Thursday, January 31, 2008

The Burning Times: When Will Men Take Prostitution Seriously?

A South African MP wants to make prostitution legal during the World Cup events of 2010. The BBC does a story called "On the Game" (oh, clever boys!). "The Burning Times" asks whether men will ever take prostitution seriously and links to some online reviews of individual British prostitutes (as radical feminists complain, prostitution IS the commodification of women's bodies - look at the reviews, as if it were Consumer Reports or Blue Book or something). "Burning Times" quotes the men's reviews of their purchases, and then responds:

Between the glum faces and the not wanting him to touch her and the lack of eye contact and everything else, you’d think these men would take the hint. Perhaps the man complaining of the saggy breasts he had hired for half an hour was no oil painting himself? Perhaps the women were repulsed by the men and what they were expected to do with them? Perhaps, just perhaps, the women would rather be anywhere else on the planet than giving this sorry human being a ‘massage’. And heaven forbid that these ‘working ladies’ should have real bodies owned by real women, and not live up to some male-media-produced fantasy of eternally pert breasts and no “signs of recent childbirth”. Don’t these women realise that their bodies belong to the men who pay for them, and they expect to get what they pay for? I really hope the man who wrote the review about the sagging boobs and stretch marks is happy with his own body, and feels very lucky that every square inch of it belongs to him and no-one else. That is his privilege as a man in a patriarchal world, to own his own body, and that of a woman (or lots of women) too if he chooses. We must change that. We must create a world in which every woman owns her own body and no-one else has a claim on it.

Well said! The entitlement of these men is just amazing. They've paid their fee, and for that they want access to a pert, perfect pornalicious body as well as the sort of lustful wild abandon and mega-moaning and begging for more that they've seen in their precious porno flicks.

"Real sexual relationships are not hard to find. There are plenty of adults of both sexes who are willing to have sex if someone treats them well, and asks. But there lies the problem. Some people do not want an equal, sharing relationship. They do not want to be nice. They do not want to ask. They like the power involved in buying a human being who can be made to do almost anything."
--Joe Parker of the Lola Greene Baldwin Foundation, in "Not For Sale"

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