Zoidberg - I'm confused, Fry. I'm feeling a strange new emotion I have never felt before. Is it love when you care for a female for reasons beyond mating?
Fry - Nope. Must be some weird, alien emotion
I was reading an article on the beach this afternoon with the headline, "A prostitute's life: 'Whether it hurts the woman or not, the men don't care'". According to the article, the prostitution racket has remained unaffected throughout the recession. Apparantly money can not only buy you love, but it can do so when there isn't much of either going 'round.
But this slightly risque blog post [reader be warned]* is not about prostitution...at least not explicitly. As I read the article, becoming more depressed with each passing sentence, a guy and a girl -- college aged -- walked by me. They were talking about her (I'm guessing) holiday in Europe/summer in America. The gist of it was that she was "scoring" some guy over there, someone she knew from Ireland. Her male friend (who clearly wished he was the aforementioned "some guy") asked if it was "just casual?", to which she didn't quite respond.
"Scoring" is an appropriate word, because all of this is indeed a game; a game we're born into and start playing at an increasingly early age. No one really has to teach us the rules or the strategy. It all just comes naturally. In fact the game only works when no one examines it or thinks about it critically, for do so might expose the game for what it really is.
It's a generalisation to be sure, but love is what each human being searches for, craves, holds most dearly. The problem, as illustrated by Fry in a most brilliant episode of Futurama, is that we have equated love with "scoring". Or perhaps we've simply decided that proper love doesn't really exist, so something less will have to do. Energy, time, and money are all put into getting this "something". Nightclubs stand as a modren symbol for the quest. As Charlie Brooker so bluntly puts it, many people will do the hard work of spending [earmuffs]
My criticism isn't of nightclubs, or of the people who "play the game". My criticism is of the game itself. It is rigged to leave all of its players miserable. We have all tasted of its misery to some degree, and the effects are not easily undone. Nor is the way of playing easily unlearned.
It may be obvious to most that prostitution is a severly corrupted and corrupting expression of love, but what about to the people involved? To the men who hand over the cash?
"Mutually pleasurable", "damage-free". My male friend on the beach might say "casual". The self-delusion does not end with the man who steps into a brothel for the first time. It is the default setting for all of us. We refuse to think, we refuse to criticise, we refuse to seek an alternative. Therefore we hurt...both ourselves and others.
[Spoiler altert]
Jimmy McNulty of The Wire represents the archtypal player of the game. He is in the process of a divorce because he cheated on his wife with a female colleague. He goes to bars, gets sufficiently drunk, and wakes up the next morning with a stranger drooling by his side. This is his life outside of police work. He then meets a classier woman (a political campaigns strategist) in a more unusual setting (a school opening day), but the relationship goes in the same direction all the others went: towards the bed. McNulty begins to sense that something is not quite right. He feels like little more than a "breathing machine" for his private parts, so he tries to make a real relationship out of this all too familiar one. His lady friend, however, is stuck in the old way, playing the game as it's meant to be played. In one of his wiser moments, McNulty gets out of his chair at a restaurant and walks away from the relationship, from the game, knowing he just can't play anymore.
Then comes one of The Wire's best scenes. McNulty knocks on the door of Beadie Russell, a single mother whom McNulty was previously interested in, but McNulty declined to consummate the interest when he probably could have. She answers the door, and McNulty starts articulating what has been going on inside his head for the past while, stumbling over his words not because of alcohol but because of something else. The scene is charged with emotion, as a rock bottom McNulty reflects on life up to this point: "It's like everything I poured into a glasss came out the bottom...and I just kept on pouring, like the thing had a whole in it..." Beadie asks him if he wants to come inside for a drink. "Not tonight" he says, but he tells her that he'd like to meet her kids.
[Spoiler over]
McNulty's self-analysis is true of most of us, if we would only stop and think for a while. We're pouring and pouring something into our lives that leaves us more and more empty. Why? Why don't we stop?
Walter Brueggemann says that a prophet's first task is to criticise. If anything is to change, criticism is necessary. But criticism is not the end. There must also be the envisioning of an alternative. It's all very well to criticise the thinking (or lack thereof) behind the conversation I heard on the beach, but what is the alternative to the dominant game? Does a Christian have anything to offer its participants besides sheer hypocrisy, distant judgements, and seemingly arbitrary commands like "No sex before marriage"? Do we have life...life to the full? A life where what we pour into it actuallly rises to the top rather than leeks out?
But this slightly risque blog post [reader be warned]* is not about prostitution...at least not explicitly. As I read the article, becoming more depressed with each passing sentence, a guy and a girl -- college aged -- walked by me. They were talking about her (I'm guessing) holiday in Europe/summer in America. The gist of it was that she was "scoring" some guy over there, someone she knew from Ireland. Her male friend (who clearly wished he was the aforementioned "some guy") asked if it was "just casual?", to which she didn't quite respond.
"Scoring" is an appropriate word, because all of this is indeed a game; a game we're born into and start playing at an increasingly early age. No one really has to teach us the rules or the strategy. It all just comes naturally. In fact the game only works when no one examines it or thinks about it critically, for do so might expose the game for what it really is.
It's a generalisation to be sure, but love is what each human being searches for, craves, holds most dearly. The problem, as illustrated by Fry in a most brilliant episode of Futurama, is that we have equated love with "scoring". Or perhaps we've simply decided that proper love doesn't really exist, so something less will have to do. Energy, time, and money are all put into getting this "something". Nightclubs stand as a modren symbol for the quest. As Charlie Brooker so bluntly puts it, many people will do the hard work of spending [earmuffs]
seven hours hopping about in a hellish, reverberating bunker in exchange for sharing 64 febrile, panting pelvic thrusts with someone who'll snore and dribble into your pillow till 11 o'clock in the morning, before waking up beside you with their hair in a mess, blinking like a dizzy cat and smelling vaguely like a ham baguette.
My criticism isn't of nightclubs, or of the people who "play the game". My criticism is of the game itself. It is rigged to leave all of its players miserable. We have all tasted of its misery to some degree, and the effects are not easily undone. Nor is the way of playing easily unlearned.
It may be obvious to most that prostitution is a severly corrupted and corrupting expression of love, but what about to the people involved? To the men who hand over the cash?
The notion of a mutually pleasurable, damage-free transaction -- as promoted by the industry and supporters of legislation -- sits wildly at odds with the reality of these engagements. Were it not for the wreckage they leave behind, the self-delusion of the average sex buyer would be laughable.
"Mutually pleasurable", "damage-free". My male friend on the beach might say "casual". The self-delusion does not end with the man who steps into a brothel for the first time. It is the default setting for all of us. We refuse to think, we refuse to criticise, we refuse to seek an alternative. Therefore we hurt...both ourselves and others.
[Spoiler altert]
Jimmy McNulty of The Wire represents the archtypal player of the game. He is in the process of a divorce because he cheated on his wife with a female colleague. He goes to bars, gets sufficiently drunk, and wakes up the next morning with a stranger drooling by his side. This is his life outside of police work. He then meets a classier woman (a political campaigns strategist) in a more unusual setting (a school opening day), but the relationship goes in the same direction all the others went: towards the bed. McNulty begins to sense that something is not quite right. He feels like little more than a "breathing machine" for his private parts, so he tries to make a real relationship out of this all too familiar one. His lady friend, however, is stuck in the old way, playing the game as it's meant to be played. In one of his wiser moments, McNulty gets out of his chair at a restaurant and walks away from the relationship, from the game, knowing he just can't play anymore.
Then comes one of The Wire's best scenes. McNulty knocks on the door of Beadie Russell, a single mother whom McNulty was previously interested in, but McNulty declined to consummate the interest when he probably could have. She answers the door, and McNulty starts articulating what has been going on inside his head for the past while, stumbling over his words not because of alcohol but because of something else. The scene is charged with emotion, as a rock bottom McNulty reflects on life up to this point: "It's like everything I poured into a glasss came out the bottom...and I just kept on pouring, like the thing had a whole in it..." Beadie asks him if he wants to come inside for a drink. "Not tonight" he says, but he tells her that he'd like to meet her kids.
[Spoiler over]
McNulty's self-analysis is true of most of us, if we would only stop and think for a while. We're pouring and pouring something into our lives that leaves us more and more empty. Why? Why don't we stop?
Walter Brueggemann says that a prophet's first task is to criticise. If anything is to change, criticism is necessary. But criticism is not the end. There must also be the envisioning of an alternative. It's all very well to criticise the thinking (or lack thereof) behind the conversation I heard on the beach, but what is the alternative to the dominant game? Does a Christian have anything to offer its participants besides sheer hypocrisy, distant judgements, and seemingly arbitrary commands like "No sex before marriage"? Do we have life...life to the full? A life where what we pour into it actuallly rises to the top rather than leeks out?
* I don't have delusions that Charismata has suddenly turned all edgey and controversial because I've used words like "pelvic" and "private parts" and an illustration from The Wire. But I am aware that I'll have some readers who won't want to read this. The warning is for them.
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