If women want to see prostitution in a positive light, why don;t they see it as a way to reward the less physically attractive male specimens, men who might have better personalities, who may be social misfits, who may be older or less fit than some of these player types.

I appreciated your defending me on the other thread about Dating Darwinism, but I have been reading your posts for a while, so I knew that this is where we part ways.

If I understand correctly, both of us hate the current power imbalance regarding sex, which creates an environment where men have to resort to deceptive and disgusting 'player' behavior in order to impress women into having sex with them. In response, you are willing to fully embrace the commodification of sex in favor of a situation where sex has a known value up front and is easily accessible to all.

My ideal is the opposite - a society where sex is equally valued by both genders and therefore taken out of the realm of commodity exchange. Both genders would indeed have to 'work' for sex in the sense of genuinely being interested in the other's personality and granting access to one's own personality in turn, rather than obtaining it through alienated, intrinsically worthless means such as money, status, or shallow 'player' tricks. And if someone happens to be ugly and not have an interesting personality... well, then maybe they don't deserve to breed. Scarcity confers value, after all.

I think you need to modify your theory - you can hardly lump me in with man-hating feminists. But I would also caution you to consider the consequences. As I said before, if women actually do have lower biological sex drives, then removing the stigma from prostitution would create a society where women exercise power over men sexually AND economically. From what I gather, you would be the last person to embrace such a state of affairs.

We can't overcome our meatness. We are what we are. A friend of mine once visited the very first commune: I think it was called Walden. It was founded on overcoming various propensities, such as jealousy: everyone would love everyone. Of course, when she arrived, it was a thicket of jealousies and power plays, which is our meaty nature.

Careful, we need to keep our definitions consistent. So far you seem to have used "meaty nature" to refer to a biological drive for physical pleasure. By this definition, the commune would theoretically be the epitome of "meatness", since physical pleasure would be freely exchanged and given without any attachment. The jealousy and power issues that arose are precisely the part of our human character that is beyond meatness. If sex was viewed as merely physical pleasure, why get jealous if your partner is giving it to someone else? After all, it doesn't in any way impede your ability to receive it. But clearly even among the hippies who likely repeated all the same slogans about free love and overcoming our Victorian prudishness, there persisted the intuition that there is a moral dimension to sex.

I was never arguing that sex can be fully divorced from issues of jealousy or power and freely given as in a commune; I simply believe that that we should strive to recover a degree of authentic human relations within our sexual views and practices, rather than fully accepting its commodification and surrendering it to the impersonal market. If you can maintain such an authentic relationship outside the confines of a traditional monogamous arrangement, more power to you, but as your example of the commune and other famous examples from history (such as Sartre and DeBeauvoir) show, it is difficult if not outright impossible.

Your view of relationships is cynical and bleak. I have found that equal relationships based on something resembling actual love are more the norm than the exception, but this may be simply because I am still fairly young, and as a grad student everyone in my social circle is equally poor. If you mostly associate with older corporate types, I can see why you would think as you do.

Ultimately, we are both pointing to the way the world currently is to make some argument about human nature. But I don't see how you can claim that our "meatness" is an essential part of human nature while denying that our tendency to restrict and moralize said "meatness" is equally so. There is no rule that says human nature must be singular and free of contradiction. If you think that, based on current behavior, it is ridiculous for me to envision a world where sex is not treated as a commodity, I equally think that, based on current behavior, it is ridiculous for you to envision a world where there are no moral hangups about sex and parents are totally fine with their daughters being prostitutes. Whose view is closer to reality?

Too tired from philosophical argument, so slipping back into snark mode. To all the women here who pretend to wish they could be prostitutes just to stubbornly make a ridiculous point, I'm calling your bluff. Don't give me that "oh if only I weren't so old and ugly" tripe - men are pretty desperate and there are plenty of fetishes out there, including granny ones. I'm sure you're not THAT ugly. At the very least you could shoot a video of yourself masturbating and sell it to some shady European porn site for a few bucks. After all, a few bucks is better than nothing, and it's not like you're giving anything away, right?