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Ban porn, subsidize prostitutes: a modest defense of whoring
The popular view is that masturbating to porn is fine, and using the services of prostitutes is not so fine. Porn is not a poor man’s prostitute, but instead a cleaner acceptable method of sexual satisfaction. You might joke with a friend, like Markiplier on the Logan Paul podcast, that you gave up porn because the two-hour wank sessions got old. Were Markiplier to say he recently gave up prostitutes, which he had been using for a decade, the conversation would have taken a somber tone. Yet for most of Western history, this moral calculation was inverted. Masturbation was seen as worse vice than than the vice girl. Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Voltaire, and Richard Wagner all thought the solitary vice more dangerous than the sex worker. Why would this be?
We don’t need to get too bogged down in the historical miscellany and theological glosses. For starters, our ancestors noted that fucking a woman is more natural than fucking a hand. But this was not haughty naturalistic phallicy. This is complex. Due to the nature of human habit and memory, obtaining satisfaction from a woman promotes and orients a man’s sexuality toward women, and not oneself. Let’s flesh this out. On the first level, once you’ve completed the intended act with the harlot, a memory is formed in which all preceding sensations cue for satisfaction of the urge. There’s [urge -> satisfaction from woman], but we can go deeper. There’s [urge -> WOMAN -> satisfaction from woman], with all the sensations of a woman encoding sexual satisfaction: pheromones, tone of voice, clothing, mannerisms, and importantly socializing with a woman, implicating your social personality and hers. This works to develop a craving associated with all the sensations of women, increasing the desire for the company of real women and the formation of relationships and marriages. There is one more social benefit, which is that the [dressing up -> traveling -> paying] is more prosocial than opening a tab on a laptop, and associating sex with money is great salience on the value of money.
If sex were the Milky Way and the earth were a wife, prostitutes would be Venus and porn would be Pluto. It’s very far away, and it’s not even a planet.
But the argument is yet to reach its climax. Prostitutes are seen as dirty, and this again betrays our modern misunderstanding of psychology. Going out, away from your home and work, to purge your desire with a woman is a way to keep your home and work life free from the cognitive “stain” of sex, because the whole sexiness is entrenched in its own unique context. The home and office, and the home office, are clean of memories and cues of intercourse — you have ejaculated these cues far away from your “pure” life. There’s no risk of Toobin-ing all over your keyboard after a zoom meeting, because your computer has no cues related to sex. Instead, your conception of sex is caught up in a web of strong cues, all of which are related to real life women.
I would argue that this relation is flipped if you compare paid prostitutes to free porn, as opposed to paid porn. That is, paid porn is worse than prostitutes is worse than free porn, because paying for sex distorts everything and makes male-female relationships transactional rather than cooperative. There is a component to many relationships in which men give money for sex, and women give sex for money, even if this transaction is implicit. My belief is that the more explicit this transaction is, and the stronger it is, the worse the relationship is. Or, at least, the lower the ceiling for how good it is becomes. A healthy relationship ought to involve people who genuinely like each other doing things either that they both like, or doing things the other person likes because they want to be kind to their partner who they genuinely care about, not because they expect to get something in return. No real relationship is going to achieve that level perfectly, but the closer you get the better the relationship is (assuming both people are doing it and not just one person slaving away for the other).
Explicitly paying for sex is about as transactional is it gets, and normalizes it in the minds of both parties involved. Men who pay for sex are going to be more willing to pay in the future, are going to believe that they have less intrinsic value as a sexual partner. If they have low self confidence this makes them easier for women to take advantage of in the future and exploit for money, or if they have high self confidence it will make them feel more entitled to sex as long as they have money and respect women less as something other than a piece of merchandise. On the other side, women who are are paid for sex, or sexual content over the internet, will also come to believe that they have less intrinsic value other than their bodies, and/or will view men as having less value aside from their money. It actually sickens me when I see the way some female streamers view their own audiences, just cash registers waiting to be emptied.
While in-person prostitution is probably not as bad as online simping, because it involves some semblance of real connection as you explain, I think the main reason it's less bad is simply because it limits the damage. An extremely attractive woman can only ensnare so many men if she has to spend a night with each one in person, while an attractive woman online can ensnare thousands or possibly millions.
Meanwhile, I don't think free porn has the same damage because it's much lower stakes, and therefore lower emotional stakes. A man is much less likely to fall in love with an actress he saw in a few videos on the web than he is to a camgirl who keeps talking to him directly and thanking him by name every time he donates $100. And a woman who puts up an amateur video on a website is less likely to repeatedly do it day after day week after week until it becomes a part of her life like a camgirl or prostitute is.
It is inevitable that money will be some component of relationships, just like politics. And similarly, the more it can be minimized the better.
Agree on your dangers of simping (great point). I disagree however on the danger of “transactional sexuality”. Ideally, sure, a man and woman would come together because they have found value in each other that is higher than money and all that the dollar represents. Their personalities entwine beautifully, conversations roll off the tongue, and their experiences couple each others. But where I disagree is that (1) many prostitutes and courtesans in history were sought after for these very properties, geishas in Japan or Tyrion’s fantastical whore in GoT, and (2) I don’t actually see prostitution as dangerously more transactional than 21st century intercourse, or maybe history’s intercourse. Purchasing the right apartment, haircut, dentist, photographer, car and clothes will ensure matches. Back in the day, it was inheriting the right title or deed. Sex for resources is a tale as old as time.
Sounds like the slippery slope keeps on slipping. I don't entirely disagree that there's a lack of categorical difference, but see that more as an inditement of 21st century intercourse.
Or rather, there is a spectrum. Everyone is different and has different levels of promiscuity and transactionality, and prostitution is on the far end (imo the bad end) of both but not quite an outlier. I don't think pointing out that it has existed for a long historically has much bearing on whether or not it's healthy. Lots of people have done lots of unhealthy and destructive things throughout history. And lots of people didn't, again everyone is different. And I would argue that the people in the past with less transactionality in their relationships had, with positive but less than 100% correlation, healthier relationships.
Additionally, historically in a lot of places going to a prostitute was seen as shameful or taboo or low class. Although this is not universal, it was at least true in the near past, so pushes towards normalizing it are part of a modern phenomenon at least locally. Which I view as bad because people respond to incentives, so normalizing it will increase its frequences, which then funges against healthy relationships. Which we can see occuring in real time. Gender relations have not been going well recently. An awful lot of men are alone and angry and purposeless. And they respond in different ways. Some become angry incels who hate women, some become pickup artists who try to trick women into sex on false pretenses. Or chads stringing along dozens are women. And women aren't happy either, with femcels, and feminists, and the MeToo movement. Things have gotten worse for an awful lot of people within the past few decades, and while I can't say that sex work alone is responsible for all of it, it's both a symptom and a cause of some of these problems.
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