Some things make me wonder if it’s just me, or if things are really seriously out of whack.
Twice, in recent days, I’ve come across news items about women desirous of auctioning their virginity. The first, if memory serves (and Google shows it does) is a 22-year-old student who wants to auction her virginity at a brothel…a more appropriate auction house I never did see… where her sister works (to pay off her educational debts), in order, she says, to buy herself a master’s degree. She wants a million US$, believe it or not. “We live in a capitalistic society,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I be allowed to capitalise on my virginity?”
The second…ah the second…is Rafaella Fico, a 20-year-old Italian model who swears blind she never had sex before and who wants to buy a house with the proceeds of her self-auction, which, if you can believe that, she expects to reach a million Euros.
A few years ago, I recall another young female (a lesbian in that case) who auctioned her virginity to pay off her college loans. (And there was yet another, Sarah DiMuro, who made a kind of online celebrity of herself by being adopted as a “case” by the erstwhile Janemagazine, which undertook to help her lose her virginity by her 30th birthday, but that’s a different case, because that woman wasn’t asking cash up-front...well, at least not directly, even if she did make good publicity out of it.)
The first thing that struck my mind when I saw this was, “What makes these women imagine their self-professed state of never having had sexual intercourse is worth anything to anyone, let alone the sums they seem to expect?” And the second thing was, “What kind of moron would want to have sex with a virgin, and pay such amounts for it too?”
Let’s leave personal equations out of it for a moment, and think about it dispassionately (as any character bidding in such an auction would have to think). Suppose you were playing in a doubles tournament in tennis. Would you want your partner to be a rank amateur who had never held a racquet before, or would you want a player who’s as expert as you can get? Like anything else, the more practice you have with sex, the better you get at it. Virgin encounters
tend to be, most of the time, icky and…embarrassingly inept.
I can only think of two reasons why any man would want to have sex with a virgin he didn’t love – or whom he was having sex with for factors other than the fact that she was a virgin. Those two reasons are psychological and biological.
The psychological reason has nothing to do with pleasure but has everything to do with power. There is the power of showing the capacity of the person involved to pay for the experience (a million Euros or whatever). And there is the power of marking himself on the woman’s life forever (“No other man, no matter how many she sleeps with in future, will ever be her first! I’m that man, forever! Yabbadabbadoo!”). This is exactly the same impulse that drives a certain kind of rapist.
The biological reason has everything to do with the actual purpose of sexual intercourse – the propagation of the genes. I’ve pointed out earlier that in a pride of lions, when a new lion takes over, his first act is to slaughter the cubs. Since only the dominant lion mates with the lionesses, he then proceeds to impregnate them to produce cubs which he knows are worth the effort of hunting for and bringing up – because they are his own, carriers of his genes.
The human reason, almost exactly similar, is this: the man who wants a virgin bride is (at least subconsciously) looking to propagate his genes through a partner who has never had intercourse with anyone else, which means that if he can keep her from having intercourse with anyone else afterwards, the children born to her will be his children – worth the effort of earning for and raising. This is the same impulse that led to the phenomenon of child marriage (still rampant in parts of India).
All the same, however power-drunk and rich a man, I wonder how he could trust in the authenticity of what these women are claiming to be selling, since virginity, either male or female, is virtually impossible to prove. Virgin women could easily have torn their hymens, and non-virgins can have intact hymens, and in any case, with such amounts of money at stake, a hymen can easily be reconstructed by plastic surgery if required.
And as for the women, I wonder how their action can be construed to be any different from prostitution. In fact I’d consider the average prostitute more upfront and honest any day.
But, as I said, that’s just me.
*******************************************************************************
THE GOLDEST PROFESSION
Well, it isn't - the Goldest, I mean. That's politics.
In the last post, I’d said that I’d rather back a hooker than a “virgin” who’s selling her virginity.
Prostitutes, and prostitution, happen to be illegal in this country. That doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. That only means that they’ve been driven underground.
It also means that they’re cut off from officially supervised health care, protection of their rights, minimum wages, and so on, and that if they’re the victims of crime (an occupational hazard among hookers) they can’t even go to the cops without being locked up themselves.
This is really pretty bizarre, because it’s not for nothing that prostitution is called the oldest profession. Ever since the first human societies formed, women have put out for men in return for material security. Temple prostitutes were a feature of the earliest Bronze Age civilisations.
There seems to be some kind of assumption (in India at least) that hookers are flaming scarlet temptresses who will somehow pull unsuspecting, unwilling, helpless men from the bosoms of their loving families and corrupt them beyond redemption (interestingly, the same logic doesn’t extend to brewers and distillers and alcohol sellers). It seems that (in this view) men are poor helpless creatures whose brains are in their testicles, and who can no longer think once their sex organs become engorged with blood. As a man, I don’t know whether to be amused or enraged.
There are many reasons why women would become hookers, from poverty to the desire for easy money, but there is one thing in common – whether a Rs 200,000 a night call-girl with a faked American accent or a dumpy housewife earning a little easy money on her back while hubby is out of town to a tribal woman trying to feed her family by turning tricks all night in trucks on the highway, they are all servicing a need. Basic economics will teach you that when there is a demand, there will be a supply. If men want paid sex, whether as variety or because they can’t get it any other way, they’ll find women willing to sell it.
Yes, I agree prostitutes may go out of their way to be alluring so they can attract clients…but isn’t that what that great capitalistic institution, advertisement, is all about?
I don't necessarily see prostitutes as victims. But I don't see them as any worse than...oh, say hairdressers either. And I'd say they're light-years more honest than Feng Shui "experts" and "aromatherapists" and other assorted scum.
Twice, in recent days, I’ve come across news items about women desirous of auctioning their virginity. The first, if memory serves (and Google shows it does) is a 22-year-old student who wants to auction her virginity at a brothel…a more appropriate auction house I never did see… where her sister works (to pay off her educational debts), in order, she says, to buy herself a master’s degree. She wants a million US$, believe it or not. “We live in a capitalistic society,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I be allowed to capitalise on my virginity?”
The second…ah the second…is Rafaella Fico, a 20-year-old Italian model who swears blind she never had sex before and who wants to buy a house with the proceeds of her self-auction, which, if you can believe that, she expects to reach a million Euros.
A few years ago, I recall another young female (a lesbian in that case) who auctioned her virginity to pay off her college loans. (And there was yet another, Sarah DiMuro, who made a kind of online celebrity of herself by being adopted as a “case” by the erstwhile Janemagazine, which undertook to help her lose her virginity by her 30th birthday, but that’s a different case, because that woman wasn’t asking cash up-front...well, at least not directly, even if she did make good publicity out of it.)
The first thing that struck my mind when I saw this was, “What makes these women imagine their self-professed state of never having had sexual intercourse is worth anything to anyone, let alone the sums they seem to expect?” And the second thing was, “What kind of moron would want to have sex with a virgin, and pay such amounts for it too?”
Let’s leave personal equations out of it for a moment, and think about it dispassionately (as any character bidding in such an auction would have to think). Suppose you were playing in a doubles tournament in tennis. Would you want your partner to be a rank amateur who had never held a racquet before, or would you want a player who’s as expert as you can get? Like anything else, the more practice you have with sex, the better you get at it. Virgin encounters
tend to be, most of the time, icky and…embarrassingly inept.
I can only think of two reasons why any man would want to have sex with a virgin he didn’t love – or whom he was having sex with for factors other than the fact that she was a virgin. Those two reasons are psychological and biological.
The psychological reason has nothing to do with pleasure but has everything to do with power. There is the power of showing the capacity of the person involved to pay for the experience (a million Euros or whatever). And there is the power of marking himself on the woman’s life forever (“No other man, no matter how many she sleeps with in future, will ever be her first! I’m that man, forever! Yabbadabbadoo!”). This is exactly the same impulse that drives a certain kind of rapist.
The biological reason has everything to do with the actual purpose of sexual intercourse – the propagation of the genes. I’ve pointed out earlier that in a pride of lions, when a new lion takes over, his first act is to slaughter the cubs. Since only the dominant lion mates with the lionesses, he then proceeds to impregnate them to produce cubs which he knows are worth the effort of hunting for and bringing up – because they are his own, carriers of his genes.
The human reason, almost exactly similar, is this: the man who wants a virgin bride is (at least subconsciously) looking to propagate his genes through a partner who has never had intercourse with anyone else, which means that if he can keep her from having intercourse with anyone else afterwards, the children born to her will be his children – worth the effort of earning for and raising. This is the same impulse that led to the phenomenon of child marriage (still rampant in parts of India).
All the same, however power-drunk and rich a man, I wonder how he could trust in the authenticity of what these women are claiming to be selling, since virginity, either male or female, is virtually impossible to prove. Virgin women could easily have torn their hymens, and non-virgins can have intact hymens, and in any case, with such amounts of money at stake, a hymen can easily be reconstructed by plastic surgery if required.
And as for the women, I wonder how their action can be construed to be any different from prostitution. In fact I’d consider the average prostitute more upfront and honest any day.
But, as I said, that’s just me.
*******************************************************************************
THE GOLDEST PROFESSION
Well, it isn't - the Goldest, I mean. That's politics.
In the last post, I’d said that I’d rather back a hooker than a “virgin” who’s selling her virginity.
Prostitutes, and prostitution, happen to be illegal in this country. That doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. That only means that they’ve been driven underground.
It also means that they’re cut off from officially supervised health care, protection of their rights, minimum wages, and so on, and that if they’re the victims of crime (an occupational hazard among hookers) they can’t even go to the cops without being locked up themselves.
This is really pretty bizarre, because it’s not for nothing that prostitution is called the oldest profession. Ever since the first human societies formed, women have put out for men in return for material security. Temple prostitutes were a feature of the earliest Bronze Age civilisations.
There seems to be some kind of assumption (in India at least) that hookers are flaming scarlet temptresses who will somehow pull unsuspecting, unwilling, helpless men from the bosoms of their loving families and corrupt them beyond redemption (interestingly, the same logic doesn’t extend to brewers and distillers and alcohol sellers). It seems that (in this view) men are poor helpless creatures whose brains are in their testicles, and who can no longer think once their sex organs become engorged with blood. As a man, I don’t know whether to be amused or enraged.
There are many reasons why women would become hookers, from poverty to the desire for easy money, but there is one thing in common – whether a Rs 200,000 a night call-girl with a faked American accent or a dumpy housewife earning a little easy money on her back while hubby is out of town to a tribal woman trying to feed her family by turning tricks all night in trucks on the highway, they are all servicing a need. Basic economics will teach you that when there is a demand, there will be a supply. If men want paid sex, whether as variety or because they can’t get it any other way, they’ll find women willing to sell it.
Yes, I agree prostitutes may go out of their way to be alluring so they can attract clients…but isn’t that what that great capitalistic institution, advertisement, is all about?
I don't necessarily see prostitutes as victims. But I don't see them as any worse than...oh, say hairdressers either. And I'd say they're light-years more honest than Feng Shui "experts" and "aromatherapists" and other assorted scum.
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