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By lm (Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 10:18:56 AM EST) (all tags)
Mostly MLP.

Yeah, I'm not the only one! Someone else is comparing politicians to the thoughts of various philosophers. In this case Stumbling and Mumbling makes a brief case for Hillary Clinton as a Nietzschean. I think I'm in love.

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.

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It's a dreary day outside, here's a round up of things I think are interesting | 10 comments (10 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback
What if you paid a hooker by Rogerborg (4.00 / 3) #1 Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 11:07:03 AM EST
purely for the purposes of using her as an audience for one of your treatises on why the experience dehumanises both of you?  Would that make you more or less human?  Is it the purpose of the usage, or simply the usage itself that dehumanises both parties?  If the latter, then am I being turned into a monkey as I sit in my cube typing this?  If so, at what point is it fine for me to start flinging my faeces?  When I'm promoted to management?

-
Metus amatores matrum compescit, non clementia.


Why would I pay someone to do that? by lm (4.00 / 3) #2 Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 11:21:50 AM EST
When I can get such folks as yourself to read them for free.
There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

ehhh? by alprazolam (4.00 / 3) #3 Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 11:39:44 AM EST
it's not that we're reading for free...you're just not the one paying!

[ Parent ]

Hint at, meaning dismiss. by Christopher Robin was Murdered (4.00 / 4) #4 Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 12:37:16 PM EST
He's using it as an example one of the "two conflicting but equally sentimental narratives of the lives of prostitutes—and by implication the men who pay for their services—confront each other at the moment. The first describes the prostitute as abused victim, incidentally of global capitalism and the free market, but essentially of the violence of men. In this narrative, the idea that the prostitute might choose of her own free will to sell her body for profit or for pleasure, or for both, is derided."

I believe he would say that your essay was an example of the same.

He goes on quite extensively about the meaning of the transaction and whether or not it is a given that it depersonalizes the prostitute, which is your charge against it: that it dehumanizes the victim inherently.

"The sexual instinct will not stay still for anybody. It would be foolish to deny that the transactional nature of sex with a prostitute will encourage some men to act brutally, but violence is by no means intrinsic to the transaction. Some men visit prostitutes to "use," others to be used. There isn't one of these diarists who doesn't joke about the submissives and quiescents that make up much of her client list. "Do they do this just to get on your nerves?" Tracy Quan wonders, unable to bear for another minute the sight of client Colin on his knees, whimpering, "Yes, Mistress, yes, Mistress." The exchange of money is freighted with meaning; for one man it will confer rights, for another it will take all rights away, make not her but him cheap, signal his desire to abjure his masculinity. Others go because they're desperate, because, like Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, they don't know how else to find initiation into adulthood. Loneliness will make a man pay for sex, as will sorrow, confusion, the longing to enjoy erotic company for a brief hour or less. As well, yes, as plain old pleasure-seeking, because you have money in your pocket and not much else to do, and she is there and happy to take it, and whatever you both think about yourselves the next day, pleasure without a single impulse to cause suffering is what you're after."

As for the last quote, he was trying to argue that viewpoints like your own - where a woman is simply a victim no matter what - is dehumanizing because it simplifies the situation to fit into a preconceived intellectual framework that robs her situation of it uniqueness and humanness.

I'm not saying your view is incorrect. But I think  the linked essay doesn't support your argument so much as give it a thorough thrashing.



``where a woman is simply a victim no matter what' by lm (2.00 / 0) #5 Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 12:47:55 PM EST
I don't know that my position can really be accurately described as ``a woman is simply a victim no matter what'' with regards to prostitution. Once the `victim' card is raised, the discussion moves immediately to the question of consequences to the prostitute, the john, or both. If I understood Jacobson correctly, he was saying that once we do that, we've lost the important bits of the discussion. And that's the bit where I think that Jacobson and myself find ourselves on common ground.

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

I don't read any bit of that . . . by Christopher Robin was Murdered (4.00 / 4) #6 Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 01:00:32 PM EST
As suggesting that there is something inherent dehumanizing about prostitution. It seems fairly clear that he thinks there are as many different types of prostitution as there are whores and johns and any universalizing description is, in fact, where the dehumanization comes in - hence his sly support at the legalization of it: "Why, when all is said and done, should a prostitute not be touched by a man's shyness or ineptitude or sadness, or made curious by his turning up in her room looking for he doesn't know what, or excited when on rare occasions what he does want coincides with what she does? Is the battlefield so unforgiving that none of this is conceivable, and that any man who goes out looking for such an eventuality must be treated as a criminal?"

He thinks sex is dead serious and deeply personal - too serious for heavy-handed media stereotypes and clueless philosophical abstractions. Any sweeping generalization about what the nature of a given type of encounter are to a person are bound to be dehumanizing - turning it into a caricature of what it is.

This is about as far from your position - that there's an inherent potential humanity in all people and prostitution impedes its expression - as I can imagine one getting.

[ Parent ]

I think you're overstating his case by lm (2.00 / 0) #7 Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 01:37:32 PM EST
Jacobson begins by stating that there are two wrongheaded and sentimental ways of looking at prostitution. At one end we've got the abuser/abused dichotomy that suggests that women are always victims. At the other, we've got the view that prostitutes are all sex addicts that like nothing better than to engage in whatever depravity they can get paid to do. His implication being that a real dialog probably ought to start in the middle.

Then he says ``if we are going to have a grown-up debate about what we are entitled to do with our bodies, then each sex is going to have to think a touch more philosophically about the other.'' Maybe by that he means something other than what I take to be the plain meaning of his words. Maybe what he really means is that no judgment of any sort is possible.

And, certainly, he does go on to argue that the reasons that men visit prostitutes are quite varied, some to use and some to be used. His main point in doing so is that to lump them all together in the `to use' category is to commit the same sort of depersonalization of men that detractors say that prostitution inherently does of women, hence his conclusion, ``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?''

What he doesn't do in that article is make any claims about whether prostitution is inherently just or unjust. Rather, his overarching point is that the debate is being had on the wrong terms and that the sex act is so deadly serious that we ought to have a proper debate that doesn't dehumanize one or both sides from the get-go. That certainly isn't all that far away from the essay I wrote.

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

Except you didn't start in the middle. by Christopher Robin was Murdered (4.00 / 2) #8 Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 02:13:51 PM EST
You started with the assumption that it inherently involves "using" - that is to say, some depersonalization. You flipped the script slightly to conclude that this is inherent to the concept of prostitution and not dependent on the consequences thereof (though why dehumanization isn't a consequence, if perhaps an unavoidable one, was never clear to me - it seems like a word game), you still came out on the side of all one-or-the-other. You just changed the binaries, right?

[ Parent ]

Now you've lost me by lm (2.00 / 0) #9 Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 02:40:01 PM EST
If your allegation is that I didn't read Jacobson's article closely enough to begin with, I'm guilty as charged.

If your allegation is that Jacobson probably doesn't see any moral problem with prostitution, while I do, that may very well be the case.

But if your allegation is that I didn't understand Jacobson's main idea, I don't know that I agree with that. A second reading of Jacobson's article based on your criticism of my reading of it reinforces my first perceptions of it. Jacobson and I do seem to agree that the the debate as typically framed is flawed and fails to treat human nature in its fullness. Further, I think I agree with him that a real dialog on the matter would be full of nuance and treat the people involved as persons rather than as if they were entirely only exclusively a victim, producer, criminal, or consumer.

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

Okay. by Christopher Robin was Murdered (2.00 / 0) #10 Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 06:39:57 PM EST
Put that way, as a sort of investigatory baseline, I see where you and he overlap.

I would say, however, after those few points, you two disagree pretty radically. You dismiss human difference in favor of a model of potential hurt (the McCain example – it doesn't matter whether it hurt a specific person, but whether a behavior could it hurt an abstract model of ideal humanity) whereas the experience of the individual is paramount for Johnson. I'd also say he's very much about the consequences – he'd just add that you can't generalize about the consequences. I also suspect you've got very different ideals about human nature: if only because you cite Aristotle and the Founding Fathers were he prefers to ground his discussion in two of the most famous bits 20th century French S/M erotica.

[ Parent ]

It's a dreary day outside, here's a round up of things I think are interesting | 10 comments (10 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback

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