A reader writes:
As someone who deals with men’s relationship to sex work on a regular basis, I don’t know that I necessarily read Katha Pollitt’s tone as moralizing. Certainly her perspective is not only shared by lifestyle dominatrixes such as myself, but also many pro-dominatrixes who provide the paid (often sexual) activities to which she is referring.
As many people’s first exposure to female domination is often through professional dommes, I end up dating a lot of men who cut their kink teeth on very transactional experiences. As a lifestyle domme, I seek to date and share real intimacy with submissive men and often find myself frustrated when the expectation they’ve developed is for me to essentially be a kink-dispenser without needs of my own, a pro-domme they don’t have to pay.
Likewise, my professional dominatrix friends frequently feel uncomfortable and even unsafe with the men who breach the boundaries of the professional relationship, who imagine themselves to be dating the woman they pay regularly to dominate them. The lines between sex work and dating are an uncomfortably blurred in my world, and it has very tangible negative impacts. I can hardly blame vanilla folks for being wary of the same paradigm impacting their chance at happiness.
For women who date exclusively in the vanilla world, this negative impact of the availability of sex for pay on dating life is probably a little more indirect. The high estimate says 1 in 5 American men have visited a sex worker, whereas anecdotally more than half of the men I date have visited a pro-dominatrix.
Twenty percent of men is still a high incidence, but maybe we should look at the majority of men that still take to heart the wide variety of messages they get about sex being for sale in one form or another, and how often this results in a leftist viewpoint used to paste over a more exploitative one. As a friend once said to me, “Whereas right-wing sexists want women to be private property, left-wing sexists want them to be public property.”
The prevailing culture that treats that all women as objects available for purchase is what causes us to treat sex workers as things available for rent, instead of human beings you pay for services and endow with labor rights. Taking a critical eye to the traditionally leftist viewpoint of sex for sale would do a huge favor for sex workers and civilians alike.
The Dish 