A different type of sex
on March 27, 2008
Category: Feminism
An ex Albanian sex worker and drug dealer living in Greece, defends her choices - injured husband, no papers, no insurance and a family to support. She goes on to give her take on who is selling what in the “business of sex” and NGOs that work with governments to maintain structures of domination and undermine grassroots organising………..
Now I consider sex for money a lot like nursing: it helps people whose lives are incomplete for all sorts of reasons. It is not like sex for pleasure or love, it is a different type of sex. It’s a bit like the sex you have when you would prefer to sleep but your boyfriend wants sex, or when you like someone but not enough to have sex, but you feel sorry for them so you let them have sex. Or you want something from someone and they want sex so you arrange an unspoken contract for the exchange. Sex for money is more honest and direct. It was hard work, but not as hard as the farm work, and it paid much better.
Some women I know find the sex work soul destroying, but they also believed that women were second class people and sex for money made them unworthy of being wives. I couldn’t understand how eight minutes of sex, several times a day, should be the defining element of my spiritual identity.
Hmm those poor men with incomplete lives that need nursing - what stories do they tell? Where do I/we go if my life is incomplete for all sorts of reasons? I find empathy difficult in this case. BUT there are some uncomfortable truths in what she says regarding the hypocrisy and moralising around the sex act
Tags:
Sex Worker
Albania
Greece
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2 Comments so far
1. darkdaughta
March 28th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
I think that if we were to listen to them rather than speak at them or organize on their behalfs, we would discover that, like the rest of us, their beliefs about who they are and what they do, fall along a continuum. Is it really so difficult for us to realize that they have many different experiences and many different voices telling sometimes radically different stories with radically different takes on the same set of issues?
I guess this is me saying we don’t have to stomach what they do, we don’t have to make the same choices or send our daughters out to do that work. Perhaps we could just take the heat off them so they can decide how best to proceed in their uncovering of what has been done to them and by who.
Their perspectives aren’t going to all line up with ours. That’s because their perspectives are their own.
Thanks for wading in a more complicated way that allows for a feminist critique to emerge rather than a feminist edict.
2. Sokari
March 28th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
I think at the very minimum one has to try to dig deep and listen and know the choices made are not easy. There is much truth in what the writer says. Sex is not the only way to sell oneself and as she says at least she is up front and honest about what she is selling and getting paid for. I think a lot of feminism has done just that - lost the critique and stuck on the edict.