Chant of the Brothelmaster

When researching a subject like commercial sex, there is nothing like cruising Facebook to get a feel for the genre. And as it happened, I ran into an uber 'sexually progressive' (more is better) and 'inclusive' (anybody's) New Age Guy (no boundaries), whose sex services and accommodation business hails from Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. And what particularly struck me about him is how emblematic he, his 'team' and his 'philosophy' are of not just a pattern of sexual discourse that has been going down since the Playboy era in the 1960s, but the way our whole economic and social milieu has been shaped since that time.

He is an ideologically articulate and still reasonably attractive older alpha male twenty-first century version of a provincially minor Hugh Hefner, who is rolling out a libertarian, post-industrial and fast money recycling sex service industry (which is one of the big three that also includes drugs and gambling) built around touchy/feely sex, male power and egoism, the pleasure principle, woke 'progressivism', fast cars, real estate wealth and having it all in the manner/template designed not just to specifically advertise and promote his business, but a much larger regime that I call 'Indulgence Capitalism'.

It is a despotism without walls or guards, where the prisoners cannot bring themselves to leave, because they are tightly held by visions of paradise, brought to them by the proud sponsors, just like our Hefner lookalike. Its ideological munitions no longer merely influence social thought, but become mediated into consciousness itself, in a regime more totalitarian than any of its more obviously authoritarian predecessors.

The step change into Indulgence Capitalism was made necessary by the need to keep exponentially expanding consumer driven production. It represented a shift away from a rational, disciplined and rules-governed economy and culture, based around needs and wants, to one of inconsequential iconic (mainly sexual) fantasies of desire and immediate satiation at any price. Such an 'economy' rewards indulgent disinhibition, deregulation and privatisation of accountability for the social infrastructure devouring ruin that it inevitably causes to anything that gets in its way or slows it down. In this world without boundaries, anything goes, including a lot of very unpleasant and seamy stuff that the propagandists of libertarian disinhibition never address.

When the so called 'Sexual Revolution' that accompanied all the above was rolled out, we only ever got to hear about the upsides of overthrowing the authoritarian repressions and disciplines of the past. But no one canvassed the thoroughly nasty downsides of a protracted free-for-all where nothing is off the table and routinely ripping off women becomes a legitimate past time for any enterprising opportunist.

On his Facebook page, our Hugh Hefner wannabe makes the case for himself as an enthusiastic, consciousness-controlling and controlled exponent of Indulgence Capitalism, by commercialising and marketing desire without limits or boundaries, satiating it and 'value adding' not just every sexual fetish you can think of, but raising all that to a sexistentialist (I am my sexuality, fantasies and delusions) 'way of being'. For him, this package delivers a benign higher level of consciousness that brings women to the font of their deepest yearning for sexual self-abandonment, leading to 'openness' to the domination of men (like our Playboy maestro for instance).

For him, all that silly superego ideological surface noise about female rights, equality and power delivers nothing but frustrated, 'unbudded', joyless, 'cunt dried' and shrivelled up husks whose intellect interrupts the most real and instinctive part of themselves. And our Hobart scion of sex can show them the way as employees, customers, and if attractive and young enough, as his subs, in a frozen world of pubescence to senescence fuckritude without end.

The reality is that the rub and rut of sex is but a preliminary bit player in a much larger sexual political business of reproducing the species and modeling to the next generation the best of what it means to be a mature, secure and honest adult man and woman, equitably partnering as an other/mutually regarding husband and wife and sacrificially mentoring children as father and mother, so that those inestimable human qualities can be passed on…..at least if we had the infrastructure left to do that any more….

There is a long term price to be paid for such an adolescent playboy regime actor and his much broader cohort of service industry 'entertainment' entrepreneurs. They produce mythologised colour and movement, signifying nothing beyond their own self-winding momentum. And while the system they help operate promised women 'liberation', in reality it declared open season on them and promoted unfettered access to their bodies.

The Patriarchy was replaced by an informal sexism that turned them into sexually available servants on demand. It was either that, or face social/sexual exclusion and ideological put downs by men who play women off against each other if they do not comply fast enough, in the same way employers did with their workers, until they started to organise unions.

We do not, and cannot, live by goods and services alone. As much as half our net worth is to be found in the quality and integrity of our social and existential software. And perhaps one of the most damning things we can do to that software is to commodify our women folk, or bits of them, like their sexual organs or secondary sexual characteristics; or reduce their broad human character to merely the sum of not even their own sexual desires, but those put upon them by narcissistic fantasists who cannot see them at all beyond the coveting of their bodies, as if they were beef eye fillets that just want to be eaten.

Faust has modern equivalents, not terribly dissimilar to our Hefner lookalikes, armed with all the trinkets and symbols of power, attractiveness, prestige and trappings of success, who equally damn themselves. These days eternal fire has given way to lifetime only contracts heavily front loaded with freebies and special deals where the devil is in the detail. They facilitate the layout of dysfunctional personal and communal histories to inexorably play themselves out to their equally compromised and damning ends, and then compound and pass their disease onto the next generation….on The Devil's special 'Childminder' rate…where the sins of the fathers….

Fixing things later will always be diabolical. Faust's desperate cleaving to his beautiful trophy consort, Helen of Troy, was emblematic of his incapacity to acknowledge his moral bankruptcy and face up to a devil who wanted his due; a failing he paid for with his existential life.

Unpicking an evil and the moral bankruptcy that accompanies it is always ten times harder than denying it traction in the first place. It has a way of entrenching and metastasising itself, and co-opting powerful allies in the body of its host, even as it destroys it.

Concealing that bankruptcy is a public relations and marketing system that has so taken over the architecture of social discourse with its iconic fantasising, that it effectively substitutes notions of objective reality with the authority of personal perception and fantasy. I feel it, therefore it must be so; you know, in the same way adolescents think that their reality is paramount and that stupid adults just do not 'understand'. This is a guaranteed path to delusion, because it abandons the paths to anywhere else. Objective reality checks, touchstones, markers and compassing just disappear.

And the adolescents just never grow up, especially male ones.

This regime has 'intelligentsia' (Indulgentsia) branch offices in all our university humanities departments pushing the same junk in the form of postmodernism, characterised by broad scepticism (so broad it is self-cancelling), subjectivism (feelings rule and objectivity sucks), and relativism (where no fixed values exist such that one view is as valid as any other). There is an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology (vacant assertion/dogma) that posits the authority of experience over evidence based reason and debate. It takes on a heresy sniffing quasi-religious authority for an intellectually baseless received wisdom that is more and more intolerant and dismissive of dissent, especially as its spurious claims are increasingly challenged.

This milieu enables even low life brothelmeisters to become moral arbiters and authorities on sexual politics, engage in a discourse replete with oracular (in the declamatory manner of authoritative oracles 'who know') and highly 'judgemental' pronouncements about women, how they ought to be and what they really want, while at the same time 'philosophically' denying the same facility to anyone critical of them, their ideas and/or their personal/business practices.

"Because we can't be 'judgemental', can we children, and call out evil by its name?"

"No, Miss!"

Sexist and exploitation enhancing self-abandonment and sexually submissive stereotypes of women destroy their capacity to be equally empowered and autonomous actors in the same way as men. Self-degradation is characterised as 'empowerment', and status destroying commercialisation of their sex/reproductive organs is passed off as 'work'; as if selling themselves as sexual servants were industrial 'value adding' in the same way as building solar panels. And all this is beyond moral/critical judgement, because in a world of pure subjectivity, everything is 'relative'. Nothing is definitive, which leaves more room for slip, slide, weave 'n duck than a Saturday night drunk.

Such propaganda spinning is self-serving bollocks. There is plenty of highly profitable grotty stuff going down in Hobart's 'Hefnerboy' club, that screws the female bunnies in every sense, including indirectly woman at large, whose larger status is materially reduced to little better than that of available-on-demand freebie courtesans who can't say no to any porno-fetish freak show if they want to stay in the mating game; or, even in some places, get a promotion at work.

The boys expect female self-abandonment and do not like to be kept waiting for their bunny hunt, eh, Hugh baby?