Virginity for sale

It's no secret that there is a robust global marketplace for sex. Last fall, Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner argued that prostitution operates like any old rags-to-riches opportunistic business: work hard, excel, make more money. "There is one labour market women have always dominated: prostitution," they write. "Its business model is built upon a simple premise. Since time immemorial and all over the world, men have wanted more sex than they could get for free. So what inevitably emerges is a supply of women who, for the right price, are willing to satisfy this demand. But what is the right price?" According to Double X, the going rate for a virgin is "at least $10,000 if the woman is reasonably attractive and under 25." Double X highlights one woman of whom the Freakonomics authors would be proud:

"Natalie Dylan is the ultimate virginity-marketing mogul. A 22-year-old women’s studies graduate from Sacramento State, Dylan needed the money to pay for her master’s degree in family and marriage therapy....After her media blitz, Dylan received over 10,000 bids, half of which were for over $1 million. Dylan approached her virginity like a good capitalist. 'The value of my chastity is one level on which men cannot compete with me... I decided to flip the equation, and turn my virginity into something that allows me to gain power and opportunity from men.'”

I've blogged about money and power in relationships in the past, in the context of sugar daddies--distinct from sex work in that sugar daddy/sugar baby relationships are, well, relationships. I wrote that "what's most distressing is not the transaction-oriented nature of this [sugar daddy] dating web site, but the persistent role that gender plays in determining the power." I do not take issue with the commodification of sex, even in the context of sex work. What makes me squirm about the virginity auctions (one woman sold hers for $32,000 online last week) and about the overly simplistic supply-and-demand analysis provided by Levitt and Dubner is not only how strikingly archaic these transactions seem (Double X points out that in "the book of Deuteronomy, a girl’s virginity is worth 50 shekels, paid to her father"), but the flippant disregard to oppression that is often linked to prostitution.

Dylan may well have been empowered by selling her virginity, but for many women, prostitution is a form of slavery. (The National Human Trafficking Resource Center has a good fact sheet here.) It's the same economic model that some women use as an empowering tool to fund advanced degrees that forces some women into a lifetime of debt bondage. In an excellent series on teenage runaways, the New York Times wrote that "nearly a third of the children who flee or are kicked out of their homes each year engage in sex for food, drugs or a place to stay."

Perhaps this is simply the everyday capitalist continuum as it applies to sex work, ranging from those who are underpaid by middlemen to those who are successful entrepreneurs. I won't argue that it's shameful to consider sex as a transaction, but I do maintain that a cultural endorsement of putting women's bodies on sale is one that endangers women everyday, in the name of men's pleasure. Women working as prostitutes are routinely abused and assaulted by their pimps. It's hard to look at a seven-figure virginity sale positively when women in the same business are held in debt bondage indefinitely, or are murdered at work. Levitt and Dubner think that it's an advantage for women that they dominate the sex market, but I see a systemic devaluation of women that institutionalizes violence, which makes it hard to celebrate a successful marketing campaign for one's virginity. -Sara