On a popular Buddhist discussion forum, someone made a post asking about looking at porn. One of the first responses simply pointed out that the Buddha taught kindness. That's not an unreasonable thought. If you think of someone with kindness, you are in a sense making a community with that person, offering the other person a chance to benefit from your interaction. Even if it's just a thought, rather than an actual interaction, it still requires recognizing the other person's humanity.
Another response to the original question was that you should be grateful to anyone who performs a service for you. Porn performers offer to include you as a viewer in an activity that is usually performed without viewers. If that is what you like, and you take advantage of the offer, why not be grateful? Accepting an offer with gratitude means acknowledging the other person's kindness rather than treating them as an object to be manipulated.
These two responses were drowned out by a flood of posts containing fantasies about the neuroses of porn performers and denunciations of the people who exploit them, along with the usual infantilizing assumptions about porn performers' motivations and their inability to decide what's in their own best interest.
As with any other religion, Buddhists are drawn from the general population and have the same feelings of shame towards sex and demeaning assumptions about sex workers as the general population. Their attitudes are not determined by their religion, but by their society. Gratitude and kindness are certainly part of Buddhism, and it would be nice to be able to say that Buddhists practice what they preach, but we don't, at least not any more than any other group of people.
Christians tend to get the blame for this type of hypocrisy, but that's just because they're the biggest religious group in this country. Over all, they're probably no better or worse than any other group. And even among sex workers, you'll find condemnation of other sex workers' choices, belittling of other sex workers as people, ingratitude, and unkindness.
If I condemn sex workers for being sex workers, I think and act the same way they do. If they condemn each other, their behavior is the same as any religious community. There's nothing special about either people who are devoutly religious or people who earn a living from sex. We're all the same.
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1 comment:
Great post. I didn't consider myself to be a "sex worker" for a long time because I never had sex with anyone. But over the years, I see how stripping is grouped in the same category.
I don't know much about Buddhism, being raised by a Christian preacher. Religions fascinate me though, they are designed to make us live better lives and be better people...but often lead us to discriminate against those who are different.
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