255. The Sex Business

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In The Economist's leader this week on the sex business only two kinds of people are mentioned as being opposed to prostitution: puritans, "who think that women selling sex are sinners," and do-gooders, "who think they are victims."  I would add a third category: teachers, who think that prostitutes are children.  In the sense that they are under-educated.

You understand that I regard anybody who doesn't know the literature his civilization has produced, as under-educated.  A student who has taken only science and engineering courses is under-educated.

What those students are missing by not taking those humanities courses, and what literature courses will best give them, is what prostitutes most need: a dramatized view of life as a whole.

Drama.  How do you get drama that gives you a sense of the whole of life?  By looking at death.  The end.  While you're right in the middle of life.

Oh, did the poets I taught ever do that!  First in the middle, the joy.  "There it is, oh golden, golden, there it is, seize it, seize it," and then "Gone, gone, gone forever, as it will all go."  Carpe diem, then ubi sunt, in the terms given us by the Roman poets.

But poets in any period do that, arousing you to the intensity of physical love and then sticking you with finality of physical death.  If you don't seize the love, the joy, when you're able to, you'll lose your chance.  At the end you'll die deprived, and in between time, if Milton is right, you'll suffer the little deaths of a deprived (he would say "depraved") mechanism, an inability to seize, seize all that's there, together.  Because you (I'm including the client now) wasted your abilities on a part, in a childish seizure, "loveless, joyless, unindeared." 

So, children, know the whole, glimpse the human future, and you'll be less likely to lie with the "cold-hearted witch,/ And after, drained dry,/ Come to the chamber where/ Lies one long sought with despair."   Yeats knows that, for most of us, there will be a period when we can't help looking back.

That looking back.  Is there a way to make it less regretful?  Yes, if you have produced children, a family, grandchildren, the "large posterity" that Spenser saw possessing the earth, all the product of the "wedded love" that Milton saw driving "adulterous lust" to range "among the bestial herds."  Physical love viewed in the fullest context.

Awareness of that context, however dim, must be what makes Christmas the saddest day of the whorehouse year.  Family, family, reminders everywhere.  Polly Adler's book, A House is Not a Home, told us about it.

There were more victims then, the forced, to whom none of this applies.  Now, with prostitutes able to charge $250 an hour (recently $350) there are fewer.

It's the people with the choice who need the drama.  Some, of course, have the imagination to provide it on their own.  But they won't get it from the True Romance magazines that, Adler says, litter the whores' private quarters.

However you get the drama, though, you can easily lose it, lose your sense that something important in human life is at stake. How, reader responsive to literature and art, do you lose that?  By becoming a scientist (you think), a clinician, a Kinsey, or an aloof Economist writer too cool to see prostitutes as anything but "workers."