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Some people may remember the episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” where Larry meets a terminally ill boy who promises to help him out of a predicament if Larry can grant him a dying wish: He wants to see a naked woman.
The situation was uncomfortable enough for the Larry David brand of cringe-comedy when it appeared in a sitcom. However, the same situation has come up in the news this week, only slightly more bizarre. Over in the United Kingdom, a 22-year-old man dying of a disease called Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy had made his final wish to his hospice, run by one Sister Frances Dominica: He asked to lose his virginity to a prostitute.
With the British being perhaps equally conservative about sexual matters as their Yankee counterparts, the ultimate paper vs. scissors battle was about to begin, pitting the strict religious ethics of the Catholic Church against the common desire to allow the ill to lead a life with every bit of normalcy they can muster.
In the end, normalcy triumphed. The hospice actually agreed to pay for the woman, a sex worker who had advertised her availability to those with special needs or illnesses. Years earlier, Switzerland introduced a plan to provide this same service to the disabled, whether clinically ill or not. The idea in mind was that sex is an important, natural part of life and that the disabled should be able to experience it. That plan was controversial, but won out in the typically progressive Swiss manner.
It is almost impossible to imagine this happening in America. Though some studies show as many as 70 percent of Americans having sex before they turn 18 – long before marriage – it seems that our culture wants to deny sex to everything it can. Sex is fine if you want to convince Americans to buy a car or soft drink, but not if someone actually wants to enjoy it.
Of course, the seamy underbelly of this story involves the prostitute, the ultimate hybrid of sex and commerce. This brings us to another story from the week in sex: “Romance Traveling.” It’s “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” only pricier.
Romance traveling is the feminine version of what is called “sex tourism” when done by males. February is the peak month for female tourists to descend on third world nations like Jamaica and Barbados and pay young men for sex. According to an article printed Sunday in the Montreal gazette, 600,000 women have engaged in the activity since 1981. These are not young women hooking up with locals on spring break. Most of these women are healthy, wealthy Westerners who plan these trips with the intention of paying a poor, young “rent-a-Rasta,” as they are called, to serve as escorts and sexual partners.
This is lucrative work for these men. Nonetheless, the result of the sex trade on the island is typically the desecration of family structures, and critics compare it to the same kind of dominance forced onto slaves of the south in the United States. That women are engaging in the behavior of men isn’t so much a strong example of feminist individuality and control over their own sex lives; it’s a sad attempt to take over the same kind of brutal and demeaning power exhibited by male sex tourists who prowl Indonesia for 12-year-olds.
Then what of the dying man who experienced sex with a prostitute in lieu of, shall we say, the real deal? Is that an act of male oppression? In our culture, we have an unthinking response to sexual ethics. We judge the acts of large groups of people as if they were herds, as if sex wasn’t a private act based on personal, individual desires and choices. Americans look down on prostitution because it is rarely a free choice, but it sometimes is. After all, Americans also look down on pre-marital sex, homosexuality and, basically, the very existence of sex itself. Ideally, Americans could start looking at all things sexual through one lens: Is it consensual, and does it make space for a healthy life? If not, it’s not sex, it’s violence. The rest is just a matter of taste.
Bangor Daily News