What kind of man would take the opponent’s side in a debate entitled “It’s wrong to pay for sex”?
A distinguished professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, Dr. Lionel Tiger, that’s who; and he doesn’t even come off as sleazy as one would expect. In fact, the live audience of the debate, hosted at Rockefeller University and broadcast to the world via YouTube, was quite enchanted with Tiger.
He immediately eschewed crowd hatred by acknowledging that it’s “clearly wrong to pay for wrong sex.” He has no tolerance for human trafficking or coercion. His argument is not about johns and middle-aged sex tourists. It’s everyday women who carry the wallet and reap the rewards in this transaction.
“If you want to see people paying for sex, I suggest you go to the ground floor of Bloomingdales,” says Tiger. “The place is full of women paying for…undergarments [and] various instruments of torture, lust, you name it, but they’re paying for their own sense of themselves as sexual creatures and they’re not on that floor because they don’t like sex and they don’t like what it means.”
Tiger has identified “an inner economy to sex” that is far removed from child prostitution and other such sexual evils. He explains, “Women have a deal with men which requires that they have some relationship with men especially if they’re inclined to reproduce (which still 80 per cent of women in North America do).” Because women with children are usually out of the labour force for about five to eight years, having a man around is likely preferable, even if only for financial security.
For this reason, it’s significant that male jobs constitute 82 per cent of jobs lost in the current recession. Tiger ties this to his argument by asserting, “If women want a mate, they’re not going to have one of those men who have lost a job.”
Add to this the custom of a dowry or bride price in which the male basically makes a down payment in a contract to support the woman. In the West this down payment is in the form of a diamond ring, which Tiger calls “the world’s most stupidest object.” A man must spend at least two months’ wages on the ring to show he is able to provide for his future wife. “If not,” Tiger jokes, “she [still] keeps the ring.”
Both women and men are paying for sex. Tiger’s once-shocking proposition that this is not necessarily wrong suddenly rings true, though not at all fair. One thing is clear throughout Tiger’s argument: in the money-for-sex transaction, men get the short end of the stick.
