Girls in the Business: The Lessons That The Stars of the Sex Industry Can Teach 21st Century Women

Posted by Chana Goldstein on May 13, 2013 in Pink Issues, Uncategorized | 0 comments

Take a lesson from the girls whose business it is – appearances can be deceiving – so is it really worth putting out for anything less than the ‘real thing’?

Take a tour around a movie set and, instead feeling like you are in the middle of the action with your favourite stars, you will quickly see how easy it is to fool a person into thinking something is real. Two fascinating stories philosophically clashed on our newsfeed this week however, this is more than a matter of semantics or intellectual debate. The point they raise could affect us dramatically if we can come to terms with what is real and what is an illusion.

In an article on Feministing.com contributor Sesali Bowen claims that there is no such thing as ‘hook-up culture’ saying that it:

[Consensual] Sex is sex

Ms Bowen claims that the act is absolute. There are no degrees. There is no context. A hook-up is no less or more valuable than one’s wedding night and vise-versa.

However, new documentary, Aroused, looks at the lives of 15 of the most well known female stars of sex industry. While I haven’t watched it, CNN quoted some stunning truths, one of which is extremely relevant – these stars of the sex industry see ‘off-duty sex’ as very different to their ‘day jobs’.

While Ms Bowen claims sex is sex – there are no ‘types’ or ‘quality’. Its the exact opposite. There is no such thing as just ‘sex’. It is an act that is completely defined by its context. The connection it creates between two people can be as real as a 100 storey Manhattan skyscraper or can be as illusory as the plywood of a movie set.

Does this mean that we can have copious quantities of ‘movie set’ sex without compromising the real intimacy? Ermmm, no. The actresses themselves say that they worry about how their work affects their ‘real’ relationships. While what they do on-set and what happens in their own bedrooms are very different, one has an affect on another.

Sorry, Ms Bowen, sex is NOT sex. Sex is qualitative even on more than a physical level.

For too long we, as society, have been pushing to remove context and (beyond physical) quality from sex claiming that what it ‘means’ or how it happens doesn’t matter. Not only has this left us with an entrenched ‘just get over it’ culture when it doesn’t happen (or end) exactly the way we want it to, it has left us doing intellectually ridiculous things like equating the images and stories of the sex industry with real life interactions, dismissing our bedroom antics as ‘just a bit of fun’ or overemphasizing them as the be-all-and-end-all of our relationships.

Take a lesson from the girls whose business it is – appearances can be deceiving – so is it really worth putting out for anything less than what you know to be the ‘real thing’?

Sex and Lies: Why Can’t We Just Be Honest With Women About What’s Really Going On

Posted by Chana Goldstein on Apr 30, 2013 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

Lying to my daughter doesn’t make her more liberated. It just leaves her unprotected from things that, honestly, don’t give a ‘clap’ (excuse the pun) about the new sexual agendas of society.

“The good news is that all STIs are preventable and most are curable.”

This bold statement was made by Gail Bolan of the CDC. Her article on CNN starts with some sobering statistics such as the fact that 24,000 North American women become infertile every year due to STIs (sexually transmitted infections). While this statistic alone is so scary it makes most women start to think ‘it could be me’, what is more shocking is actually her bold ‘good news’ statement that all STIs are preventable. She is technically right, however, it would mean the end of the human race as we know it. Let’s explain.

Well…if he wears a condom I can’t catch anything right?

The failure rate of a condom hovers around 5% if one masters perfect technique every time. Of course, in the heat of the moment, small details like performing the suggested ‘air pillow’ test or making sure he adhered to optimum condom storage conditions get a little lost in the moment. The reality is that a condom (or more likely ‘condom operator’) fails 11% of the time. Let’s add to the mix the fact that NEWSFLASH…..Condoms don’t protect against a number of serious STIs that actually don’t even require full, or even close to, intercourse to be transmitted. The short story is that there are lots of things that can drastically reduce STIs but Gail is wrong. We are as far from preventing all STIs as we are to collectively and globally embracing abstinent lives.

On a short trawl of the web I came across this gem of an article from none other than Mens Health Magazine. While Gail says that young women put themselves at risk by having ‘multiple partners’, her answer is condoms and screening. Mens Health Says:

Prevention [of any given STD]: Mutually monogamous relationship with an uninfected partner; using a condom can help decrease your risk but wont prevent it.

Forgive me but the women’s equivalent Cosmo is telling me ”Our Bodies Have Built In STD Protection” (March 1) and that, according to a new sex calculator, one particular journalist has slept with ’2 million guys’ so we should all have ‘incentive to tell your guy to wear a condom’ (March 11). In this case, even with perfect condom usage – she was exposed over  100,000 times!

Why why why can we tell men to engage in monogamous relationships and that condoms are not the be-all-and-end-all of ‘safe sex’ yet even the CDC continues to lie to women about the realities of our current situation?

Lying to my daughter doesn’t make her more liberated. It just leaves her unprotected from things that, honestly, don’t give a ‘clap’ (excuse the pun) about the new sexual agendas of society.