Prostitution | Poverty meets Sexual Suppression

"Prostitution is bad, and must be stopped at any cost", is the general response you get from most people.

And all the feminists and the women right activists, cops and all the rest of the social moral policing circus go barging straight into the brothels catching the helpless prostitutes and their desperate clients in the act, that can hardly be called love making even by the most twisted and sick minds and drag them out half naked in public straight to the prison. And in the process snatch away whatever little dignity they had left.

Even though everybody agrees that prostitution is bad, nobody seems to really know what it is exactly about prostitution that is bad. Because if people knew what was wrong with prostitution, then they would also know how to fix it.

You can usually tell how well an individual or a group of people understands a problem, by looking at the way they try to solve that problem.
And our way of dealing with such issues, reflects on a very poor understanding of the problems of the world to say the least. The way we handle social problems like prostitution cannot even be called finding a solution to the problem. At best it can be looked at as desperate attempt at trying to cover up our own mess.

Of course there is no denying that some people are into the profession because they make a lot of money, are happy being sex workers.
And if a person is happy prostituting herself/himself, I have nothing to say to them. It’s the rest of the helpless unhappy sex workers that I am concerned about.

Most individuals are too busy leading their own little selfish lives and have no time to ponder over these social issues, and since people have not had the time or concern to come to their own intelligent conclusions about such problems, they just mindlessly repeat what they have heard other people say over and over again without having any understanding of the actual problem.
Something on the lines of "Prostitution is an ugly scar on the face of humanity, and must be gotten rid of".

While I totally agree with the fact that prostitution is ugly, sad and degrading to women, I disagree with the method being employed to counter prostitution with the same intensity.

Prostitution, just like war is a product of our society.It has grown out of the very structure of our society ans is a result of the very way of life which we have all agreed to live by.

But while most people very willingly like to take a lot of personal pride in talking about the seemingly positive results or accomplishments of the way of life of our species, the most common and over rated one being technological advancement.
On the other hand we as individuals and hence as societies are equally reluctant to accept and embrace the adverse impacts of our social paradigm.
And since we refuse to accept that all social problems are consequences of all our choices and actions, to keep hoping for any real change to occur only seems more and more pointless.

Problems like prostitution are dealt with as if it is an ugly burden that was imposed on our society by some external force and needs to be gotten rid of.

The haste with which we want to turn a blind eye to, or cover up these ugly faces of human paradigm reflects on a nauseating sense of shame and embarrassment that we as individuals and societies are too fearful to face.

May be deep down inside we all know that each one of us is responsible for these problems, but we keep running away from facing ourselves.
Because if we accept that these social and individual problems are a result of our way of life, then we can no longer point fingers at other people for these problems and will inevitably have to change the way we live.

So in order to avoid having to give up our selfish lifestyles, we quickly try to detach ourselves and our actions from these problems and make believe that a problem like prostitution is something that is being forced on to us for no fault of ours and try to fight it as an external adversity that exists independently of our choices and actions.
Just like how a father wants to take all the credit for his son's achievements if the son is successful according to social norms, but wants nothing to do or claims to have nothing to do with his son's failure if he is not successful, all of us as individuals only want to associate with the positive aspect of the social paradigm and claim to have nothing to do with the negative.

Anyway let us try and see how our choices, decisions and actions as individuals lead to a problem like prostitution.

On taking a closer look it becomes clear that prostitution seems to be the love child of two more basic or fundamental problems with our society.

1) Poverty
2) Sexual suppression

Let us look into how each one of us is contributing to the problems of poverty and mass sexual suppression and in the process try and witness the birth of prostitution from our very actions.

Our social design is based on a very animalistic drive of selfish competition for survival. You look around and you see everyone competing for everything, for schools, for colleges, for jobs and for every other senseless thing.
Through all these competitions, everybody is trying to secure more resources and money for themselves, in order to improve their individual chances of survival. Now when everybody is trying to pull limited resources and money to their own houses and bank accounts, there is bound to be a struggle and fight for resources and power. And where there is a fight someone has to lose.
So some people manage to successfully compete and secure more money and resources for themselves, while the others lose and are forced to struggle for a basic survival. And people who managed to snatch away resources and money now find themselves in a stronger position to compete further and continue to hoard more and more for themselves. We see everybody increasing their bank accounts deposits, whether it be politicians or any common man.
And the people, who had failed to secure resources for themselves, now find it even harder to compete with people with more resources. And hence in our society we see that rich people keep getting richer, and the poor get poorer.
So while we see some people staying in mansions worth millions of dollars and driving super expensive cars, many others barely manage to find one meal a day.

We all see building our individual bank account deposits as a very natural thing to do but we make a lot of noise when politicians do it. Not because it's corrupt, but simply because they managed to hoard a lot more than most of the common public could.

The problem is that everybody creates an image for themselves, and calls it ‘me’ and builds their lives centered on it. To this image of ‘me’, people usually attach a few other people and call them my, this usually includes few family members and in some cases friends.
And the moment there is something that is ‘me’ and ‘my’, there automatically comes into existence something that is ‘not me’ and ‘not my’.
So people might postpone or give up the idea of buying the next big TV, car, or house if their own sisters and mothers were on the verge of being forced to prostitute themselves to make a living because they belong to the image of ‘me’ as my mother and sister.
But since people fail to connect to the whole of humanity as ‘my’, even though women have been forced by poverty to sell their soul and dignity for survival, all of us continue to build our individual bank accounts so we can take that next big holiday abroad, and buy the next cool gadget. Because we see these other women as 'not my' mother or sister.
Hence we see how all of us individually are responsible for the plight of women in this male dominated society.
But prostitution is not a supply driven market, but rather a demand driven one. Women with all other hopes lost, decide to make a living by selling themselves because a demand for such a service already exists in the society.

And this is where we come to the second problem of sexual suppression.

Even if someone, whether man or woman is prostituting themselves because there is a lot of money in the profession, the fact that a need for the existence of a profession like sex worker arises out of sexual suppression cannot be denied.

It seems that as part of the society, we all contribute to sexual suppression to some degree or the other for two reasons.

1)Even though different cultures and countries handle sex with varying degrees of sensitivity. One thing that is more or less common to all cultures and religions is that chastity, and abstinence are looked at as moral virtues and sex is either considered a taboo or less respectable to say the least.
Now As I said earlier, that everybody creates an image for themselves called ‘me’ or ‘I’.
And just like competing for resources is necessary for survival, competing for a positive social image is equally critical to social existence.
Social acceptance is very necessary for survival, because a negative social image leads to inevitable ostracisation of the individual.
Another important point that needs to be made at this point is the fact that sexual instinct is the second most dominating human instinct, after survival.
And caught up in a social paradigm where sexual instinct is suppressed rather than faced and understood for what it is, people being too fearful of being judged negatively for their sexual desires end up suppressing them. And as a result of suppression of such a basic instinct, doesn’t successfully put the sexual desire to rest, but forces it to come to surface in morally deprived ways like prostitution.

If psychology and study of the human mind has taught us anything, it’s that the only way to get over one’s fears, and anxieties is to face them, and not to suppress them. Suppression only leads to depression, and conflict.

2)The second reason for sexual suppression being the fact that just like we selfishly compete for resources, we also compete for sexual partners. And it usually helps to condemn or discourage other people from engaging in sexual act, so that with everyone else out of the way we can improve our own chances of sexual intercourse.
Our contempt for sexual act seems to arise more out of jealousy than out of concern for moral values.
I am sure everybody wants to be part of as many out of the box sexual experiences as possible, but since people find themselves deprived of fulfilling their desires. They discourage other people from achieving that too, by labeling the act as evil, or unhealthy. As a species and civilization we clearly love sex. Our increasing population is a testament to our sexual inclination. But while we like to go wild behind closed doors, once out we like to maintain a sombre image. And as this social charade of double standards continues, many people are completely deprived of sex and all the sexually frustrated people find themselves heading to the red light districts to get what the society deprived them of.
So we see here again, that for our selfish need to maintain a positive social image as individuals, and to compete for sexual partners we lead a two faced life and have created a social paradigm that when combined with poverty in a male dominated society inevitably leads to prostitution.

Continuing to live in a social paradigm
1)Where everybody is selfishly competing with one another for survival, and people are forced to do anything and everything to make a living and,
2) where the second most strongest instinct of sex is continuously suppressed and tabooed rather than explored and intelligently understood.

and then trying to stop something like prostitution, will directly result in even more stronger suppression of the sexual drive and will only end up bringing out the sexual needs in ways so sick and perverted that will make prostitution look like child's play.

The only way to free humanity from these miseries is to shift from a social paradigm where everybody leads a self-centered life to one where concept of 'me' and 'my' becomes obsolete.
Once people truly grow beyond their selfish needs, then possibly we can think about sharing our resources equally and handling and understanding life without perversion for selfish means.
Any other method to tackle social problems like prostitution short of the required self-change will only be a band aid, or temporary fix and not a solution.

Hiding from Reality | Symptomatic Approach : It's Origin and Ineffectiveness

Self-survival instinct is at the very core of all the drama of life here on earth.
It is the most fundamental drive in the animal kingdom, common to all living beings but individual to each one, which means that each animal is responsible for his or her own survival.
And when each and every animal is individually driven most strongly by his/her self-survival instinct, it is logical to say that only the fittest survive, because there is a competition and a struggle against one another for survival.

There are two sides to this struggle for survival - on one side animals of any species have to struggle and fight with other members of the same species for life resources, and on the other they have to struggle to keep safe from the predators.

Also to me it seems that any animal that can live freely and independently without risking his/her life will prefer to live freely.
So we see that animals like the cheetah or the eagle who are at the top of their respective food chains and have very few or no predators to fear of, can and do live and hunt independently.
Whereas a lot of other species of animals like deers, monkeys, buffaloes, elephants who are not strong enough individually to survive alone in the wild usually stick around in groups or herds.
But it is important to understand that these animals don't stick around in groups because they want to look out for one another or for the common good of the group.
Rather the fundamental reason behind relatively weak animals staying in groups is that it improves each one's individual chances of survival.

A good example to illustrate this point would be to consider a herd of deer grazing together in a field. Now if a cheetah or a pack of lions were to attack this herd, every deer would run for his/her own life away from the group rather than facing the danger together as a group.
Hence it's clear that these animals stick together in a group as long as it keeps them safe or at least makes them feel safe individually, but the moment this feeling of safety is threatened they leave the safety of the group and run away.
Same is true in case of human beings as well. Say a few people are in a movie theater, and the theater catches fire. Now what do people do? Do they stick around together and try to get the whole group out safely?
No they don't! Everyone runs for their own lives. Forget about sticking around together to save each other, in a hurry to save themselves people don't even care if they kill a few other people in stampede.

So we see that all animals come together in groups because it gives them an improved sense of individual safety, but the moment that feeling of safety is challenged, each one is on his/her own again.

We humans are animals too, animals who are capable of intelligent thought and logic and all that, but looking at what we have done with ourselves and our world, we clearly haven't let our intelligence make us very different from the rest of the animals.

Human ancestors lived in groups as well, alongside all other animals, fighting for survival in the wild.
And they started living in groups for the very same reason as all other animals did- because they were too weak to survive alone in the wild, and living in groups increased their individual chances of survival.
So we see that even the earliest human society began as nothing but a group of animals who stuck around together for their own individual safety.
And when individuals in a group are only concerned about their own well being, there is bound to be a competition for resources and power.

Just like all other groups of animals, the earliest of human groups had leaders too.
Usually the strongest one would more or less self-appoint himself as the leader, just like even in today's world.
So our ancestors lived in the jungle in families under leaders in exchange for a feeling of safety from other animals.

Slowly we came out of the jungle, and started living in relative safety of tribes and villages, under new leaders. Now we didn't have to worry too much about the wild predators. But as individuals we were still insecure about our lives and being too weak to survive alone still wanted to live together in groups.
But as I said the only reason animals/people stick together in a group or a society is due to fear of something.
In the jungles we stuck together because we had fear primarily of predators. Once out of the jungle we needed something else to be afraid of in order to stick together in tribes.
And we found this fear in form of tribes or groups of other people.

This individual insecurity/fear that people have for their own lives has been exploited by our leaders for a very long time. We as animals are always afraid for our lives, and our leaders give us something to be afraid of to keep us together under their leadership.
The leaders understand that to keep people together, they have to be kept in a constant fear of something or the other.
There has to be an enemy image for the society to stick together.
But the leaders alone are not to be blamed, they have merely played on our insecurities.
The people are the ones who want something to be scared of so they can stick together as a society, leaders just happen to want the same, so every now and then they create a new enemy for the society to face.
The current favorite of our leaders seems to be terrorism.
So we see that in a selfish paradigm where each one is merely bothered about his/her individual survival, it is impossible for anyone to live without fear. Because each one sees other people as a potential threat to his/her survival.

Now when as individuals, we feel threatened by other individuals for survival, it's obvious that this insecurity reflects at society level as well. Because if individuals living in different societies feel threatened by each other, then the societies too are going to feel threatened by other societies. A society is nothing but a collection of individuals anyway.
So we fight individually for survival with one another, and we also fight as societies with other societies for the same reason.

Our ancestors fought with one another for survival in the jungle, and we are still fighting with one another for the very same reason - individual survival.
Only thing that has changed is that those fights and skirmishes between early tribes of humans, over the years turned into bloody battles between kingdoms, and today they have turned into wars between countries.
Now we think we have evolved and are better than those lesser evolved animals because we have climbed off the trees, and come out of caves and built ourselves clean cities, and handsome clothes, and expensive cars.
But we haven't really evolved, with all this external glamor we are only trying to cover up the true animal nature that is still the driving force behind our lives.
If we have evolved anything, it is the ways in which we can compete with one another for survival.
While other animals compete with one another for survival based primarily on their physical strengths, we humans have invented a whole array of concepts to compete with one another for survival.
Religions, Castes, social classes, fashion, nationalities are all concepts that show how desperate we are to give ourselves and each other as different identities as possible, so that when we look at one another we only see how different we are from one another and hence a threat to each others individual survival.
As neighbours we fight, as different religious groups we fight, as different castes we fight, as different countries we fight. So we are constantly fighting with one another for our lives.

But now one may ask - what exactly is the problem here? Human beings are animals and they live like animals! So what's wrong with that?

The problem is the fact that we humans can think intelligently, unlike all other species of animals.
So when a powerful lion snatches away food from a weaker lion, and the weaker one goes hungry, the stronger one doesn't think about the plight of the weaker lion, because he can not. He is purely driven by his self-survival instinct and does not have the capacity to think about the consequences of his actions.
But because we humans can think, when relatively powerful human beings compete and snatch away food from weaker human beings, it makes some of us question our actions . And hence the whole debate.
Besides I think when a lion has eaten his stomach full he might leave the rest lying around for other lions to eat.
But we humans want everything for ourselves, even if we are done eating, we had rather hide the remaining food till it rots than give it to other people.

In spite of our ability to think and understand logically and even after thousands of years of technological advancements, the problems facing the human society haven't changed at all.
Thinkers like Plato from ancient civilizations spoke about the same social and moral issues that we face today. Which means that there is a realm in human existence which has remained unchanged over all these years.
This is the psychological realm, or realm of the consciousness.

But why have we failed to eradicate these issues for thousands of years?

To me this seems to be due to lack of our sincerity towards addressing these problems.
But why have we shown lack of sincerity towards these serious social issues?

When people get cancer, do they go to the doctor and ask him to just remove enough cancer cells to eliminate physical symptoms to allow them to go about their daily life or do they ask him to remove the god damned thing from the root itself as soon as possible?

They obviously ask him to remove it from the root as soon as possible, so we see that there is sincerity when an individual's life is at stake. But even though society has been suffering from these ailments for thousands of years, we have failed to face the root causes and get rid of them.

And our failure to show same sincerity towards these social cancers shows that just like all other animals,even humans are still driven purely and only by their self-survival instincts, and welfare of the entire group is of little or no importance.
There seems to be no trace of wise use of intelligence in the design of our social paradigm.
What we have done instead is that we have used our intelligence along the lines of primitive animal instincts like competition, self-survival, possessiveness, crude violence and so on. And this way, what we have created are more ways to effectively compete with one another for survival, or in other words more effective ways to destroy each other.
Remember that we humans came together and began staying in societies only because living in society made us feel more secure as individuals and not for the betterment of humanity. That is why in our society we see that everyone is competing with one another for everything- There is competition to get into school, then to get into college, then a job, and so on. So we see that we are merely living together and competing with one another for our individual survival, rather than coming together and thinking about the common good of the society.

Now when society is nothing but a group of people who are pretending to be together and looking out for one another, but at heart only care about their own life and needs, there are bound to be conflicting situations, and homeless, poor, hungry, and abused people in the society.

The reason we have failed to eradicate these social issues for thousands of years is because we have failed to understand the root cause of all these social issues. Unaware of the underlying root cause, we have only been trying to cure the symptoms that show up on the surface. But since the fundamental problem is still not understood, these symptoms like poverty, homelessness, crimes, wars keep coming back.

Of course there is no denying that a lot of people out there genuinely want to do something about these poor, hungry, homeless people.
But rather than trying to drill down to the root cause behind these problems, they go out there and try to fight these symptoms as if they were independently existing problems. Which is a very shallow approach.

In our current society, NGOs and other social welfare organizations are also committing the same mistake by trying to solve social issues like child labor, women abuse, poverty as individual independently existing problems. But this kind of approach will never work,because these problems are mere symptoms of the fundamental problem with our society- which is our selfish paradigm.
We see that these problems have been there since the inception of human society, and they are still around because we have been trying to cure the symptoms of the fundamental problem, rather than trying to understand the fundamental problem itself.

When I think about the possible reasons behind our failure to understand the fundamental issue behind all these problems - two possibilities come to my mind.

One could be that we have been so deeply conditioned psychologically over millions of years that as individuals we feel that fighting with one another for survival is the natural and the only way to live, and to us this selfish lifestyle doesn't seem to be the cause of these problems, instead we feel that these problems are independently existing unique social issues, and need to be dealt with like individual problems.

The other possibility could be that in society people who are in a position to make a difference are the ones who are well-off, the underprivileged themselves cannot do anything about their situation. And the people who are well-off including most of us and our leaders don't want anything to change because we have successfully competed against the weaker to secure a safer environment for ourselves.

I feel that the true reason behind our failure to understand the root cause behind social problems is a combination of both of these two possibilities. While on one hand as masses and individuals we have failed to evolve beyond our individual insecurities for life, on the other our leaders have deliberately kept us fighting for survival with one another so that they can continue to rule our society.

And in this human civilization of ours, which is already paralyzed by our selfish nature, invention of a concept like God has only further paralyzed humanity.
Religions of the world make people feel that everything that the world is, is a part of God's design, and so when they see problems in the society, they take it to be a part of God's plan and completely give up the idea that they might have something to do with these problems. Since people hold God responsible for everything, the whole concept of god takes away the responsibility of our actions away from us.

For such religious people here is a mental exercise - Let us for a moment agree that God is looking after everything, now think about the world as it is now - with humans and all their human problems.
Now for a moment imagine the world without human beings. Eventhough God is still looking after the world and other living beings, don't all social issues disappear with humans as well?
Now put humans back in the picture and we see all problems coming back all over again.
I think this simple thought experiment is enough to show that human beings themselves are the cause of their problems.

As I said earlier that except humans all other animals have only their self-survival instincts to live by, and there is nothing wrong with their selfish paradigm because that's the only way for them to survive.
But we humans can think, and yet we have not used a trace of our intelligence in trying to understand life better.
Continuing to live in this selfish social paradigm and then trying to cure the social problems which arise because of the very selfish nature of the society is naive and ignorant and is not the solution.
The only way to get rid of these social issues if we are at all serious about it, is for us to try as individuals and as societies to evolve beyond our selfish insecurities and understand that it is possible for us to live beside one another without having to fight for survival.
And once we understand that every person and every living being has the right to and wants to live as much as anyone of us, hopefully then we can come together as improved conscious human beings and create a society for the welfare of one and all.