The Canadian National Newspaper: Australian Insight: Sex with prostitutes or dates?

So I’ve been getting trickles of comments still for a write-up about sex with a prostitute being cheaper than sex with a date. Thus far the men who have been defending the “sex-with-a-prostitute” camp have been using two basic arguments of defence.

The first argument is that sex with a date might appear to be cheaper in the long run, because after a few dates you can just hang at home and order a pizza and have sex, but in the longer run it can be more expensive because divorce is so expensive these days.

The second argument is that sex with a prostitute is morally superior because a man is not pretending to want anything more than sex with a prostitute, whereas he might be pretending that a woman means more to him than just sex in order just to get sex.

Both of these arguments seem a little bit white-picket-fence pleasantwille kind of arguments to me, but if that’s the way society still rolls then I’m prepared to be given a heads-up here today.

Firstly, the “divorce-is-expensive” argument does not seem to acknowledge the fact that you still have statistics on your side if you plan to get married, with a 3 in 5 chance of the marriage not ending in divorce. Secondly, it amazed me how, when I was talking about sex with a prostitute versus sex with a date, so many men automatically started talking about marriage. Thirdly, it seems to be assumed that in a marriage a man does all the work while a woman sits at home and takes half his money when the divorce is settled.

In most marriages the man would probably have the higher salary, partly because men tend to be rewarded with higher salaries for doing the same jobs as women. I’m sure, too, there are some wives of wealthy businessmen who do very little around the house, who play tennis and go shopping and get their hair done. But, I would suggest that their marriage is a sham in any case, and the husband is probably fat, bald and ugly. If a beautiful woman has been having sex with him for ten years then she deserves to be handsomely compensated when she has had enough or he has found a younger model to replace her.

It’s amazing because the divorce-is-expensive argument seems to contradict this men-just-want sex argument: when I’m talking about having sex, a lot of men seem to be thinking about marriage. If men just want sex sometimes, and if going to have sex with a prostitute is “morally superior” because a man does not have to pretend he wants more than just sex, as he might have to do in order to get his date into the sack, then why is the cost of divorce even on the table as an argument for going to prostitutes?

As you might see, these two argument don’t fit snuggly together like a man and a woman in bed: on the one hand there is an assumption (by men?) that dating leads to marriage, on the other there is an assumption that dating is just an attempt (by men) to have a breezy sexual encounter while women always want to settle down and have babies and a serious relationship (not necessarily in that order).

This old dichotomy of men pretending to enjoy intimacy for the sake of sex and women pretending to enjoy sex for the sake of intimacy - just how well does it stand up these days? Was Cyndi Lauper wrong? Girl’s don’t just want to have fun?

A part of me thinks that there is a tender male ego or two among the respondents. Maybe it is just too, too painful for a man to even consider that a woman just wants to shag him for a bit of fun. Maybe a man likes to assume he is invariably the kind of man that every woman he shags wants to be with for the rest of her life. But maybe he is wrong.

I remember when I was in my early twenties (actually, I might have been twenty) and living life fairly freely and there was, of course, a few more than a few pangs of reformed Catholic guilt involved in acknowledging my prurient, libertine, sluttish lifestyle. I had a good friend, a girl, whom I spoke to once after a weekend of fairly sluttish behaviour, and I was sobbing self-indulgently about what a terrible bloke I was, just shagging away, and Kath said to me, “But Ev, I’d say a lot of these girls just want to f*** you too and don’t want a relationship at all.”

I remember being hurt by the comment at the time. I was still a sensitive little boy back then and my ego was expansive in its polarities. What was Kath trying to say, that women just wanted to shag me and then… leave me? Oh no! I thought. It could not be possible. Oh yes! I thought, I’m nothing more than a piece of meat!

Both these reactions were wrong and the truth was somewhere between a contextual validity and a generalised sham. But it was a comment that stuck in my head and the more I hung out in my twenties the more it seemed there were a lot of girls who did just want to f***. That’s not to say all girls are like this, but I think some men struggle to acknowledge that any girls are like this - ever; I think some men want to think that the sex always means something profound to a women, otherwise they might start to feel used themselves instead of just enjoying the freedom.

What I found interesting in the responses to the sex-versus-prostitute debate was that men assumed that women always wanted more than just sex from a date. Or, paradoxically, men assumed that dating ends in marriage (which suggests women are more successful in getting what they want from the dating game than men) and divorce (which suggests women don’t, in fact, know what they really want).

So you tell me, don’t women just want to enjoy some wild sex sometimes without wanting anything more from a man? Do men really think women always have their eye on the mating prize?

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