“Prostitution is a seesaw of supply and demand: the customer pays for what he wants and hasn’t already got (no matter why) and the prostitute supplies it. An indirect food-sex equation of sorts emerges. The working girl [um, or guy] wants money; the customer wants sex. Money buys food; a hunger for sex works out to be the equivalent of a hunger for food. Oversimplified, yes… but prostitution, as women who work at it will tell you, is work like any other, and the reason we all work — whether or not we like what we do — is to put dinner on the table and to pay the rent.”
— Bunny Crumpacker (The Sex Life of Food)
Like restaurant dining, prostitution is a thrill. I can be a new me, if only for hour-long shifts.
That’s not to say that food and sex are the same. Restaurants and food are hedonistic, yes. Pleasure-giving, absolutely. They are not erotic.
People can live without sex. Food is different. Food gives life; sex gives humanity. That is sex’s singular power. I made a crippling mistake conflating the two. I thought that sex, stripped of love or even affection, could be utilitarian, a trade and nothing more. You can slap lipstick on a roasted suckling pig, but that pig is still just dinner.
‘What do you want?’
“Well, I need to eat.”
![[EXPLORE] Tsarina's Chambers](https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52759754105_fe2bb13fa8_s.jpg "[EXPLORE] Tsarina's Chambers")
Akira Morikawa 