Thoughts on a disturbing SF trope.
I don’t think that prostitution should be illegal, but neither should it be encouraged.
11 thoughts on “Space Hookers Must Die”
Comments are closed.
Thoughts on a disturbing SF trope.
I don’t think that prostitution should be illegal, but neither should it be encouraged.
Comments are closed.
Why?
It’s called the worlds oldest profession for a reason: No society has eliminated it.
And I agree: I neither condone nor condemn it.
It should be legal, but rare…right?
The protagonist of “Firefly” is a lapsed Christian who consistently opposes prostitution, and he lives in a society which is clearly not utopian.
And in a frisson of cognitive dissonance, is in love with a prostittue.
Write good stories and ignore people who tell you to do otherwise, whatever their motives.
I recently had the misfortune to read a book where they took “Make Love, Not War” literally, and all women were drafted at 18 to serve a couple years in a sex corps to keep the peace, under the idea that a free and easy sexual outlet was all it took to quell man’s violent nature. (This was only a background element, not the main focus of the story, but on the other hand, the primary plot about laser light shows being the most highly regarded form of art wasn’t particularly compelling either. And don’t get me started on how unlikable the characters were.)
Well, until he got to the laser light-show biz, I was seriously thinking this was a William Barton work.
So, the author thinks that “sex for money” is intrinsically bad, evil, dirty and Double-plus UnGood. *Whatever* YMMV…
I was reading Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy where he was writing about the French troops in Indochina fighting the Viet Minh. He was a French veteran of WW2 and an independent journalist that ‘bummed about’ the theater. What always amused me was an anecdote about the Ouled Naïl tribeswomen that earned their dowries by being prostitutes — it seems that the French military abbreviation has the same letters for ‘Mobile Field Brothel’ and ‘Independent Mobile Field Battalion’ There is some question, as he said wryly, which type of ‘reinforcement’ that rankers would like to see arriving. On a more practical note that often served as extra nurse’s assistants when treating casualties in the field….
On the other hand, there is the Imperial Japanese armed forces policy of forcibly conscripting ‘Comfort Girls’ from places like Formosa or Korea. Or the practice of ‘selling children’ into lifelong indentured servitude in China, Korea and Japan. My brother knew a sensei that had been an ‘extra’ peasant son sold to a dojo, but what of the unwanted girls children sold to brothels…?
I guess my sticking point is at involuntary servitude, *not* actually what people may actually decide to do for a living.
Lots of SF is just stories about the American west circa 1850, but with rockets instead of trains or ships and lasers instead of guns. So, you get lots of men looking to strike it rich alone, and very few women willing to live on the frontier.
Prostitution is a natural result of that disparity. The alternatives are constant fights to the death over the women, or mass celibacy. Humans being human, prostitution is the least unacceptable option for people involved.
Pioneering is physically demanding and often unpleasant work. Any occupation with those characteristics tends to be extremely lopsidedly male in its demographics. One always finds brothels and freelance hookers on frontiers. Do, as they say, the math.
Preaching moralizing is not going to sway my opinion of legal sex work. I don’t think much of it (tbh, the former and the latter), but I’ve been to Amsterdam, slummed in the Place Pigalle, and knew the streets of NYC well. Frankly I think Amsterdam has the best approach, with safety buttons in the booths, prophylactic requirements, and regular health checks.
I have never personally partaken of the services of a prostitute, but I begrudge no one else the choices they make in that regard. I regard sex between two individuals who care about each other to be the best, while in prostitution it is just a mechanical act devoid of real emotion. There are mechanical acts devoid of real emotion that are way, way cheaper than prostitutes.
To each their own.
An AI sex robot will free me from the tyranny of the situational human female libido algorithm.
“Yes, we are married, but you don’t have access to me whenever you want.”
Okay. You’re fired.
Male birth control. Got it.
Got options.