And furthermore, Ich bin ein Gegenstände (tr. “we are all objects”)

November 4, 2009

In response to my previous and seminal (no pun intended) post, Objectifornication?, a commenter on The Sexist fired back with the formerly lethal female argument tactic of a one-two punch of 1) apparent absence of comprehension combined with, 2) an attempt at stretching the meaning of words beyond any reasonable boundaries for its use.

The commenter, MHW, ranted,

So, I took the time to read your lengthy post, and I have to admit it’s left me somewhat nauseated. While your intention may have been to point out how much you humanize the escorts you sleep with, what you really manage to demonstrate is how enormously you dehumanize all women. I mean, us ladies, we’re all in the same game– leveraging sex for things. It’s just that some of us are “amateurs” at the game of getting things from you through pleasing you personally by having sex with you when you want it and others are professionals at it. THAT’s the attitude that makes me queasy. See, since I’ve been brought up to think that relationships between individuals are equal and that real sexual intimacy comes from two people honestly wanting to fuck the shit out of each other MUTUALLY, it’s pretty disturbing to come across this idea that no, actually, women are supposed to work like ATMs. You put money in, we put out, not because we want to, but because you’ve paid your fare.

Women leverage sex for things? Never! Anyway, true as that so often is, its not at all what I said in my post.

MHW finished her rant with,

So, I’m glad you treat the escorts you employ well– and I’m damn sure they are too. But it doesn’t mean you don’t think of them, and all women, as objects.

My retort:

In what appears to be yet another feminist veiled attack on sex work, MHW misinterprets my post and creates a fiction. I wasn’t referring to non-escorts being “amateurs” at some sort of game. I was referring to non-escorts being amateurs at sex.

I’ve been with a lot of escorts, and I’ve been with a lot of non-escorts. By and large, sorry to break what should be obvious news to those who aren’t inclined to want to hear it, escorts tend to be much, much better at sex than non-escorts – its what they do for a living, and contrary to what Amanda wrote in her post, us guys who see escorts do indeed very much appreciate their abilities as a “worker, performer, or businessperson.” Amanda’s very attack on us is that we don’t appreciate professionalism – in fact, as the post on my blog (including the quotes from the review sites) makes clear, we surely do. And with those many escorts that like what they do, not only is it mutual, but like anyone else who likes their job, they tend to do be the best escorts.

MHW’s entire rant, written under the influence of nausea presumably induced by her sudden awareness of superior sexual competition and concomitant perception of disempowerment and femasculation, is based upon a misinterpretation. Therefore, there’s no need to address most of the remainder of it, other than to say that if she read my post and still concluded that johns, including myself, look at women as objects, then her definition of “object,” like the definition of “rape” by many on this site, has become so expanded as to become meaningless, and surely would also apply to all sorts of ways women, even the holier-then-thou types like MHW, looked at guys. The emotionalist absurdity of MHW, who doesn’t know me, and yet accuses of me of thinking of “all” women as objects, says it all. According to MHW, I think of my mother, my 90-something grandmother, friends, co-workers, former teachers, infant niece, sister-in-law that had cancer surgery today, Ayn Rand, Mother Theresa, and cunt of a boss – all of them – just objects, even though I have no sexual interest in probably about 90% of women alive.

On behalf of all of us – guys and women – who don’t share your E Harmony factors view of the world, why don’t you dehumanize us a little more

And finally, what I didn’t write is that, of course, people, after all – all of us – are objects, too. Aren’t we.

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