The Oldest Profession
Good day, Henry here. Our local paper carried a large picture on the front page of an attractive woman and the caption: “Ex prostitute says johns are fighting their own demons as much as sex workers.”
Later in the article she is quoted as saying:
“Judges can become johns by night. So can businessman, doctors, and politicians….There’s judges out there, there’s lawyers, there’s everybody. There’s doctors, there’s preachers, everybody even politicians and women….It’s the power. They want control over things…It boils down to they don’t love themselves no more and so they take it out on the weak like prostitutes and drug addicts.”
She knows more about this side of life than most of us will ever know. She is convinced that it is all about power and that is certainly true in abusive relationships. These women obviously deserve all the genuine help they can get.
Maybe a little bit of learning doesn’t do us any favors, but I am intrigued by two things that come to mind. It sticks in my memory that one of the Roman Emperors in an effort to stop prostitution in Rome banished the prostitutes. As I remember the story, 50,000 women left and the city could not function without them so he had to let them back in. I don’t know if it is true or not but it always struck me as a good yarn.
I do know that throughout the ancient world there were temples to the feminine goddess serviced by temple prostitutes. Apparently that was a relatively elevated profession quite different from our poor streetwalker.
The ex-prostitute in this morning’s paper is pushing us to legalize prostitution. She says it will make the work much safer and healthier. If she is able to get prostitution legalized which I cannot see happening in our world, she will be bringing back prostitution as a valuable profession. If, as she believes, it would make the work safer and easier, it seems like it would be a good idea. It would certainly be a change, a this has been a public health issue for, well, thousands of years.
Psychologically this is about what we do with our shadow, how the bad stuff gets projected outside of ourselves and focused on people like addicts and streetwalkers. As a culture we feel purer and more free if we are able to blame our problems and weaknesses on some subclass in our world.