You lost me at “some dudes just can’t get laid.”

I can promise you that of all people on the planet, I know the pain of not being able to get laid.  I am not a person who thinks it’s no big deal.  I will even go so far as to say that I consider sexual interaction to be – for me – necessary for my overall health, similar to sleeping or exercise.  Maybe more similar to exercise – I don’t go quite as berzerk without sex for long periods as I would go without sleep for even short periods.

Point being, I don’t just feel for the dudes who have trouble getting laid – in some ways I am those dudes!  Metaphysically speaking.  Or thereabouts.

That part – empathy for anyone, including men, who has trouble getting sexual desires/needs met – is an almost reflexive thing for me.  Unless your trouble is based on being a jackass to anyone who might otherwise fuck you, I feel for you if you are not getting fucked and wish that you were.

What bothers me about the partially quoted phrase from this interview in the title of this post, is that it does the thing that is pretty much always done when pro sex workers’ rights people are talking about sex for money. 

It makes sex this disembodied thing, like food, or shelter, or anything else that is something you can *have* in the way you can have objects or self-contained experiences.  Like a nap.  You can have a nap.  And it sucks when you really need and want a nap but circumstances prevent it.  In the statement that “some dudes just can’t get laid,” getting laid is a consumable, have-able thing one person does or doesn’t get to have/do. 

Whereas in reality, sex – except for masturbation – is defined by basically everybody to be something you do, something you “have,” with another person.  You cannot have sex, you cannot get laid, without another person’s body being there and doing it also.

So it is never true to say “I cannot get laid,” without it 100% meaning “something that should only ever happen by a person’s own choosing is not something I can get someone to choose to do with me.”  There are no exceptions.  There are no sad people who it means something different for.  Fair or not, shitty or not, when a straight dude says he can’t get laid – and when anyone else is *talking* about a straight dude using the phrase “he can’t get laid,” what they are saying is “cannot get a woman to join him in sex.”

Now am I the only person who sees that meaning being disappeared in statements like “some dudes just can’t get laid and personally I’m glad they have the option to pay for it?”

There is not actually any such “option”.  There is nothing that exists that is that “option”.  There are in fact only people.  In the case referenced here, those people are women.  “Option” in the above statement literally, if crassly, means “woman to stick it in.” 

Is it so much to ask that if I am willing to be honest about the fact that yes, I have had some excitement and satisfaction in the lifestyle I led for several years in the sex industry, and yes I goddamn love to have all kinds of sex to this day, and yes I am rabid about people not talking shit about whores – if I am willing to be honest about this, is it too much to ask that everybody go out on a motherfucking limb and be honest about the fact that we are talking about men’s right to purchase women’s bodies?

To me, it is all valid conversation – what it means to experience complete sexual rejection amongst your fellows; why we think some characteristics are “not attractive” and punish each other for having them; why some people may even have experiences of “woo, money turns me on!” and enjoy sex for money in that context.  Almost everything else in the interview I linked to made sense to me.  It just, for me, is not a simple case of semantics, this point I bring up and am passionate about.

It is not that I think the two things are equivalent and I just want people to talk about it in more radical language! as per my tastes. 

It is that the thing that is hidden and misnamed – purposefully or not – in the phrase “some dudes just can’t get laid” as juxtaposed with the idea of the “option” to get laid via paying for “it” – that thing is in fact what all trafficking is based on.  What all unhappy hookerism exists because of.

The fact that the unstated and unacknowledged – and perhaps even unknown on a conscious level! – right to be able to get laid instead of having actually NO “option” at all, wherein if no one will fuck you, you will simply remain unfucked, period…the fact that this right is sometimes, even often, assumed and exercised by people who pay well, have great hygiene, are courteous, even give you (me) orgasms – that does not make it a different assumed right than the men who demand that women be available for fucking via kidnapping and coercion. 

It just makes it an assumed right that some men exercise in a tremendously more palatable way than others.  Men who I have liked and loved, some I still do.

Fine, it’s not sexy to talk about, and it *sounds* judgmental because mostly people who talk about it judge it to be a bad thing.  I give you that.  I will suggest that if we base how much of the truth we are willing to talk about on whether someone else talks about it in ways we disagree with, or the fear that such acknowledged truths will be used against us if we admit them – then we are being cowards, and we are being exactly as revolutionary and helpful as every other hypocrite out there who lies about or leaves some shit out of the discussion in order to strenghten their position.  I can’t help it, I expect more from people who seem brave and honest in all these other ways.