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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 think its time for me to admit that I am an ex John and an ex compulsive porn user. I visited well over 20 prostitutes in my life and there were periods where I was masturbating to porn 3-4 times a day. I don't do either of those things anymore. But that's a different post.
Having laid out my past, I would say your post sucks big time.
Bait title (nothing about banning pornography or subsidizing whores), and same old hot take that 50 million people had on the internet before (go visit /r/redscarepod for 5 minutes). Anyways, since I can't just call your post shit and leave it at that, I will try to lay out why I think so;
The central thrust of your post, which is that masturbating to porn and having sex with prostitutes are distinct because one of them involves a "real woman". Is extremely naive to the psychology of actually visiting a prostitute. Why do I say this? Because the distinct categories are not {having sex with a mutually attracted partner, having sex with a prostitute} and {porn} it's {having sex with a mutually attracted partner} and {porn, having sex with a prostitute.} As someone who has had sex with a prostitute and someone who did it willingly, its not the same thing at all!
When I visited prostitutes, the same pathways in my brain were firing as the ones that do when I beat it to porn. There was no need to please the other person, no mutual feedback, no higher order feelings (such as "love" or a genuine interest in the person), it was a pure satisfying of lust. And I don't think any other John would attest against this.
In fact, one of the reasons I stopped was because I started going to them incessantly and this was getting too expensive, I never wanted to incessantly have sex with my "real" sexual partners. With them, having sex was a nice thing that happened ever so often, it wasn't something that happened ONLY to satisfy my urges as it were with porn and whores. Seriously, I never went to a whore for anything but sex. And those who visit whores for intimacy are still just masturbating, real intimacy isn't paid for, its reciprocal, it's not something you can summon at will.
Prostitution is cleaner than masturbating??
You are aware that whores tend to have are at least an order of magnitude more likely to have common STD's and multiple orders of magnitude to carry the godfather of all STD's HIV. In some cases upto 57% to whores have HIV.
Also the psychological distinction also doesn't make sense. If you are separating sex from home, do you not have sex at home? Your logic lies on the fact that sex with a prostitute is the same level of dirtiness as having sex with a consensual partner. Without that assumption it wouldn't be any different from masturbation would it?
Masturbating and compulsively masturbating to porn are two distinct things along the axis of purity or whatever you seem to care about. Your arguments apply to both of them, not only one of them.
Also jacking off into a keyboard? Is this a troll? You shit and piss in the toilet, I don't think jizzing into the toilet seat is all that worse, if you think it is, congrats on the advanced solipsism.
I explained why porn is worse for a human than seeing a prostitute, and why prostitution is in prosocial in its orientation. So I wouldn’t say my title is mistitled at all. I wasn’t going to go into the history of prostitute regulation or scholastic theology. If porn is bad and prostitutes are better, I advocate banning porn and subsidizing prostitution. It would be awesome if the RS subreddit made this point often, but I don’t think I’ve seen it, if you can link me that would be cool.
I can’t dispute your personal lived experience, but I do wonder if you’re an outlier. “The same pathways in my brain were firing as the ones that do when I beat it to porn” is extremely improbable given the unique cues associated prostitution. The lack of intimacy is one reason why prostitution is not identical to real intercourse, but this doesn’t supersede the numerous reasons why it is closer than porn. Living in a society where, I think it’s 30% of men haven’f had sex in a year, doesn’t afford us with the counter argument of “just find a gf bro”. Ideally everyone would be in longterm relationships and yet historically cultures saw fit to introduce regulated prostitution.
Re: cleaner, we’re talking about psychological cleanliness involving cues. A girlfriend is a living breathing psychological cue for sex. She doesn’t exist on a tab in your computer. While sure, your bed would associated with sex (with your girlfriend), that still retains more psychological “purity of space” than having porn in the same browser that you work on. The question is what we’re associating together. Associating being alone and the internet with sexual gratification is worse than either a prostitute or having a significant other.
I'm interested in digging in a bit more on why you think this is important.
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