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• Thursday, December 4, 2008 04:52 PM

  Sex without love?

  Ideally, it seems that even if people are having sex without love that they ought to at least be able to achieve towards their partner a feeling of goodwill and reasonable respect.

  The whole business end exchange with strangers would seem to preclude this.

  Interestingly, my latest issue of Scientific American Mind has an article on why men buy sex. What surprised me is that -- after being told over and over here at Broadsheet that "men pay prostitutes to go away" -- this article says that a surprising number of men are repeat customers of the same prostitute. One study by sociologist Janet Lever found that "more than two thirds of devotees used the services of a particular prostitutes more than 50 times. One in four had sex with the same prostitute more than 100 times" (Mind).

  So what's up with that? It sounds almost like a relationship. If what men are really seeking is variety, why the repeat customers?

  Mind speculates that "real relationships with women are risky and complicated, features that men don't always want and cannot always handle." Moreover that "an ordinary female date might reject a man or happen to be tired, distant, or not in the mood."

  So whatever these particular men are seeking, it surely isn't unpredictability.

  A study by Dieter Kleiber said that there was a sort of romantic john who was seeking "the ideal of love in a fee-for-service setting."

  How sad is that?

  —AKA Smith Read AKA Smith's other letters
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