Another Fet blog post of mine from eight months ago. I must have been busy just after New Years'
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Usually, when I say something it makes sense. but sometimes
I got back and look and ... well ... let's look at this masterpiece of
mine, posted under the title "Pardon my skepticism?" three months ago.
There will be a semi-happy observation coming up at the end of all of
this ugliness, something for a guy to think about at a time when
MGTOW-inspired cynicism about feminine motives is so in fashion.
"Women AND men? How much money could there be in cam modeling for
men, and wouldn't the men have to reach some sort of impossible physical
standard to make any money at all, at this?
Even now, how difficult is it, really, for a woman to find men who
will let her see them naked? Why would a woman pay for that which she
can get for free?"
A few people responded, and they seemed very nice - and perhaps very
tactful. Now that I think about it, I'm wondering what I was thinking
about when I wrote that first post in that thread. My whole line of
argument was based on at least one faulty premise that I should have
known was faulty, because life had thrown the truth in my face. Like,
repeatedly. When I finished the coursework for my PhD in Mathematics, I
got to make a discovery, just not the kind one usually publishes in the
sort of magazines I read. :)
I came back to Chicago, deciding to work on my thesis at home for a
number of reasons, including those of health. I'm Jewish, and our
college town turned out to be in the middle of Klan country. Surprise!
Our synagogue got bombed and the police refused to investigate. I
decided that I could use a breather, and remembered (perhaps
conveniently) that I had debts to pay off (like my student loans from
undergrad). I went looking for a real job, and found that I wasn't
allowed to have one. Long story - there was the issue of
"overqualification" because I already had my masters, I was stuck in the
"no experience, no job" cycle, and then there was the fact that a lot
of the people I was meeting in HR seemed to be under the influence of
some kind of controlled sustance or another. In at least one case, a few
of us were fairly sure that the substance was Cocaine. Job seeking can
be a nasty experience.
Especially when one doesn't have a phone because one's father has
decided that it is a luxury that one doesn't need, forcing one to put
his telephone number on one's resumes and job applications, and he then
turns the answering machine off at his place because he does what he
wants, meaning that when the employers finally call, they can't leave
messages. I probably should mention that my father was a child beating
narcissist. I got bigger, but he didn't stop being a narcissist. He just
replaced his love of physical brutality with extortion, manipulation
and sabotage of various sorts.
I got some more coursework, this time in Electrical Engineering, but
my job search continued to go nowhere, because now I was one of the long
term unemployed. I scraped together as much of a living as I could out
of tutoring, work as a prep cook, substitute teaching - every lousy
little temp job I could find and had a halfway decent chance of
surviving. I continued looking for work, in what free time I had.
One day, I got home to my shabby little apartment building, and found
that I was being approached by somebody who seemed to understand my
personal financial crisis more than she should have and she had a deal
for me, a job I could get from her with only a minimal amount of
relevant work experience, if you want to call it that. A lot of people
who've been to grad school probably already know what I'm referring to,
having had this sort of meeting, themselves.
If I had said "yes", I would have been an escort for a wealthy (but
not extremely well educated) female client, who wanted to purchase
somebody who was capable of being discreet. The client got her money
through inheritance, not through her own work. In the upper class
settings in which she would mingle, she ended up feeling that she was on
the receiving end of snobbery. While definitely not unattractive,
physically, she was short and of stocky build, pretty but not in a
conventional way. This left her with a type of boyfriend she wanted, but
couldn't get through conventional means, because this type of boy would
almost never ask her out - tall, thin and a professor (or something
like one). But that which would not come her way of its own accord,
could always be purchased.
"Escort" in this case is just a polite way of saying "prostitute",
albeit a prostitute with a very limited client list and a broader range
of services provides (not just intercourse, but companionship and the
maintenance of an illusion). This woman had already solicited (and
received) services from one of my classmates, I'm not sure how
consensually (we'll get to that). She was ready to trade up. At the risk
of sounding immodest, I was both taller and more attractive than her
previous purchase, and better educated. She liked the idea of this
trade. I was rather scandalized by it, myself, perhaps more so than I
would be today, because as far as I was concerned, I was not that kind
of boy. I turned her down. This shouldn't have been such a big deal for
her, because grad students often will do the kind of work she wanted,
and I'm sure she could have found somebody better looking than me, but
her response to my declining of her offer was in no way a ladylike one.
Or normal.
I moved without leaving a forwarding address, for a number of reasons
which we can go into later, and she had somebody track me down. Hired a
private investigator to find my unpublished address, which he did,
leaving her knocking at my front door, which seemed rather indiscreet to
me, at the time. It's hard for me to be 100% sure of what happened
after that, but I can make a good guess, because the heiress was willing
to help clue me in. She tried to blackmail me into providing her for
free, with that which I had been unwilling to sell her, reminding me
that what to her was loose change, to the right people in the university
would be a large enough bribe to get me expelled, and sure enough, I
was being called in for a series of hearings over what were clearly
trumped up charges. Nobody said no to her in her mental world, but
that's not a world into which I wished to move, even temporarily, until
my time to be replaced came.
The story gets strange and unpleasant after that, in a way that takes
us off the point, so I'll cut it short. The good news was that one of
my brothers soon finished law school, he knew people, and the whole
thing got dealt with, without any laws being broken by our side. She
didn't do any prison time, even though what she did (at the least) was
stalking, but I did get an order of protection out against her. There
was that. I haven't been bothered by her, since. I don't know if she has
tried to buy any more engineers, lately, or mathematicians, though I
suppose we're probably more available now, than ever, thanks to
outsourcing. Who knows?
People have done and endured a lot worse than live the life of a kept
man or woman, over the last few years, just to stay alive. If that's
the route one chooses to go, I will say that there is something to be
said for that choice. It seems to be a more pleasant and certainly more
easily survivable one than that faced by the usually less educated
streetwalkers. "So, you're saying that if one wants to be a hooker, one
should study hard and stay in school, Books?", somebody will ask. Yes,
it's a fine, uplifting message, isn't it? I'd like to give you a better
one, but given the realities of the world in which we live, I'm not sure
it's always there to be found.
People get killed doing some of the low paid, risky work we do to
stay on the "straight and narrow", so even if the PTA wouldn't approve,
I'm not sure that's a bad message to walk away with. I will say one
thing for that choice, and it's one that sometimes makes me wonder if I
made the right choice - if I had said "yes", I would have been out from
under the thumb of that narcissistic father of mine a lot sooner. and
avoided a lot of unpleasantness, some of which could have cut my life
very short. I'm left with the strange thought that maybe I turned my
nose up at an easy route out of the troubles my father's actions were
causing me, because my father would not have approved. But given that my
father was deliberately sabotaging my career at that point, just for
the lulz, why did I want his approval? Why would I care about what the
bastard would have thought?
How many sexual partners do most of us have these days, anyway? Would
having one more have really been such a big deal, even if it was
somebody terrible? I honestly don't know, and I wonder about the choice I
made. I suppose, given the stalking, she did seem very unstable, and
one shouldn't stick one's dick into crazy, but my other alternatives
weren't clearly any better. I'll get into that, later.
When I started to argue as if only men purchased sex, I was being
ridiculous and now I wonder why. I know better than to argue such a
point, because I know it's not true. I even know why it's not true, and
that's a realization that can take me to something a lot less messed up
that which I had just started to describe.
The basic truth of sex work is this: while the usual assumption is
that the client pays for sex, that's not exactly true, most of the time.
Really, anybody who wants to have sex can get it almost instantly. Some
people (mostly men) will loudly deny the truth of this, but think about
it. If one of those sexually frustrated 18-35 year old "nice guys" one
keeps running into in the clubs went up to somebody's 70 year old
widowed grandmother and made himself available to her, do you think
she'd say no? Not likely. Make her a 90 year old, and that gets even
less likely. The reality is that he can get sex, he just can't get the
sex he wants.
No, what the client pays for isn't the sex, it's the fantasy. The
client pays in order to be with somebody who usually say no, hitting the
sheets with somebody outside of his or her own "weight class", as I
heard somebody put it. In this, I could find one happy thought that came
out of a degrading (and not unprecedented) experience. A lot of men
drive themselves into craziness and despair, asking themselves what
women want, and falling prey to illusions through which they fail to
see.
Consider the case of the well known, hyper-buff Gulf War veteran who
was written about, I believe by the "Honest Courtesan" (of whom I do not
think highly). He tried to sell his body in a Nevada brothel and gave
up, after finding only one buyer. The Honest Courtesan, in true
ultra-right fashion, offered this anecdote as proof that there was no
such thing as a gigolo (raising the question of why the word even
existed) and that the market value of male sexuality was nil. Bloggers
in the manosphere, more than a few of whom seem to be emotional
masochists, clung to this conclusion in joyful despair, saying that the
incident showed that no man could ever hope to catch a woman's eye, and
that AWALT "'all women are like that"), valuing men only for their
money.
This is nonsense.
While what i was getting out of my well-heeled stalker certainly
wasn't love, it did have the virtue of beating the life out of a
depressing theory for me, to such an extent that the theory can't get to
me much, at all. She was spending money that she wasn't going to
recover doing this, and as she had nothing but inheritance income, she
could make no profit by impressing anybody. An argument that she was
operating out of mercenary, financial motives would be an insane one.
For the matter, given that I've spent my life stuck below the poverty
line, if, as the MGTOWS say, there were no NAWALTS, then how would I
have ever lost my virginity? It is absurd.
So many despairing single men, seeing that article, will take one
look at the guy (I think he was a navy seal), and say "look at how the
guy is built, we could never measure up to that guy, physically."
They're right, of course. They couldn't, and neither could I. "So if no
women are lusting after that guy", they'll ask, "what chance is there
for the rest of us."
Well, strange as this might sound (and really is), geting stalked can
be seen as a source of hope, because who is going to try to steal that
which is of no value to her? Reality check, and people who've seen me at
local events will vouch for this - while I'm about 6'3", I only weigh
about 180 pounds at this point, judging by the looseness of some of my
old clothes this morning. Nobody would consider me buff. I'm in decent
condition, but I'm not physically perfect. I don't need to be, and
neither do men, in general.
What one needs to do is work on all aspects of oneself, not just the
physical. Our would-be nevada man-whore might have been built like a
Greek god, but he was also a lunkhead working in tacky environment. Sex
on terms like that is a male fantasy, not a female one. Women want more
than that, and if we listen to them, listen to the ones who do know how
to behave like civilized people, we'll find ourselves presented with a
questions like "when and how did we forget that we wanted more than
that, too" and "how did our expectations ever get so low."
No, we don't need to spend forever, pounding away at our muscles,
just to be noticed (perhaps even be noticed a little too much). We need
just to live our own best, fullest lives and stop worrying about the
fears that certain people will encourage in us. As for the crazies I
keep meeting, sure, a little fear in those cases might be a good idea,
but we can talk about that, later. Going to places you genuinely want to
be, doing things you want to do instead of chaining yourself to a
weight machine hurting yourself, and getting more in return - does that
sound so bad?
The world is a nasty place, but not as nasty or as hopeless as some people might get one to believe.
