THE GLOBAL SEX TRADE

Once, while still in The City, en route to some unremarkable location, I fell into a state of shock passing the street hookers who had positioned themselves on 10^th Avenue alongside what I can only imagine was the welcome heavy traffic of the West Side Highway. It was a young, shapely, attractive woman who remains in memory, wearing an elastic waist thong, gartered stockings and high heels. These women had remained unperturbed by law enforcement, no doubt because they were not an obstruction to local residents.

Further, in my skid row courtship with my late Ex, I would listen to the stampede of street hookers up and down the stairs of the Elton Hotel. I don't know what would set them off, but I did once witness a passer by solicit their trade, and was struck by the brashness involved in being one of their Johns.

To get to the point, globally, the sex trade, rather than just the cottage industry of the street, has become big business, including the availability of sex vacations. These would inevitably include the Asian peninsula, where I can only guess prostitution is nothing more than a common, acceptable way of life, for those pushed aside as the brackish residue of globalization. Women can be rooked, abducted and then trafficked across borders, with the returns of a villainous, unregulated income for those in charge; but always by the ancient and unending need men have to put women into subjugation, offering money in exchange for the intimacy of their sex organs. It is only in Western society where the fantasy of the high end hooker can have some basis in reality, turning what might otherwise be considered sordid into a business proposition. (I couldn't pass up the temptation of reading Xavier Hollander's The Happy Hooker when it was first published in the '70s.)

So instead, here I am, in the 21^st century in a mid-Hudson city riddled with crime and prostitution, saddened by the occasional woman in dowdy dress in freezing weather, perhaps looking for $15 to turn a quick trick. Too, for protection, prostitutes also tolerate a male figure in the background, taking their chances that the relationship will be a mutual windfall and not something than will compromise their safety or quality of life.

There needs to be more than one answer to this worldwide double standard. While marriage is considered the benchmark of stable society, it only masks the insatiable need for a greater license in pursuit of sexual gratification. The prostitute, otherwise frowned upon, upholds the standard of the woman unbound by considerations of convention, promising unconditional acceptance, and opening the door to the unqualified encouragement of the sex act.