Stone Cold Sober in Infinity Bar and Lounge

On the Sorrow of an Exposed Booty

One of the most useful things I’ve seen on YouTube was a ‘Symbolic World’ video on profanity. Of course to say profanity generally means a curse word or certain crudeness. What makes a curse word such though? Is it just an agreement that it was bad? Pageau explained that it was to bring something into a realm it didn’t belong in. 

So when I agreed to go to a bachelor party in the Dominican Republic, and found that while the establishment mentioned in the title did not employ any prostitutes —they were certainly present for duty. I did not receive anything from any of them, but the experience was instructive. It is a tragedy. When the people on either end of the line are giving of themselves for some money, there is something lost that cannot be made up for with money. I’m not arguing for the illegality of prostitution, but I’m trying to say something that can’t be measured by the state. These girls, in their revealing outfits and their makeup, are being cheated out of something holy. The people paying them for their service were likewise being cheated. This practice isn’t a word, but it is still profane. 

Photo by Artem Labunsky on Unsplash

Returning briefly to why something might be profane, poop and dirtiness are things that don’t belong in general life, these things exist at a lower tier. These things are disgusting and are worthy of reviling. Cities need to remove them from where people live or else they can’t exist, they can cause disease in people who come in contact with them. Most verbal profanity is the opposite, instead of bringing something from the lower tiers of life up, it brings something from the higher tier down. This is why curse words related to religion are so popular.

Profanity surrounding sex and sexuality is often mistaken for the first type, when instead it is the second. This type of activity is traditionally reserved for people in a special covenant (marriage) so that they might be totally united in body and spirit. So when someone makes some other crude joke, or says something derogatory towards it is violation of the sanctity of sex, it is making something pure, dirty. This is sometimes lost in the culture, and often in Christian communication there is miscommunication about which way the profanity is flowing. There are some that might equate it to being like a used couch. 

 This profanity exists at the root of a laundry list of issues in human culture. Gallons of ink could be and have been spilled about hooking-up, only fans, porn, etcetera. Too much of it doesn’t have a backing that adequately explains why these things are problems. It’s a metaphysical issue, and the misalignment with the greater good is what causes all of the follow-on problems, interpersonally and socially. Without carefully communicating why these things are profane, the practical effects of them are not convincing. 

There is a cultural meme of the prude yelling about how people these days just don’t act like they used to. Characters like Ned Flanders are sort of stiff-necked and cardboardish. In the narratives they are proven wrong. Characters are free to pursue their passions in whatever way they like, without the limiting and stifling rules of old. This factor is being worked against by the day, if not in a way that has reached the culture’s creative outlet. These days though, listen to enough podcasts and you’ll come across writers like Louise Perry talk about why the sexual revolution in the 60s might not have been that great. The vices the movement unleashed have had a wide variety of novel effects on the relation between people, but some factors have always been in society, at different times closer to or farther from the edge of it. Brothels and prostitution are illegal in many developed countries, but are part of the cultural heritage of the wild-west mining town for instance. 

One piece of the modern cultural tradition that is problematic in this sense is the ritual of the bachelor’s party. It’s not necessarily something that is like this, but if you were to look at movies about it, the movies would most often involve going to a strip club, hooking up with someone, and all of the potential fallout given to something like that. Performing an 11th hour bit of hedonism prior to entering into a marriage is something that in a real sense undermines the intent of the covenant. The relation should be something that one is exited for, and not acting as though it’s a burden. 

Returning to the Infinity Bar and Lounge, what disruption to life in the community emanates from a spot like this? The area around the club felt dangerous, and more than a little dirty. A pair of enormous dudes served as guards in front of the heavy metal door. I performed a little bit of a faux pas not tipping the guy who ‘protected’ the car I borrowed to drive to the club. The waitress, who did work for the bar, but who also wasn’t shy about titillating her customers, seemed to fake enjoyment when asked to grind on some of the guests. I didn’t participate, I did my best to sit and drink juice. I don’t speak Spanish, and wouldn't have been able to ask given she didn’t have time to stop and have a little chat (too many people to give drinks/lap dances to,) but I suspect that the face she made had been carefully practiced for a long period of time, and not really genuine. The other women and girls who were there in case someone wanted a spare hole had a surprising variety of behavior. One in particular saw fit to galavant across the club and ensure that everyone felt welcome, some stood and looked at their phones like bored teenagers, most others stood in a spot and looked on anxiously. 

It was a place that I hadn’t really seen before, but it is in every country and county. 

Someone had attempted to justify this genre of exchange to me by stating that the balance of power was in the favor of the providers of the service. In this person’s imagination, the women exerted a power over the men, and were able to use it for their gain. It was a process of duping the person to engage their base instincts. Aside from the exploitation that often accompanies this work, it cannot be said that the cash is an equal exchange. Something is brought out of a higher place, and that is harmful to people. The issues of prostitution are perhaps the most extreme on a scale that includes exchanging lewd pictures on Snapchat to producing pornography to buying someone for the night. When someone says that there should be limits on what a person does with their sexuality, this is the continuum that is thought of. Giving of a person’s self for something other than spiritual connection.