Last year, at a wedding I attended, one of the conversations I participated in involved a straight woman asking a gay woman how much money it would take for her to sleep with a man.
Now, I’m not saying nobody should ever have such a conversation – as woman B said to me after woman A had left for a bit, she has had that conversation with her good friends, possibly more than once. But to ask that question completely out of the blue pretty much immediately finding out that a person does not want to make sexy times with any person of a particular gender? Really?
The conversation was not made any better by woman A’s exposition on prostitution (her word) sex work, and linking it to desperation and solely that, which came about when I pointed out that the question wasn’t really a test of sexuality, per se, as some people are quite happy to have sex with people they might not be particularly sexually attracted to, sometimes for money, and for others – assuming they are generally happy with their present material wealth, which woman B is, and that’s who she was asking – no sum would be sufficient. Funnily enough, different people feel differently about this, and it’s not necessarily about their sexuality (if sexuality is defined as what gender of persons one is attracted to).
Now, much better thinkings and writers than I am have written very interesting things on sex work, a good general introduction being Harriet Jay’s post at Fugitivus.
More importantly, if you want to read some writing by sex workers, Bound, Not Gagged is a great starting place.
But is this really about sexuality or about sex work? And maybe a bit about gender, too? If Woman B had said she was into men, would the first question that came to Woman A’s mind have been: how much money would it take for you to sleep with a woman? If Woman B had been a man, whether into men or women (or both), would Woman A have asked the question at all? And this is leaving aside completely questions of genderqueerness, trans*-ness and sexualities other than “straight” or “gay”. (On that note, I actually hate to think what Woman A might have thought appropriate to ask had Woman B said she was bi- or pansexual.)
I don’t really have any conclusions. This post is more of a musing on the WTF-ness of the conversation. However, if anyone is still out there and reading, I would be interested in your thoughts.
I’ve seen people ask gay men how much it would take for them to sleep with a woman, but that doesn’t mean it’s considered in the same way.
When I think of the “what would it take for you to have sex with [whoever]” type questions, there are so many other considerations that come up before money – the person themselves, safety, relationship status etc etc. If all of that could be resolved, yeah sure, pay me money to have sex with someone! To me it would feel more like “how much would it cost for you to betray your safety and morals?” rather than my sexuality, but then my sexuality is rather fluid, so maybe I’m a poor example.
This is rambling and pointless, but yes, I think there are many interesting layers to such a weird question to ask a person you don’t know well.
I’ve seen people ask gay men, too, but I don’t think ever as the first question following the revelation (for want of a better word – I’m not sure it’s really “coming out” as such when a person casually mention/s refers to their sexuality during general conversation) of sexuality. But in terms of the question popping out when it did, gender might not have been so much the issue as whatever was going on in Woman A’s head at the time…
And yes. So many other considerations. I wonder whether some of those operate more on women than on men as a general rule, because of relative social power and the existence of corrective rape as a Thing?
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