It’s not sexual; it’s work. Using our whole bodies to earn a living makes it clear how much sexual feelings really come from our minds: a lover may touch the same way a customer does, but produce an entirely different feeling.
Conversely, a desire for celibacy is laughed off as “frigidity” rather than respected as a choice; lesbians are ridiculed as weird creatures unable to “get a man.” It’s no accident that the number one male fantasy is of a woman dying to suck his cock. The penis is man’s symbol of his power and superiority, the one proof that he is different from woman, and his justification for dominating her.
But he’s insecure about his supposedly God-given superiority; he knows he needs women, at very least, for the survival of the species. In order to survive this conflict, he splits women into two kinds: Good Women, do don’t desire sex for themselves, who, at the extreme, only submit to his desires when absolutely necessary for procreation; and Bad Girls, whores, whose function is to reassure him, through worshipping his penis, that he really is superior.
When I tell other women these stories, they usually respond with silence, and when I try to talk to men, it can be even worse. I once had a boyfriend who felt his penis was too small, and he was upset and jealous when I told him a man with an elephant penis told me he had killed women with it and he wanted to kill me with it, too. “Gee,” he whined, in his envious little boy’s voice, “If you met a guy with a dick that big, what chance do I have of impressing you?” It didn’t, of course, ever occur to him to sympathize with me or to comfort me because I had once been someone whose life was considered so worthless that men often tried to kill me.
We live in a culture that worships death through war, through an economic system that keeps most people starving while a small percentage of people focus on expensive drugs like cocaine and on sex with strangers. We live in a culture that encourages people to be shallow and soulless, or to focus on possessions and repressing others and themselves. Sex in this culture often takes the form of prostitution — on a person turning of her emotions, being psychically someplace else while someone who despises her is making love to her.
For a long period in history, women had only a small number of options for economic survival, including getting married, becoming a nun, or becoming a prostitute.
Classically, male workers are hired for their brawn and not the brains, and female workers are hired for their appearance not their performance. Essentially, the male worker’s muscle and the female worker’s smile are prostituted to middle- and upper-class demands.
If you weren’t so rich, you’d be a whore.
One woman who never suffered such violations said, “I was aghast to hear my father list the fact that he never molested me as one of his accomplishments as a father.”
Every man, at 50, gets the face they deserve.