Why whoremongering is wrong

I’ll probably regret this…

In response to my post, "The Oldest Profession", someone calling himself James B Logwriter tried to post a comment that I rejected, but I've been thinking about it. He wrote,

I don’t really agree, because I don't think you know anything about prostitution, and you can't imagine working as a prostitute.

There are many different levels of prostitution, and it has a different significance in different cultures. Since I have written many thousands of words about prostitution on my own blog, I am not going to repeat here, but you might also be interested to read the blog of my friend Nia, who is a prostitute, and also a damn good writer.

I’d dispute the description of Nia as a “damn good writer”, but Mr Logwriter’s taste in writers (and other matters) is clearly very different from mine.

He said, “… you can’t imagine working as a prostitute,” but I can; I’d just rather not. Judging from Nia’s blog, her approach to prostitution might be safer than the street-walkers who’ve been murdered in Ipswich, but it’s still a dangerous game.

Anyway, I investigated Mr Logwriter’s blog, and his friend Nia’s, and several others that link to theirs. They make depressing reading.

Mr Logwriter’s blog is called “Memoirs of a Whoremonger”, and is described thus:

This is a series of photo essays that tells of my experiences as a man in his early 50s who finds himself single again and travels to the Dominican Republic many times, learning to speak Spanish, having sex with dozens of attractive young women, and meeting a formidable woman who became his 'novia' or girlfriend. Everything here is true, though slightly rearranged in some cases to make a better narrative or to preserve anonymity and to protect the guilty.

The Dominican Republic is popular with sex tourists and sex traffickers. However the whoremonger might like to justify his behaviour, he’s just one of many who exploit impoverished women for personal gratification. Approximately 30% of Dominicans live below the poverty line. The whoremonger expresses a preference for black women, who are the most impoverished. Little wonder that many resort to prostitution.

In the BHA forum I referred to prostitute’s clients as “… generally emotionally inadequate, for a variety of reasons. They are also highly irresponsible, because most are unwilling to be tested or treated for sexually transmitted diseases - most HIV is spread by heterosexual activity, where men infect their innocent partners and, in turn, their children.”

One of the men who’ve contributed to the thread wrote,

What does “emotionally inadequate” mean? Inadequate for what? I’m not aware that there’s much known about men who frequent prostitutes - they are even harder to study than the prostitutes themselves. What are you basing this assertion on?

I meant that men who regularly pay for sex appear to lack the emotional wherewithal to deal with life as mature individuals, by failing to control their impulses and by treating women’s bodies as commodities. Do they regard prostitutes as different from other women, by deluding themselves that they’re more sexual? Or do they think that all reasonably attractive women are potential prostitutes? However they feel about women in general, their attitude towards prostitutes must involve emotional distance while engaged in sexual intimacy. If they can do this while using a prostitute, is it something they turn on and off at will? How do they relate to the other women in their lives?

In his book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goldman describes a research project with four-year-olds at Stanford University in the ‘60s, when the children were promised a reward for resisting the impulse to gobble some marshmallows immediately. When the experimenters left the room, some children distracted themselves from temptation by covering their eyes, talking, playing games and so on, while others couldn’t wait fifteen minutes for their reward and grabbed marshmallows within seconds of being left. The same children were tracked down as adolescents and some as students. Unsurprisingly, the marshmallow-grabbers didn’t do so well. They lacked perseverance and coped badly with frustration, amongst other things.

I’m not suggesting that men who pay for sex were all greedy, impatient four-year-olds, but there is something very immature about expecting to have what you want, including sex, regardless of the effect of your behaviour.

Most of the humanists I know try to live ethically – they’re environmentally aware, they avoid doing anything that exploits other people or animals, and they buy fair trade goods. Prostitution isn’t a fair trade. It involves some of the poorest, most vulnerable women, who are manipulated, abused and trafficked in huge numbers. The call girls who are simply expensive prostitutes may say that they do what they do freely, but read what they say and tell me, honestly, that they’re well-balanced, happy individuals.

A woman who’s contributed to the BHA thread wrote,

… what about a man who offers a starving woman food in exchange for sex? She agrees; there is no threat of violence. Would you consider this to be coercion? The contract between a prostitute and client is not one agreed freely between equals. The prostitute’s choices are limited and the client has the power to exploit this vulnerability. As I’ve already said, psychological problems and low self-esteem precede prostitution. Many of the women involved already have these problems, which is what leaves them open to pimps and clients in the first place. Don’t you accept that there is anything intrinsically damaging about renting out the most intimate parts of the body for someone else’s gratification? Prostitutes speak of having to turn off their feelings and distance themselves from reality whilst with clients. It is degrading and dehumanising and this is not just a result of it being against the law or of society having a bad attitude towards sex.

I totally agree.

For further reading, see "Dirty Old Men"