Whether they were “Socialators” in Battlestar Galactica, or “Companions” in Firefly, or any number of other euphemisms, one SF trope that seems particularly insidious, especially in movies and TV, more-so than in literature, although it is still prominent there, is turning the world’s oldest profession into something glamorous and honorable, even exalted. I recently had the misfortune to read a book where they took “Make Love, Not War” literally, and all women were drafted at 18 to serve a couple years in a sex corps to keep the peace, under the idea that a free and easy sexual outlet was all it took to quell man’s violent nature. (This was only a background element, not the main focus of the story, but on the other hand, the primary plot about laser light shows being the most highly regarded form of art wasn’t particularly compelling either. And don’t get me started on how unlikable the characters were.)
Maybe it’s a relic from when SF was just another facet of Men’s Adventure magazines, or maybe it’s capitalizing on the stereotypical basement-dwelling Geek’s desire to have high quality women to command at the wave of a few credits or gold pieces. Or, more cynically, it’s the desire of Hollywood producers who actually DO have high quality women at their mercy, career-wise, to further normalize the idea that “Sex work is real work” to help smooth away the resistance to their hamfisted efforts on the casting couch.
TV Tropes has a number of entries about this, from “Unproblematic Prostitution” to “High Class Call Girl”. Writers like to call up the imagery of the Geisha, and make their Space Hookers come across as brilliant sexual artists, with additional talents that help the protagonists, such as advanced degrees or connections to corporate executives and high ranking government officials. (Funny how they are not corporate movers and shakers or government officials themselves…). They forget, of course, that Geisha were not actually prostitutes, and only rarely took lovers. There were still actual brothels in Japan for that sort of thing.
Science Fiction has gotten a lot more difficult to write as the frontiers of reality have pushed back against the flights of fantasy. We have had to accept that you can’t get to the moon inside a Victorian upholstered artillery shell, or set foot on the Jungles of Venus. And maybe that’s why a lot of SF in recent decades has turned towards the softer sciences where theories are more prominent than scientific facts, making it simpler to speculate.
However, even in our understanding of society, there are some realities that can’t be ignored. A few of them are listed in the aforementioned “Unproblematic Prostitution” entry. The primary social reality that undermines all of the tropes is that when you commodify sex, you are putting women on sale. Maybe it’s just fractionally, for a few hours out of her lifetime, but when your fantasy/SF hero comes along and waves a few C-notes to get a woman to do what he wants, it’s not the “Combination of Sex and Capitalism” (“… which are you against?” the excuse goes) but the sublimation of Sex TO Capitalism.
“Sex work is real work,” they like to say, but when you turn sex INTO work, it strips it of all of its better qualities. “Do what you love and you’ll never work another day in your life,” is another lie. I’ve known too many artists who go from having a fun hobby to chasing unsatisfying commissions, eventually burning out from endless requests by cretins for illustrations of their vilest fantasies. So the idea that our happy Space Hookers are having fun and getting paid, and what’s wrong with that, turns into burnout in pretty short order, because the kind of guys who go out looking for “That kind of girl” are not interested in the parts of sex that make it as enjoyable as it is for a compatible couple. They don’t have girlfriends for a reason. So the trope that Prostitution is just Sexy Fun Time falls by the wayside in the face of human nature.
SF also likes to postulate that science will make sex consequence free with perfect contraception and cures for all diseases. Writers and Producers fail to see the actual social costs and secondary effects, some of which we are finally running afoul of today, as women are aging out of their “Hookup culture” days and finding themselves alone and with few prospects for a lasting relationship, while at the same time human reproduction is falling below the replacement rate worldwide. And of course, nature being what it is, there will always be new diseases from new planets or new alien races or who knows WHAT our horny young space cadets have been sticking their dicks into. Human biology has less security in its OS than a Commodore 64.
And of course, when you turn people into a profitable commodity, there will be people looking to maximize that profit. So the effort to paint a happy face on Space Prostitution expects the Pimps and Madams to somehow decide that their chattel are better off lazing about in luxury, that happy hookers are productive hookers. See above about the clientele. They don’t give a shit. They have cash, and they think that entitles them to whatever they want. And the pimps want that cash, so they will not tolerate their girls being non-productive, and they will not be generous in any way that does not maximize profits.
“But what about a Post Capitalist society?” What about it? If you’re not commodifying women and sex, then you can’t have prostitution, right? So that leaves the state, and the dystopian horror of government-run brothels, only they’re “free”, right? And any system you try to invent that restricts this to clients of higher “Status” puts you right back to capitalism, but instead of cash, you’re trading something else, like influence, or black market goods. I mean, if you try to make it about Eugenics, then there’s sure to be corruption about whose genes are considered superior….
So getting back to Capitalism, once you have made sex a legal commodity, and women into Capital, there will be an industry. And if it’s not legal, there will be a black market. There will be trafficking. In fact, even if you do legalize it, there will be a black market that chases profits that are not taken away by the legal system. (One need only look at the legalization of pot to see that the idea that legal weed can eliminate the illicit trade, AND be taxed at ridiculous levels, is a scheme that can only be taken seriously by people with no grip on reality. Avoiding those taxes and licensing fees makes illegal pot a much cheaper option for those who want it.) Regardless of one’s economic system, if there is something people want, and there’s a way to benefit from providing it to them, there are people who will take whatever risk is required to provide it.
The Space Hooker trope also demands that there be no social stigma attached to prostitution. For that to work either the population of women needs to all be the same (See the mandatory service trope above) or somehow sex needs to be simultaneously worthless and valued. That is to say, it has to be valued or else Space Hookers would be out of a job, but also not valued so that giving it up for money is no big deal, no different than waiting tables. I think this version of the trope has its basis in the Free Love movement in the 1960’s. Then, as in the fictional future, they thought that contraception and Penicillin eliminated all the possible consequences from sex. Physically, maybe, but the real point of the movement was Hippie guys using it to convince Hippie girls to put out without any kind of commitment. Convince them that they’re revolutionizing society and the real result was drugged out party girls who got passed around and then dumped when they realized they actually wanted something more. Free Love was more like Love Free.
Eliminating the Social Stigma from Prostitution is about as easy as eliminating the social stigma from Slavery. Either way it’s the buying and selling of somebody’s body.
To bring this around to my initial point, Cui Bono? Why do we see so much of this trope coming from producers who spout #MeToo slogans out the other side of their mouth? Well, though I am slightly loath to make this a political screed, there is one side of the spectrum that pines for a 1960’s that never really was (much like the other end wishes for a 1950’s that was equally mythical). Politics is downstream of Culture, they say, and these people have maneuvered themselves to where they control the levers of power in our media. They can achieve their Utopian Dream of a “Free Love Future” if they constantly feed this meme (in its original meaning as an idea that spreads like a thought virus) into all the entertainment they can possibly wedge it into. They believe they can turn the culture into one non-stop orgy (where of course their power, wealth and position make them highly sought after by the highest quality women), and you can tell when some of them have jumped the gun a little and become well-known sex-pests or rapists. But scroll down in that TV Tropes entry to the Red Dwarf video that is linked. The Hologram crew have achieved this future: There is no disease or pregnancy, no expectations other than it is considered healthy to go at it twice a day, and it’s considered rude to turn down any sexual request. But Rimmer’s questions while trying to fit in reveal the truth, there are no partnerships or commitments, and love and family have been completely eliminated as counterproductive to mental efficiency. Is that REALLY Utopia? Or just a Brave New World?
… So if you’re gonna go and create your own Utopia, with Hookers and Blackjack, just stick to the gambling instead. Maybe throw in a few Sex Droids if you find empty, meaningless sex essential to the plot. But please don’t press women into that role.
Shoplifting in the Marketplace of Ideas 
I’ve seen multiple news stories from “enlightened” Europe about women who go to the local unemployment office and get offered jobs in brothels, with the implied threat that turning down work you’re qualified for cuts off your benefits. How often does it actually happen? I’d think once would be enough.
It’s always grated on me that Heinlein fell into this, to the point that young people couldn’t even understand Lazarus Long’s stories about whores, pimps, and bouncers, which were already whitewashed.
-j
Well, that was at the root of the “Free Love” ’60’s, when they believed that “The Pill” would erase all conservatism and stigma out of sex. It was pretty typical for SF authors then to take this sudden new technology and extrapolate the changes it would render on society, but some of it (along with stories where reproduction was transferred to artificial wombs) was just wishful thinking about making sex more available.
I think we’re finally recalling that the culture was there for a reason, but we have others who are fighting that recall tooth and nail.
Heinlein mostly (with the possible exception of *To Sail Beyond the Sunset*, which deals with it quite explicitly) addressed the Free Love concept in positive mentions, references, and side-plots, but Spider Robinson — who was either strongly influenced by Heinlein, at the very least, and might even be viewed as Heinlein’s informal protégé — made it the main theme of at least two anthologies-cum-novels, *Callahan’s Lady* and *Lady Slings the Booze*. I was quite enamored with them as a young man, when women were mostly an enigma to me, and before life, marriage, and fatherhood of daughters taught me the lessons that are the basis of this insightful essay by Dr. Mauser.
I think it has become excruciatingly clear that the people making movies and TV are mindlessly churning the same pot of over-cooked gruel, which explains why “Space Hookers” and the “Free Love Future” keep showing up. Also many of them do seem to be perverts, as you mentioned.
It takes some considerable tolerance for cognitive dissonance to be able to put Space Hookers and Free Love Future in the same show with Sarah Connor/Ellen Ripley, but they keep doing it. And they keep losing money at it because it sucks.
Which is why I don’t watch that stuff. I watch anime, where the hero always gets the girl(s) because he’s just that awesome. It isn’t that anime tropes are any less ridiculous than Hollywood tropes, it is more that the point of the trope isn’t to denigrate or scold the audience. The trope is what you wanted to see.
Every guy wants to be awesome and have his own collection of fabulous girls. Its stupid, but we do. And you can tell because there are plenty of real cultures in the world where if you are “awesome” enough, and of course rich enough, you can have a real harem. (Great for guys with money, not so great for anyone else.) There are zero cultures that have glamorous and honorable space hookers. As you say, that doesn’t happen.
Real prostitution on a grand scale can be seen in Thailand. I hear a lot of things about that, but I never hear that being a bar girl is a great life, or that bar girls are socially accepted. Tolerated, maybe. Accepted? Only if they have money. Because at the end of the day, money is what prostitution is really about.
Your point at the end about love and family being eliminated as counterproductive to mental efficiency is another great one. I think Herbert Spencer or one of those other Victorian dudes might have started that one. Exactly what you here being spouted by tech bros, emotional attachment is weakness etc. Get your ashes hauled professionally, it leaves your head clear so you can work harder on your third billion. Such an existence would be like Purgatory.
And even in Anime Harems, there’s always one “Best girl” whom the Hero would end up choosing eventually.
The ones I like the best are the goofy ones, where the MC just keeps collecting them through no fault of his own and ends up with this whole baseball team. Generally the Best Girl is the first one he meets. Or she, because they do that sometimes as well. All in good fun.
The more “real” they make the relationships the sketchier it gets. Are five -real- women going to put up with that many toothbrushes in the bathroom? No way. They’re going to fight, and it will get ugly.
Which we notice from history. The tales of backstabbing in Imperial Japan among the wives and concubines of the court are the stuff of legend.
[…] here to read the rest, but here’s a good […]
Reblogged this on Head Noises and commented:
:morgan freeman meme:
He’s right, you know.
/end meme
Maybe throw in a few Sex Droids if you find empty, meaningless sex essential to the plot. But please don’t press women into that role.
They can’t.
(yeah, I know you know, but-)
The whole enjoyment isn’t from the, ahem, release, it’s from the act with someone– that folks want to have their cake and eat it, too, is human but not healthy, especially not when they try to warp the world to GIVE it to them.
It’s most obviously not healthy for gals, who emotionally bond from sex more quickly and obviously– but it’s also not healthy for guys, who also bond and need that bond. (It’s almost like the survival of the species depends on it….)
One of the interesting things about John Wright’s libertarian utopia/dystopia, the Golden Age was how it posited the range of sexual opportunities and limitations.
One of my favorites being that uf you kept upping the capacity of your sex-droid to the point that it could pass the Turing Test – congrats, and pass the cigars! You’re now a dad. Or mom.
That’s what happens in my books. That robot girlfriend you bought just woke up? Well now you are -married-, kid. Congratulations. ~:D
True! A cute book.
Which is also a great way to point at the reality– it *works*, people-wise.
You ought to use your WordPress and/or Blogger to promote them. I was looking, briefly.
My single book so far is “Unfair Advantage” by Edward Thomas. I definitely should promote more, I barely do anything.
Next book will get more promotion, I swear! ~:D
This is something the next generation will probably be finding out.
The first guy who makes a robot that can reliably walk around without falling will sell it to the government for a soldier, where it will fail spectacularly. He will try to sell it as a domestic servant, and go broke. Nobody needs a servant that incompetent.
The guy who buys the company in bankruptcy will make a -super- cheap version, slap a Farrah Fawcett wig on it and… probably go broke again.
It is going to be difficult to make a thing like that attractive. The more real it behaves the weirder and creepier it will be. If they manage to make it only a tiny bit wrong, I bet that will be the ultimate nightmare fuel.
Public reactions to the Boston Dynamics robots indicate that sex droids may end up being a harder sell than one would think.
They just need to form a Partnership with the “Real Doll” company…. But the result will be so expensive only the wealthiest will be able to afford it, and at the kind of wealth, there are plenty who will seek the role willingly.
Just looking at pictures of those things, they’re pretty wrong. Having one in the house would be weird. You’d have to pick it up and move it, dress it up, wash it, and it is -big-. Full-size human, right? It’s as big as you are.
Now make it walk around and talk like ChatGPT. Is it capable enough to dress and wash by itself? That’s going to be one hell of a robot. But it will still be -dead- and that will be painfully obvious.
I hypothesize that the number of men who would find that sexy is small, and that the number of such men who have money is even smaller.
….that “all women drafted into brothels at 18” sounds rather like what the *villain* did in Jack Vance’s The Killing Machine. (All girl children produced become the next generation of sex slaves. All boys become just slaves.)
A rather disturbing realization came to me while I was re-reading this, while also thinking about the current release of The Sound of Freedom. Aside from de-stigmatizing the sexual slavery of women, they sure seem to be pushing the idea of child sexuality on society as well. And they’ve gone well past the idea of whether that’s appropriate at all, to making people think about How early, and what twisted KINDS of sexuality are okay to impress upon children.
I’m pretty sure that the goal with modern sex ed is to impose dysfunctional sexual mores onto children so that as adults that will not be able to function in a western society.
I read a short story in the 1980s contained in a science fiction anthology specifically about futuristic sex. I believe the title of the story was “The Island of the Rapes.” In the story, humans had unknowingly been subjugated by an alien race. The aliens kept their slaves under control by not allowing man-woman or familial bonds to be formed: Men all served in the Space Marines, doing the aliens’ fighting for them as semi-clever cannon fodder; women were walking incubators, also caring for their offspring until they were sufficiently independent enough to be carted off by the aliens, to be indoctrinated into service. Merciless culling would obviously be necessary for this system to work, though this couldn’t be fleshed out within the confines of a short story.
Men and women were almost always kept completely separate from each other. The men had sex dolls aboard ship with them, and were rewarded for how quickly and unfeelingly they could inseminate the dolls. Once every so often (and one assumes it was used as a carrot for the men), men and women would be brought together on an island on Earth for the purpose of procreation, the idea being that the process would engender no more feeling or attachment than when a bull services heifers.
The story actually took the argument the other way, positing that — even under the “perfect” conditions the aliens had established for keeping their human cattle under control by completely commodifying sex — human attachments were sure to form and upset the aliens’ apple cart.
Most of the rest of that anthology glorified the wonderful time to be had by all when Happy Hookers in Space would be readily available. That made “The Island of the Rapes” stand out in even sharper contrast.
I have been able to find neither the anthology — I believe it was titled *Future Sex* — nor the “Island of the Rapes” since borrowing the book once in the eighties. I haven’t exactly been on a quest to find either of them, but I do look from time to time. I wonder if anyone here might remember them.
I recall that story as well, but while mankind was at war with aliens, humans did the breeding thing to themselves. The men were trained to respond quickly to particular models of sex dolls, and on R&R planets, women were brought in and made up to look like that model, for gene-matching purposes. The protagonist had been trained on a particularly uncommon model. ISTR it was actually run in an issue of Penthouse.
Since I haven’t cracked an issue of Penthouse in my life, that wasn’t where I saw it; I don’t know where you saw it, if we’re indeed talking about the same story. I was living in the Netherlands at the time, though the anthology was in English. I was at a friend’s house for dinner, and he had an extensive collection of SF paperbacks. *Future Sex* piqued my interest, and he loaned it to me.
The part about a particular sex doll model matches: I seem to remember that the doll had bright red hair. I don’t recall anything about gene-matching, though. Humans didn’t know they’d been enslaved by aliens, they thought it was all normal; but there were aliens who’d cooked up the whole scheme to keep humans subjugated.
The protagonist blew the lid off the whole thing when he broke the rules and stayed longer than necessary to do the deed — and in so doing got to know the “dolled up” woman when her disguise slipped. She became more than a sex object to him.
If I’m misremembering and/or adding elements that weren’t in the first story, I need to get busy: I have an “original” short story to write and flog to publishers.
It still tracks, after they did the deed, they talked for a while, and she removed some of the costume elements, and they even tried for sex lasting more than 15 seconds….
Now this is really bugging me.
This sounds like “Planet of the Rapes” by Thomas M. Disch, first published in Penthouse and included in the collection The Man Who Had No Idea.
Do any of these covers look familiar? https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/titlecovers.cgi?58793
I have concluded that my memory from 1987 had been corrupted — not surprisingly — so that I was remembering vague concepts I’d experienced while mangling the details. The story — which turns out to have been a novelette — was indeed “The Planet of the Rapes” by Thomas M. Disch (H/T to Don for putting me on the right track), which also explains why I could find no trace of it over the years. By the time of the advent of the internet and its easy access to information, I was misremembering what I’d read years before, thus I was destined to never have any luck in my intermittent searches.
Information about the novelette is here:
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?58793+1
I read it in 1987 as part of the anthology *The Shape of Sex to Come*:
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?47006
It is with great satisfaction that I resolve this longstanding mystery that has reared its head in my consciousness from time to time. I’ve ordered a used paperback of *The Man Who Had No Idea* so that I can refresh my faulty memory of “The Island of the Rapes”; with shipping to Europe (I live here again), *The Man Who Had No Idea* cost $16, compared with used copies of *The Shape of Sex to Come* going for upwards of $70 with shipping, so the choice was easy, Besides. my wife probably would have looked dimly on me putting this cover on my bookshelf for all to see:
So is that the story I was thinking of? With the girls dressed in outfits that looked like the dolls the men trained on?
Yes, it’s the story I remember, and yes, the women get made up and dressed to match a particular doll. My memory also served me correctly about the entire scheme being orchestrated by an alien race — called the Hyperboleans, if you can believe it. There can be no question that the story was meant as satire; Disch says so explicitly in his foreword: “[T]he following is *satire*, not a blueprint for utopia….”
In the story, at some point in the past, humankind had discovered the Hyperboleans hidden in their midst; the humans had gone to war against them. The Hyperboleans had led the humans to think the humans had won the war and had wiped the aliens out, but the aliens had actually infiltrated the halls of human power in disguise again, determined to be more careful in avoiding detection as they ruled over the unknowing human cattle.
The final paragraph of the novella makes this clear: “When Colly had left her office, the chairperson breathed a sigh of relief. Her nose was simply killing her. Catching hold of the bridge between her thumb and forefinger, she peeled it off. Then, able to breathe again at last, she sat down to write a recommendation, in the ancient script of Hyperbole, that Mama Ecology of the Butterberry Utopia be sent back to Pleasure Island for a permanent tour of duty.”
Our ingenue, Colly (Mama Ecology) had figured the whole thing out because she had palmed the memory-blocking medication she was given to ingest while getting fitted out like a Polly Doll. As a result, after the first shocking rape, she had talked to Ensign 73-J and gotten to know him in the month they had together; the Marines would spend a month on Pleasure Island with their chosen dolls to maximize the chances of conception. Colly even grew to enjoy sex somewhat.
The history of the Hyperbolean War was well known to the Marines, but never taught to the women sequestered on Earth. Colly first learned about it from Ensign 73-J Hardscrabble during their conversations — which mostly consisted of pillow talk. Ensign 73-J wasn’t supposed to divulge such secrets, but he assuaged his conscience with the mistaken assumption that Colly would forget about it all before she returned home.
It’s easy to understand my faulty memory about the title of the novella: In the story, Pleasure Island was an island on Earth where men/Marines would “beam” (some sort of matter transferral involving something called a “jumpsuit”) home from the faraway fleet to get some R&R and impregnate a woman, before beaming back to return to service in the fleet. There is no separate planet where the story takes place, the setting is an island on Terra; I simply remembered my automatic mental “correction” of the title, having thought that “Island of the Rapes” would have been a more appropriate title. I don’t know why Disch chose “Planet of the Rapes,” unless he was hoping to leave no doubt that it was speculative fiction that might well involve Space Hookers.
That’s more detail than I can recall, but it jogs my memory. As for the title, clearly it’s a pun on “Planet of the Apes.” And thanks for solving the riddle!
From that description it sounds as if you are talking about J. Neil Schulman’s The Rainbow Cadenza. I have to say that I didn’t especially like it when I read it. But I think it’s fair to note that Schulman envisioned the sexual conscription of women as an evil, and the protagonist of his novel was a woman who was struggling against it; she certainly was not a HAPPY future prostitute. What Schulman was actually doing was dystopian satire, not advocacy.
Correct. Although to be fair, the heroine was forced into it early, and had been trying to avoid it, but nobody else put up much resistance. Also a product of the time he wrote it I guess was that he was dismissive of Lesbianism, but on the other hand elevated gay men to superior position, they were a Senate-like house of the government.
As I recall, both followed from the logic of Schulman’s worldbuilding. He assumed that parents would be able to choose the sex of their offspring, and that this would lead to a large surplus of males over females (in the style, I believe, of some Asian countries where women pregnant with female infants commonly abort). So there was a shortage of partners for straight men. Having women drafted into sexual services was a way of reducing the social stress; so was encouraging men to choose other men as sexual partners by privileging homosexuality. On the other hand, lesbianism made the problem worse, by women from the pool of available partners for straight men, two at a time, so the government saw no benefit in encouraging it. I suppose that lesbians, like other women, were drafted into providing sex to men, whether they found men sexually appealing or not.
I’ll stipulate that this is oversimplified and improbable. But satire often is both; consider for example Pohl’s “The Midas Plague” or Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.”
I think perhaps it suffered from trying to jam just too many tropes into one story. Including cloning and brain transplants with everything else.
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Yea, why portray hookers at all? Why should we even shallowly try to destigmatize a lived reality where women get murdered because they sell sex? Let’s name a blog post something that includes the phrase ‘hookers should die!’ instead! Feels so much more nuanced, so much healthier.
I know I’m not being very constructive handing out sarcasms. But this type of rethoric amplifies a discourse about women who sell sex that is directly harmful.
If you care for women enough to think of the commodification of us as ethically wrong, please consider that we that are presently so commodified are the ones that are primarily hurt and impacted by perpetuating stigma.
Pretending a bad idea is a good idea does not make you less likely to die from the bad idea. It makes you likely to be unprepared for when the reasons it’s a bad idea hit.
Which is why it is exactly what predators like to use to keep the prey flowing. Especially when they can’t make a rational counter-argument to the arguments they want to destroy.
DARVO– Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender.
It’s not “Hookers” (the women) “must die.”, but “Space Hookers” (The harmful SF Trope) “must die.” The fact that you had to leave a word off of it suggests to me that you’re deliberately misunderstanding, “Parse until offended”.
And in case you didn’t read past the title, the problem with the trope is that it tries to pretend that the commodification of women is something that can be reformed by pretending that all the ills (trafficking, pimps, abuse, and social stigma) that go along with it can somehow be erased, but even so, women are still lowered in stature and commodified.
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