I understand why a lot of people don't want to pay for sex. The points made about why some of you guys don't want to are all pretty valid. However,what i don't get is the point made that it's bad for you. Provided that you know what you're getting into and you don't catch some sort of crotch rot what exactly is the harm?
I think over time and in excess, it diminishes your ability to have a "normal" relationship. Crotch-rot aside, think about the damage of depending on solely that as a means for sex, companionship and the eventual substitution for a relationship. The Aussie retirees that paid for sex often were seriously repulsive to the non-prostitute females that were around and we all have that friend who's a little too eager to go to the strip club. That perpetually single friend. Again, over time, it would inhibit your ability to grow and have a relationship that would be considered equitable, healthy or normal. I would also say that it's bad for you in the same sense that any "vice" is bad for you: not really and only in excessive amounts, just like anything else.
I've paid for it a couple times, but I have a strict "no-hookers-in-the-US" policy. The times I've paid for it were on deployment. If you're only gonna be in port for a few days, then go back out on the water with 200+ dudes for who knows how long, you just wanna get your dick wet. You can go to a bar with your friends in one of these foreign ports, spend all night trying to pick up strange which will probably end up being a hooker anyway, and run the risk of hanging with some chick you'll never meet again all night rather than partying with your friends. Or you can go get some release right away, and then relax for the rest of the night. It's not all that expensive, the places I've been were always very safety and cleanliness conscious, and then I got to rome Singapore for three days without blue balls. In your home country, though, that idea just makes me sad.
Dislclaimer: Spoiler This is not to start a religious debate. Please, do not go down the rabbit hole. If you compare the countries where there isn't a stigma vs. where it is a huge stigma against paying for sex, the major difference is religion. Christianity has pages and pages of stuff guilting talking about how bad sex is and how the body is dirty, yadda yadda yadda. *Read the disclaimer again, one more time.* Who were some of the people that got here first? Puritans. That's really it. Now we westerners, some of us have grown up and developed personal decisions based off those core beliefs of "sex is dirty, it can only happen under x,y,z circumstances" religious or not. Or we haven't developed them at all. Shinto, Buddhism or anything in those Asian countries have them talking about stoning their whores or women who sleep around for money being burned in hell. Taking more of a history view look at Italy and Greece. Before Christianity hit them, naked women in paintings, orgies, bacchinalia, grown men banging little boys. Then that came and it all dried up because it was dirty, bad and a sin. Also this whole thing "I don't NEED to pay for sex, I can get it on my own." Yeah, you also don't need to pay $6 for one beer when you can go to the store and get 12 for $14. Pretty don't think we need to do a lot of research to toss out that a good portion of men that partake in such activities could easily take women on dates, have wonderful conversations, learn about their passions, families and start lives with them to live happily ever after. Oh and of course NO MARRIED MAN who has live in, committed access to sex, ever goes and pays for sex. Never. Its not about that. Sometimes people just want different circumstances. Man the TiBettes better start getting to PMing, we have a lot of romantics on this board.
To maybe draw some of the women into the discussion: girls, have you ever considered escorting? Ever go to the male strippers? Anything in this vein? We did a whole thread with Pussy Galore awhile back. I'm interested in the female views on prostitution as well as the guys.
Does it count as paying for it if I take my money back after I dismember her corpse? Focus: I'd never pay for the services of an escort or prostitute. Pride and self-respect aside it's be pointless for me because I can't cum when I'm wearing a condom and Hell could freeze over before I'd consider fucking a hooker bareback. While I don't disagree I think the stigma today has changed somewhat. Because casual sex is pretty much accepted these days the stigma has less to do with religous guilt than the idea that if you're paying for it you're such a loser who can't get laid any other way.
I think besides the ingrained religious stigma it's kind of a two fold issue. One, the double standard that women that have had a lot of partners are undiscerning sluts, hookers will take anybody for a simple dollar amount. We've had that debate on here plenty and even here it boiled down to "it's fine if a women sleeps with a lot of dudes IF she isn't doing it for some fucked up emotional issues" (daddy issues and filling the hole in her soul was bandied around quite a bit with no real qualifiers). Though no one really mentioned the problem with guys who fuck tons of girls because they have emotional/personality issues... Two, the negative connotations have given rise to basically the two extremes I mentioned in my first post, street walkers or high priced escorts. Growing up in a middle class western culture I have never once encountered girls that would fall in the middle of the spectrum, because they don't seem to exist, or the high dollar ones, because it was just so far out of my social circles. The only time you'd come into contact with hookers in a normal situation would be driving through the inner city, seeing the drug addicts. Even with the rise of craigslist you might see some news report sting and the girls were still the drug addict type. When your only exposure is to probable homeless drug addicts to pay for sex, seeing it as an icky thing doesn't seem that hard.
Am I the only one who read the top two topics in a row (actually, the third kinda works too), and cracked up?
Not to kick a dead horse, but I still think its still based. Sort of like a mutli-symptom - disease connection. It's another reason not to do it when the core came from that. Because its the rich ass business men who run shit in Tokyo eating their fresh sushi chicks and then banging them, not the down and out losers in the slums. I really don't think casual sex is a new thing brought on by college. People have been fucking around forever. Or was the Scarlett Letter written after Van Wilder came out? Seriously, let's not have a recency bias distort reality. It's in your face now in pop culture, doesn't mean its a new thing. The cat has always been in the box, we're just opening it and saying "Oh hey, there's a cat there!". Now I would love to see some of you guys with a fifth of Jaeger in you, single, at 4am with one of the girls Malignity posted, have your buddy offer to pay and see you say no then. **Sort of stupid out of the box theory alert** I think in America, the biggest problem is that most of our whore-women are BUSTED, because all the hot ones (who would be pay-for-sex, not talking about the smart ones who can get jobs and what not) can get jobs as music video honies, athlete groupies, rapper groupies, be non fashion models (think) car models etc. In those countries the opportunity can't be they go into the business. Think about a situation where the whores* are 2-3 points hotter than the average office/bar girl. As opposed to America's situation where the whores are 3-4 points lower. Huge point of view shift that Kubla was discussing. *Not counting the high-end escorts, that cost a ton of money we're talking the average original street meat.
My point is that we feel this way about prostitutes but not about dry cleaners or yacht sellers. I think it is interesting that sex is one of the few things that we feel this way about. If we look at sex as an economic good (which is what it is in this context), it appears to work differently than almost any other economic good. The underlying logic often seems to be that sex largely attains a special sort of value by two things: emotional content, and exclusivity. But often, one-night-stands lack the former, and we tend to look down on high-class escorts and those that use them despite them meeting the latter. It seems that we don't necessarily require emotional connection, and that sex is somehow different from other Veblen or positional goods where their value is interrelated with their exclusivity. The only thing I can get from this is that the value of sex is directly linked with affirmation. Essentially we think that sex should, to some degree, demonstrate both people conferring a sort of value judgment of desirability upon one another, and that not having this in the transaction basically means you're doing it wrong. Since one can't buy approval, the idea of buying an act that we think is linked with approval seems weird. Once sex stops being an implicit pat on the back, it starts to really weird us out.
Focus: I have never done it, nor come close to buying flesh, but it has crossed my mind. I have zero problem with it. I'd be more inclined to buy some company for an evening if the possibility of infection was lowered significantly. It creeps me out considerably. Why would I patronize a prostitute? Simplicity. I'm a bit of a loner, tired, and bored. Hopefully without sounding like a jackass, I just don't want to deal with someone I'm only interested in for sex. Putting up an interested facade just kills me. I have zero desire to maintain a relationship like that. The last few women I've run into stressed me out they were either so drunk, needy, or boring, or some amalgamation of the 3. Again, I am not going out much looking for tail as it is, so obviously my recent sample of women is no doubt skewed. But, ideally, the prostitute allows one to get their rocks off and not be bugged. Not just sex, but vital human contact without strings. That interests me. She knows why she is in the business, and is, ostensibly, reconciled to her position. I assume favorably since she hasn't quit. Is this another person I should be responsible for? Someone I don't even know? Or just take it at face value, take the service she offers? Funny this is brought up. I'm reading a book called The Sexual History of London. It wasn't until the last couple hundred years that prostitution really became a dirty secret. Why? Puritanism. Which is why America has such a social stigma attached to it, as the country is founded by Puritans kicked out of Europe for harshing everyone's buzz. The negativism associated with the whores started as responses to crime, disease, bawdiness (very public brothels were dens for thievery and murderers, and in times of plague and the introduction of syphilis, disease). As far as church is concerned, any punitive measures on their part was a way to stamp out ecclesiastic corruption. Then, with The Reformation, a direct response to those Protestant protestations on lax Catholic mores. Catholic church owned and operated brothels one, for money, two, because it was a "necessary evil." They also rented out their lands to burgeoning entrepreneurs of the horizontal arts. Very public sex houses were in operation right up to the turn of the last century. Including homosexual brothels. As in right out in the open much like The Bunny Ranch, but regulated. In other words, the ladies weren't pulling people in, but they could display their, ahem, goods. I'm only halfway through this book. It's an awesome read.
I can tell you that living in a social situation where it didn't have the same stigma, your arguments was basically invalidated. Exclusivity played no part it seemed at all in any given situation. As for the approval aspect I can't say there weren't guys that were doing it because they couldn't pick up women otherwise, or that it didn't become a crux for some dudes instead of even trying to score normally. But since it is was just a simple transaction the whole approval aspect you keep raising was just simply moot. Going off what people over there that did frequent hookers told me the whole "I have to know that Im getting her off or else Im not getting off" was also something that just wasn't an issue. I don't know if they actually were getting these girls off or if the girls were really just good actors but it simply wasn't a problem that was ever brought up. I assume like any interaction you have with people on a job, any apathy or outright dislike of the work is present you are going to feel it and prefer people who aren't apathetic or hate their work. I'm not trying to sound all SUAPYG-ey here but having never having experienced anything outside of the bubble you grew up in it is kind of hard to see things from a different perspective. That's why it was so mind blowing to me and one of the more interesting things to experience living abroad. Trust me I talk about it here with a lot more candor than I do with my real life friends. Even people I know back in Asia warned me not to divulge too much as one, privacy issues, and two the stigma. edit: I also thought it was funny and/or shocking that in Shanghai if you only resorted to hooking up with Western girls you were seen as desperate. As the ease of picking up regular chinese girls was so simple and the next go to was hooker bars, resorting to western girls was something you could be chided for. European/Aussie dudes must have had it the easiest as they had chinese girls wanting them and American girls lobbing up everything they had to get with them just because of the accent.
I don't think the hotness or the money is really a factor for a lot of people here. I also don't think it's a sex-negative or Puritanical thing to have "this person wants to fuck me" as a baseline for sexual partnerships. If other people want to negotiate differently, I have no desire to step between consenting adults, but "she is reaaaally hot" doesn't literally nothing for me when it comes to prostitutes. Or, for that matter, non-escorts who don't want to have sex with me.
I think sex also has an importance because of its connection to pregnancy and it's traditional use as tool of warfare/oppression. If hordes of soldiers had burned through a town and made all of it's women get on their knees and martinize* their dress shirts, we might feel differently about paying for dry cleaning these days. Also, for me personally, there are some pretty negative consequences about getting to a point where I'm immersed in performative sexuality. Maybe I'm just not as mentally strong, but I really don't want to go down the rabbit hole (sex toy pun?) of undermining consent. *may not be true if martinizing is not what it think it is
I think he was talking about here, which is true. Over there, not so much. Like here its considered "scoring" where there its just a transaction, its just a thing you do.
Yeah, I've considered it. I wouldn't be surprised if every girl at least considered it when they're completely broke, and I have been completely broke far more often than living comfortably since I turned 18 and that became an option. I haven't ever made any steps in actually going through with the idea, though, partially because I'm not entirely comfortable with the thought but mostly because I don't think I'd be very good at it. Social interaction with strangers isn't exactly one of my strengths, and I'm not very good at pretending to like people when I don't because I never bother to do so in real life anyway. However, I haven't ruled out the whole world entirely. During my last job hunt, I kept trying to respond to ads to work as the receptionist-equivalent of the dungeons in midtown because I thought it would be fun and interesting and weird. But for some reason they all had age requirements of at least 30, usually in the forties. I don't understand. Now I have this idea of starting my own dungeon. I may or may not have some business partners from the board who may or may not be underestimating how much I would totally go through with this plan if given the chance. I really want to own and run my own business, the fact that it would be more or less related to sex not only doesn't bother me but is part of the appeal. I think it would be an interesting experience. As for male strip clubs, yeah I'd go, especially after seeing Magic Mike, which made me laugh until I was crying. I don't think women tend to go to those places because it's sexy. I think the silliness is more of the appeal, and I like silliness. I think it would be a similar kind of entertainment as to when I go to drag shows. Yeah, there's an element of sexiness to it (I have never been more sexually confused than after my first drag show) but mostly it's just a fun time with your friends.
This place used to be fun. How in the name of Christ can a thread devoted to prostitues on this particular Board devolve into a discussion of Puritanical American morality? I am depressed. If you give a stripper a ride home after a bachelor party and lots of drinking sometimes things happen. The bothersome thing about it is a buddy of mine (and what I can only assume is a statistically significant portion of the male population of Tampa, FL) and I have something in common. Even more bothersome is that he got there several hours before I did.
I have never paid for sex, but that is a matter of personal preference and having alternatives rather than moral conviction. Hell, far from considering prostitution immoral, I consider sex workers to be among the most pro-social members of society, for all sorts of tl;dr-reasons related to dulling the destructive potential of reproductively isolated males. Could I ever? Of course. Bought booty is (must be) an inferior experience compared to booty that is willingly given. However, if I were to, say, end up in a wheelchair and find it hard to get willing partners, I would rather pay for human contact than going without.