This is Just Silly
Feb. 11th, 2012 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitout"Whereas in the United States, brothels tend to be isolated (as in the ranch brothels of the Nevada desert), illustrating our modern assumption that sex work should be segregated and unmentioned, Roman brothels were broadly dispersed throughout the city, clustering around combined residential and commercial districts with nearby lower-class housing."
How about with, most _places_ where you could go to pay for sex indoors in the United States (as opposed to numbers or online contacts you might use to arrange for the sex to be delivered) are probably small service businesses clustered in mixed use areas with nearby lower-class housing. Not that I would invoke a cliche or anything. Given that brothels are illegal most places in the US, it's kinda hard to draw a clear comparison. Also, automobiles. Telephones. Small urban weeklies. Craigslist. How could an illegal operation confined in one bustable place possibly compete with the fleeter options available?
(They would have been better off drawing a comparison to brothels in, say, Germany or the Netherlands. Altho not as much better off as you might think.)
ETA: I'm finally out of the introduction (was that painful!) and into the first essay and I am still not impressed.
"Neither the female nor male cultic personnel ... can be identified as female or male prostitutes or catamites."
Really? You just _threw that in there_ because you like the word. Female or male prostitutes would include catamites, by definition, and by including catamites, you created a style _and_ substance issue (where's the underage female hooker term to match catamite?).
I wouldn't necessarily have minded (found it jarring, whatever) except a very short number of sentences later, the same author produces these phrases:
"women who exchanged sexual favors for pecuniary consideration"
and
"sex in exchange for wealth"
Given that this is all lead-up to a bit about Inanna pricing her services (one shekel against the wall, one and a half to bend over), what's the problem with "sex for money"? Short, sweet and unconfusing.
Unlike this book.
ETAYA: Oh, look at this misleading pile of stink:
"although birthcontrol [sic] measures are not well documented in Mesopotamian sources, 29 such measures would have been generally relegated, cross-culturally, to the domain of women's folk medicine and thus do not occupy a place in formal medical treatises that survive."
(1) I don't think there are _any_ medical treatises that survive in Mesopotamia, the way we have Egyptian ones. Prescriptions, sure. Diagnoses/signs/symptoms and similar to go with? Nope.
(2) And there isn't much medical _at all_ that survived from Mesopotamia.
(3) "Cross-culturally" the author is just plain wrong. Egyptian medical treatises cover what we would consider gynecology. As do other cultures that really get into the whole make-medicine-a-career thing. When pros start doing part of medicine, they start doing _all_ of medicine.
*sigh* The footnote is not active.
Oooh, but it's to a really cool book by Marten Stol. Very expensive.
Anyway. The article is attempting to show that the laws weren't about "morals" but about inheritance and private economic considerations, and the woman was held responsible in some situations where both parties had to swear an oath to stop having sex with each other. One of the situations described could easily be the plot to a Regency romance (right down to a guy trying to quickly marry one woman with the assistance of her brother who works at the palace, while dad is negotiating a separate alliance, and dad manages to scotch the deal the boy put together on his own).
In any event, the author is so busy showing this isn't about "some community consensus about a duty to keep gullible and impressionable young men out of the clutches of unsuitable women" and another argument about "sexual free agent" women that she seems to be missing a much simpler explanation for a lot of these cases: a powerful father who wants to control who his son marries, because his son is going to inherit a lot (power, resources, slaves) and make grandchildren and generally behave as a dynast. Dad isn't going to want sonny to hook up with a golddigger whose loyalties are open to negotiation (demonstrably) because dad is busy creating an alliance with another dynasty to pool the wealth.
It is ever thus, right?
The linguistic arguments about which words might or might not mean prostitute under various circumstances strike me as sort of missing the point. Gail Collins told a story in her most recent column about a priest calling her mother-in-law "no better than a whore in the street" for using birth control. We all know what whore means. We all know Gail's mother-in-law isn't one. But that is definitely the word the priest used and meant.
How about with, most _places_ where you could go to pay for sex indoors in the United States (as opposed to numbers or online contacts you might use to arrange for the sex to be delivered) are probably small service businesses clustered in mixed use areas with nearby lower-class housing. Not that I would invoke a cliche or anything. Given that brothels are illegal most places in the US, it's kinda hard to draw a clear comparison. Also, automobiles. Telephones. Small urban weeklies. Craigslist. How could an illegal operation confined in one bustable place possibly compete with the fleeter options available?
(They would have been better off drawing a comparison to brothels in, say, Germany or the Netherlands. Altho not as much better off as you might think.)
ETA: I'm finally out of the introduction (was that painful!) and into the first essay and I am still not impressed.
"Neither the female nor male cultic personnel ... can be identified as female or male prostitutes or catamites."
Really? You just _threw that in there_ because you like the word. Female or male prostitutes would include catamites, by definition, and by including catamites, you created a style _and_ substance issue (where's the underage female hooker term to match catamite?).
I wouldn't necessarily have minded (found it jarring, whatever) except a very short number of sentences later, the same author produces these phrases:
"women who exchanged sexual favors for pecuniary consideration"
and
"sex in exchange for wealth"
Given that this is all lead-up to a bit about Inanna pricing her services (one shekel against the wall, one and a half to bend over), what's the problem with "sex for money"? Short, sweet and unconfusing.
Unlike this book.
ETAYA: Oh, look at this misleading pile of stink:
"although birthcontrol [sic] measures are not well documented in Mesopotamian sources, 29 such measures would have been generally relegated, cross-culturally, to the domain of women's folk medicine and thus do not occupy a place in formal medical treatises that survive."
(1) I don't think there are _any_ medical treatises that survive in Mesopotamia, the way we have Egyptian ones. Prescriptions, sure. Diagnoses/signs/symptoms and similar to go with? Nope.
(2) And there isn't much medical _at all_ that survived from Mesopotamia.
(3) "Cross-culturally" the author is just plain wrong. Egyptian medical treatises cover what we would consider gynecology. As do other cultures that really get into the whole make-medicine-a-career thing. When pros start doing part of medicine, they start doing _all_ of medicine.
*sigh* The footnote is not active.
Oooh, but it's to a really cool book by Marten Stol. Very expensive.
Anyway. The article is attempting to show that the laws weren't about "morals" but about inheritance and private economic considerations, and the woman was held responsible in some situations where both parties had to swear an oath to stop having sex with each other. One of the situations described could easily be the plot to a Regency romance (right down to a guy trying to quickly marry one woman with the assistance of her brother who works at the palace, while dad is negotiating a separate alliance, and dad manages to scotch the deal the boy put together on his own).
In any event, the author is so busy showing this isn't about "some community consensus about a duty to keep gullible and impressionable young men out of the clutches of unsuitable women" and another argument about "sexual free agent" women that she seems to be missing a much simpler explanation for a lot of these cases: a powerful father who wants to control who his son marries, because his son is going to inherit a lot (power, resources, slaves) and make grandchildren and generally behave as a dynast. Dad isn't going to want sonny to hook up with a golddigger whose loyalties are open to negotiation (demonstrably) because dad is busy creating an alliance with another dynasty to pool the wealth.
It is ever thus, right?
The linguistic arguments about which words might or might not mean prostitute under various circumstances strike me as sort of missing the point. Gail Collins told a story in her most recent column about a priest calling her mother-in-law "no better than a whore in the street" for using birth control. We all know what whore means. We all know Gail's mother-in-law isn't one. But that is definitely the word the priest used and meant.
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no subject
Date: 2012-02-13 10:50 pm (UTC)seems cool -- I don't think you've recommended it before
Date: 2012-02-13 11:20 pm (UTC)http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1587191.html
"However, I cannot work up any sympathy for this lady and her terrible plight in stepping into the murky waters of internet dating in her mid-forties [ETA further trigger warning for rape]. (We note that she meets some real gems of terribly poor stuff through other means, though.)"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/10/internet-dating-dangers-margaret-overton
HOWEVER, I would go in a very different direction than she did. The rape story really crystallized a very general inability to define any boundaries whatsoever that Overton is clearly trying to get over and having some persistent problems with. I'm betting the ex-? husband is an alcoholic and Overton may well have alcoholics in her family as well.
People like that make me feel a little nuts, in part because I invariably find out after I've interacted with them for a while that their perception of my treatment of them and how I _intended_ to treat them vary wildly -- I just can't be around people who can't give me a straight answer. People who _want_ to be around the boundary-impaired are at best clueless and more likely to be predatory.
*sigh*
Agree re boundaries
Date: 2012-02-14 12:44 am (UTC)