing full well that she's done it many times before. The woman takes the money and gives up her body, knowing full well that it's neither an act of self-debasement or a statement of female power, but rather a basic business transaction. Neither party is delusional about the meaning (I'm talking here about what I assume to be the majority of these kinds of transactions...I know that there are all kinds of other, more dangerous permutations that take place).

Moving away from strippers and hookers, but sticking with the sex, here's an article that examines the work of Daniel Bergner - the same guy who wrote the Times articles I linked to yesterday. This piece deals less with gender differences than "deviant" sexuality, but there's some of the former mixed in as well. And once again, there's reference to experiments where subjects' verbal responses to sexual imagery don't match up with their physiological responses, which I think is fascinating.

Fascinating because it shows us how much we continue to be confused about human sexuality. We have our bodies, our minds and our interaction with other people and with mass culture, all of which creates a confusing jumble. We don't know what feelings come from where, or what to do with them. We just know that they're there, and probably always will be.