Hey come! Legalise South Africa's prostitutes

I hastily jabbed in a text message to a friend of mine in China: “I have a new, cute, teaching assistant, her English name is Easy. I wonder if she is”. Randy (aptly named) rapidly replied: “Well try her out and give me immediate feedback”. Thereafter, the flow of text messages back and forth got more and more raunchy. When I got home and told my wife, Chookie, she just laughed.

‘Strue, in China we have Chinese teaching assistants in private training companies. They are usually female and can give themselves daft English names like Silly and Only. I’ve tried telling them to change them and that I am quite happy to call them by their Chinese name, but they are stubborn, it is so de rigueur to have an English name as well.

The prostitution trade in China is huge. When we lived in Shaoxing, as I strolled past the ostensible hair salon or massage parlour, the doors would open invitingly, as did the glossy legs within. And many of them do prostitution to improve their social standing and further their careers so they can pay for various courses.

In some of the pubs near where I live the ladies of the night are in your face about it. One will come sit right next to me, shoulders brushing, stare at me longingly, give my ankle a nudge with her shoe and make a drinking gesture with her hand, thus asking me for a drink and commencing foreplay. (Now that’s where I draw the line; I have gone to the pub for a drink, not to be harassed.)

When blokes get together in the pub the topic is often about women. That’s just how we are. We debate what is sexy about Chinese women, and many of them are hot (pity most Chinese chicks don’t do boobs, we mourn, just cute, barely discernible ping pong balls. One extra layer on the butt would make them terrific, but they don’t do bubble butts much either). We have informed discourses on how are they different to their Western counterparts (man, after a few years in pencil-legged China those bikini competitions in Australia or Hawaii or where ever, the girlies look like cows, just look at the udder on her).

My Chook and other women have told me that when they have a “girls’ night” they often talk about their men and men in general. I learned from her that they use expressions like “he’s dressed left” and usually men “dress right”. In other words, my astonished ear was told, when he puts his underwear on, he shifts his willy either left or right to make the entire apparatus more comfortable. I immediately thought that I dress “centre” but realise I lean, ahem, more to the left, maybe because I am left-handed…(hey, where are you going with this Rod?) and sometimes I am now self-conscious about it. I didn’t know the girls could notice that much. Yeah sure, I know the expression “well hung” but that is the headline, anyone can see the headline, especially if the pants are tight, but “dresses right”? That’s details in the fourth paragraph after the headline, just after depth and width of bush and before circumcised or uncircumcised and helmet colour.

The point is, people really like sex enormously, even if it is just to talk about it or to look at the opposite sex. I think it is healthy. The energy drive propelling the genitals into liquid action is certainly extremely potent. Take Freud. He wrote unsublimated reams about it. We all know about the perverse sublimations of celibate priests. if you ain’t going to come healthily with a consenting fellow adult or two or three, free of charge or with payment, you are going to one day start coming unhealthily, through vicarious means. Ask Christian pastor Ted Haggard, who was the leader of a huge, worldwide church. He openly slammed gays as godless sinners from the pulpit, and then was exposed for having regular sex with a male prostitute! How does a person manage to lead such a double life?

But I was not at all surprised. Projecting your problems onto others is text-book psychology, Psychoanalysis 101. He is one of the countless. Ask fellow blogger Bert Olivier, whom I met the other night in Shanghai, he specialises in psychoanalysis, he’ll tell you. (“Rod,” you’re thinking, “duh, like we need proof”.)

Religions really get people by their guilty! gotcha! short and hairies when they get them to believe that sex, which can be so wonderful, relaxing, relieving and blood-pressure-reducing is actually very, very bad. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd gets it spot on in The Final Cut album: “By the cold and religious we were taken in hand [wanking movement], shown how to feel good and told… to feel bad.”

So now Mokotedi Mpshe in SA criticises the move to decriminalise prostitution by the time of the World Cup, saying it is a moral issue. It is only a moral issue if you decide it to be. To me sex, provided it is with a consenting partner(s) is just a natural function, like eating, drinking and the need for fun and entertainment. Prostitution is regarded as the oldest profession in the world and you do not need to be a quantum physics theorist to figure out why. People are going to find and get sex whether or not it is legal.

Going back to the early 20th century, the USA of the Great Gatsby banned alcohol and that just did not stop people. Whiskey etc. was bootlegged in from Canada through the crime system that mushroomed. Some of the hooch they were drinking was downright dangerous, weird mixes like neat alcohol mixed with brake fluid which understandably killed people or left them with severe brain damage. So alcohol was legalised and a system put into place whereby nothing that dangerous could be consumed.

The same with prostitution. I know it can be a sad career. So can a dentist’s, a gynaecologist’s or an actor’s. The first would put me off food, the second off sex and the third has to be extremely tough and unstable unless you really crack it. But, like Holland, if sex is legalised, male and female prostitutes can be protected by labour law and the police force. (Well, first we need to also sort out our police force, I know.) The perception of whores as mere dirty sluts is just that: a perception. Sex is a bodily function that will have its way one way or another.

I have been with prostitutes twice in my life and it is not my scene. My preference is really for sex with a consenting partner and part of the turn on is that she wants me to give it to her, yes baby! But that is my preference and it is not for me to decide other people’s preferences. Sex is not bad or immoral or something to be demonised. It becomes demonised when it is seen as bad or immoral. So legalise it and protect the prostitutes.