Is intimacy inherently better when it doesn’t have a dollar amount attached to it? I don’t necessarily think that has to be the case.
Based on some helpful dialogue on Twitter, I want to clarify an idea I expressed earlier, in my posts on why conceptualizing sex as commodity is problematic, and explaining why I left sex work out of that conceptual post. Special thanks go to the sex workers who took the time to point out some of the implications of my posts and educate me on their perspectives.
I did not intend to state that all intimate human interactions (acts of sex, emotion, nurturing, caring) cannot or should not be commodified. The problem, I believe, is when not all humans have communicated about and agreed to the degree, if any, of commodification influencing their interaction.
What I was trying to get at in my blog post on sex-as-commodity was that an objectified or commodified view of sex within heteronormative patriarchal courtship is problematic because it makes men into the ones pursuing The Sex from its gatekeepers, women. This dynamic leads to countless unhealthy and abusive behaviors and is one of the pillars of rape culture.
Just go Dutch, all the time, on everything...or maybe "Tit for Tat"?
Let's see.... help me out here ok.... she's saying that guys that pay for sex turn out to be rapists and abusers.
You can pay for sex , but you can't pay for love . When they figure that out the hard way , they feel short changed , but it's still no excuse for either .
@Douglas. Ok .... thanks.
A major factor making that dynamic so toxic is that nobody’s really up front about it. We’re all just enacting the cultural scripts we were taught, believing that it’s natural for men to want more sex than women do, for men to be the pursuers, and so on. These scripts don’t leave much room for behaviors outside this heterosexual box, either, behaviors that queer gender roles and sexuality and more.
But there are models for outsourcing intimacy, and they’re not all bad ones. It’s acceptable to pay a therapist for their time, emotional presence, and training (though there’s still some stigma accompanying admitting to needing to see a mental health expert). Many people pay for childcare or elder care, which have both practical/logistical and emotional components.
Or take food. Food preparation used to be almost exclusively (in recent Western history anyway) a domestic activity. Now we outsource much of that preparation, and much of the eating of food, to restaurants and the prepared-foods-sections of gas stations and markets.