The case for legalizing sex work

Q Do you think post-op transgender people have any obligation
to tell their lovers they were once the other sex? —On the
Fence

A Yes.

Q I’m in my 40s and straight. My wife of nine years is no
longer interested in sex. Period. I haven’t had a blowjob in about
eight years, I can’t touch her beautiful tits, kissing is without
tongue and our rare sex is missionary and in the dark. I’m
miserable.

I believe she’s depressed. She refuses to get help, saying that if
only I would do this or that, she would be more willing. But I do this
and that, and she’s still not interested. After a lot of talking, she
suggested that I find a girlfriend for sex. However, she set conditions
that were unrealistic: She wanted to approve of her before I slept with
her and I could only see this other person late at night, with the
wife’s permission, which would only be granted after ALL other family
obligations were satisfied. I preferred a “don’t ask, don’t tell”
approach. She then withdrew the idea entirely. I proceeded to meet and
sleep with several different women anyway, and I am now seeing one
regularly. Sex is enjoyable again.

My question: I know that people would say I am cheating on my wife,
but am I wrong to feel just as cheated by her? —Need Some
Answers

A No.

Q A few months ago, I sent you a note thanking you for your
column. Today, the power of your voice hit home. As you know, an angry,
sexually frustrated gunman went on a killing spree in Pittsburgh.
Reading the killer’s blog, I was struck by the similarity of his
situation to that of the lonely, sexually frustrated men you counseled
in your column the week before the shooting. But George Sodini did not
reach out; the men who wrote you did.

My situation, for years, was similar to Sodini’s and to the lonely
men who you helped in that column. Although I wasn’t a virgin, I was
“clogged up” and unable to get close to people physically and
emotionally. I overcame my fears and life is good now. But it wasn’t
easy. I was never as angry as Sodini, but I was absolutely as lonely
and isolated as he was and as the men whose letters you answered. Maybe
if I’d been alone another 14 years—I found my life partner at 34—I
might have become that angry. —Middle-Aged Family Guy

A Thank you for the note, MAFG, and thanks—I think—for
pointing me to George Sodini’s blog. The blog has been pulled down, but
it is extensively quoted in news reports and it makes for depressing
reading. It’s never pretty when chronic sexual deprivation and a
lifetime of romantic rejection slam into a narcissistic personality
with sociopathic tendencies who happens to live in a country awash in
guns: “I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe,
touch of cologne—yet 30 million women rejected me, over an 18- or
25-year period. That is how I see it. Thirty million is my rough
guesstimate of how many desirable single women there are.”

So, hey, why not go shoot up an aerobics class full of women?

A woman I knew at college—an antiviolence activist, righteous and
right-on—used to say, “Testosterone is gasoline, porn the match.” I
disagree. Testosterone is gasoline—which isn’t necessarily a bad
thing (gas makes things go)—but sexual frustration is the match.

I’m not suggesting that this tragedy could’ve been averted if only
some selfless woman had “taken one for the team” and married Sodini, an
asshole and a sociopath. The women who rejected him obviously saw him
for what he was and were right to run away. But if someone had told
Sodini, who hadn’t had sex since 1990, to see sex workers—something I
advised the guys in my column two weeks ago to consider—it might have
taken the edge off his anger and kept it from curdling into homicidal
rage. Maybe if we, as a society, valued sex workers and sex work, if we
legalized and regulated it, and if we viewed “paying for it” as a
legitimate option for guys who would otherwise go without for decades,
perhaps this tragedy could have been averted.

But Sodini wasn’t taking advice from me. He was getting it from R.
Don Steele, author of How to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35.
The book was sitting on Sodini’s coffee table in a video he posted to
the web. Steele apparently traffics in—and profits from—instilling
false hopes in losers like Sodini. (“Immediately improve your success
with women!” Steele says on his website steelballs.com. “Everything is 100 percent
guaranteed money back.”)

Sodini felt that he was entitled not just to sex and a romantic
relationship, but to sex and a romantic relationship with a much
younger woman. And he was following the advice of a love-and-romance
guru who encouraged him to cling to that belief. But Sodini wasn’t just
another socially maladapted schlub furious with the world—and with
women—for denying him the 20something ass he felt he had coming.
Sodini was a nut. And he couldn’t understand why, if he was doing
everything right, he wasn’t finding the success that Steele guaranteed
him.

Someone needed to sit Sodini down and explain that settling down
requires settling for and that young women are usually interested in
young men and that we can’t always have what we want and that there
might be women out there who would date him—perhaps women closer to
his own age, women in his own league in the looks and social-skills
departments (and Sodini wasn’t bad-looking)—but no woman was going to
date him until after he got his shit together. And someone needed to
tell him that he wasn’t going to impress the ladies by leaving How
to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35 on his coffee table.

And someone needed to tell him that some men—and some women—are
alone all their lives and, yeah, that sucks and it’s not fair and it
hurts.

Instead, Sodini had R. Don “Steel Balls” Steele telling him that if
he just bought a matching sofa set—really—and the right suit, that
success was guaranteed.

This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2009.