There was a story out of New Zealand today about a 19 year-old girl who auctioned her virginity to pay for university fees. At auction’s close, her highest bid was for $46,000 NZD, and more than 1200 people had bid on her virginity. According to the girl:

“I have never had a sexual relationship and am still a virgin.

“I am offering my virginity by tender to the highest bidder as long as all personal safety aspects are observed.

“This is my decision made with full awareness of the circumstances and possible consequences.”

She added: “I am fit, healthy and have no medical conditions of any nature.

“I am a keen athlete and have a trim physique.”

While some people may commend her entrepreneurial initiative to fund her studies without going into debt as the rest of us do, there are some serious issues with the fact that prostitution is one of women’s only viable ways to make money. It says a lot about our society that some strange man would be willing to pay a girl that much money for the gift of her virginity.

People talk about the “free choice” women make to sell their bodies. Where is the freedom? Being brainwashed by the porn culture to believe that prostitution is glamourous and an easy way to make a pile of money? A 1998 ILO (UN International Labor Organization) report suggesting that the sex industry be treated as a legitimate economic sector, found that prostitution is one of the most alienated forms of labour; the surveys [in 4 countries] show that women worked “with a heavy heart,” “felt forced,”or were “;conscience-stricken” and had negative self-identities. A significant proportion claimed they wanted to leave sex work [sic] if they could (Lim, 1998: 213).”

And where to men in society get the justification to feel as though they have the right to buy women’s bodies? It amounts to women being treated and considered as less than human. As Catherine Mackinnon points out:

To be a prostitute is to be a legal nonperson in the ways that matter. What for Blackstone and others was the legal nonpersonhood of wives is extended for prostitutes from one man to all men as a class. Anyone can do anything to you and nothing legal will be done about it. John Stoltenberg has shown how the social definition of personhood for men is importantly premised on the prostitution of women. Prostitution as a social institution gives men personhood–in this case, manhood–through depriving women of theirs.

In an interview with The Guardian she explains:

the selling of sex because “gender equality will remain unattainable so long as men buy, sell and exploit women and children by prostituting them”. Otherwise, she contends, unenlightened men still write the laws. And when, for instance, they write laws on rape they make what she believes are grotesquely sexist assumptions. “The assumption,” she says, “is that women can be unequal to men economically, socially, culturally, politically, and in religion, but the moment they have sexual interactions, they are free and equal. That’s the assumption – and I think it ought to be thought about, and in particular what consent then means. It means acquiescence. It means passivity. You can be semi-knocked out. You can be dead in some jurisdictions.”

It is interesting that the article on the NZ girl auctioning her virginity refers to her as “Poor New Zealand girl,” justifying her decision to sell her virginity on the basis of desperation. Because it is overwhelmingly destitute women who get into prostitution. Prostitution gets romanticized in our society and glamourized through the pornographication of culture. But it’s not glamourous or attractive. It’s violent. It is sexual torture. It is degrading and humiliating and abusive. And this is what society tells us is the most attractive option for women with few employment prospects?