These are good questions, and I think that you will find the answer becomes apparent if you assume that everyone intuitively and unconsciously understands that sex is a market, and an inherently and unavoidably unbalanced one. They likely don't consciously think of it that way because no one has articulated it to them that way and people have overlaid other concepts. But if you consider that both perspectives are a way to try to solve an unbalanced market problem, then both the conservative/sex is sacred stance AND the progressive/desire-is-required stance make sense.
Everyone (well, most everyone) wants sex. But to get it, you need another person to "transact" it with you, so it's a market. The problem is the demand is universal, but the supply is actually quite low, because everyone wants sex from the same relatively-small subset (i.e. young, attractive people). If we assume that people live to 90, and that they will spend 70 of those years with some desire for sex, and if we also assume that most people are only sexually attractive for maybe 25-30 years of their lifespan, and even within that "span" of attractiveness, only about half of people are actually considered "attractive"...then you have a problem where 100% of people want something for a span of 70 years, and they all want it from only 15% of the population. Add in the fact that men have this desire even more strongly than women, on average, and it creates even more market imbalance.
In other words, if they could, all (straight) men would only be having sex with a small sub-set of women in a particular age range correlating with fertility. And if it was all based on attraction-only, no one would ever have sex with old men, or unattractive men. And because of the gender differential in desire, some people would still have sex with old or unattractive women, but they wouldn't be willing to pay or give or trade-off much of anything to do it.
I think all adults understand this intuitively. The young themselves don't, always. So how does society solve this imbalance without creating a lot of problems and strife? Many people do NOT want young women do be able to fully capitalize upon their market power here. It would create too much of a monopoly for them. It would screw over everyone else, and if they were allowed to fully realize upon the high demand for what they have, they'd be able to increase the costs way too high.
Society therefore tries to find ways so that young, attractive women are unable to capitalize on the natural monopoly they hold, either via religious shame or making it outright illegal or other norms discouraging it. And for the most part, women don't complain TOO much about that, because those same women will one day age out, and they likely realize that their future selves will be screwed in a situation where young women have zero social impediments from fully marketing and capitalizing upon their sexual assets.
For the feminists, this creates a problem, because the interests of young/attractive and old/unattractive women are directly in conflict, and feminism is not good at acknowledging or dealing with instances where different groups of women have directly conflicting interests. Thus, the constant wars over this issue, where they never quite acknowledge the real issue, which is that a gorgeous 20 year old selling sex appeal is in fact empowering herself and likely engaging in the most lucrative possible work she could, while directly dis-empowering all other women.
For non-religious right-wing people, their preferred solution is to try to keep the costs of sex with young women as low as possible while also retaining maximum leverage and bargaining power for men. And honestly it's so thinly-veiled and transparent that they've never been able to impose their vision absent force.
For religious people, the solution is to allow sex only in life-long contracts, which circumvents the market distortion created by the age-based supply and demand skew. Because you marry a hot 25 year old and the trade-off is you're stuck with them at 75, so it solves the problem.
And for ordinary people, substituting the life-long-within-contract-only sex requirement for the requirement of mutual sexual desire is a slightly different way of solving the same supply-demand skew. Because young and attractive people are naturally attracted to each other, and then everyone else just has to pair up roughly according to equivalent attractiveness-level, which seems seems intuitively fair, balanced, and reasonable to most. So two hot 25 year olds can pair up and it's a fair trade, or two non-hot 25 year olds, and the same for two 45 years olds or 65 year olds -- in all cases it fixes the age-based supply/demand skew. This is basically how things work in practice for 90% of the population, until technology rubbed the market skew into people's faces a bit too much, and made it much easier to transact among market participants, without having to do so publicly or risk getting caught.
The reason that an ugly but famous guy sleeping with a pretty young fan bothers people, or an old wealthy man sleeping with a pretty poor woman, is not actually because of concerns over influence or power (as you correctly point out, old men are quite exploitable by young women). It's because it creates a market disruption by circumventing the accepted solution (life-long contract or equivalent-attractiveness-level-trades). And markets are collective where what others do DOES directly impact one's own possible options. If old men with money are allowed to easily purchase sex from young women without any taboo, it pisses off the young men, who don't have money, and who hate the thought that their equivalently-attractive female peers can simply be bought so easily. And because of all the "sacredness" and other obscuring voo-doo that people surround it with, it allows all the other old men to start thinking that young women are actually ATTRACTED to old men, and that they should be able to get one too (this specific problem is at least fixed in the case of direct prostitution). And then that screws over all women, who don't want old men to think they can get young women without paying very dearly for it.
When Aella or Hanania point out the actual fact that prostitution is extremely lucrative for young, attractive women, most everyone else will react against that. Because it's clear that by allowing them to freely capitalize on their asset without stigma would make them TOO valuable, to literally everyone else's expense OTHER THAN an equally small portion of wealthy men. But they don't say it that way because it sounds too much like whining or envy or being a sexual communist. So instead they come up with reasons that sound more like they're concerned with vulnerable people, such as sex trafficking or exploitation concerns. Their actual concern is that too much of a free-market in sex will create disastrous social implications because the supply and demand are inherently, biologically extremely skewed, and basically everyone who isn't wealthy or attractive will get nothing, in that type of regime.
If a 60 year old man is free to spend all his money on a 25 year old purchased girlfriend, without shame or stigma, why on earth would he stay married to his 60-year old wife? Or why would she stay with him, if he's spending all his money on mistresses? And how would young or poor men have any hope of ever having a girlfriend? And why would anyone want to pair up long-term, unless it was for a purely economic-type partnership without an implied expectation of love and sex? These things sound extreme, but they are actually the logical result if you open the door for utterly unstigmatized transactional sex on a short-term basis, allowing for any type of trade-off. Even the people who supposedly claim to be most in favor of legal prostitution are almost certainly relying on an assumption that it would remain stigmatized and somewhat unusual (which I think is a very bad assumption to make).
Anyway, food for thought. I've found that most people are unwilling to go along with my market-based analysis -- it's too coldly economic for them -- but I've found that all of the seemingly irrational positions people hold make perfect sense when viewed that way. Most people will protest that in fact they very much love and are still attracted to their 60 year old wife, or that most women would never want to be prostitutes like that...personally I think they are fooling themselves and only think that because they've lived in a society with the mix of the religious and attractiveness-matching norms that keep the rails on the real marketplace, or how people would behave absent such norms. A truly free market with out any governing norms/taboos would be very bad for most, so regulating things by repressing the conduct of both young attractive women and older men with money/fame helps everyone else.
In ages prior, the skew was not QUITE as much of a problem because the risk of pregnancy limited behavior, and older men aged out of capacity earlier. Viagra, birth control, abortion, and the ability to easily and anonymously transact sex without anyone finding out has amplified an existing wired-in market skew several times over.
Also, I fully agree with your first footnote and criticism of Louise Perry.
Thanks for the thoughtful response, Kate, sorry I hadn't had time to read through this properly until now! I agree with a lot of this, although I'm a little softer in terms of the assumptions I make re the motivations leading others to try to stigmatize sex - I think the fear of letting young women capitalize fully on their sexual value is a significant part of it, but I also think some of the motivation for people like Perry is that they really believe these behaviors will be net negative for the women long term and with a sufficiently broad understanding of welfare. I think there are some number of women in their 30s/40s/50s who are now married with kids and regret their slutty phase (although maybe only because they weren't appropriately compensated for it) and worry that other young women will be overly short term focused, not understand their true value etc. and have sex with men that are in some way "unworthy". Now, whether that would still be true if this sort of sex was destigmatized is unclear. But, wondering what you think regarding how much of the "sacredness" is socially constructed - my thought is that, particularly for women, the inherent costs of sex (pre tech like birth control) were very high such that it may have been evolutionarily adaptive to guard it closely, and that since sexual attraction is our evolved mechanism for determining when sex is "worth it" or not... overriding that feels really bad (especially for women). This thought is still half baked but I think it might be directionally right at least?
"(although maybe only because they weren't appropriately compensated for it)" BINGO! That's it right there.
The question you're asking about is one I've wondered about, because Perry's message just does not vibe with what I've seen. I was raised in a small town where for whatever reason (I honestly don't know why), there really were no norms or expectations that women were less promiscuous or horny than men. It wasn't a thought that even entered my mind til I went to college and found out that that lots of people still thought that. Prior to college, I'd thought that was an old-fashioned view that went away after the 60s. I've discussed this with old classmates and none of us can figure out why the culture in our area had zero gender-based sexual norms, but it really didn't, and there was zero stigma attached to female sluttiness or expectation that women were less horny than men. It's not like it was taught that women SHOULD be promiscuous, it's more like nothing was said one way or the other, so we just came to our own conclusions. I guess maybe our parents were modern enough not to teach us things like "girls should stay virgins", but weren't yet hip to the times enough to realize what we were getting up to or worried about it, so adults didn't really send us any messages one way or the other. And the media often portrayed men and women with similar sex drives (Basic Instinct and Titanic being two blockbuster movies at the time, both featuring sexually predatory or adventurous women).
I saw zero evidence of any gender discrepancy in the sexual conduct of my peers, in school. Some boys and girls were more prudish or reserved or less interested, and some boys and girls were horndogs, and it did not seem at all distributed by gender. My female friends and I were always on the take trying to hook up with boys. Now, I DO, as an adult, think men generally have a more consistently high sex drive, at least as a group, but I didn't see it back then, and maybe that's just because girls mature a couple years earlier than boys, so it kind of evened out because the boys didn't really catch up to their full levels of horndog-ness and sexual adventuresome til they were 19 or 20. I'm not sure, but it never seemed like the boys were trying to get it from the girls, or that the girls weren't equally as on the take trying to get it from boys.
Also, it seems to me that women are much more likely to fall back on socially-acceptable reasons when they do something out of horniness, rather than ever attributing it to their own lust. Like if a guy cheats, we just assume it was because he was a cheating horndog. Whereas when a woman does, they always come up with some other reason like "we weren't communicating" or "I wasn't getting my emotional needs met" -- instead of just admitting that lust and desire overrode their motivations not to cheat. I don't think they consciously lie about this, I think that in their mind it is literally not possible that they would do something like that just because they were super aroused and in lust and for no better reason. So they come up with a reason that makes sense in their cultural context.
So I don't think women have to "train themselves out of it" if they aren't raised explicitly being taught that being chaste or virginal is important. Though I think porn probably makes it all seem much more anxiety inducing now, even just on a social-comparison basis. 30 years ago, we weren't afraid of being compared to porn stars.
But admittedly, I don't really have much evidence on that point, just my own anecdotal experience. I always thought that raised without any expectations or cultural norms at all, young women would be more like the main character in Poor Things, or The Blue Lagoon -- i.e. curious and enthusiastic about sexuality because it's exciting and feels good. But I don't know how you could do a controlled study on such a thing.
One does have to wonder, if women are so inherently more chaste, why most cultures have felt the need to bang them over the heads with messages telling them to stay virgins and not to be slutty, or to harshly punish it. Usually you don't need such strong rules and norms against things that people aren't motivated to do on their own! Here in Utah, they were still teaching girls things like "no one likes a used piece of chewing gum" *in school* up until recently!
Oh, and I'm also more willing to believe that older people do like having romantic relationships with people they can relate to / are deeply bonded too even though they aren't as sexually attractive as young people. That said, they'd still likely keep that deep bonded relationship while also getting to sleep with very attractive people once in a while as an ideal - it's just that most people don't want to offer this sort of option to their partner (i.e. a poly relationship). And speaking of market dynamics, the thing I wonder with poly couples is how they deal with the shifting relative SMV over time - like if they open their relationship young, it kind of all works out because the woman has more opportunities for sex but is probably less into casual sex, but as they age, especially supposing this is a financially successful and interesting couple the man will eventually have more opportunities and motivation to sleep with other (younger) women, at which point the woman seems to have an objectively worse deal than her monogamous girlfriends
Very good point here. Most couples I knew that tried opening their relationship either closed it rather quickly or the whole thing blew up, because of this imbalance and the woman being so much more popular and it not living up to the man's fantasies (often turning into his nightmare, actually). But they were all young...what you describe would certainly be the case later on, depending on other assets. And plenty of women married to rich men DO just look the other way, when they're older, because they have no other choice, unless they want to lose their whole lifestyle.
I think it's odd the way some Millennials and Zoomers seem to think that being a "monogamist" or a "polyamorist" is an inherent orientation of some sort. I think my cohort just assumes that everyone would like the freedom to get some on the side now and then, if they could, but they don't want their partner to. My husband and I are certainly deeply bonded to each other and share values, a home, a shared history, shared generational references, our pets, our politics and in-jokes, etc....and both do our best to be as attractive as possible despite the march of time. But I have no illusions than one or both of us would cheat if we thought we could get away with it. But he knows he's out on his ass if he does, and I know someone might die if I do, so we have a little mutual-destruction pact. :) If young people are going to label everything as an orientation, they need to add one for "sexual hypocrite", because that's what most everyone is...freedom for me and not for thee!
This is actually the real issue the 25 year old trad wife needs to worry about. People will tell her "what will you do if something happens to your husband?" and she'll just say oh he has life insurance. What she actually needs to worry about is having zero leverage the last 4 or 5 decades of her life, if he decides he wants to cheat on her constantly and can afford to do so without much impact on him, financially.
Speaking as someone who is usually really disgusted by the “sexual market” arguments, this is actually very well argued. I think that it is useful to look at the “market” forces to understand the underlying dynamics, but us autistic zoomers tend to forget the next step, which is to then ignore the theory and dive right into real life practicalities anyway- none of you older women commenting on this stuff would ever intentionally treat your own significant other in a transactional way, despite all the theorizing.
I remember this old video by Karen Straughan about the transaction that justifies a marriage(or it did historically, idk what in the world is propping up its corpse now). She argues that traditional marriage, at its bones, is actually a young woman trading her fertility for things like lifelong protection and provision as well as a pension after her fertile years are over. This is why there was no such thing as marital rape, and your husband being unable to adequately provide for you were considered legitimate grounds for a separation. The fact of the marriage itself meant that both parties had those entitlements. But I describe it as “at its bones” for a reason- just because it is a transaction does not, and should not, remove all sentiment behind it. In fact, I think that the sentiment holds a marriage together much more than the transaction does, and contrary to what the leanings of other people here might be, sentiments are not empty or worthless. They might just be the most accessible infinite asset we have available.
I don’t know why, but lately I have developed this visceral disgust toward people that are obsessed with explaining away complex ideas like marriage or sacredness or desire. The logic is usually sound, in fact I end up agreeing with pretty much all of it, and yet it all feels so dead and flat and slightly noxious. It’s like a meticulously and beautifully dissected carcass of your once beloved pet. I suppose that just because you can explain the logic behind your feelings doesn’t make you stop feeling them. And just because you read the end of the script in advance doesn’t mean that you don’t play your role in the drama of it anyway.
Yeah I mean, I definitely do not talk in these cold market terms with my husband...I think we both have the "intuitive" understanding of underlying dynamics but it does not show up in our every day jokes and affections for each other and shared life and goals etc. Just like one's career and all the richness, pain, and triumphs lived every day does not reflect the underlying terms governing the job and one's home is much more than the price paid for it and the price one can sell it for. But whenever people are confused by an apparent contradiction in the logic of an argument, usually you can reconcile it if you look underneath what people are saying and focus on what market dynamics would cause you to predict.
I have a particularly bad habit (or skill, depending on one's perspective) at viewing things in transactional/market terms because I'm a transactional lawyer and my whole job for almost two decades now has been negotiating terms between parties on all sides, which makes the veil drop away. How it usually works is that the actual market players have to maintain their relationship and all the social and emotional bonds that are absolutely necessary to make collaboration and deals possible, so they barely even directly discuss such things, and then they turn it over to their lawyers to do the dirty work of negotiating the real terms. Because the real terms have a taint of vulgarity, and can ruin the relationship. This is most blatantly obvious when negotiating a prenup, but actually applies just as much to any business partnership or deal (or dissolution of one).
It has ruined me a little bit. Christmas isn't quite as much fun once you know there's no Santa, and it probably isn't healthy for people to live in a completely demystified and non magical world. So yes, constantly analyzing the world in 1s and 0s like an economist or autist...or at least LIVING and feeling like that, is not going to lead to joy and social harmony. This is one of the problems of the internet though...it has burst so many myths and laid bare underlying market dynamics that weren't previously so apparent...and now we have so much uncertainty because of it. No one really knows what to do and so we're all arguing with each other for our preferred way of addressing things and a million little ideologies are proliferating.
I was reading this and mostly nodding along, feeling nostalgia pangs for my autistic teenager days, until my naked girlfriend who I will not be leaving when we’re 60 rolled over to cuddle and I was reminded of why I put myself through the harrowing work of curing my cynical transactional reductionism. So nope, rejecting this paradigm, sticking with true love, bye losers
Well that proclamation might hold some weight if made when you and your naked girlfriend were 59 and a half years old, rather than you proclaiming something about what the future you decades in the future will be doing.
Proclamations of undying lifelong love and ardor are broken about as often as they're made...what's your own track record of your past utterances on the topic remaining in force? I note that said naked cuddler is your girlfriend, not your wife. ;)
Scepticism is expectable and to the extent that I’m a random person you don’t know, it’s fair enough for you to say that for all you know, *my* case being one of lasting true love is as unlikely as not. But the sort of attitude that I find mistaken and confused is when people apply the statistical mean to themselves, as if they have no further agency in determining what their own life will be like beyond the odds handed down from on high. Both things can be true — 50% of marriages end in divorce, but you can decide and act such that your marriage’s chance of ending is way lower (or way higher!) Similarly, I can grant that most relationships won’t build to states of unconditional love — but to infer from this statistic alone the notion that *my* relationship probably won’t build to unconditional love is silly. It’s like thinking “I will have 1.56 children, because that’s what the average number of children per household is.”
My impression is that countries that have legal sex work don’t seem that much different than similar countries where it is illegal. Do marriage rates, rates of singledom and frequency of sexual activity, etc. look all that different in Germany than other countries in Europe? What about Japan and S. Korea? I think that people place a lot of value in the other benefits of relationships besides sex,
such that talking about a market for sex doesn’t quite capture all of the dynamics, as sex is so frequently part of a larger bundle of goods.
This is a good question that I don't know the answer to. I have only been to the Netherlands, which obviously has the red light district and sex shows and all that...except none of the sex workers are Dutch (at least, they weren't last time I was there, which was a while ago). They were all obviously impoverished and/or drug addicts from countries without the nice economy. Which leads me to believe that engaging in sex work must still be stigmatized there, even if not illegal. Certainly that is similarly the case in the brothels where it's legal in Nevada. I don't know how it works in Germany or Australia.
If it's legal but so stigmatized that almost none of the native women of the actual country are doing it...or if they do it's totally secret, then it doesn't have the same effect on the market. The Dutch women are NOT being purchased in this example.
Being able to do it all anonymously also changes things. I suppose any guy could get paranoia that his girlfriend maybe used to be a sugar baby or sex worker and how would he ever know? There's ALWAYS been a de facto black market for these things, but either the illegality or the social stigma meant that most would be dissuaded unless they were already alienated from their parents, desperate, or supremely confident in their skill at not getting caught. It's different it's just actively accepted by everyone and not stigmatized at all (which is what at least some people are pushing for).
Maybe someone knows the answer: would it be possible in Germany or Australia for an ordinary woman who is otherwise qualified to be a corporate executive or doctor to be hired for those jobs if she was honest on her resume about having been a prostitute? If not, then we have the answer and it's still hidden and stigmatized to tamp it down...so you might not actually go to jail, you'll just be totally unhirable for any real job ever again.
“As we’ve progressed technologically we’ve reduced some of the most material risks associated with sex [reducing justifications for considering it sacred].”
I think this is true, but I also wonder often how much of sex’s sanctity is hardwired into our psychology via genes. There’s good evolutionary reasons for men to feel strong sexual jealousy and to act exploitatively, for women to be cautious of sex with uncaring men, etc. I’m firmly on the side of greater sexual liberation, but I do worry sometimes my position will start to run into genetic barriers soon.
Ecxellent writing! I like your enquiring and balanced mind. (Those parts of it that you let come to light, at least.)
To your question/statement towards the end. Do you believe evolutionary psychology could play a part? That the sacred bit could be a "manifestation" of the old knowledge of the risks that used to be involved in sex, at least for the women?
Thank you, Ole! Yes, I'd expect that we've evolved to feel sexual desire when it's adaptive to us, i.e. when it's a good idea to mate with some individual. And so, it might be adaptive to fear overriding that and thus create this view of sex and desire as sacred. I'm not sure if this is fully correct but that's my initial thought. It's tough to tell what is and isn't socialized with respect to sex since basically all cultures treat sex as sacred... then again that fact alone implies doing so is likely evolutionarily adaptive?
I would amend “adaptive to us” to “adaptive to our genes” - these are not the same thing. Take the example of women that grow up in rough environments who end up finding themselves attracted to brutal men who are more likely to commit domestic violence, or men who can’t resist the urge to cheat despite it leaving them with intense guilt and the possibility of major life disruption that far outweigh the fleeting upside.
I think we should consider sacred sex in tension with the abundance of rape and sex slavery throughout history. If you take away civil norms, women get raped: specifically wartime and religious cults leaders provide numerous example.
We makes good, loving sex sacred because profane sex is indeed a tool to terrorize, control or subjegate. Sex work and casual sex blurs the lines and provides social legitimacy for rape-adjacent behavior.
Trad con women like Perry are 100% doing intragender competition in the guise of improving humanity. Good for me conflated with good in itself. The desire to control other people's sex lives to create a culture that creates fewer tradeoffs for her and underwrites her preferences and adds costs to others. Not that the same can't be said for the liberationists as well, but the trad cons are more blinkered about it.
I think you have it right. The penumbra of sacredness gives everyone the shades of grey to justify their twisty thinking about sex. Subconsciously, we have a hard time separating "what I choose in my life" from "what others may choose in their lives" because we're deeply socialized to judge sex through a moral lens. Perhaps that's why alcohol is the built-in excuse for "bad decisions"? Even when the very sober decision to go the bar in the first place was made for the purpose of creating precisely that opportunity… Our Puritanical legacy casts a long shadow.
I'll bite. I'm curious what the "primordial causality" is. Are you suggesting that Homo sapiens are biologically or evolutionarily inclined to oppress one another? Perhaps just within the realm of sexuality?
I wouldn’t say that Puritanism has much to do with oppression. Norms for sexual behavior are found across most mammals, the policing of those norms can take far more vicious forms than even we humans use, and those who run afoul of those norms, on average, are not evolutionarily selected, for obvious reasons.
"Sex is explicitly described as sacred within Christianity"
Controlling women's sexuality -- for fun and/or profit/prophet -- from time immemorial?
But somewhat closer to the bone -- so to speak -- is your closing comment and question:
"My intuition here is that most of us, or at least most women, must train ourselves out of seeing [sex] as sacred using reason and utilitarian arguments, rather than being socialized into seeing it as sacred. But perhaps I have this the wrong way?"
Not entirely ... 🙂 though maybe moot on why women "must train themselves" out of that "sacred" view. Except maybe to question why some tout it as such -- often just to pick their pockets.
But kind of think the solution, the synthesis, is in the view that the bedrock of "reality" is a "quid pro quo" -- all the way down. Something that I think far too many "feminists" lose sight of in their too quick anathematization of prostitution -- the issue there, I think, is whether the exchange is an equitable one or not. A question that probably has a great deal of relevance to a great many "relationships" far outside those ones.
Apropos of which, reminds me of an essay, several essays in fact, from "Maggie McNeill", The Honest Courtesan:
MM: "While I understand why many activists and allies argue decriminalization from human rights, libertarian or harm reduction viewpoints, and indeed use these arguments myself because they are all valid ones, it’s sad that almost nobody wants to acknowledge another, equally important factor: human society needs whores every bit as much as it needs farmers, soldiers, physicians and builders, and far more than it needs preachers, academic feminists, politicians and 90% of the other control freaks who work so assiduously at rousing the rabble against us. Our ancient ancestors understood this; it’s not accidental that in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the temple harlot Shamhat is the one who tames the wild man Enkidu, turning him from a beast to a man. But in the 5000 years since that powerful myth was first pressed into clay, Man’s world has forgotten its debt to us and has generally succumbed to the hubris of believing it no longer needs us; even in areas where our trade is legalized or decriminalized there is the self-important pretense that we are merely being tolerated as a magnanimous landlord might allow stray cats to eke out a marginal living on his property."
No doubt whatsoever that Maggie has something in the way of an axe to grind, a pecuniary motivation behind her argument. However, one might also suggest, to say the least, that she, and many other "Daughters of Shamhat" are actually honouring that "sacredness of desire".
Kind of reminds me of chatting with an escort on Twitter many moons ago -- some ten years ago in fact:
@SteersMann @Kristina_Escort Ain't that the truth. Mental health, physical health -- and marriage counseling. Escorts do it all.
I agree, and whether it's sex or something else, society should definitely hold *something* sacred, whether it's truth, science, freedom, reason, compassion, prosperity, equality, it doesn't matter. An individual can only value something up to a certain degree without reinforcement from the larger culture and institutions, especially if those values are under attack. And I'm not advocating for any specific key values that should be enforced from the top down. Just highlighting that sacredness isn't just a personal construct, but a social construct that serves a very deep and important function in terms of living a meaningful life.
These are good questions, and I think that you will find the answer becomes apparent if you assume that everyone intuitively and unconsciously understands that sex is a market, and an inherently and unavoidably unbalanced one. They likely don't consciously think of it that way because no one has articulated it to them that way and people have overlaid other concepts. But if you consider that both perspectives are a way to try to solve an unbalanced market problem, then both the conservative/sex is sacred stance AND the progressive/desire-is-required stance make sense.
Everyone (well, most everyone) wants sex. But to get it, you need another person to "transact" it with you, so it's a market. The problem is the demand is universal, but the supply is actually quite low, because everyone wants sex from the same relatively-small subset (i.e. young, attractive people). If we assume that people live to 90, and that they will spend 70 of those years with some desire for sex, and if we also assume that most people are only sexually attractive for maybe 25-30 years of their lifespan, and even within that "span" of attractiveness, only about half of people are actually considered "attractive"...then you have a problem where 100% of people want something for a span of 70 years, and they all want it from only 15% of the population. Add in the fact that men have this desire even more strongly than women, on average, and it creates even more market imbalance.
In other words, if they could, all (straight) men would only be having sex with a small sub-set of women in a particular age range correlating with fertility. And if it was all based on attraction-only, no one would ever have sex with old men, or unattractive men. And because of the gender differential in desire, some people would still have sex with old or unattractive women, but they wouldn't be willing to pay or give or trade-off much of anything to do it.
I think all adults understand this intuitively. The young themselves don't, always. So how does society solve this imbalance without creating a lot of problems and strife? Many people do NOT want young women do be able to fully capitalize upon their market power here. It would create too much of a monopoly for them. It would screw over everyone else, and if they were allowed to fully realize upon the high demand for what they have, they'd be able to increase the costs way too high.
Society therefore tries to find ways so that young, attractive women are unable to capitalize on the natural monopoly they hold, either via religious shame or making it outright illegal or other norms discouraging it. And for the most part, women don't complain TOO much about that, because those same women will one day age out, and they likely realize that their future selves will be screwed in a situation where young women have zero social impediments from fully marketing and capitalizing upon their sexual assets.
For the feminists, this creates a problem, because the interests of young/attractive and old/unattractive women are directly in conflict, and feminism is not good at acknowledging or dealing with instances where different groups of women have directly conflicting interests. Thus, the constant wars over this issue, where they never quite acknowledge the real issue, which is that a gorgeous 20 year old selling sex appeal is in fact empowering herself and likely engaging in the most lucrative possible work she could, while directly dis-empowering all other women.
For non-religious right-wing people, their preferred solution is to try to keep the costs of sex with young women as low as possible while also retaining maximum leverage and bargaining power for men. And honestly it's so thinly-veiled and transparent that they've never been able to impose their vision absent force.
For religious people, the solution is to allow sex only in life-long contracts, which circumvents the market distortion created by the age-based supply and demand skew. Because you marry a hot 25 year old and the trade-off is you're stuck with them at 75, so it solves the problem.
And for ordinary people, substituting the life-long-within-contract-only sex requirement for the requirement of mutual sexual desire is a slightly different way of solving the same supply-demand skew. Because young and attractive people are naturally attracted to each other, and then everyone else just has to pair up roughly according to equivalent attractiveness-level, which seems seems intuitively fair, balanced, and reasonable to most. So two hot 25 year olds can pair up and it's a fair trade, or two non-hot 25 year olds, and the same for two 45 years olds or 65 year olds -- in all cases it fixes the age-based supply/demand skew. This is basically how things work in practice for 90% of the population, until technology rubbed the market skew into people's faces a bit too much, and made it much easier to transact among market participants, without having to do so publicly or risk getting caught.
The reason that an ugly but famous guy sleeping with a pretty young fan bothers people, or an old wealthy man sleeping with a pretty poor woman, is not actually because of concerns over influence or power (as you correctly point out, old men are quite exploitable by young women). It's because it creates a market disruption by circumventing the accepted solution (life-long contract or equivalent-attractiveness-level-trades). And markets are collective where what others do DOES directly impact one's own possible options. If old men with money are allowed to easily purchase sex from young women without any taboo, it pisses off the young men, who don't have money, and who hate the thought that their equivalently-attractive female peers can simply be bought so easily. And because of all the "sacredness" and other obscuring voo-doo that people surround it with, it allows all the other old men to start thinking that young women are actually ATTRACTED to old men, and that they should be able to get one too (this specific problem is at least fixed in the case of direct prostitution). And then that screws over all women, who don't want old men to think they can get young women without paying very dearly for it.
When Aella or Hanania point out the actual fact that prostitution is extremely lucrative for young, attractive women, most everyone else will react against that. Because it's clear that by allowing them to freely capitalize on their asset without stigma would make them TOO valuable, to literally everyone else's expense OTHER THAN an equally small portion of wealthy men. But they don't say it that way because it sounds too much like whining or envy or being a sexual communist. So instead they come up with reasons that sound more like they're concerned with vulnerable people, such as sex trafficking or exploitation concerns. Their actual concern is that too much of a free-market in sex will create disastrous social implications because the supply and demand are inherently, biologically extremely skewed, and basically everyone who isn't wealthy or attractive will get nothing, in that type of regime.
If a 60 year old man is free to spend all his money on a 25 year old purchased girlfriend, without shame or stigma, why on earth would he stay married to his 60-year old wife? Or why would she stay with him, if he's spending all his money on mistresses? And how would young or poor men have any hope of ever having a girlfriend? And why would anyone want to pair up long-term, unless it was for a purely economic-type partnership without an implied expectation of love and sex? These things sound extreme, but they are actually the logical result if you open the door for utterly unstigmatized transactional sex on a short-term basis, allowing for any type of trade-off. Even the people who supposedly claim to be most in favor of legal prostitution are almost certainly relying on an assumption that it would remain stigmatized and somewhat unusual (which I think is a very bad assumption to make).
Anyway, food for thought. I've found that most people are unwilling to go along with my market-based analysis -- it's too coldly economic for them -- but I've found that all of the seemingly irrational positions people hold make perfect sense when viewed that way. Most people will protest that in fact they very much love and are still attracted to their 60 year old wife, or that most women would never want to be prostitutes like that...personally I think they are fooling themselves and only think that because they've lived in a society with the mix of the religious and attractiveness-matching norms that keep the rails on the real marketplace, or how people would behave absent such norms. A truly free market with out any governing norms/taboos would be very bad for most, so regulating things by repressing the conduct of both young attractive women and older men with money/fame helps everyone else.
In ages prior, the skew was not QUITE as much of a problem because the risk of pregnancy limited behavior, and older men aged out of capacity earlier. Viagra, birth control, abortion, and the ability to easily and anonymously transact sex without anyone finding out has amplified an existing wired-in market skew several times over.
Also, I fully agree with your first footnote and criticism of Louise Perry.
Thanks for the thoughtful response, Kate, sorry I hadn't had time to read through this properly until now! I agree with a lot of this, although I'm a little softer in terms of the assumptions I make re the motivations leading others to try to stigmatize sex - I think the fear of letting young women capitalize fully on their sexual value is a significant part of it, but I also think some of the motivation for people like Perry is that they really believe these behaviors will be net negative for the women long term and with a sufficiently broad understanding of welfare. I think there are some number of women in their 30s/40s/50s who are now married with kids and regret their slutty phase (although maybe only because they weren't appropriately compensated for it) and worry that other young women will be overly short term focused, not understand their true value etc. and have sex with men that are in some way "unworthy". Now, whether that would still be true if this sort of sex was destigmatized is unclear. But, wondering what you think regarding how much of the "sacredness" is socially constructed - my thought is that, particularly for women, the inherent costs of sex (pre tech like birth control) were very high such that it may have been evolutionarily adaptive to guard it closely, and that since sexual attraction is our evolved mechanism for determining when sex is "worth it" or not... overriding that feels really bad (especially for women). This thought is still half baked but I think it might be directionally right at least?
"(although maybe only because they weren't appropriately compensated for it)" BINGO! That's it right there.
The question you're asking about is one I've wondered about, because Perry's message just does not vibe with what I've seen. I was raised in a small town where for whatever reason (I honestly don't know why), there really were no norms or expectations that women were less promiscuous or horny than men. It wasn't a thought that even entered my mind til I went to college and found out that that lots of people still thought that. Prior to college, I'd thought that was an old-fashioned view that went away after the 60s. I've discussed this with old classmates and none of us can figure out why the culture in our area had zero gender-based sexual norms, but it really didn't, and there was zero stigma attached to female sluttiness or expectation that women were less horny than men. It's not like it was taught that women SHOULD be promiscuous, it's more like nothing was said one way or the other, so we just came to our own conclusions. I guess maybe our parents were modern enough not to teach us things like "girls should stay virgins", but weren't yet hip to the times enough to realize what we were getting up to or worried about it, so adults didn't really send us any messages one way or the other. And the media often portrayed men and women with similar sex drives (Basic Instinct and Titanic being two blockbuster movies at the time, both featuring sexually predatory or adventurous women).
I saw zero evidence of any gender discrepancy in the sexual conduct of my peers, in school. Some boys and girls were more prudish or reserved or less interested, and some boys and girls were horndogs, and it did not seem at all distributed by gender. My female friends and I were always on the take trying to hook up with boys. Now, I DO, as an adult, think men generally have a more consistently high sex drive, at least as a group, but I didn't see it back then, and maybe that's just because girls mature a couple years earlier than boys, so it kind of evened out because the boys didn't really catch up to their full levels of horndog-ness and sexual adventuresome til they were 19 or 20. I'm not sure, but it never seemed like the boys were trying to get it from the girls, or that the girls weren't equally as on the take trying to get it from boys.
Also, it seems to me that women are much more likely to fall back on socially-acceptable reasons when they do something out of horniness, rather than ever attributing it to their own lust. Like if a guy cheats, we just assume it was because he was a cheating horndog. Whereas when a woman does, they always come up with some other reason like "we weren't communicating" or "I wasn't getting my emotional needs met" -- instead of just admitting that lust and desire overrode their motivations not to cheat. I don't think they consciously lie about this, I think that in their mind it is literally not possible that they would do something like that just because they were super aroused and in lust and for no better reason. So they come up with a reason that makes sense in their cultural context.
So I don't think women have to "train themselves out of it" if they aren't raised explicitly being taught that being chaste or virginal is important. Though I think porn probably makes it all seem much more anxiety inducing now, even just on a social-comparison basis. 30 years ago, we weren't afraid of being compared to porn stars.
But admittedly, I don't really have much evidence on that point, just my own anecdotal experience. I always thought that raised without any expectations or cultural norms at all, young women would be more like the main character in Poor Things, or The Blue Lagoon -- i.e. curious and enthusiastic about sexuality because it's exciting and feels good. But I don't know how you could do a controlled study on such a thing.
One does have to wonder, if women are so inherently more chaste, why most cultures have felt the need to bang them over the heads with messages telling them to stay virgins and not to be slutty, or to harshly punish it. Usually you don't need such strong rules and norms against things that people aren't motivated to do on their own! Here in Utah, they were still teaching girls things like "no one likes a used piece of chewing gum" *in school* up until recently!
Oh, and I'm also more willing to believe that older people do like having romantic relationships with people they can relate to / are deeply bonded too even though they aren't as sexually attractive as young people. That said, they'd still likely keep that deep bonded relationship while also getting to sleep with very attractive people once in a while as an ideal - it's just that most people don't want to offer this sort of option to their partner (i.e. a poly relationship). And speaking of market dynamics, the thing I wonder with poly couples is how they deal with the shifting relative SMV over time - like if they open their relationship young, it kind of all works out because the woman has more opportunities for sex but is probably less into casual sex, but as they age, especially supposing this is a financially successful and interesting couple the man will eventually have more opportunities and motivation to sleep with other (younger) women, at which point the woman seems to have an objectively worse deal than her monogamous girlfriends
Very good point here. Most couples I knew that tried opening their relationship either closed it rather quickly or the whole thing blew up, because of this imbalance and the woman being so much more popular and it not living up to the man's fantasies (often turning into his nightmare, actually). But they were all young...what you describe would certainly be the case later on, depending on other assets. And plenty of women married to rich men DO just look the other way, when they're older, because they have no other choice, unless they want to lose their whole lifestyle.
I think it's odd the way some Millennials and Zoomers seem to think that being a "monogamist" or a "polyamorist" is an inherent orientation of some sort. I think my cohort just assumes that everyone would like the freedom to get some on the side now and then, if they could, but they don't want their partner to. My husband and I are certainly deeply bonded to each other and share values, a home, a shared history, shared generational references, our pets, our politics and in-jokes, etc....and both do our best to be as attractive as possible despite the march of time. But I have no illusions than one or both of us would cheat if we thought we could get away with it. But he knows he's out on his ass if he does, and I know someone might die if I do, so we have a little mutual-destruction pact. :) If young people are going to label everything as an orientation, they need to add one for "sexual hypocrite", because that's what most everyone is...freedom for me and not for thee!
This is actually the real issue the 25 year old trad wife needs to worry about. People will tell her "what will you do if something happens to your husband?" and she'll just say oh he has life insurance. What she actually needs to worry about is having zero leverage the last 4 or 5 decades of her life, if he decides he wants to cheat on her constantly and can afford to do so without much impact on him, financially.
Speaking as someone who is usually really disgusted by the “sexual market” arguments, this is actually very well argued. I think that it is useful to look at the “market” forces to understand the underlying dynamics, but us autistic zoomers tend to forget the next step, which is to then ignore the theory and dive right into real life practicalities anyway- none of you older women commenting on this stuff would ever intentionally treat your own significant other in a transactional way, despite all the theorizing.
I remember this old video by Karen Straughan about the transaction that justifies a marriage(or it did historically, idk what in the world is propping up its corpse now). She argues that traditional marriage, at its bones, is actually a young woman trading her fertility for things like lifelong protection and provision as well as a pension after her fertile years are over. This is why there was no such thing as marital rape, and your husband being unable to adequately provide for you were considered legitimate grounds for a separation. The fact of the marriage itself meant that both parties had those entitlements. But I describe it as “at its bones” for a reason- just because it is a transaction does not, and should not, remove all sentiment behind it. In fact, I think that the sentiment holds a marriage together much more than the transaction does, and contrary to what the leanings of other people here might be, sentiments are not empty or worthless. They might just be the most accessible infinite asset we have available.
I don’t know why, but lately I have developed this visceral disgust toward people that are obsessed with explaining away complex ideas like marriage or sacredness or desire. The logic is usually sound, in fact I end up agreeing with pretty much all of it, and yet it all feels so dead and flat and slightly noxious. It’s like a meticulously and beautifully dissected carcass of your once beloved pet. I suppose that just because you can explain the logic behind your feelings doesn’t make you stop feeling them. And just because you read the end of the script in advance doesn’t mean that you don’t play your role in the drama of it anyway.
Yeah I mean, I definitely do not talk in these cold market terms with my husband...I think we both have the "intuitive" understanding of underlying dynamics but it does not show up in our every day jokes and affections for each other and shared life and goals etc. Just like one's career and all the richness, pain, and triumphs lived every day does not reflect the underlying terms governing the job and one's home is much more than the price paid for it and the price one can sell it for. But whenever people are confused by an apparent contradiction in the logic of an argument, usually you can reconcile it if you look underneath what people are saying and focus on what market dynamics would cause you to predict.
I have a particularly bad habit (or skill, depending on one's perspective) at viewing things in transactional/market terms because I'm a transactional lawyer and my whole job for almost two decades now has been negotiating terms between parties on all sides, which makes the veil drop away. How it usually works is that the actual market players have to maintain their relationship and all the social and emotional bonds that are absolutely necessary to make collaboration and deals possible, so they barely even directly discuss such things, and then they turn it over to their lawyers to do the dirty work of negotiating the real terms. Because the real terms have a taint of vulgarity, and can ruin the relationship. This is most blatantly obvious when negotiating a prenup, but actually applies just as much to any business partnership or deal (or dissolution of one).
It has ruined me a little bit. Christmas isn't quite as much fun once you know there's no Santa, and it probably isn't healthy for people to live in a completely demystified and non magical world. So yes, constantly analyzing the world in 1s and 0s like an economist or autist...or at least LIVING and feeling like that, is not going to lead to joy and social harmony. This is one of the problems of the internet though...it has burst so many myths and laid bare underlying market dynamics that weren't previously so apparent...and now we have so much uncertainty because of it. No one really knows what to do and so we're all arguing with each other for our preferred way of addressing things and a million little ideologies are proliferating.
I was reading this and mostly nodding along, feeling nostalgia pangs for my autistic teenager days, until my naked girlfriend who I will not be leaving when we’re 60 rolled over to cuddle and I was reminded of why I put myself through the harrowing work of curing my cynical transactional reductionism. So nope, rejecting this paradigm, sticking with true love, bye losers
Well that proclamation might hold some weight if made when you and your naked girlfriend were 59 and a half years old, rather than you proclaiming something about what the future you decades in the future will be doing.
Proclamations of undying lifelong love and ardor are broken about as often as they're made...what's your own track record of your past utterances on the topic remaining in force? I note that said naked cuddler is your girlfriend, not your wife. ;)
Scepticism is expectable and to the extent that I’m a random person you don’t know, it’s fair enough for you to say that for all you know, *my* case being one of lasting true love is as unlikely as not. But the sort of attitude that I find mistaken and confused is when people apply the statistical mean to themselves, as if they have no further agency in determining what their own life will be like beyond the odds handed down from on high. Both things can be true — 50% of marriages end in divorce, but you can decide and act such that your marriage’s chance of ending is way lower (or way higher!) Similarly, I can grant that most relationships won’t build to states of unconditional love — but to infer from this statistic alone the notion that *my* relationship probably won’t build to unconditional love is silly. It’s like thinking “I will have 1.56 children, because that’s what the average number of children per household is.”
Excellent analysis. Yes....Scarcity & Desire. (It's the title of an essay that I keep meaning to write.)
Older men with money can buy sex with younger women right now, easily. Young women can also sell their sexual favors easily. Yet most don't.
My impression is that countries that have legal sex work don’t seem that much different than similar countries where it is illegal. Do marriage rates, rates of singledom and frequency of sexual activity, etc. look all that different in Germany than other countries in Europe? What about Japan and S. Korea? I think that people place a lot of value in the other benefits of relationships besides sex,
such that talking about a market for sex doesn’t quite capture all of the dynamics, as sex is so frequently part of a larger bundle of goods.
This is a good question that I don't know the answer to. I have only been to the Netherlands, which obviously has the red light district and sex shows and all that...except none of the sex workers are Dutch (at least, they weren't last time I was there, which was a while ago). They were all obviously impoverished and/or drug addicts from countries without the nice economy. Which leads me to believe that engaging in sex work must still be stigmatized there, even if not illegal. Certainly that is similarly the case in the brothels where it's legal in Nevada. I don't know how it works in Germany or Australia.
If it's legal but so stigmatized that almost none of the native women of the actual country are doing it...or if they do it's totally secret, then it doesn't have the same effect on the market. The Dutch women are NOT being purchased in this example.
Being able to do it all anonymously also changes things. I suppose any guy could get paranoia that his girlfriend maybe used to be a sugar baby or sex worker and how would he ever know? There's ALWAYS been a de facto black market for these things, but either the illegality or the social stigma meant that most would be dissuaded unless they were already alienated from their parents, desperate, or supremely confident in their skill at not getting caught. It's different it's just actively accepted by everyone and not stigmatized at all (which is what at least some people are pushing for).
Maybe someone knows the answer: would it be possible in Germany or Australia for an ordinary woman who is otherwise qualified to be a corporate executive or doctor to be hired for those jobs if she was honest on her resume about having been a prostitute? If not, then we have the answer and it's still hidden and stigmatized to tamp it down...so you might not actually go to jail, you'll just be totally unhirable for any real job ever again.
I really liked this article.
“As we’ve progressed technologically we’ve reduced some of the most material risks associated with sex [reducing justifications for considering it sacred].”
I think this is true, but I also wonder often how much of sex’s sanctity is hardwired into our psychology via genes. There’s good evolutionary reasons for men to feel strong sexual jealousy and to act exploitatively, for women to be cautious of sex with uncaring men, etc. I’m firmly on the side of greater sexual liberation, but I do worry sometimes my position will start to run into genetic barriers soon.
My intuition is similarly that much of it is “wired in” particularly for women but I’m not super confident about that
Ecxellent writing! I like your enquiring and balanced mind. (Those parts of it that you let come to light, at least.)
To your question/statement towards the end. Do you believe evolutionary psychology could play a part? That the sacred bit could be a "manifestation" of the old knowledge of the risks that used to be involved in sex, at least for the women?
Thank you, Ole! Yes, I'd expect that we've evolved to feel sexual desire when it's adaptive to us, i.e. when it's a good idea to mate with some individual. And so, it might be adaptive to fear overriding that and thus create this view of sex and desire as sacred. I'm not sure if this is fully correct but that's my initial thought. It's tough to tell what is and isn't socialized with respect to sex since basically all cultures treat sex as sacred... then again that fact alone implies doing so is likely evolutionarily adaptive?
I would amend “adaptive to us” to “adaptive to our genes” - these are not the same thing. Take the example of women that grow up in rough environments who end up finding themselves attracted to brutal men who are more likely to commit domestic violence, or men who can’t resist the urge to cheat despite it leaving them with intense guilt and the possibility of major life disruption that far outweigh the fleeting upside.
Fair enough, adaptive to our genes propagating rather than adaptive to our happiness or fulfillment
I think we should consider sacred sex in tension with the abundance of rape and sex slavery throughout history. If you take away civil norms, women get raped: specifically wartime and religious cults leaders provide numerous example.
We makes good, loving sex sacred because profane sex is indeed a tool to terrorize, control or subjegate. Sex work and casual sex blurs the lines and provides social legitimacy for rape-adjacent behavior.
Trad con women like Perry are 100% doing intragender competition in the guise of improving humanity. Good for me conflated with good in itself. The desire to control other people's sex lives to create a culture that creates fewer tradeoffs for her and underwrites her preferences and adds costs to others. Not that the same can't be said for the liberationists as well, but the trad cons are more blinkered about it.
I think you have it right. The penumbra of sacredness gives everyone the shades of grey to justify their twisty thinking about sex. Subconsciously, we have a hard time separating "what I choose in my life" from "what others may choose in their lives" because we're deeply socialized to judge sex through a moral lens. Perhaps that's why alcohol is the built-in excuse for "bad decisions"? Even when the very sober decision to go the bar in the first place was made for the purpose of creating precisely that opportunity… Our Puritanical legacy casts a long shadow.
Obviously Puritanism is far downstream of a much more primordial causality.
I'll bite. I'm curious what the "primordial causality" is. Are you suggesting that Homo sapiens are biologically or evolutionarily inclined to oppress one another? Perhaps just within the realm of sexuality?
Sex has an element of shame or privacy amongst many mammals, from which it follows that the facility of alcohol seems quite clear.
I wouldn’t say that Puritanism has much to do with oppression. Norms for sexual behavior are found across most mammals, the policing of those norms can take far more vicious forms than even we humans use, and those who run afoul of those norms, on average, are not evolutionarily selected, for obvious reasons.
"Sex is explicitly described as sacred within Christianity"
Controlling women's sexuality -- for fun and/or profit/prophet -- from time immemorial?
But somewhat closer to the bone -- so to speak -- is your closing comment and question:
"My intuition here is that most of us, or at least most women, must train ourselves out of seeing [sex] as sacred using reason and utilitarian arguments, rather than being socialized into seeing it as sacred. But perhaps I have this the wrong way?"
Not entirely ... 🙂 though maybe moot on why women "must train themselves" out of that "sacred" view. Except maybe to question why some tout it as such -- often just to pick their pockets.
But kind of think the solution, the synthesis, is in the view that the bedrock of "reality" is a "quid pro quo" -- all the way down. Something that I think far too many "feminists" lose sight of in their too quick anathematization of prostitution -- the issue there, I think, is whether the exchange is an equitable one or not. A question that probably has a great deal of relevance to a great many "relationships" far outside those ones.
Apropos of which, reminds me of an essay, several essays in fact, from "Maggie McNeill", The Honest Courtesan:
MM: "While I understand why many activists and allies argue decriminalization from human rights, libertarian or harm reduction viewpoints, and indeed use these arguments myself because they are all valid ones, it’s sad that almost nobody wants to acknowledge another, equally important factor: human society needs whores every bit as much as it needs farmers, soldiers, physicians and builders, and far more than it needs preachers, academic feminists, politicians and 90% of the other control freaks who work so assiduously at rousing the rabble against us. Our ancient ancestors understood this; it’s not accidental that in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the temple harlot Shamhat is the one who tames the wild man Enkidu, turning him from a beast to a man. But in the 5000 years since that powerful myth was first pressed into clay, Man’s world has forgotten its debt to us and has generally succumbed to the hubris of believing it no longer needs us; even in areas where our trade is legalized or decriminalized there is the self-important pretense that we are merely being tolerated as a magnanimous landlord might allow stray cats to eke out a marginal living on his property."
https://maggiemcneill.com/2012/05/24/the-daughters-of-shamhat/
No doubt whatsoever that Maggie has something in the way of an axe to grind, a pecuniary motivation behind her argument. However, one might also suggest, to say the least, that she, and many other "Daughters of Shamhat" are actually honouring that "sacredness of desire".
Kind of reminds me of chatting with an escort on Twitter many moons ago -- some ten years ago in fact:
@SteersMann @Kristina_Escort Ain't that the truth. Mental health, physical health -- and marriage counseling. Escorts do it all.
https://x.com/HothenDotCom/status/500759715479973888
Madonna and whore -- methinks the sacred and the profane aren't unique to either.
anyone who has no sense for why sex is considered sacred has never had good sex.
Of course you can also have sex in a way that isn't sacred at all.
In my opinion a lot of the stuff applying market logic to sex comes from fear of sex and its power.
I agree, and whether it's sex or something else, society should definitely hold *something* sacred, whether it's truth, science, freedom, reason, compassion, prosperity, equality, it doesn't matter. An individual can only value something up to a certain degree without reinforcement from the larger culture and institutions, especially if those values are under attack. And I'm not advocating for any specific key values that should be enforced from the top down. Just highlighting that sacredness isn't just a personal construct, but a social construct that serves a very deep and important function in terms of living a meaningful life.