Recent news about the ex-governor of New York has revived debate among my progressive friends about the proper legal approach to prostitution.
To this debate, I offer a memory of walking through Bangkok 20 years ago. My wife and I had been in the town a week, interviewing the city’s Jewish ruby dealers. One evening, on a side street in the gem district, we passed an open door under a neon sign and I glanced in. In a waiting room, several men stood looking past a glass wall. Beyond it was a sloped gallery, where women sat in theater seats wearing black bikinis or thin slips. And each wore a round, numbered badge, so a client could ask for lot 23, or 37. Even if the women had the human form, they had the function of merchandise, of animal commodities.
The scene conjured up some lines from Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric”:
A man’s body at auction
For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,
I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.
Gentleman, look at this wonder
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it
For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years…
In this head the all-baffling brain
In it and below it the making of heroes…