Bread and Circuses
Today is Tuesday, 11 March 2008.
Hiring prostitutes is not about sex, it’s about having power over another person.
Thus, it is a quintessential capitalist crime.
It’s one thing to own a car or a house, or a dog or a cat, but it’s entirely another order of things to own a human being for an hour or an evening.
What Eliot Spitzer, governor of New York, did in hiring prostitutes is loathsome.
Due to the prurience of the average American, it leads the newscasts.
And it diverts attention from the continuing Bush-Cheney-Republican Party mass murder in Iraq.
Welcome to ancient Rome.
Hiring prostitutes is not about sex, it’s about having power over another person.
Thus, it is a quintessential capitalist crime.
It’s one thing to own a car or a house, or a dog or a cat, but it’s entirely another order of things to own a human being for an hour or an evening.
What Eliot Spitzer, governor of New York, did in hiring prostitutes is loathsome.
Due to the prurience of the average American, it leads the newscasts.
And it diverts attention from the continuing Bush-Cheney-Republican Party mass murder in Iraq.
Welcome to ancient Rome.
posted by HH at 6:24 AM
6 Comments:
Pardon me, but your Puritan slip is showing. Capitalist crime? If prostitution is the world's oldest profession and soliciting prostitution is a capitalist crime, then either capitalism is the world's oldest economic system or prostitution was its mother given your altogether too dogmatic preaching on this subject.
Stripping away the artificial moral posturing, it appears nothing more to me than a pretty simple contract involving goods for services.
Marriage is also a contract although considerably more complex in most cases.
If indeed the contract for services in particular included ownership of another as a condition of the agreement, then the agreement was entered into between consenting adults.
Lighten up, Dude.
I can imagine nothing more demeaning or degrading than being a prostitute. I shudder to contemplate the desperation that leads women to this. And I am disgusted by the suggestion that this is a simple agreement between consenting adults. Forgive me, but I didn’t realize my objections to slavery or rape were artificial moral posturing.
I really thought Dr. Laura’s comments on the Today Show were as low as they come, blaming women for not making their men feel appreciated. And then I read this anonymous writer’s dismissal of Spitzer’s actions and his admonition to lighten up. Well, we can’t all lighten up. These actions diminish us all.
So you feel entirely justified in dictating your personal value system?
Somewhat at odds with an anarchist world view.
You say tomato...
I fear "anonymous" misunderstands the anarchist world view.
HH is a classical anarchist, knowing that a system predicated on capitalist violence seldom produces justice, and that only peaceful, nonexploitative cooperation can produce a better world.
Prostitution ALWAYS is founded on coercion and exploitation; there is no free will or consent involved in a capitalist patriarchal fascist system.
Your sophistic tomato is rotten, Dude.
How nice to be able to encapsulate the sum of human experience in such a neatly convenient package.
In my experiences, I have found human motivations and actions to much messier than the rather sterile assessment you have chosen to assert as fact rather than as postulate.
The fact that you can imagine nothing more degrading, etc. gives your postulate the flavor of projection.
I would suggest that our reptilian biological responses to stimulus and/or other base (not a value laden term in this context)imperatives layered with generations of socialization and a highly evolved cerebral cortex may have just possibly created a socially necesary niche for sex workers.
Although I do not deny that the motivations you assert in absolutist terms exist with attendant societal harm. It is several steps too far to be able to infallibly assert that prostitution would not exist otherwise, Betty Freidan to the contrary.
My personal experiences on the subject from the perspective of the abject, degraded wretch that you have painted in the manner of a latter day Hogarth are entirely alien from the conjecture you have clothed in scant logical rainment.
The behaviors of our primate cousins are illustrative.
Ecce Bonobo
Just a few words to clarify, then I will remove myself from this miserable debate.
The style and context of the "anonymous" posts lead me to assume that they are from the same unnamed person. You, "anonymous," should not assume the same. I am the person who can still think of nothing more degrading, and yes, I may be projecting. I fail to see how that makes prostitution any more acceptable.
I am not, however, HH. My observation is that he identifies himself as such when he responds.
Now farewell to you and this discussion. Good luck with those reptilian biological responses of yours.
Post a Comment
<< Home