So yesterday I didn’t get a chance to join the conversation on BBC radio’s World Have Your Say after all. The Beeb had invited me to talk about the Australian “virgin auction” reality TV show, but breaking news preempted the broadcast halfway through. (New Prime Minister. What are you gonna do?) However, some of you have asked me what I would have said, given the chance.
After listening to the 25 minutes of World Have Your Say that did air, what I wanted to ask was this: Are the producers of the virgin auction show completely cynical, or is the whole thing a joke?
The idea behind the virgin auction, supposedly, is to explore the commoditization of sexuality in today’s world. The winning male and female virgins are going to sell their first sexual experience to the highest bidder and then be filmed having sex with those strangers. The show’s website states:
Throughout the film it is our objective to create a discourse that questions the repressive religious, political and social mechanisms that limit the ways that we can understand and act upon our individual sexual natures.
The BBC had the documentary’s director in the studio, along with one of the contestants, a virgin named “John.” Not his real name. The BBC host asked the director, Justin Sisely, whether he thought he was exploiting the young women and men vying to auction their virginity. Sisely’s answer: Everybody gets exploited. All work is exploitation, more or less. Working for wages, working for a boss, working in a cubicle, are all forms of exploitation.
It was a facile answer that elided the real issues at stake, and made me think that Sisely really wasn’t serious about the auction show being grounded in intellectual and moral inquiry. Well, that and the fact that the show’s website is fameandfortune.com.au. And I wanted to ask “John”: Does he mind being exploited by this show?
Because everything about the show is geared toward sensation and ratings. Shocking premise? Check. Worldwide publicity? Check. People phoning and emailing to express outrage? Check. All of which makes me think: Maybe this whole thing is a gag. A piece of performance art. The publicity, the pearl-clutching, the callers’ outrage — maybe it’s all part of the “discourse” about sex, and at the last minute the producers will reveal that it’s all a hoax. Joke’s on you, believers.
Which would be a relief. Which would be better than finding that the enterprise is wholly crass and exploitative, and that its veneer of intellectual exploration will rub off like lip gloss as soon as the producers get a distribution deal for the sex video.
And here’s the thing: I’d like to find out it’s performance art. Because the questions raised by the concept of a virginity auction are fully worthy of examination.
The show asks: What is virginity worth? And the answer seems surprising. Despite all the people who say virginity is something to be gotten rid of, that it’s useless, an impediment, that it’s given away a thousand times a night after a couple of drinks, in fact it remains highly valuable. It remains so in the secular 21st century west, and not only among religious spoilsports and those famous killjoys, “Parents.” This is proved by the fact that the reality show is promising to pay its winning contestants $20,000 each, plus 90% of their “auction price.”
However, nobody connected with the show has admitted that money doesn’t fully measure the value of virginity. There are plenty of intangible values associated with virginity, and sex, that are not captured by a financial transaction — not even a transation that nets five, or six, or seven figures. For proof of this, look no further than the fact that the auction contestants are using pseudonyms. Their fake names are stop-loss measures. They’re barriers, meant to stem the contestants’ loss of privacy and dignity, to reduce their shame, protect their futures, and to reduce the risk of prosecution.
Yeah, prosecution. Because as much as the producers position the show as daring, shocking, and transgressive — that is, new — it’s not. What the contestants have agreed to engage in is called the oldest profession, for reasons men and women would have understood four thousand years ago. And as much as the contestants rationalize the sale of their virginity as a personal expression of sexual will, and insist that “By doing this, I’m not becoming a prostitute, it’s not a career move…” and “Technically I’m selling my virginity for money, technically that would be classified as prostitution, but it’s not going to be a regular thing, so in my head I can justify that I’m not going to be a prostitute,” there’s a good reason the auction has been moved from Australia to a legal brothel in Nevada. And if they don’t get what that reason is, here are a couple of hints: (1) You’re holding the auction at what is essentially a factory designed to provide sex on an industrial scale, and (2) You’re paying 10% of your auction price to a whorehouse.
Yeah, this whole thing is a joke. Unfortunately, it’s on the contestants. Ho ho ho.
Yeah. What she said.
And besides, Aussie discourse-producers, the whole auctioning virgins isn’t even all that transgressive. Attaching value to a woman’s virginity (and to some extent to a man’s, for which it’s a little harder to produce evidence) has a long history in marriage negotiations between families in cultures around the world (including our beloved Anglo-American). As far as broadcasting the negotiations, try the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage. Just what was the big deal with the handkerchief and the blood in Othello? Oops, did Desdemona’s market value just tank? And who were the biggest players in this particular market? Those kill-joy parents. So, Australian broadcasters, find a new concept (the fundraising for the brothel was kind of a good one).
Ok, stopping for a breath now.
I was just thinking that the same issue was in Memoirs of a Geisha. Pretty old stuff, right?
Pingback: Lying for a Living’s 2010 | lying for a living