on bodily transactions

The article also comes up with an old issue, which it doesn’t even begin to deal with. If prostitution ain’t so bad, why are so few men doing it?

It’s a good question but I don’t think the answer is simply that men don’t have the high exploitation threshold that women do. I think the answer is much more complexly (or maybe simply) about male and female sexuality in general. Remember the various survey findings that men are attracted to young beautiful women while women are attracted to high status men prepared to spend oodles of money on them. As a crass generalisation it’s true, and it helps to explain both prostitution and the groupie phenomenon. Not that some women wouldn’t want to have a go with a sturdy handsome well-endowed prostitute occasionally, perhaps especially those who’ve already got their status wrapped up in a neat marriage package (and socio-biology tells us – I’ve read my Jared Diamond – that it’s a broad interspecies generalisation, albeit with many exceptions, that the female of the species tends to plump for one high-status partner, with the occasional each-way bet on the side for insurance, while the male prefers to spread his seed around), but then there’s the unfortunate physiological fact that men can’t fake it the way women can. This pretty glaring fact as well as the lack of clientele for socio-biological reasons would help to explain the numbers being down. Also there’s the point that their own status counts for a lot with men, more than with women, so that engaging in prostitution would be more demeaning for a man, whereas a woman counts more on her physical beauty, and exploiting that could be in many ways empowering for her. Of course of course we can’t rely too heavily on socio-biology, but the trend is clear and needs to be explained somehow. If anyone has a better explanation please get in touch.

Presumably if more males became prostitutes, the profession would begin to enjoy a higher status. There’s also the matter of the barriers to women in hiring a prostitute. Some would argue that women are less interested in fucking and forgetting than men, but I’m not so sure about that. Possibly they might find buying sex more injurious to their self-esteem than men do. They also might find the whole scenario intimidating. With one-on-one encounters the male is generally more physically powerful than the female. This is a kind of residual effect, since the transaction is hedged around with all sorts of conventions, and since the bloke ends up the loser and the gal the winner financially there’s a built-in restorative, but often this physical difference is enhanced by cultural differences to allow a game of power to be played as part of the transaction – indeed it’s probably true that some men visit prostitutes precisely in order to buy that power, to allow themselves a period of domination and even downright bullying, to restore a ‘natural order’ swept from under them by their shrewish wives. Hopefully such scenarios are very much in the minority, but only one in a thousand would make the prostitute’s life a danger, perhaps unacceptably so.