sex for sale

Prostitution is such an ugly word. Such negative connotations, so many snap judgments in the spaces between the syllables… I used to think it was an ugly phenomenon, a blemish on the face of society, something tucked away in alleys and the shadowy places of the world. When I lived in Dhaka, Bangladesh, I’d walk out my front door at night and see the same girl standing on the corner, 25 meters from my front door, in the wealthiest neighborhood in the country, waiting for tricks. She couldn’t have been older than 12, face painted in garish shades, always with too much lipstick and a vacant look in her eyes… Looking at her was devastating, a single glance was a portrait in iniquity and desperation, defiling any sense of purity or morality you could possibly cultivate in a place like Dhaka. Seeing a girl younger than me turning tricks for a living put things in perspective…

But my perspective has changed with age…For better or worse, I can’t tell, I try not to put value judgments on what I see anymore. But I see sex for sale everywhere…and in Brazil, from what I’ve seen and heard, it’s just the way it is. I apologize to anyone reading this looking for the history, the culture, the things I’ve been riffing on for the last two weeks. Spend enough time somewhere and you start thinking about more than the mystique and heritage of a place, and about the actual people who inhabit it today… And what I see here in Brazil is a society so stratified that it’s reduced a large section of its population (aka underprivileged women) to selling themselves to survive. People pay for sex here all the time... From the very highest echelons of society to the favela dwellers, in this culture, you can make money giving it up. Sex is treated as a commodity, and bodies are bankable assets…

Is that wrong?

I never feel more American than when I’m passing self-righteous judgment on other cultures, speaking in platitudes about justice and what’s right and wrong and how life ought to be and how people ought to behave, to someone who never asked for an American opinion in the first place. So I try not to do it, I’m in no position to claim awareness of some kind of absolute for all the different people in the world. Besides, it’s not like America’s insistence on public Puritanism has led to a more righteous society, if anything it’s led to greater hypocrisy… I saw a great bumper sticker recently that sums up how I feel about America perfectly: “Waging War for Peace is like Fucking for Chastity.” Right? Right…

Anyhow, I bring this up because the opportunity to have sex for money presented itself a couple times this week. I, however, had my bank freeze my account cause they apparently think it’s suspicious that I’ve started spending my money in Brazil. So I’ve been colossally broke this whole week, and it’s been a pain in the ass. I’m not sure that I have it in me to pay for sex, but I would’ve liked to flirt, or at least buy a gorgeous Brasileira a drink, and I couldn’t even do that… how’s the Busta Rhymes song go? “Got no woman and you got no car? Then you got no woman, and there you are.” Plus I don’t have a phone, so making any kind of a connection with someone was damn unlikely. But I got some crude hints from passing strangers, in Portuguese no less, so I might have completely misunderstood, but I doubt it… the way those hips were cocked, they couldn’t mean much else… and there were plenty of spots around town where you can go and pick up someone looking to get paid. Is it right? Is it wrong? I don’t know, but it’s simply the way of life here.

Brazil, like many other countries, has created an economic system where many of the people have no specific skill sets or education, and the only value they can manifest is through selling the one asset they have, their bodies. That’s the way of things in a lot of places, actually, in Thailand, in the former Russian republics along the Baltic Sea, in a lot of countries with limited opportunities, women tend to turn to the oldest profession to get by… Although a lot of people would paint this story in tragic shades (and it is horrific, and there is sex-slavery, and there are terrible atrocities in that world), I get the sense here in Brazil it’s not something people wring their hands over much. This country as a whole has more serious problems than people getting paid to have sex… Although perhaps that’s the manifestation the deeper issues facing this society…

But I’m not a critic. This place is what it is, and no tourist who strolls through for two weeks should be dishing out overarching criticisms like this… I’m just observing…