And Prospect magazine has a piece on prostitution that hints at some of the same criticisms I did this week on Doxos. Howard Jacobson's Prada Prostitutes hints, just hints, that the real criticism of prostitution should be based on what it means to be human rather than the actual consequences to prostitutes. His main point, though, seems to be that johns also are injured as the activity of paying a hooker is also demeaning to the human person. I tried to comment in Prospect's ``blog'' on this issue, but it didn't seem to take. Hence, I'll put what I tried to submit here.

Two bits of the article struck a chord with me:

``What Belle de Jour does, in Bunting's view, is `buttress men's sense of entitlement to use a prostitute.' `Use.' Not visit, not hire; `use.' That is, depersonalise and do violence to her.''

``And does it not demean a woman, every bit as much as it demeans a man, to position her either as victim of men's appetites or as fantasist of them?''

I think the article would have been far stronger if it had highlighted the reasoning that underlies these two sentences. The presupposition seems to be that there is something inherent to the human person to both parties in the transaction of prostitution that is destroyed by that very transaction. I'd really like to see a critique of prostitution that doesn't stem from the consequences but stems from the answer to the question of what it means to be human.

Regrettably, Jacobson doesn't spend much time exploring what that might be. Most of the article is spent detailing the brute facts that are only incidental to the discussion. Not that this cataloging of the literary genre of call girl memoirs isn't well written, it is. And if that catalog were the main point of the article, I'd have no quibbles. But with the strong conclusion and the brief quote from Bunting, both quoted above, it is clear that this article strives to be more than a litany of the superficiality of books written about the memoirs of prostitutes. Unfortunately, we're not given much in the way of either analysis or support for Jacobson's conclusion.

The Economist briefly reviews a work on the Byzantine empire, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire and notes the current rethinking of the role of the eastern Roman empire. I might have to check this book out.

Judith Herrin, a professor at King's College London, sets out to show that there are far better reasons to study and admire the civilisation that flourished for more than a millennium before the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and whose legacy is still discernible all over south-east Europe and the Levant. She presents Byzantium as a vibrant, dynamic, cosmopolitan reality which somehow escaped the constraints of its official ideology.

NPR's Morning Edition ran a touching radio commentary on the number of deaths of US soldiers in Iraq. Well worth the listen.