What is prostitution really about?
I am here to invoke some ideas about what the point of prostitution really is. I come at this topic from a male perspective, not a feminist, or anything modern. Is it really about seeing women to get pleasure, to bust a nut? Is that simple or is there something more complex involved. I’m just trying to make sense of things and I’ll portray some ideas that I think are connected or crucial.
Prostitutes are an interesting subject. A real Taboo. It’s just one of those things, especially as a youth, you engage with these ideas more, naturally because your testosterone is completely out of control. None the less, engaging with them from a psychological/sociological perspective can uncover some interesting aspects of society as a whole. What really sparked me to write this post was reading this one. I found it extremely interesting and represented the ideas that I had thought about for so long, as to why prostitution actually exists.
It presented a really simple idea ; a man pays a women (sex worker) for the opportunity to pleasure her. The aim, or the desire of the man, is to pleasure the women. We have seen in countless films, how men, end up at a point in their life , where they fall in live with a women of the night. She is kind, charming, understanding of their needs, and shes free, sexually, the man understands that he doesn’t need to fear her sexually, and she understand and know whats the man wants from her. The men require attention, of the flesh, of the mind, but evidently, of the soul as well. The connection between two people laying in bed talking, is not purely sexual, arguably not rational, but what, we can term ‘heart-warming’.
You can see this really in action when you consider high-end escorts and Girlfriend experience (GFE). High end escorts arn’t just beautiful, they come with another aim, to accompany one on their day/business trips etc. The point is about companionship, not just about pleasures of the flesh. Same goes for GFE, the aim is to have an experience, not mechanical, but pleasurable in the sense of enjoying being naked, enjoying kissing, enjoying a connection more than the physical ( loosening of the boundaries of oneself and another, or loosening the boundaries of oneself into the infinite, can this really be achieved through mechanical, perhaps only in the form of neurotransmitter and pleasure chemistry, arguably not in the true sense that eroticism is about, but I digress)
Married men, single men, old and young alike decide to use prostitutes. According to one guardian article [1], paying for sex by men has doubled in a decade. So where has this come from? Has it been purely been that more men either need sex/need a partner?
Travel
Having gone to foreign lands such as Amsterdam or Thailand and engaged in such practises, individuals feel comfortable that they can do this back home as well.
A more potent area in my opinion is one which is has been generally developing over the years and could provide the backdrop for more than just the rise in the use of prostitution, but we focus on this for now.
Hyper-Sexualisation of society
There is plenty of literature which discuss’s how society has become more and more sexualised, everything has become ‘pornified’. If this is true, and we can see that there is an extremely strong argument (just check media/social media), then this would promote sexuality and increase sexual desires (I am writing simply, high-level here). These can come in various forms, from body image (muscular/ ‘big ass’ etc) or a variety of fetishes previously taboo or hidden in the underbelly of society. [2][3]
This ties in directly with the fact that, perhaps, previous generations were more resilient to unavailability of sex at home. With the hyper-sexuality society we live in today, everything is in the open. People come across through the internet various passions that they never knew existed. At home, their partners might not be willing to try it out, or, as it seems is the common case, people are quite busy with life; i.e. children etc and thus are not engaged in sexual activity.
So the combination of over sexualisation, in-ability to actual engage in form of sexual activity or activity which doesn't provide the pleasure requires or satisfy desires provides us with some reasoning as to why prostitutes are used and are on the rise.
NOTE: There is so many branches of this, with commercialisation of sex. Even within this , we see the concept of the image in marketing, as well as products and devices which assist in sexual activity and the ever increasing ‘home-made’ pornstars. [4][5][6][7]
Conclusion
The point of the article was to portray some ideas and feeling I have about what prostitution is really used for, what does it really feed. The simple notion that it’s just take care of an itch is somewhat naive. We can see that there is that concept, but there is so much depth to the reasons of why men use prostitutes. One of the ideas that I mentioned was the general hyper-sexualisation of society. If people are becoming more sexual, then they naturally look to have ever increasingly and ever harsher/fetish based desires satisfied. This goes hand in hand with domination of the other.
Bibliography
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/jan/15/why-men-use-prostitutes
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2374623815588763
[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-men-buy-sex-2012-10-23/
[4] https://www.theodysseyonline.com/theory-consequences-hypersexualisation-youth
[5]https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181002005775/en/Global-Adult-Toys-Market-Worth-23.7Bn-2017
