The following is quoted from an article in the English newspaper News Of The World.

How can he see himself as a politician and visit brothels at the same time?

While the newspaper is English, reporting and editing have apparently been outsourced to a parallel universe where English politicians never visit brothels.

The politician, Alan Boyce, was an unsuccessful candidate for Parliament. He visited the Big Sister brothel in Prague, where clients get free sex in exchange for allowing their activities to be videotaped and broadcast. So Boyce visited a brothel in the most publicly visible way possible. Politicians that honest are rare, and like Boyce, unelected.

Enlightenment 101

Two recent blog posts.

A stripper starts her career:
Evil Tart

And a middle aged pornographer almost ends his career:
Mike South

It happens, and we know we're not in control. After it's over, we tell ourselves stories about the experience that put us back in control. But it, the thing that happened, is completely us. There's no part of ourselves separate from the experience to be in control. When you're riding a tiger, is there some part of you that isn't busy trying to hang on?

People talk about being one with reality, but nobody seeks out the true experience.

Mirror

The following is a quote from an interview with Susannah Breslin at the clusterflock blog. She's talking about her unsuccessful attempts to sell the idea of a non-fiction book on porn.

My favorite rejection letter came from a well-known editor at a major publishing house who passed on it by stating that he would have to leave this project to those editors whose values were less influenced by the radical Protestant movements of the 16th and 17th centuries.

When he says "values", he's not talking about his personal morals, although these values may serve that purpose also. He's talking about the criteria he uses in his role as gatekeeper for books. These values help determine what information becomes publicly available.

I wish everybody were this honest.

Later in the interview, Breslin engages in some honesty of her own.

Interviewer: "Is there a unifying goal for the work you do?"
Breslin: "...I'm interested in exploring the heart of darkness in our culture, which can be seen by entering the American sex trade."

To me, the "American sex trade" is a mirror. I can look in the mirror and hold up my desires, my biases, my fears, the blender full of social messages, religious formulas, and acquired classification systems that constitutes my conscious thought; I can hold up an entire society, as I know it, and the mirror faithfully and honestly reflects it back.

Of course, I could find this mirror anywhere. I could look into the illegal drug trade and find my own face looking back. The fact that I've chosen sex work as a mirror says something about me, just as Breslin's choice of porn as her heart of darkness says something about her, and the editor's decision to identify his gatekeeper role with radical Protestantism says something about him. But in this case, all this honesty is a glimpse of something reflected in the mirror of sex work.

News Bits Priestess Amanda Subverts Religious Piety

From the SWOP East News Bits:

A personal comment about what I see in my daily Google Alerts; it's really strange to me how many religious dblogs concern themselves with prostitution or use the word prostitution in their blog posts. Just sayin...

It's because our thoughts are so pure.

Really Amanda, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

All Work Is Like A Bad Simile

About a month ago, Audacia Ray made a post that ended with the sentence "And so help me, if anyone says that all work is like prostitution, I will scream."

I've been seeing this statement or statements like it, and if I see another I won't scream, but I will wince. The underlying argument is that everyone is a prostitute because everyone has to exchange something for money. Using the same logic, all workers are computer programmers because computer programmers exchange something for money. And all workers are lawyers for the same reason.

It's easy to see why some prostitutes make the argument that all work is like prostitution. Prostitution carries a stigma, and some prostitutes want to overcome that stigma by pointing out the similarities between prostitution and other work. That attempt is understandable but bound to fail because everyone recognizes the fallacy it's based on. People who aren't sex workers don't sell sexual services, and that difference is what creates the stigma. Pointing out the similarities won't make the difference go away or cause people to stop stigmatizing it.

When the "all work is prostitution" statement is made by non-prostitutes, it's generally less benign. It's usually made by someone who believes that some aspect of their job is morally dubious, and the "prostitution" statement is an attempt to claim that everyone's work is immoral in the same way. But instead of removing the moral stigma of sex work, this reinforces it by using sex work as an archetype of immorality. All in all, the "all work is prostitution" statement works against prostitutes.

However, there are ways in which all jobs are like prostitution. First and most obviously, all jobs involve the exchange of work for money. Secondly, workers, both prostitutes and non-prostitutes, wouldn't be doing their jobs if they weren't being paid. And all workers choose their jobs by comparing jobs that are available to them and ranking them based on pay, flexibility, prestige, security, and any of a large number of other characteristics. Or sometimes they pick a job because someone offers it to them when they need a job. So while different prostitutes choose their job for different reasons and through different processes, the reasons and possesses are the same as those that lead other people to choose other jobs. People opposed to prostitution argue that prostitutes are forced into prostitution, or that they choose prostitution because the lack the correct political consciousness, or because they are immoral; in other words, they try to explain prostitution by identifying what makes prostitutes different from other people. But the evidence indicates that people become prostitutes because they are like everyone else. Normal, ordinary decision making causes different people to choose different jobs, one of which is prostitution.

Prostitution is unlike other jobs for the same reasons that any job is unlike other jobs. In addition, prostitution has a socially determined stigma. Even if you don't agree that prostitution should be stigmatized, you have to acknowledge that the stigma has important consequences, and the stigma is therefore an important difference. However, prostitution also has similarities to other types of jobs, and those similarities stem from the fact that prostitutes are drawn from the same population as other professions. It's a fact that prostitution is unlike other jobs. It's a delusion that prostitutes are unlike other humans.

Driving With Your Cell Phone Is Like Selling Sex

I was driving yesterday, and came to a stop sign. Three cars, including mine, approached the intersection at roughly the same time from three different directions. I arrived second. I and the driver who arrived third waited for the driver who arrived first to go through the intersection. And waited. The first driver was talking on his cell phone, looking back and forth at myself and the other driver, and not moving. Eventually I got tired of waiting and put my car in gear, starting through the intersection. The first driver, still on his cell phone, decided to proceed at that point, cutting me off.

I made a post recently in which I talked about the Prisoner's Dilemma game in relation to strippers who sell sexual services. The Prisoner's Dilemma game represents any situation where people need to cooperate in order to protect some resource or to create something good, but it is to the advantage of each individual to cheat and not cooperate. It's widely understood that talking on a cell phone while driving makes driving less safe, not just for yourself but also for the people you could potentially have an accident with. But a lot of people talk on the cell phone while driving anyway, relying on other drivers who aren't using cell phones to compensate for the cell phone user's mistakes. As an example, the driver I encountered yesterday relied on me to brake and avoid hitting him when he drove into the intersection after I was already in it. In the language of the Prisoner's Dilemma game, he was counting on me to cooperate while he cheated.

The truth is that I also sometimes "cheat" in Prisoner's Dilemma situations. Drivers cooperate to keep the roads safe by driving safely and respecting traffic laws, but sometimes when I'm in a hurry my driving becomes less safe. I may cut in front of people and force them to brake, or I may rush through a stop sign. I try not to do this, but sometimes the short term, personal advantage dominates my thinking. And of course, the more I drive that way, the more likely I am to have an accident, even though the odds of having an accident each time I cheat are low.

We all think of ourselves as cooperators, but most of us cheat from time to time. People vary in the amount of cheating they do. Some people have specific areas of their lives where they never cheat; for example, I don't cheat on my taxes, although I sometimes pay them late. But as with my occasional unsafe driving, it's rare that someone never cheats. We almost always have some area in our lives where we don't think it's that important. Someone who never cheated would probably be considered obsessive.

As I mentioned in the previous post, strippers need a business that is licensed as a strip club in order to work. Most strippers cooperate to protect the strip club license. Those that don't cooperate may have one of several reasons. First, they may not expect to work at the club very long. In that case, selling sexual services in addition to stripping maximizes their short term income in a situation where the long term doesn't exist.

Something similar may happen if stripping is a part time job. A part time stripper may not value her job if she has another source of income, or she may feel that a second, part time job isn't worth while unless she can increase her earnings through prostitution.

If a stripper is bad at her job, she may need to sell sexual services in order to make stripping worth while. Or she may feel entitled to sell sexual services as a way to make up the income difference between herself and more capable strippers.

She may believe that all strippers sell sexual services.

It may have occurred to her that one stripper selling sexual services one time doesn't pose much risk to a strip club, but it may not have occurred to her that one or more strippers doing it regularly increase the risk a lot. So she may feel that she's not harming anyone.

She may be a prostitute who finds a strip club convenient for getting business.

And there are probably reasons I haven't thought of.

We all use this type of reasoning when we cheat. We do things in short term situations that we wouldn't do if we had to live with the consequences over the long term. Those of us who have worked two jobs know that we tend to make demands of our second job that we wouldn't make of our first job. Cheating is more likely to occur among people who are poor students than people who are good students, poor athletes are more likely to cheat than good ones, and so on in any situation where people can be ranked according to how well they perform.

In some cases, the decisions of strippers who sell sexual services may be perfectly rational. In other cases, they may be rational only from a short term view point, but we all sometimes fail to take the long term into account. In any case, the thought processes that lead them to sell sexual services are the same processes that we all use in various areas of our daily lives. Stripper/prostitutes are engaging in ordinary, human thinking. This ordinary thinking leads them to sell sexual services, just as it sometimes leads me to drive too fast. For most of us, having safe roads is much more important that regulating the behavior of strippers in strip clubs. Using the same logic as stripper/prostitutes, we do things that are a risk to ourselves and others.

And we wouldn't be human if we didn't judge stripper/prostitutes for taking foolish risks.

Valentine's Day Thievery

The Thieves

Lovers in the act dispense
With such meum-tuum sense
As might warningly reveal
What they must not pick or steal,
And their nostrum is to say:
'I and you are both away.'

After, when they disentwine
You from me and yours from mine,
Neither can be certain who
Was that I whose mine was you.
To the act again they go
More completely not to know.

Theft is theft and raid is raid
Though reciprocally made.
Lovers, the conclusion is
Doubled sighs and jealousies
In a single heart that grieves
For lost honour among thieves.

—Robert Graves

The point of Buddhism is this lost honor; the loss of "you" and "I". It occurs during orgasm, but it occurs many other times. There is no activity or exercise that leads to giving up "self". It occurs naturally and spontaneously, without any contribution from the fantasy we call "myself". You can't force it to happen, but it happens all the time.

"Zen" means meditation, and Zen Buddhists spend a lot of time meditating, but there's nothing special about meditation. Picking one activity and calling it spiritual and elevating it above other activities is a bit silly. After you have sex, you get up and you go about your life, and everything involves "you" and "I". The same thing happens after meditation. You're not more selfless now that you've meditated, or more enlightened.

A large number of Buddhists practice tantra. A very small proportion of Tantric Buddhists engage in tantric sexual practices. It's not very common, but it gets a lot of attention. A lot of Buddhists frown on it and call it "dark" tantra, but it's like meditation; there's nothing wrong with it as long as you don't imagine that it's more spiritual than washing the dishes. Go to the act without knowing who is doing it. Lose your honor, whether you are having sex, meditating, or washing the dishes. Don't try to advance spiritually, or gain insight, or progress to a higher level. These are all forms of honor, baggage carried around by the self. Instead of worrying about what you're going to get from the act, just focus on the act.

Lap dances, computer programming, scrubbing the toilet; they're all the same. Whatever you are doing right now is the gateway to liberation.