A Quick Picture
October 26th, 2007Here’s a picture from me last weekend in Boston.
Tying myself up. Courtesy blood-dolls.com.
While there is much about self-bondage on the Internets, I thought to read none of it. Clearly if one can tie up other people, tying oneself up must be easy! Ha. Ahahaha. No.
On an unrelated note, I have my whip back. Just in time to be Catwoman for Halloween! I chose her purple costume, a long dress slit up both thighs and cut low in the front. The trim and the mask are black. New Yorkers can come see it at SMack tomorrow night, where I’ll be headed after I get out of work. (TES members: only $15!)
On another unrelated note, I was reading back posts from College Callgirl (my new obsession), and saw she’d written the following in a comment:
I doubt there’s any such thing as a woman who sells her body for “purely financial reasons.” If it was that easy, everybody would do it.
I want to come back to that. Do you think it’s true?
October 26th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Hmm… I’d have to go read the whole post/comment (I haven’t read her in a while), but no, I don’t think that’s true. I’ve never been in dire financial straits, and I’m the kind of person who probably never will be - I have a partner to share expenses/hardships with, I have family nearby who would shelter/clothe/feed us if necessary. But I can’t imagine a scenario in which I would choose to sell my body, other than within a more fantasy-like scene auction or event. I make no judgements about those who do sell their body, for whatever reason. But I truly could never see myself doing it, no matter how much I needed the money. Seriously, I’d work at McDonald’s for ten bucks an hour first.
October 26th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Of course you wouldn’t. Most people would die first. And that’s fine. But what if you could remove all the judgement and consequences?
It’s hard to tell whether sex work is innately abhorrent, or if the socially imposed consequences make it so. On the flip side, all sex workers see positives that outweigh the substantial negatives: in CCG’s case an (admittedly unhealthy) need for self-esteem and approval, but in others the desire to meet people, help people, have fun, explore sexuality, or just have a few extra hundred bucks, among many other reasons.
I guess that “If sex work wasn’t awful, not at all, not even a little, would you try it?” isn’t a viable question. No job exists in a vaccuum.
October 26th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
I haven’t read her post, but I would imagine that there are women who sell their bodies for purely financial reasons. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were women trying to support themselves and/or their children in less advanced parts of the world, but have no other way of doing it, for whatever reason.
October 27th, 2007 at 8:02 am
*grin*
If I don’t get to see it tonight, I so want to see pictures of this costume!
October 27th, 2007 at 10:34 am
I think (mostly) not. Before someone - who’d eventually end up going through with it - would consider such an option, you must first consider the reason they’re even seeing it as a viable choice when society tells us so blatantly that it’s not. Not to say the reasons are always good ones, just that there are a lot of less-than-financially-secure people who wouldn’t even entertain the thought of sex work.
October 27th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Can we set aside what society says and consider the actual act? Is there something intrinsically bad about having sex for money?
October 28th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
No. There is nothing wrong with sex for money. What’s the difference between “I’m taking you out to dinner, giving you a nice bracelet, and buying your drinks and then we go back to my place and I expect to fuck you until the neighbors complain” and prostitution?
You might have been able to buy something you actually liked with cash, my taste in bracelets is terrible. Other than that? I don’t see a difference.
October 29th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Eden,
That is hardly what I’d call selling one’s body for “purely financial reasons.”
October 29th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
It’s danmned hard to set aside what society thinks about sex for money, because in doing so you would also have to set aside what society thinks about sex. And about money. And hell, even about what’s “bad.”
Here’s the thing - take society out of the picture, and what is sex? Is sex love? Pleasure? Service, submission? Is it violent, is it exultant, is it degrading? What’s the product that’s being sold?
I don’t think the question of whether having sex for money is intrinsically bad can be answered in a societal vacuum.
But then, you could deal with the “intrinsic” aspect of the question in relation to society. If sex for money has an intrinsic quality of being either bad or good, one might speculate that the intrinsic nature of the act would be evident in every situation. Following, since that’s clearly not the case, one might speculate that sex for money has no intrinsically “bad” or “good” nature.
Or not. Speculation, after all :).