Marriage & Prostitution
In what ways are prostitution and marriage related? Well, I’d say that in many cases they’re essentially the same thing, with one form designed to cater to only one man (at a time) and the other to many, but another way to look at it is to see prostitution as an alternative to marriage. That’s how I viewed it at the time, along with seeing it as a way to preserve the maximum amount of freedom in my day-to-day life without being shackled to the whims and wants of one man in particular.
This belief doesn’t necessarily spring from the events of my own youthful marriage in as much as I’m not nearly as bitter about what went down back then. Though I’m sure my experience in feeling so dependent on and at the mercy of my partner ultimately did affect my decision to buck the traditional expectations and find a way to care for myself on my own. Back when I first decided to try my hand at prostitution the wounds were still raw and the anger and resentment hadn’t subsided yet.
I’m not so sure how I feel about the institution of marriage these days. Would I consider remarrying someday? Perhaps. It’s hard to say. I’m not necessarily against marriage as an option, but I do resent it being pushed repeatedly by my family, even before my husband hit the scene, beginning at the age of 15. It’s odd to think about it all now, knowing that my friends had different experiences, receiving little or no pressure to marry until they were at least of legal age. In my family, however, marriage was encouraged much earlier, beginning with pressure from my mother to marry a boy in high school, followed the next year by my grandma sending me back across the country in hopes of having a man twice my age (making him 32 at the time) care for me. (Not that I’m bashing my grandma here; while it sounds archaic, the underlying motive was actually a lack of income to continue to provide for my care. She regrets that decision now, but it was born out of desperation and a lack of resources, not a lack of love.) Admittedly, I’m sometimes torn over how things went down during those years, not wanting to feel like a burden on my people while at the same time not being ready emotionally to take on that level of responsibility. It is what it is and there’s nothing that can be done now to undo those events, though I do understand that they obviously impacted me greatly.
With that all in mind, it’s not difficult to see why marrying my (now ex)husband seemed like a good idea at the time. Or more accurately, why it was viewed as the best option presented up to that point. So no, our marriage wasn’t a result of teenage rebellion against our parents (well, maybe for him), but instead an attempt for two kids to combine resources and create some semblance of family, which we both craved. We could have combined resources without marrying, but with the marriage license comes benefits, such as me regaining residency in that state for tuition purposes and us not having to claim our parents’ income on financial aid applications (very important since neither of us received any parental support). Mundane reasons like that prompted us to go forward with our plans, as unromantic as that is.
Marriage is an economic institution above and beyond all else. Or at least it has been historically and remains so for plenty of people. Marrying solely for the sake of love seems to be an event reserved primarily for those with access to an abundance of resources. I can’t speak for others obviously, but only one couple in my direct lineage that I’m aware of had that luxury (the woman that my family member married came from a well-to-do family).
As a female, particularly from a financially-stressed family, there can be tremendous pressure to find a man that can help provide for your needs. Sometimes I wonder why there isn’t more encouragement for young women to lean on one another as friends and create a cooperative of sorts rather than enter into a commitment of this magnitude, but then I don’t suppose that would serve the patriarchy very well.
What I had been taught back then was that a man was necessary in order to improve your lot in life, even if the situation proved temporary. Once married (in respect to viewing it through an economic lens) you begin to see how it breaks down into using sex to barter and convince, and sometimes you learn that sex can also be used against you, as in the case of extramarital affairs and a sense of entitlement to unrestricted access on the part of your mate. If you can carry that economic lens over into the dating realm after leaving the marriage, it’s a short leap from realizing that the services you provided to your husband are transferable and can lead to income. Sound cold? Well, that’s the over-simplified version, but it’s honest.
As for the husbands of others, they too have discovered that visiting prostitutes is a convenient way to circumvent any sexual bartering their wives may employ, in effect reducing the power their wives wield in the relationship by remaining sexually satiated by another source. That too is cold, IMO, but no less real. This is an issue a few of my clients discussed openly during our time together, leaving little room to doubt that they knew exactly what they were doing and how it undermined their wives’ efforts to exert control.
Marriage also relates to prostitution in that women are oftentimes driven to this line of work after being abandoned by their husbands, especially when he was the sole breadwinner and she lacks a work history or any useful job skills. Many, if not most, of the escorts I knew had been married, and subsequently divorced, and many have children to support. When men refuse to pay child support on a regular basis, women have to rely on other means to bring in income. Some women whom I met lost the support of their family due to them aligning on the side of the husband, leaving her to fend for her children and herself on her own. Others don’t have family to speak of or turn to. Many of us were left with the bulk of the mutually-accumulated debt when our husbands decided to move on. Listing the debts in the divorce decree does little in terms of collecting on that debt unless you have the funds to track him down and sue him in civil court (as I understood it anyway). But then too, some of us couldn’t afford to hire attorneys and instead relied on paralegal services where we completed the paperwork ourselves and were responsible for pushing the divorce documents through the required channels. It saves money but also makes the entire divorce procedure that much more confusing.
In my case, my ex was impossible to track down and serve, not that he ever agreed to sign the documents, preferring instead to tie up the process with motions for continuation in an effort to delay the divorce in hopes of making it more expensive for the one footing the entire bill. Thankfully the judge saw through this ruse and granted the divorce without him having to be present.
The bitterness born out of dealing with this bullshit is enough to make any woman want to swear off men, if only for a few years. But when pressed financially, dealing with men may be the only real option available. The question then becomes how to go about it so that you’re not stuck back in the same damn situation you just escaped. Prostitution made better sense than marriage after all of that.
But lots of women get divorced and not all turn to prostitution. Other forms of conditioning tend to be involved with influencing women, making prostitution more tolerable, or even exciting, than it otherwise might be. I’ll discuss my thoughts on all of that at a later date.
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The “Easy” Way Out - Why Prostitution Made Sense (Part 4) « Wake Me Now said
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wakemenow said
I don’t feel I’ve done proper justice to the topic of marriage because all of this leaves out the romantic end (which we had). At a future date, I’d like to write more on the positive aspects to make up for the limited scope of this post. Our marriage was, first and foremost, about love but economic factors absolutely factored in, and we were able to discuss this openly with one another even prior to marrying.