Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

When I decided to get divorced, I had a number of women tell me I could not do that, I was too sick and I needed his money. I felt that said more about their lives than mine, but it also anecdotally agreed with a remark I read once that "there is more prostitution in marriage than outside of it". Unless/until society finds a way for men and women to have financial parity of some sort, quite a lot of women will continue to trade sex for money on some level, whether it fits the legal definition of prostitution or not. To me, the attention prostitution gets really just misses the mark.

View on HN

Even if there were as many women as men who were homeless or broke and conversely fantastically wealthy you're still going to have women trading sex for money. If there's a demand for something, someone, somewhere will figure out a way to monetize it.

Um, I don't quite understand. Is that supposed to be a rebuttal? I don't really care if people trade sex for money. I think if a woman freely chooses that route, so what? If a woman makes a conscious decision that she would rather take cash in hand from many men instead of a roof over her head and food on the table from one man, so what? As I said, I think that focus really misses the mark.

I read wheaties' reply as being a response to your comment that

> Unless/until society finds a way for men and women to have financial parity of some sort, quite a lot of women will continue to trade sex for money on some level

which seems to suggest that a lack of financial parity is the driving force behind women choosing to trade sex for money. The response was that, even if financial parity were achieved (i.e, if there were as many homeless, and also hugely rich women as there are men), women would still trade sex for money.

See http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm which was linked on here recently for another viewpoint on the debate over financial disparity between the sexes, which you may find interesting.

With more financial parity, presumably you would also see more men trading sex for money. Discussions about prostitution generally revolve around a default assumption that women are selling themselves to heterosexual men. This isn't always the case but the assumption speaks volumes about certain large-scale general realities.

Thank you for the link. But having briefly perused it, it suggests an assumption that I think men are fundamentally better off than women, which is a) not true and b) irrelevant to the question of whether women would trade sex for money less if they had more financial parity. I took a class on homelessness and volunteered at a homeless shelter for a time. I am abundantly familiar with the fact that homeless men get fewer services than homeless women and, therefore, generally have a harder time of it. I am also a former military wife so I am abundantly familiar with how we send young men off to war to be maimed or killed but are much less likely to do so with young women, who, last I checked, were still barred from serving in combat positions.

Anyway, gotta go. :-)

>With more financial parity, presumably you would also see more men trading sex for money.

There was a study in Sweden a while ago that showed that there were more teenage boys that prostituted themselves than teenage girls, and most of these teenagers were middle class and presumable pretty well off, but they usually did it to get more disposable income to buy stuff to impress their peers.

Parity with men financially would mean the highs AND the lows. There are more broke, destitute men than women.

If your ideal was realized- parity financially- you'd still have PLENTY of women forced by their financial situation to 'prostitute' themselves into marriage. You'd also have plenty with livable wages who'd try to marry up and STILL 'prostitute' themselves into marriage.

The real difference as I see it is currently more men are willing to 'pay' for such services than women. The way to equalize things is more likely to equalize the demand.

Yes, this is the nasty little secret at the heart of feminism. They want to be CEOs and who wouldn't? But men are also the vast majority of the homeless, the prison population, the people doing dirty, dangerous jobs, the people getting killed at work. There are more men than women denied the right to see their kids, yet financially crippled supporting them - and their ex-wife - anyway.

Can't have it both ways.

There was another article recently that looked at gender issues and concluded that the differences weren't so much women being better or worse off, but the men being more extreme and greater risk takers. So men see more of both the highs and the lows. It isn't an inherent difference in ability at all, but there may be inherent behavioral differences partly accounted for by hormones and other genetic factors.

It's a very limited comparison, but look at the behavior differences between male cats that have been "fixed" and those that haven't.

Differences in testosterone and oxytocin levels vary and can have a large influence on behavior.

> Yes, this is the nasty little secret at the heart of feminism.

The straw man version of feminism you hold in your head is not the one that exists in real life. Google "patriarchy hurts men, too".

There's a big slice of the feminist segment outside the intelligentsia for whom feminism is pointing to a stat that says that X% of all Fortune 500 C-level execs or some such are men, and being outraged.

All -isms are an attempt to justify the self-interest of their sponsors.

Parity with men financially would mean the highs AND the lows. There are more broke, destitute men than women.

I am aware that men suffer more when it comes to homelessness, etc. But I don't think "parity" has to mean "Our goal is for women to live more similarly to the way men live currently". I think if we are to get there from here, the lives of both men and women would need to change. But, as I stated elsewhere, I'm really not well tonight. So not up to posting any kind of lengthy explanation.

Thanks.

>If there's a demand for something, someone, somewhere will figure out a way to monetize it.

That certainly seems to be true. What puzzles me is if it's the startup potential of such a business or perhaps one that develops web services to support it that makes this a relevant story here?

</halo off>

I don't know about parity in terms of single women, but divorce law (at least in the US) is heavily tilted towards the aim of women achieving economic parity with their former husbands.

My understanding is this is not so, at least not in the US.

No, you are right. If anything, it is slanted towards allowing the ex-wife to EXCEED the financial situation of the ex-husband.

Interesting. Could you cite some specific examples?

Around 4% of alimony recipients in the US are male.

Unless/until society finds a way for men and women to have financial parity of some sort

Men and women don't have financial pairty? I see this claim all the time, but it only seems to be backed up by gross misuse of statistics. Care to provide evidence?

(edit: clarified)

Please clarify: Evidence of what specifically? That we do not have financial parity?

Thanks for clarifying. I'm really not well today, so the best I can do is give you a link to a long post I wrote (that probably almost no one saw) where I list some of what I have gleaned over the years:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1530791

Financial parity may not be sufficient, even if it is possible. It may be the case that eons of natural selection have carved out the female homo sapien to be, on average, naturally hypergamous. (Purportedly this is why "DHVs" and "negs" give men leverage in the crimson art of "game".) I doubt that financial parity would have any hope of mitigating this; women might still find themselves disproportionately attracted towards the top of the linear dominance hierarchy - which money, for better or worse, helps to signal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy

I've heard one definition of a wife being "a women who trades sex for money but to only one man."

I can't say I disagree with it entirely.

I think it's more along the lines of "a woman trading sex for stability"

Women, especially those with children, care a very great deal about stability ... and since men care a great deal about easily available sex the equation works out pretty well for both ends.

However, some women stop offering sex and still get stability via child support orders.

Wow that is sad. How would you describe these women?

I don't recall much. I think at least 3 women said something like that to me. I only remember details about 2 of them. They were both older and I think that was a factor in their reluctance to start over. I think they both had younger kids than mine, and that can be emotionally and logistically a lot harder to deal with. One had a life-threatening illness. I think the other also had health problems but I can't remember any specifics.

One of them had a history of very unhappy relationships and when I was getting divorced she spammed me with venomous divorce/relationship jokes. I ignored all such emails until she finally stopped. I felt it was clear she had serious baggage and I could not think of a good way to tell her that, sorry, I don't appreciate such "humor". I felt that would just be kind of like pouring salt in her wounds, so I just didn't respond at all. The other woman once said something to me along the lines of "One of the good things about growing older is how much more you get done. Young people spend too much time screwing." I don't think I really knew anything about her sex life but that remark didn't exactly paint a rosy picture in my mind. (From what I gather, some women hit menopause and go "Whoohoo! Party Time!!" because they are no longer living under the threat of unintended pregnancy.)

FWIW: In one case, I don't think it would be accurate to say she herself was trading sex for money. Her marriage was mostly sexless and, most of the time, she made more money than him. Yet here she was trying to talk me out of my divorce on the grounds that I needed his money. Go figure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com