Prostitution’s Dirty Little Secret
– by David Matthews 2
Here we go again!
Yet another sex scandal has come out. This time someone high and mighty and presumably incorruptible has been taken down because of it.
Although, we really shouldn’t be surprised by it all. Just like “the quiet ones” are always the ones to go on sudden killing sprees, so too are the “presumably incorruptible” the first ones caught up in some kind of corruption.
And you can’t get any more clichéd than this… Eliot Spitzer, the self-appointed “Sherriff of Wall Street”, the former Attorney General who got himself elected as the Governor of New York, had to publicly admit that he retained the services of a prostitute. The man who made his career by shutting down escort services and prosecuting prostitutes had to admit that he was also an active client of their services. The firestorm of this public confession was enough to drive him out of office.
The self-righteous were once again beside themselves over this bombshell.
“WHY” they asked themselves out loud. WHY did he risk his job, his career, his future, his family, his very life over some prostitute?
The media, of course, went on a feeding frenzy looking for the so-called “other woman”, and they happened to have found her. It was a young woman who considered herself an aspiring singer. She had a hot-looking body, she wasn’t old or fat or looked like she was strung out on anything except life. In other words, she didn’t appear to fit the stereotype of a prostitute that you see on TV shows like “COPS”.
Of course the media forgets that she wasn’t the ONLY woman who worked for that escort service, nor was she the ONLY person from that service who met with Spitzer. She was just the only one that the federal investigators could identify.
So this young woman, who initially went under the name “Kristen”, became the new face of the world’s oldest profession. Everyone wanted to meet with her. Everyone wanted to interview her. Men’s magazines wanted to photograph her, and Joe Francis thought he even had marketable footage of her from her younger days… until her lawyer announced that she was only 17 when all of it was taken. (That’s yet another potential charge looming over the “Girls Gone Wild” king.)
This caused the media to also look at prostitution, and they predictably went into it with the prejudiced stance of it being inherently wrong. They give a loathing, judgmental look down at what they decry as “the sex industry” and “the sex trade”. They equate it to slavery… and some of them even go so far as to CALL it nothing less than slavery.
ABC’s Dianne Sawyer used her airtime to interview self-professed prostitutes, including one who considered what she did as a form of empowerment, and Sawyer simply REFUSED to accept the woman’s explanation of why she did what she did. That couldn’t be right in her bigoted mind! The woman MUST have been sexually abused as a child, or hooked on drugs, or was being pressured into it by a pimp pretending to be her boyfriend. SHE MUST HAVE! Those are the only “acceptable” explanations why someone would willingly turn to prostitution.
But such delusions from people like Sawyer only serve to cover up a much greater truth regarding the world’s oldest profession, and WHY it is such.
Every time the media turns its biased eyes towards anything involving sex, it is always done with an equally biased message. Unless it is done in an “acceptable relationship” and done for the sole purpose of making babies, then it is considered wrong, freaky, strange, perverse, dangerous, and even if it isn’t illegal, they would consider it as such. Whether or not it is done between consenting adults in private is irrelevant. Whether or not it improves a relationship or at least the self-worth and well-being of a person is irrelevant. The subject itself is considered scandalous enough to get attention, and therefore must also be judged and convicted by the most restrictive of minds as wrong. That is the only way that they can justify airing such material without saying that it was for the sake of ratings and the almighty advertising dollar.
In other words, THEY don’t want to admit that they are doing what they are doing for the sake of money… because it would make them no different than the prostitutes that they condemn.
Let’s get brutally honest here… WE ARE ALL PROSTITUTES in one form or another. That’s the dirty little secret about prostitution that nobody wants to accept.
When someone engages in prostitution, they aren’t just offering one body part for money. Even if it’s for a quickie around the corner, the person offering it has to provide a fantasy, an illusion, a sense of desire. It’s not just offering the body part and that’s it. They have to provide the illusion that they WANT to do this instead of saying “I just need the money”.
Think for a minute about all of those professional athletes that sell their services to the highest dollar. They haggle over the price of their talent while professing their love of the game. They’re even willing to shut down the whole sports industry just to get what they want. They get traded and moved around to different teams, different cities, even different countries, and every time they do so, they smile and give it their best so they can get their paycheck. They prostitute their services and call it a “pastime”.
Think for a minute about the writers in Hollywood who recently went on strike for no other reason than to get more money for their services. They pretty much shut down most of their own ego-driven industry for the sake of money. And then, when they came back, they pretended to do so for “the love” of the viewers!
Politicians are the biggest prostitutes in the world. They claim to champion “the common man”, and yet they will meet with millionaires and billionaires, and will themselves become millionaires and billionaires in the process, and then sell out “the common man” behind closed doors. They will sell their support and their ethics to the special interest group that helps them stay in power. And then they will go back to “the common man” and smile and shake hands and kiss babies and claim that they are still on THEIR side.
And it’s not just the rich and powerful and the talented who prostitute themselves. It’s not just those on Wall Street or K Street or Pennsylvania Avenue or Madison Avenue. It’s also Main Street. It’s also YOUR street.
How many times have you worked at a job that you didn’t really want to work at, but you had to for the money? Work in a factory? Work at McDonald’s? Work for a temporary employment agency? Do you show up at that job with a scowl on your face and obvious disgust about ever working there? Probably not. Even if you hate what you do, you probably still show up there with a smile on your face and an eagerness to get right into the job. How many Starbucks baristas are really aspiring models? How many waiters and waitresses are aspiring actors and actresses? If you’re not working at the job that you’ve always WANTED to work in, and you’re showing up there with smiles and giving nothing but your best into it, even though everything inside you says that this is not you, then what YOU are doing is NO DIFFERENT than what prostitutes do.
YOU are a prostitute!
Go ahead and get disgusted at the realization. Get upset about it. Decry it if you so desire, but that does not make it any less true. If you are working at a job that you really don’t want to work in, but need to because of the money, then you ARE a prostitute! You are selling your services for money and you are giving people the fantasy that you like what you are doing!
Think for a minute about all of the marriages that were done for convenience. The number of times that women settle down with a man in marriage, not because she’s in love with that person but simply because “he’s a good man”. She may not be madly in love him, but she convinces herself that her financial and security needs are more important than her personal desires. And she’ll never let him know that, of course. Even if he suspects it to be true, she’ll still pretend to love him.
How does that differ from prostitution? It doesn’t! That’s all part of the dirty little secret!
Back in the “olden days”, marriages weren’t made for love. They were made because of financial or political reasons. They were arranged by the family members years in advance and done irrelevant to the wants and desires of those involved. But they would STILL show up in the church and give the illusion that they were getting married because they “loved” each other. They would lie about it. The family members would lie about it. Even the minister charged with the task of wedding them would outright LIE about it. They would still produce children on the illusion that that it was done out of “love” instead of for politics or for financial gain. It would be the worst-kept secret in the universe, but it wouldn’t matter, because the ILLUSION... the FANTASY… of that union was more important than the REALITY of it. It was a PROSTITUTION of marriage.
And THIS is the real reason why prostitution was outlawed. Not because of “health” reason or for the sake of “reducing crime” or on the pretense of “slavery”, but because it exposed the illusion for what it was.
Indeed, courtesans and concubines were once considered respected positions in powerful circles, although so-called “polite society” could not recognize them as such. They were given comfortable quarters, beautiful clothes, good meals, and were paid quite well for their services, both in and out of the bed chamber. But they also understood their place in the relationship. They knew that their continued service depended on their performance. This was a job… a financial arrangement.
In fact you can blame organized religion for making such positions outright illegal and lumping their services in with the worst of the worst in society. They had to, of course, because the very existence of such affairs exposed the marriage of politically powerful families as a fraud and a hoax.
Thus we return to the infamous “Spitzer question” of why he did what he did. And the answer here is crystal clear. He did it for the same reasons why Bill Clinton strayed in his marriage when he was President. He did it because he could. He did it because he needed something that he couldn’t get from his legally-married spouse… the one that he dragged up on stage with him so she could be humbled in front of the world.
Yes, there are women who are forced into prostitution. There are prostitutes who are addicts and have abusive boyfriends or pimps or managers or whatever you want to call them. But you don’t see them in places like the rural areas of Nevada, where prostitution in brothels is legal and heavily regulated and taxed. Why is that, you wonder? The answer to that is simple: as long as the action is considered illegal, then it opens itself to the worst of the worst.
The savory stereotypical characters surrounding prostitution were the same ones that were surrounding alcohol in the 1920’s when Prohibition made it illegal. And it was made illegal then by the very institutions that continue to keep prostitution illegal today. It was made illegal by the political, religious, and social prostitutes. The ones that needed to maintain an illusion… a hoax… over reality. And until we accept the reality of our own actions and the real definition of what prostitution is, then “the world’s oldest profession” will continue to remain not just society’s dirty little secret, but that of humanity itself.
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