MISCmedia for 1/7/00
The Big Bamboo-zle?

SOME WOMEN SPEND FORTUNES trying to look sexy. But none would ever spend a dime directly for sex.

That's the message of an article in the print version of the sex-workers' zine Blackstockings. (It's not available on the zine's website as of this writing.)

The piece's writer wants to be mean to any het-male readers of the zine--men who are probably picking it up out of support and/or sympathy for the women and gay men in the escort, stripper, phone sex, and porn trades, and should be thanked instead of scolded.

But no, this writer wants to talk trash to any guys out in her reading audience who have the common but unrealistic fantasy of sexually servicing women for money.

It's an intriguing dream, to imagine oneself such a great lover as to charge cash from ladies. As long as you don't think of having to go through some of the everyday hassles women in the sex-biz face--from having to mate with unattractive people (as spoofed in the recent farce movie Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo) to legal troubles, cruel pimps, personal-safety threats, and the other stuff Blackstockings regularly reports in detail.

While women directly buying sex is rare in North America's cities, a lot of more common transactions come close. Women have often "paid" indirectly to satisfy their hormones--day-spa treatments from Senor Bruno; costly singles-bar apparel; affairs that put a woman's marriage and/or career at risk; abusive relationships a woman might stay in because of her addiction to the intense sex; seductions that lead to confidence-game scams.

Some of these costly behaviors might theoretically be better replaced by discreet, professional encounters with men trained to completely please a woman and to expect nothing in return but the bucks. (That could also be a potential godsend to older or shier women, or professional women who don't have the time or patience for the dating grind.)

And it is happenning; just not anywhere around here.

Early last year, I mentioned how, in the Caribbean, the sex-tourism industry had discovered female customers. There's an extensive item about it in the latest Utne Reader, called "In Search of the Big Bamboo."

The story describes island "beach boys" who troll the resorts and tourist zones, offering their toned, dark-skinned bodies to visiting women in exchange for "gifts," some of which are in the form of cash. The story adds that similar scenes take place in Brazil, the Philippines, Greece, Spain, India, and that sex-biz stalwart Thailand--spots where the weather's warm, the scenery's exotic, no gossipy neighbors are around, and women with money can meet studly young men with much less money.

This means certain females, under certain conditions, will indeed behave as "johns--" the behavior certain radical-feminists used to point to as evidence of the universal ickiness of all males and the universal victimhood of all females.

But it makes a little more sense if you can abandon such narrow gender stereotypes and accept that women really can do everything men can; including things an '80s radical-feminist might disapprove of.

As for the '90s "sex-positive" feminism of Blackstockings, the existence of overseas "beach boy" hooking proves that females have (1) females have desires, and (2) in a monetary-based society, desires will be traded for currency.

It just probably won't involve any would-be Deuce Bigalows in the Blackstockings readership, at least not soon.

MONDAY: More on the MP3 glut.

ELSEWHERE:

• Is Ken Griffey Jr. now "so valuable that no team can afford to pay him properly"?...
• Are you sure you really heard that on the air?...
• How to reuse a spent WTO tear-gas canister (found by Bud)....
• Finally, somebody found some appropriate uses for a cell phone....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Does "political" writing have to be incomprehensible?
• When California stops being America's political bellwether.
• Why self-proclaimed trendsetters can't imagine a future without trendsetters.
• Musings on the end of Peanuts.
• The always-splendiforous MISCmedia In/Out list.
• Remembering the Nineties, when seemingly nobody else is.
• The Grinch who stole New Year's.
• Comparing punks to neo-punks.
• Retail-as-theater and theaters as retail.
• Thoughts from having lived with Christmas for two months.
• Disposable tabloid zines of highbrow literature.
• Indie film's potential resurgence.
• Imagining life after Microsoft, and exploring the roots of the Gates personality cult.
• The first and second parts of our visit to an imagined Northwest theme park.
• Parts one, two, three, and four of our WTO protest post-mortem; a list of WTO-protest links; and the earlier preview piece.

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