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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.
Sterility, which is why your argument that "prostitution orients men towards sex with women" doesn't work. Porn will have sex with women, why isn't that conditioning as much? Hookers dress and act (and recite a script for interactions) in the stereotypical way which involves a lot of 'this is supposedly sexy clothing and behaviour'.
The reason masturbation was seen as worse than common fornication was precisely because it was a solitary vice. Having casual sex was at least open to the chance of pregnancy, it was following the natural path of "men and women have sex, babies result", even if it was being contorted for pleasure (by men) and money (by women). Masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, use of contraception are trying to avoid the natural end of sex and its natural consequence: babies.
So modern prostitution would be as ill-regarded as porn: it's sterile. Prostitutes and their clients have methods to avoid conception. Sex is purely a transaction of money for satisfaction. The problem with modern sex, be it porn or prostitutes or cohabitation or contraception and abortion within marriage is sterility, deliberately avoiding what sex is meant to do. (This is completely ignoring the problem of STIs, which haven't gone away, and as the monkeypox outbreak demonstrates, good old promiscuous sex is still the best way to spread diseases).
So modern prostitution, even if it did orient men towards women, is not orienting them to relationships with women, it's towards the woman as source of satisfaction as you want it. The prostitute isn't there to have a good time herself, she's there to provide a service that you pay for, and since it's a transaction, she has to sell the goods to your demand. Even if that demand is for intimacy, the 'girlfriend experience', it's still a fake. It's not socialising awkward men to be able to interact with women, it's socialising women to be what men see in porn. Because this is what modern sex has become: for increasing novelty, porn has to provide something new and spicy. And after a while, seeing this in porn, consumers want it in real life and glossy magazines are all too happy to write articles on how you, too, modern woman, can be a porn star in the bedroom.
Oral sex was once something only whores did. Now the expectation is that of course your girlfriend will give you a blowjob. Anal sex was mainstreamed via porn, and once the novelty of heterosexual sodomy has worn off, I have no doubt that Cosmopolitan will be writing articles about the best way to perform the new kink.
Possibly incest, there seems to be a lot of interest in brother-sister as step-sibling incest porn? So Cosmo will have articles on "10 Ways To Role-Play Incest" and "How To Play Sister And Brother With Your Boyfriend".
That's modern sex. That's not about socialisation, it's about 'consent is the most important thing' and 'pleasure is the only reason for sex' and adopting "sex work is real work" will still have a stigma, because there was an excuse for men to go to prostitutes once upon a time (my wife would never do this act and I would never ask her to do it) but nowadays, women are supposed to be sex-positive and willing to do anything, because sex is not dirty and no act should be beyond the pale. So it still will be "only the losers who can't get a girlfriend go to the sex workers".
And again, that is ignoring the whole problem of the awkward men who do want the entire girlfriend experience, who do want "this attractive girl is with me because she wants to be and she likes me for who I am", not "I am paying this woman for an hour of her time and access to her body, and she has other clients before and after me". The socially awkward guys may want "the formation of relationships and marriages" but there's more to being with a woman in a relationship than "okay, I've been to hookers so I know how sex works". If all the problem is "lack of confidence" and going to a sex worker helps with that, it may result in "can get a proper girlfriend". If the problem is more than that, it won't solve it.
There are men who use prostitutes who have wives, etc. and it's a matter of convenience for them. They don't need socialisation, they're horny and want a quick, convenient climax where they don't have to bother about their partner's pleasure or anything other than getting off the way they want. They needn't be jerks while fucking the hooker, they can be quite pleasant, but it's nowhere near "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".
They already have relationships and marriages, they're horny right now and just want to get off and their wives/girlfriends aren't there to satisfy it.
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