The Wisdom of Whores

Prostitution or especially global policy towards it is in my opinion so terribly captivating because of the amount of legitimate angles it can be argued.  I love everything to do with it--it is intriguing for its various cultural adaptations as it exists in virtually every society everywhere, it is statistically generous from health and social work standpoints as it plays into various phenomenons, and it is academically useful in its connotations-- prostitution has everything to do with class, economics, politics, culture, and well everything.  It is what people do and have done forever.  Forever.

But that's not why I wrote my UG thesis on it or why I bring it up to anybody that won't immediately freak out at the P-word.  I do this because my whole life I thought prostitution should be legalized and regulated until I read the book Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn about the correlation between legalize/regulate models and human trafficking.  They argued basically that prostitution wasn't as much about policy as I always thought but about power and how women don't have it but could.  They drastically changed my opinions, and I can't stress this enough: that is pretty damn difficult to do... but here I am  scribbling out some stuff about prostitution again.  This time I'm blaming someone else: Elizabeth Pisani and her pithy, thoughtful book The Wisdom of Whores and it's humanistic approach to what *some* people don't consider about *some* hookers: the stigma is a social construct.  Prostitution is a SOCIAL pathology, not a real one.  At least not to prostitutes.

I have this ongoing debate with a friend of mine who interned at the DA's office and developed a deep empathy for guys that had it rough and stumbled into prison without a second chance for dumb reasons.  I argued him that prostitution was inherently degrading and inherently victimized-- that there were of course deviations from this norm, but that it was indeed the norm.  I guess I'm changing my mind about that (again) as I read this book.  What I've realized is that to take a step back from the narrow viewpoint of my experience means separating prostitution, a profession which many enjoy and reap a variety of benefits from, from its connotations.  Sure, in a paternalistic social system, prostitution will manifest itself as a paternalistic evil, thus our stereotype of prostitution today-- misogynistic and cruel.  But trying to "fix" prostitution is trying to fix the symptoms without blaming the disease.  It is just a part of the big picture, albeit a rather ugly and messy part that nobody wants to look at.

Animal Spirits

"Cause we are living in a material world,

And I am a material girl." -M

As society speeds increasingly rapidly into uncharted territory technologically and materialistically speaking, the place of women continues to evolve.  We have a tendency to point to changes in society as "progression," but an objective second thought allows us to see that change in an affluent capitalistic system will not necessarily be good or bad, but rather the path of least resistance fiscally speaking.  Contemporary philosophers have remarked on the ability of advances in technology and market speculation to increasingly addict the modern man to his place in society over his independent self, but not much has been said about women, especially young women.  If we are to figure out on a more positive rather than normative level what is happening to 21st century girls, we have to first figure out what that place is.

In One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse presented a radical and daring thesis that through economic and political liberalization, man had effectively trapped himself into a functional role in which he is completely dependent on the purpose he serves within the societal whole.  There are many factors as to why this happened, including rapid technological advances furthering more definite class lines and market specialization, handicapping men from their inherent ability of self-reliance.  Man's option to distance himself from society becomes less and less viable as he becomes dependent on others to fulfill not only his real needs (food, shelter, etc), but his socially constructed consumer needs, which continue to expand and are never effectively satiated.  As he becomes more of a member of society, he becomes less of a person in the whole individual sense.  The paradox is that he loses his free will to freedom--to market expansion and capitalization.

Marcuse doesn't talk about the role of pre- or non-professional women specifically in his rather prophetic book, but modern girls face a symmetrical paradox.  Through societal pressures and constant media reinforcement, the place of girls not as the consumer but instead as the commodity is becoming a similar addiction to girls themselves.  And in the same way that men propagate themselves as powerful based on their economic delusions, women propagate themselves as powerful based on delusions of sexual power.   Girls are addicted to themselves as an object, so even their main role as consumer plays into the idea of becoming a better, more attractive commodity.  They learn to view all aspects of their life in such a light, relying on their parents, friends, and love interests to reinforce the idea that they are an adequate, marketable substance, the one-dimensional girl.

It has been said that the sole problem of philosophy is to build an argument against nihilism, which many claim cannot be done.  From Descarte's foundations to Nietzsche's limitless human potential to James's poetic pragmatism, all ideas suggesting a greater point to human existence have delved beyond the grounds of reason, and shown us that reason has not and quite probably cannot give us a conclusive argument that there is such a greater truth.

In asking myself the central question, "what drives 21st century girls," I was struck by the economic ideas of John Maynard Keynes's "animal spirits", the idea that humans participate in acts of progression not for any logically sound reason, but just through sporadic impulse.  In his more eloquent words, "Our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic.  Most, probably, or our decisions to do something positive...can only be taken as a result of animal spirits-- of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities" (General Theory, 161).  Here Keynes was attempting to explain the "why" of early financial markets, but in a broader sense also to explain the "why" of human nature.  It is not striving for a logical end goal that moves us, because we have nothing to show that such a thing exists.  Evolution has given us the illusion of purpose, a "spontaneous optimism" that allows us to thrive as a species.  In the words of Nietzsche, "The beast within us insists on being lied to...without erroneous moral assumptions, man would have remained a beast"  (Thus Spoke Zarathustra).  If we are to accept his theory, it becomes pathetically amusing that while centuries of philosophers have struggled to defend a greater truth to give purpose to man, their actions have only been perpetuated by purpose when not in contrast to raw biology.

Keynes saw economic power as detrimental to the wholeness of man in the same way that I am arguing sexual power to be detrimental to the wholeness of girls as independent people.  It is a very old idea dating back as far as we have records of human history, but further cultivated by Adam Smith, that the individual vices of people contribute to the greatness of a whole society.  This society-dependence for women is the result of their Keynesian animal spirit.  What Keynes described was a sort of economic nihilism, the idea that there was no objective progress in economics, only the illusion of progress.  Pragmatically speaking, the difference between real progression and the illusion of progression in financial actions doesn't matter at all.  This idea is heavily dependent on pre-Hebrew ideas of the cyclical nature of human development, and ties into renowned Czech economist Tomas Sedlacek's sub thesis in Economics of Good and Evil, that just like myths, mathematical economic models show what never was, but always will be.  There is no truth to them in the idealistic sense if they do not and cannot copy reality, but their truth value lies in their pragmatic cash-value, i.e. as guides for investors and (now, though they weren't around in Keyne's days) hedge fund managers.

So, of course economic models are true to an extent, stopping short of an ability to capture the non-rational, or even arational, essence of human behavior.  This is why they are timeless-- they do not change as man changes.  The price that comes with that explains the riskiness of all economic behavior-- the face that while a myth or model can interpret an aspect of human nature, it cannot copy human reality.  Economics cannot force itself to be an actual positive science because it describes people, and the idealistic girl of the 21st cannot be given life, but only modeled for her pragmatic value vis-a-vis the manipulative power real women do wield in learning to become her.