prostitute

I'm going to hire a prostitute.
I've never paid for sex, and given my personality, it's quite likely i never will. This cuts me off from direct experience of one of the most prominent features of our society's sexual landscape.
It messes with my mind, living in a world where 16,000 children will die of starvation today, while some have so much that they can pay strangers to engage in the most intimate of all human acts.
So i'm going to hire a prostitute. To not have sex with.
I understand one cannot assume every prostitute hates her (or his, but mostly her) life. I understand that an experience is what you make of it. I understand the danger in letting judeo-christian mores poison our thoughts...i have a friend who likes sex, and men, and sex with men, so much she says she's imagined being a happy prostitute.
But even so...there is an inherently dehumanizing, spirit-devouring aspect to prostitution in this society. Money poisons the attitude of both parties. The john cannot help feeling that he owns (if only temporarily) another human being...an attitude that should never be tolerated, ever. The prostitute...well, i suppose one of the things i seek to understand is whether any prostitute doesn't ultimately feel at least some small measure of resentment for any man who can buy her because his society allows him to do so.
And let's not fool ourselves...despite the quaint illegality of prostitution in many societies where the church still wields some influence, in capitalism money trumps everything. I would imagine that very, very, very few men who have paid to fuck a woman, have been bothered by the thought that perhaps they didn't deserve her.
And too, let's not fool ourselves into thinking there's such a great difference between a prostitute and Donna Reed. Wifedom over the past ten thousand years has been about a woman being sold, or selling herself...selling her sex, her womb, her labor, even her thoughts...to a man. If you think there's an essential difference between Divine Brown and Anna Nicole Smith, you have the mental capacity of a flea. It's also quite likely that some prostitutes have been able to live lives that were, on the balance, better than the wives their johns went home to (at least until they got old).
However, as Amy Gardner said, no little girl dreams of growing up to be a whore.
So i'm going to hire one to not have sex with.
I understand that street corners are losing their vogue, and that the internet is the new place to rent love. Hi ho, it's off to craigslist i go!
I swear on Percy Mortimer's grave, i did NOT intend that pun.
And just what will she and i do while we're not having sex? Here's the template of a response i'm sending to prostitooty ads that catch my eye:
Hello.
I'm looking for a special situation. I'm a writer, and i want to hire a woman. We will hold each other nakedly, with no sex. We'll talk about everything or nothing. We might listen to music, have a pillow fight, give each other backrubs, or just lie together.
I don't drink or smoke. If you do drugs, this won't be for you. I'm a pacifist and non-materialist, trying to find words that will help heal this broken world. We would have to like and trust each other...
warmly,
wrob
I make minor (or major) changes, depending on the ad.
It is my wish to give some woman a break from her life, to treat her with the greatest gentleness and care, and let her walk away with cash in pocket.
I realize this idea is semi-idiotic and fraught with pitfalls, not least of which is the chance that i'll come off as condescending. Why not just befriend a prostitute? Or date one?
Because i need to understand this reality as firsthand as i possibly can. To create the conditions of prostitution (if not the proper execution). Many feminists would say that my relatively benign intent merely amounts to a benigner act of violence against a woman. I can't tell you they'd be unequivocally wrong.
But perhaps the point that radical feminists miss is the difference between prostitution, and prostitution in a capitalist society. I've been thinking about this for many years, and only now think i might have something to add to the human discourse on the subject. The question being, should prostitution be legal? If one believes in freedom, how can any interaction between consenting adults be wrong? Feminists rightly argue that prostitution is about the lack of options and resources that woman have always faced. But i ask you to imagine prostitution in a non-capitalist society, where the prostitute always maintains the economic freedom to exercise total control over what they do, and with whom. Would that be ethically troubling for any earnest feminist or humanist? I submit that it would not.
Getting back to this idiotic idea of mine, more troubling than pissing off some feminists is the realization that buying a woman's time flagrantly risks destroying the chance she might trust or open up to me.
But there's another motivation for my doing it this way.
I need human touch so badly, i'm dying from the lack of it.
I could tell you this is a response to my last girlfriend, who because of clinical depression, was often physically unable to be in my presence for weeks at a time. While there may be a bit of truth in that, the larger truth is found in my lifetime's worth of weeks and months without holding anyone at all.
The thought of just holding someone, for one guaranteed hour each week...that thought is so beautiful to me right now that my chest hurts a bit just thinking about it.
I'll keep you posted.