Body and Soul

I just don’t get why an intelligent girl with a good family and  boyfriend would start to sell her body.  She was so honest and let me look for a few seconds into her soul, and I saw who she is and I don’t think she wants this.  I want to help her, but to her I was just another bad guy who paid for that and don’t deserve her respect.  I want to understand why is she doing this.

“Sell her body“?  Do you mean she started doing sex work?  You mean she chose an extremely lucrative job with shorter hours than most, extreme flexibility and no boss?  Sounds pretty damned intelligent to me; in fact, it’s the career I chose as well, and I’m generally considered to be reasonably intelligent.  Now, if you meant something more literal, like selling blood or eggs or some other part of her body, I stand corrected; however, something tells me that you just mean she became a whore.  She chose one job over the other options available to her, for the same sorts of pragmatic reasons anyone chooses his or her job over the others available at the time.

You say she “let you for a few seconds into her soul”; I’m not sure what sort of mystical or pharmaceutical process was involved there, but I can assure you that unless you are The Shadow or Dr. Strange or something, I sincerely doubt it was her soul you saw.  To be honest, it sounds to me what you were seeing was the constellation of your own needs you projected onto her.  You seem to have some sort of guilt (“I was another bad guy who paid for that”) about a simple business transaction, and you appear to load sex down with all sorts of Deep Meaning and metaphysical weight that it simply does not have, except in the minds of people conditioned from an early age to believe a load of rubbish about how something even dogs and chickens engage in is somehow a “sacrament” when highfalutin’ monkeys with notions do it.

You’re probably thinking about now that I’m an incredible bitch, and that I’m being very mean to you.  On the contrary; I’m doing you the great favor of trying to wake you up to the fact that sex is nothing more than a biological activity, and that the only “meaning” and “sacredness” it has is that which we choose to invest in it.  Eating can be a rich and wonderful bonding experience and the center of powerful rituals…or it can be a mundane thing one does because one is hungry.  And nobody pretends that the latter somehow “violates” or “degrades” the former, nor that there’s anything wrong with cooking or serving food for pay.  Nobody would say a waitress is “selling herself”, or pretend that a diner is “bad” for buying a hamburger.  And nobody, but nobody would pretend that there is some deep psychological motive behind a cook working as a cook, nor state that he could tell in a few seconds that said cook “really didn’t want to do this”.  Sex work is work, nothing more or less, and sex workers have the same range and complexity of feelings about it as other people have about their jobs.

(Have a question of your own?  Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)