The egalitarian, global commodification of s*xuality

Women, we’ve arrived. We’re equal now with men. The conditions for equality have been met. Am I talking about political, social and financial equality? No.

Access to maternity leave, child care, the opportunity to balance work and family life? No. The ability to live free from harassment and sexual bullying. No.

We know we are empowered because now we can buy men like they buy women. Men can be prostituted to provide sexual services for women. Here is proof of our newly won freedom: we can participate in the sexual objectification of men in the same way we have been objectified through history.

Free from restriction, the sex industry is now open to all. And there’s lots of pseudo-feminist rhetoric to make us all feel good about it. It’s all there in a piece in The Age last month which reads like a free plug for a new male escort service (“She needs more Melbourne-based men and older men, in their late 30s and 40s”).

But just because it’s women doing the buying - and the pimping - doesn’t make it liberating. Being able to trade in human flesh doesn’t mean that emulating the sexual behaviour of men and their sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, is progress.

This move is part of a capitalist celebration of the female sexual consumer who can choose to buy dildos, botox, pole-dancing classes, new breasts, Brazilians, surgically altered and coloured labias - and men. These are the tokens of our emancipation? This is what “freedom of choice” has delivered?

This is a parody of liberation in which women become a mere participant in a mass-marketed orgy of so-called sexual freedom.

I do have some sympathy, however, with the argument that women cannot find men they want to be with intimately. In our pornified culture we are raising men who are callous and insensitive to the needs and desires of women. We knock tenderness out of them with a diet of brutality from the earliest of ages. Boys’ role models are celebrities and sporting figures who see women as conquests, there for the taking.

But buying a man won’t fix that. It is a reflection of distance, disconnection, a lack of intimacy and a subtraction of emotion from sex.

And it’s dishonest to tell women who want something more than a quick $500 f— that they can have “the whole boyfriend experience” - hair stroked, hand held and even a walk in the park with her, her kids and her dog. For a mere $1,200-$1,500 a day. That’s a lot of money for simulated intimacy. That’s a pretend boyfriend, not a real one. How does that “make a woman feel special”?

There’s a similar development in the story of an Australian film-maker who is organising an auction of Australian virgins at a brothel in Nevada. He is offering $20,000 to each virgin candidate, along with the proceeds of the auction (bar 10 per cent cut for the brothel).

Two men have apparently come forward to agree to have their virginity auctioned. (While wanting to take them at their word, we are not informed how the “virginity” of any participant is established. It wouldn’t be the first time reality show contestants have presented themselves as something they’re not.) Alex, 20, says he “wants to meet someone”. Even if that someone is the kind of person willing to bid in US dollars for the use of his body.

John says he is “excited about the journey”. My exciting journey of being sold in a Nevada cattleyard. By John. While John says he doesn’t mind if he is purchased by a male or a female, Alex seems to be offering himself to a woman flesh buyer.

Once again, this is an attempt to show how egalitarian the global commodification of sexuality has become.

But the fact remains: purchasing prostitutes remains fundamentally a male preserve, which is why we don’t see huge line-ups of women wanting to buy the bodies of boys and men. When women pay men for sex, it doesn’t have the same social effect because there is no history of women enslaving men; the porn industry is still primarily driven by men’s sexual demands. And there’s no social construction of men as sluts who enjoy their own degradation.

The rise of male “escort” services reflects a devaluation of sex because of the primacy of exchange and commodification of another person.

All we’re seeing with this new men-for-sale business is the democratisation of objectification. Buying and selling male or female bodies for sex will always be reducing them to a means to an end; a denial of their full humanity.