So over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, they’re having yet another invigorating and insightful discussion of economics. Not micro- or macroeconomics. Pussyconomics.
Stalgrim starts off the discussion with a call for more affordable, er, pussy:
The pussy is too damn high!
Demonspawn, a noted pussyconomist, explains the importance of having a well-regulated pussy market:
When another Redditor claims that the pussy market is already heavily regulated, what with prostitution being illegal and divorce laws and all that, Demonspawn gently corrects these common misunderstandings of pussyconomical thought.
“Perhaps you don’t understand what the pussy market is.”
“Perhaps you don’t understand what the pussy market is.”
“Perhaps you don’t understand what the pussy market is.”
Mammotheers! Your challenge for today is to see how many times you can work “perhaps you don’t understand what the pussy market is” into conversation. BONUS POINTS if you precede this comment with the words “au contraire,” or, even better, “au contraire, mon frère.”
The charming 5th_Law_of_Robotics suggests that we may be headed for pussypocalypse, pussyconomically speaking.
![5th_Law_of_Robotics 3 points 8 hours ago I've heard concerns that we're rapidly approaching peak-pussy. I dismiss those as alarmist. Surely when we get near that point some sustainable alternative will have been developed. /perhaps some sort of corn based solution exists . . . permalink save parent report give gold reply [–]Demonspawn 1 point 2 hours ago I've heard concerns that we're rapidly approaching peak-pussy. It's more like a pussy bubble. The government that has been artificially increasing the price/value of pussy collapses and we return to a more natural market.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/peakpuss1.png?resize=512%2C308&ssl=1)
I’m honestly a little baffled by this discussion. My own pussy supply is quite stable. Except sometimes when it gets bored and bites me.
Hmm…Licensure system for sex-workers?
…But yeah, legalizing it the way Germany has done isn’t doing what I’d hoped legalizing would do, which is to protect sex workers from abuse.
I mean, I’d like for a sex worker to be able to call the police and file charges if someone hurts him or her, right?
But I’d also like for people to not be economically forced to do sex work if that’s something they find repellent.
Also, if I ever end up doing sex work myself, I really don’t want a criminal record.
Then you’d love what Sweden is doing. Those working in prostitution are not criminalized. Only pimps, traffickers and johns are. The happy upshot of the Swedish sex-buying law is that people in prostitution feel safer calling the cops on bad johns, and both the frequency and the severity of assaults against them have decreased. The social safety net there is better, too, so people can confidently exit the sex trade when they’re fed up. Also, the mafias taking advantage of impoverished girls in Eastern Europe have fucked off out of there, because the market for their wares has collapsed. Men there don’t want to be lawbreakers, go figure. The few women still selling sex in Sweden are almost all locals.
It’s so successful that the same law has since been adopted in Norway, Iceland and Finland, and even the Dutch are looking at adopting it, because they’re plagued with organized crime themselves. The push for something like it is on in Germany, too. Of course, the local pimp lobby is big and rich and well organized (and heavily connected with politicians, many of whom no doubt frequent their establishments, ugh), so it’s gonna be one hell of a fight.
Haven’t read the comments yet, just wanted to say that I don’t think I’ve ever laughed this hard at a WHTM post. “The pussy is too damn high!” “pussyconomist!” “peak pussy!”. Thanks David, I really needed the laugh.
Well, lemme see…
Merriam-Webster Online has “mook” down as “a foolish, insignificant, or contemptible person”, dating back to about 1930.
And the Urban Dictionary has it as meaning various things along the lines of asshole, loser, self-centred adolescent punk, and drunken fratboy.
Yeah, I’d say that all pretty much fits.
Did that guy really say what I think he said?
http://imgur.com/onOi58X
[I posted this before but it seems even more appropriate here.(To be honest, it is probably appropriate on almost any thread involving things said by the manosphere.)]
Anyone up from some slow motion cats? I’ve got nothing else to add.
Freemage
Hrm. I’m not sure how I feel about this. The problem with talk like this is that it places sex work as an inherently bad thing. There are many undesirable jobs out there. Stuff people wouldn’t ever ever do if they didn’t have the choice between that and starvation. Placing sex work below those, and apparently everything else does nothing help sex workers. It basically says they’re the lowest of the low unless they’re in it for leisure work.
I’m not saying anybody should be forced into a job they find immoral. But just because someone is doing it to actually put food on the table, doesn’t mean they are going against their morals. It doesn’t mean they have hit rock bottom. If sex work was legal here and sex workers were actually protected, it would be higher than rock bottom as far as jobs go in my personal book, but it still wouldn’t be “for fun” or “preferable”. It’d be a job. Not my dream job. Work. To put food on the table. And still not something to be judged.
WWTH:
That kitty video is wonderful. I like when the Jaguar is jogging and looks all hardcore, and then the domestic kitty’s face has ALL THE SERIOUS but his jog is so much lighter and bouncier and it cracked me up.
I’m still giggling a bit.
Both of them leap with the same ferocity though, but that jog. 🙂
I would LOVE to be the econ professor who gets handed an essay on the “pussy marketplace”.
(Mod sidenote: while in most cases we’re leery of people using the “p” word, I’m assuming that we’re letting it slide for this thread. Unless there are objections? And of course, if someone starts abusing it, let us know!)
Yup. In a marketplace that values love and kindness and intellect and romance and other actual human qualities, these guys know they can’t compete. So they piss and moan about how unfair it is that women aren’t being forced – by economics or custom or violence – to put up with them.
No, but they once read some guy on r/libertarian describing a Ron Paul speech he heard one time, and that’s way better than an econ degree from some liberal PC ~university~!
I was just saying this to my partner, especially referring to that claim that 10% of the men are hoarding 90% of the pussy: I love how this is acceptable to libertarian MRAs when the thing being hoarded is money, but when it’s sex suddenly there should be fair and equal distribution. It’s almost like the only consistent thing about their politics is that things should benefit them in some way.
Score one for the theorists who claim that visiting sex workers DOES NOT improve men’s attitudes toward women. There may be some merit to the theory that visiting sex workers only reinforces the belief that we exist for men’s enjoyment.
Tessa, I get what you’re saying. But, for a lot of us, it’s a little harder to disconnect from the stigma than it seems like would be preferable.
It’s because for a lot of us, it is so personal. The thing most of us are attempting to get at is that if it’s a choice between sex work or starving, there will be a lot of women who are ill suited to sex work because it makes them feel extremely violated who get forced into it.
If we try to go with “It’s just a job”, it erases those women’s right to acknowledge their feelings about their bodies. If “it’s just a job,” then the German employment dude would have been totally right in telling the woman that she should become a prostitute or loose benefits for turning down a job “she was qualified for”.
Should we look down on people who choose sex work? No. More power to them! But, we can’t dismiss the notion that for many women, (and some men, too!) being forced to do that work to stay alive (feed themselves, get a roof, have money) would be horrible and have a lot of bad consequences for them both physically and emotionally.
Maybe it would be far from the last job you’d consider (if it were legal and had protections), but it would be the absolute last job I’d be mentally and emotionally equipped to handle.
I’m privileged enough I likely wouldn’t get trapped in that role, because if everything in my life goes to heck I have a wonderfully supportive family and extended family, and a pretty good network of friends and acquaintances who’d help keep me alive. So, maybe I shouldn’t be weighing in here.
But, if I had a choice between cleaning all the bathrooms in grandcentral station with a toothbrush every day and sex work, please hand me the toothbrush. It’s not because I find it immoral, but because the thought of it makes me nauseous beyond compare.
I hope you don’t think I mean to attack you, or that I think badly of you. I don’t. I just think that maybe we both haven’t considered this issue in enough detail? Then again, I don’t really have the heart to look at it in any more detail, at the moment.
So… I’m just going to go get some brain bleach. I might just re-watch the panther and kitten and see where the links of recommended videos takes me…
Just wanted to remind that sex work does vary.
…Stripping, happy ending massages, pro-doms/dommes, camming.
It doesn’t always involve penetrative sex with paying strangers.
…In fact, legalizing would probably make the market for safer alternatives to paid penetrative intercourse drop drastically.
If a customer can purchase full intercourse fairly easily, I’d guess them more likely to prefer that to a handjob….I’d guess. But I have no data to back that.
I’ve had to do stuff as a guard that I…didn’t really like doing. Like running off panhandlers. Even though I know well that I’m very lucky not to be one of them.
I’ve not been put into the situation where I have to defend strikebreakers yet, and I think I’d say no to doing it, but I don’t know that for certain.
Sex is different. Intercourse is an extremely personal thing, and it seems really creepy to economically force people into having intercourse with other people for money. Not to mention that HPV and herpes can go around barriers when mucous membranes touch.
But almost all of us are getting exploited in some way or another.
(Argument? I don’t need your argument, I already am my own argument.)
Tessa, we’ve had this discussion before, and there was more or less complete agreement with your points. We’ve had sex workers post here. In a nutshell the consensus seems to be that nobody should be forced to do sex work and nobody should be shamed for doing it
By the way, the OP reminds me of Laurel Aitken’s classic musical lament “Pussy Price (Gone Up)”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rdqBoaPUac
contrapangloss:
I didn’t see what you’re saying as an attack or anything. No worries there. And since you’re not in the moodmindset to have a detailed talk on the matter, I won’t drag you into one. But I just think there’s a place in the middle between “just a job” and “only someone at the lowest lowpoint of their life would do it for work if they’re not doing it on a lark.”
Also, I want to apologize to Freemage if my comment before came off as more aggressive as I intended. After re-reading it, it seems like it might, even to me. So sorry.
THAN I intended… not as. What the heck?
Tessa:
I don’t see it as putting sex workers at the lowest of the low, or making any judgement about them. For me, it’s stating how horrifically dangerous and abusive the vast majority of sex work is. There’s also the matter of it turning an intimate physical experience (how much more intimate does it get than allowing someone inside your body? – and please don’t anyone compare that with having surgery) into something probably unpleasant, potentially painful, certainly dangerous and, all too often, potentially deadly. It is not comparable to other work, not least since it’s overwhelmingly putting women at immediate risk from men in a sexual situation.
It’s much more basic than morals. I walked out of the best paid job I’ve ever had, because I found it ethically unacceptable (yes Centrelink, I’m looking at you). I wasn’t being exploited. I wasn’t expected to let some man I had no desire for shove his penis into my body. I wasn’t someone’s fucktoy.
If someone is in sex work against their will, if they are coerced into it in any way, they are being raped.
Also, everything contrapangloss said. Gimme that toothbrush.
emilygoddess:
Yeah, that’s how I’m looking at it. Y’all know the word squicks me out, but it’s kinda unavoidable in this thread. 😀
GREAT BIG LITTLE BLACK PUSSYCATS! <3
More kitty awesome – 5-year-old Iris and her therapy cat Thula.
Exactly! Well, if that work involves penetrative sex given or received, then yes.
If not it’s sexual abuse. And either’s pretty horrible.
Nobody ought to be forced to do a job that they find degrading, but what any one person finds degrading may vary.
…I was hanging out on this other site wherein one poster noted that she hated her new job at a fast food place. The pay was horrible and the manager was verbally abusive.
She wanted to go back to what she had been doing…
So I asked what that was…and it was prostitution at $60 an hour.
@ Michelle: I don’t know, what the news outside Germany wrote, but here inside, they told a different story about that sex worker case. 😉 Actually it wasn’t a real case at all. It was a discussion, if sex work is a real job and should therefor profit from the same social benefits as real jobs do.
One argument in the whole discussion was, well if sex worker really is a real job, then unemployed people looking for work should apply for these jobs. Usually they don’t want to, so it is not a real job.
That was the discussion. Funny, that outside Germany the news wrote, that this hypothetical case actually happened. 🙂
Personally, I think that no one should ever surrender their bodily autonomy unless they agree to it of their own free will, uncoerced. There’s really nothing that’s a perfect metaphor for sex, but I think that pressing people into clinical trials and medical testing would probably be a close analogy. (I admit that I am not deeply familiar with clinical trials and this thought experiment may not be accurate to the industry.)
If there’s lots of safety measures in place, lots of regulations and safeguards, then you’re still put under intense bodily scrutiny by strangers, come in contact with with probably safe substances, but there’s always that slight possibility something could go horribly wrong, though at least you’ll probably be compensated and treated if that happens, and you’ll still have stuff forced into your body. Most people wouldn’t be cool with that, though some people are, and shouldn’t be judged for going into it for the money or whatever reason they have.
If there’s NOT lots of regulations in place, then you’re probably treated more like an animal specimen than a human, with little care to your emotional wellbeing, and you’ll be put into contact with all sorts of questionable substances that could lead to multiple complications and you probably won’t be looked after if something does go wrong because there’s plenty of other people around to take your place if you can’t perform anymore. And the authorities will probably turn a blind eye to it all, if they aren’t complicit.
The second is obviously worse, but neither situation should be something that people are told ‘do this or starve’.
I’m sure someone’s already made the point, but if these douchecanoes want women to stop having “power” over them (to grant their ridiculous premise for a second) maybe they could, oh, I don’t know, do something with their lives that doesn’t entirely revolve around women and the deceit thereof?
Learn to paint or some shit. Also, leave women the hell alone.
How does one reconcile slut-shaming with pussynomics? Econ 101 would suggest that the best way to lower the price of something is the flood the market with it. Slutty women do just that: more pussy given away freely, price lowered, problem solved. So why all the slut-shaming? It seems counterproductive from a pussynomics standpoint.
Re: legalising/decriminalising sex work. There was a case in New Zealand not long ago when a sex worker successfully sued the brothel owner for sexual harassment in the workplace. A world-wide first, apparently.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11212075
Which seems like a pretty positive move in protecting sex workers.
@michelle young
Nope, http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/brothel.asp
Yup. And even in Toronto, it’s like that. Last time I was there, prostitution was legal, but solicitation, pimping and brothel-keeping were not. (That law has since been struck down; a new bill is pending.) But the streets were full of streetwalkers, some obvious and some not. And it was such a mess that I couldn’t walk alone at dusk because some curb-crawling moron would be trying to get me into his car, thinking I was for sale just because there were other women out alone for that ostensible purpose. It doesn’t even have to be fully legal for there to be guys who have that “every woman has her price” mindset which is so injurious to women’s dignity (to say nothing of their health) on the whole.
And count me into the “gimme that toothbrush” club. I’d rather scrub toilets with my bare hands than dispense BJs to random assholes anyday. At least a nasty old toilet won’t beat me up or try to kill me. Even high-paid call girls have had to occasionally service a psychopath, and there is literally no reliable way of telling who those guys are, unless you’re a neurologist with an MRI machine on hand.