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“Meet, Pay, Love”—that's the name of the review of Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys by Toni Bentley in The New York Times. A very clever spin on Elizabeth Gilbert's book Eat, Pray, Love.
“Why is sex supposed to be free?” Bentley asks in the opening. “It never is. Ask anyone. Like Sebastian Horsley, England’s low-rent Oscar Wilde. 'The difference between sex for money and sex for free,' he writes, 'is that sex for money always costs a lot less.' Money is the elephant in every bedroom, making your parents’ constant presence look positively bourgeois... The collective cry for identity found in this unsentimental compilation will resonate deeply — even, I suspect, with those among us who pretend not to pay for sex.”
I had issues with the angle that we're all paying for sex, one way or another, not because I particularly disagree with that statement (I am divorced after all), but because it ignores a very crucial fact: people outside the sex industry are free to expect something from their exchanges with other people, be it dinner, gifts, alimony, the house, the boat, etc. Sex workers, on the other hand, are criminalized for being upfront about the exchange.
There may be an elephant in every bedroom, but in a sex worker's room, there's also a wolf.
When I started writing this column, I made a little promise to myself: I would not get political. I would keep Sex and the Single Girl and Sex and the City near my heart.
But I have to confess it's hard to ignore politics. While I'm railing about the failed institution of marriage, some people are fighting to be able to enjoy the same privilege with their partners. While I discuss how important it is to get tested for HIV and STIs regularly, I'm stumped when someone messages me asking if I know any free clinics because they don't have health insurance.
I'm privileged socioeconomically, I'm privileged in my career choice, I'm privileged in my heteronormality. I'm privileged that I live in an age that doesn't see my sexual proclivities as paraphilias.
With that privilege comes the responsibility of remembering not everyone may as free as you are.
GARAPAN GEESE
I grew up in the Northern Mariana Islands, a United States commonwealth in the Pacific. It's perfectly all right if you have never heard of them. Unless you’re in the Navy or Marine Corps, a WWII Pacific Stage veteran or trivia junky, the unassuming dots on your map east of the Philippines have no reason to mean anything to you.
So let me tell you a story—and it is a story, as it goes way back before my childhood. During that epic race for the Spice Islands between Spain and Portugal, Ferdinand Magellan “discovered” the archipelago. Skirmishes with the unruly locals who were fond of thieving from the intruders led the expedition to dub these islands “the Isles of the Thieves.” It wasn’t until Spain claimed them formally nearly 150 years later that they were named for then Spanish Queen Mariana of Austria.
Post-Magellan, the islands were the possession of the crown until Spain sold them to Germany in 1899. After WWI, when a defeated Germany was stripped of all overseas possessions, the Marianas were turned over to the League of Nations to be administered by Japan. Less than two decades later, Japan annexed the islands and withdrew from the League of Nations. By the time war cast another shadow over the Pacific, some 29,692 Japanese military personnel were already stationed on Saipan, the main island of the archipelago.
Located at a strategic position, the United States wasted no time taking over. On June 15, 1944, they assaulted, leading to one of the most brutal and decisive battles of the Pacific Stage of WWII. American forces eventually gained control and a year later a B-29 named Enola Gay took off from the island of Tinian, also in the Marianas, and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
At war’s end, the islands were devastated. They, along with other islands in the region, (collectively known as Micronesia), became the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands in the care of the U.S., which had no idea what to do with them. (Kissinger, in fact, while discussing the fate of the islands at the time, quipped, “We’re only talking about 90 thousand people—who gives a damn?”)
Located 6,000 miles west of Los Angeles, 3,700 miles west of Hawaii, and having too small a workforce, the islands were difficult to develop, much less made self-sufficient. Soon, they were
