Wifely Services

The existence of prostitution in all its forms lowers the value of wifely sexual services,

This is a Phrase from Ann E. Cudd’s Analyzing Oppression which has stuck in my brain ever since I read it a few weeks ago.

I don’t plan to talk about the book, other than to say that it had a number of interesting ideas and was either 2x too long or 5x too short. I can’t decide (fortunately, I never attempted a career as an editor) 

This mental stickiness was enabled by having read Kimberly Kay Hoang’s Dealing in Desire immediately prior.

Hoang’s book contained this quote

I only had to sleep with two men to make what would take me a month to make [at the shoe factory].

Which certainly sounds a lot better to me than working at a Nike/Adidas factory. Hoang found that none of the women were forced to work and could decline clients at any time. Her description of the financial arrangements reinforced this finding: the bars didn’t pay the women, bars made money from drinks and the women didn’t share their earnings with the bars who provided a safe, seemingly enjoyable place to meet and screen potential clients

The Phrase has so much going on, it’s impossible for me to pick a single best entry point, so I’ll just start at the beginning.

The existence of prostitution, so prostitution’s existence in and of itself devalues. However, it’s reasonable to assume that prostitution existed before marriage, or at least started concurrently. Wikipedia dates marriage back to 2350 BC(E) ~= the same time as prostitution. You’d think that whatever discount gets applied to wifely sexual services by the existence of prostitution has been baked in from the get go, or perhaps, in commodifying sexual services prostitution suddenly assigned a value to wifely sexual services (kind of like fencing off the commons (aka enclosure) and grazing rights)

in all it’s forms is perhaps more puzzling, in its implication that the wifely sexual services can satisfy every need of each wifely being’s partner. It seems beyond the realm of current biology/surgery to do that. If the partner of a particular wifely being has a preference for multiple different types of genitals in their sexual partners, how is the need for engagement with one genital flavor commensurate with an engagement with others, since AFAIK current technology doesn’t allow for immediate/on the spot genital rearrangement. I would also think that a “forced” (by privation, if nothing else) substitution of wifely genitals for the “in the moment” preferred genitals at a time when they’re not wanted would actually lower the value of the wifely sexual services of the wifely being even at other times when that genital set of the wifely being is of the preferred flavor. Prototypically, male and female genitals are markedly different in look, feel, and taste, so I don’t think that the claim that they’re not readily substitutable is controversial.

Similarly, it’s difficult for me to see how BDSM practices map into this, particularly those that may involve no physical contact, e.g., findom

lowers the value I guess I’m not clear on what value means here, since I can’t conceive of assigning a value without also positing an axis. One might value their newborn more than life itself, but probably would still not value them particularly highly as a statistician. Usually I’d think that for something to devalue something else, it must share some characteristic with it. Unless prostitution, like a concussion, deadens our overall ability to fully experience things. If the argument is that prostitution, by its existence reduces the desirability of wifely sexual services, due to every wifely partner’s senses being deadened it would be difficult to rule that out. However, since everyone currently alive who is married was married while prostitution existed, the discount again seems baked in. 

So, OK, it’s heteronormative and especially prudish, but what’s really going on here. I don’t feel able to ascertain any particular motivation about the author herself. Not only is she well respected, but as I said, I find many of her ideas interesting. So, I’m going to come at it from a bit of a different angle: positing a model of sex as a vessel, rather than sex as a physical act. If you think sex as a physical act, it becomes analogous to a sport, where it’s reasonable to pay for trainers, sparring partners etc., in which it doesn’t devalue your relationship to your teammates if you pay for training/sparring partners, although the whole team might want the trainer.

On the other hand, if you consider the sexual act as the vessel, that holds your hopes and dreams for one of the most important relationships in your life (I say “one of” since parent/child relationships seem the most important. After all divorcing (metaphorically) your parent/child is much, much rarer than divorcing your spouse) it makes some sense.

Since the vessel becomes contaminated if it’s been used to hold something impure (I’m writing this during the covid-19 pandemic, so contamination is a ready-to-hand metaphor), this impurity devalues the vessel. Although I might be stretching here, once I read that Phrase, I felt that that, in the rest of the book, whenever sex came up there was always a puritanical feel to it. Even so, the conflating the reduction of a puritanical purity of the marital sex with lowering the value of it seems odd to me. Purity seems manifold while value although, having the potential to be measured along many axes, is transactional even when it isn’t monetary.

And that’s the nub, prostitution is primarily transactional. Sure, as with any retail transaction there’s limits. I want a donut that’s good to eat and even though I don’t care about your politics, I do care about your sanitation (corona everywhere). I simply can’t grasp how a transactional purchase downgrade (devalues) a long-term relationship, even if you had a pact of exclusivity around genital rubbing (or at least parameters of genital rubbing), it’s more a breach of the contract rather than a devaluation of what has been contracted.