Several years ago, when I was practicing the craft of journalism in a small town, a co-worker who was disappointed with the community's exceedingly shallow dating pool planned a trip to Nevada. His primary purpose was the opportunity to patronize one of that state’s legalized brothels. Several of us at the office asked him why he would be willing to spend a significant percentage of his biweekly paycheck on a sexual encounter.
"You always pay for it," he responded with the world-weary cynical air of one who has picked up the tab on dinner and a movie one time too many.
He returned from his trip with a more relaxed pleasant disposition, leading some in the office to consider helping fund a second trip.
But "Sam" later confessed over a beer that the encounter had left him somewhat unsettled and disturbed. The woman he had selected was pleasant and accommodating. The sex itself was everything he could have hoped for.
Afterward, he noticed that the name on her footlocker was not the same as the one she had given him. And in that instant, the illusion was shattered. How do you claim a conquest when you haven’t even managed to learn the identity of the one you supposedly conquered?
The sexcapades involving former Empire State Gov. Eliot Spitzer and the prostitute known to him as Kristen have gotten me thinking about my co-worker’s encounter.
What is the appeal of prostitution? Two consenting adults take a life-affirming act of intimacy and reduce it to a simple commercial transaction. The emotional investment is exactly the same as that required when ordering a Number 3 combo meal at your favorite fast-food restaurant.
Except that people (unless they are devout vegans) don’t generally experience acute shame from visiting the Home of the Whopper.
For Spitzer, encounters with prostitutes were incredibly risky. Let us put aside his reported refusal to wear a condom, which is a singularly poor idea in a time when STDs run rampant. He also willingly endangered his professional standing, his political career and his home life, all for a relatively brief sense of gratification. It’s not like he could use the encounters as fodder for locker-room talk with his buddies. Patronizing a prostitute does not prove sexual prowess. It establishes only that the client had enough money to gain admittance.
There may be many people who believe that male courtship behavior consists of a set of behaviors which aim to culminate in sexual congress. In those cases where the behavior doesn’t yield the desired result, there is at least some learning going on, so that the man in question is a better person when he meets the next object of his affection.
Prostitution requires no such personal growth. There is never any doubt about what the outcome of the evening is going to be. In such a situation, the act of sex becomes hollow indeed. In fact, the act is so hollow that there had to be an alternative to the choice Spitzer made.
Are there people so afraid of emotional development that they’d spend a small fortune to avoid it? If that’s what happened here, Spitzer deserves pity, not scorn.
And what of Ashley Youmans aka Ashley Alexandra Dupre aka Kristen, the hooker at the heart of the scandal. From all accounts, she is the product of a privileged, albeit broken home in suburban New Jersey. Her current employment in the sex trade is the culmination of a series of bad decisions in her young life.
There’s a school of thought that suggests people in Kristen’s line of work are empowered by taking control of their sexuality. But a prostitute is dependent on customer satisfaction even more than the lowliest cashier at a big-box store. If the cashier runs afoul of a customer, there are mid- and upper-level managers to intercede for them. Sex workers run the risk of dissatisfied customers maiming or killing them.
In the case of Client Number 9, who reportedly avoided condoms, the downside might only be disease or pregnancy.
It might be instructive to check up on Kristen in 10 years’ time, after her temporary notoriety has waned. By then, the money that has accompanied her time in the spotlight will likely be gone. What will her life be like?
Never mind career. What will her personal life be like? Will her work have left her too jaded to enjoy sex an expression of intimacy? Will she ever be able to convince a lover that pillow talk is sincere?
Ashley Youmans’ job required her to be little more than an animated receptacle for seminal fluid. Except for well-rehearsed phrases designed to tickle the ear of a client, there was no reason for her to call upon the unique series of firing neurons and synapses that make us individuals. She willingly stripped herself of her personhood as surely as she stripped off her clothes.
Whatever career Ms. Youman might have had in music surely has been damaged by the scandal. It’s difficult to project the image of unattainable chanteuse when her history suggests that she can be attained by anyone with a fat wallet.
And it’s difficult to gauge the collateral damage caused by the world’s oldest profession. Practitioners are surely morally complicit in the ruin of countless relationships.
Years ago, the author John D. McDonald’s salvage consultant/beach bum described the consequences of promiscuity this way:
The scene is reputed to be acrawl with adorably amoral bunnies to whom sex is a pleasant social favor. The new culture. And they are indeed present and available, in exhausting quantity, but there is a curious tastelessness about them. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else. They become a pretty little convenience, like a guest towel.
Two lives ruined, one by a needless risk, another by heedless choices. Two lives mortgaged by subprime choices.