Amidst the stress of Holy Week and the approaching end of the semester, I made a brief escape this afternoon. A quick call to “Joyce” arranged an appointment with “Sara.” After returning home to shower and change clothes, I drove to the city and walked down an alley by the river to Sara’s incall. It’s a cozy loft discreetly located — perfect for a late afternoon frolic. A knock on the door and she let me in.
I’ve seen Sara about a dozen times. With her long blonde hair and tight, athletic body, she makes for an entertaining playmate. She’s quite sweet, but she doesn’t reveal much of her personality. Halting attempts at conversation with her have gone nowhere. Joyce advertises her as “GFE,” and while Sara may provide a lot of services on the menu, she doesn’t really fit that (admittedly vague) description for me. Little emotional intimacy is shared. Our encounters are marked by raw physicality. There are times when I seek a genuine personal connection with an escort. Other times, frankly, I just want to fuck. Sara is the perfect companion for those times.
Today she met me in an outfit that was totally slutty, advertising her sexual availability. She offered me a glass of water. Few words were spoken before we were stripped naked, French kissing on the bed.
“Let’s fuck,” she said sweetly.
Sara’s instrumental, impersonal approach to sex (even her moans were obviously feigned) is erotic in its own fashion. Having little sense of her as a person, I consented to her sexual self-objectification. She had been reduced to a “fucking machine,” an assemblage of tits and ass and pussy which was designed solely for my sexual gratification.
The prostitute does not satisfy the need for a woman or even the demand for a particular sort of woman. She accommodates the client’s desires for a woman who ceases to exist when she is no longer wanted. A man seeks a prostitute in order to avoid the inconvenience of sexual relations with another subject. Indeed, he pays her to disguise the subjectivity expressed through her individual needs, interests, and desires. With a prostitute, a man can have sex when and how he wants it…. The consequences she bears for their sexual encounter need not concern him.
– Yolanda Estes, “Moral Reflections on Prostitution”
But, as Kant and others have asserted, isn’t all sex ultimately objectifying? In his Lectures on Ethics, Kant writes that sexual activity is inherently objectifying because the participants use each other as means to an end, which is sexual satisfaction. “[A]s soon as the person is possessed, and the appetite sated, they are thrown away, as one throws away a lemon after sucking the juice from it.” Sex also entails self-objectification, since in the throes of sexual passion one abandons rationality and descends to the level of animal instinct, using oneself as a mere means for sexual pleasure. Sara and I merely made explicit what is implicit in all sexual activity. I used her to obtain an orgasm. She used me to obtain $300. We fucked without pretense.
Lutheran Guilt 