I'm on a flight to Cancún with a terrible hangover. My mother came with me to the tiny airport in Puebla where we had lunch at an overpriced café. A tall and good looking "indigenous" woman waited us, bringing me a hamburger and chicken soup for my mother. From the shape of her legs I could tell she suffered malnutrition as a child and I lamented the injustice and loss of beauty arising from this.
Perhaps I shouldn't get righteous when the reason for my hangover was going to a strip club with two friends (one of them the father of my nephew, who is no longer with my sister, but it wouldn't matter). We met for dinner, reminisced about our younger years going to strip clubs and they sort of grew into the idea. I was lukewarm (or slightly cold) to the idea but I didn't protest.
When we arrived the waiter brought us different ladies to sit with us briefly to see if we liked each other enough to invite them a drink. I told immediately each one of them: I don't know if I want to invite you a drink yet, I usually take a while to feel the chemistry and if we have it I will spend money just on you, but we must have that chemistry first. I didn't feel chemistry at all, in fact it was quite distasteful.
One of my friends told me he overgrew strip clubs by learning how to partner dance. He said that dancing was more exciting and sensual than this, and he felt he had overgrown this phase. The other head to a private room with a young woman but came back alone shortly after because she was too drunk and was stumbling, so security sent her back home.
The owner of the strip club is my cousin, their family got into the business after being the landlords of a stripclub, but this club went broke and they gave it a try with great success. My cousin has done jail time. They say he is ruthless, holding women against their will and payment from their employees. But he's diversified since then, opening gyms and restaurants, but he still uses women to increase their appeal.
I'm glad we went because this resolves the constante temptation to pay for intimacy. Being this close to it and finding it sad supports my conviction that this is not the way. I've written and reframed why a couple of times, each version reads moralistic or individualistic. I want to put into words what I feel rather than think, and to me this felt wrong.
I used to be greatly skeptical of feeling as a moral compass, there are things which we were trained to dislike (I used to recoil at seeing men kiss) and fear is particularly insidious in this matter. I see my mother and my sister misreading feeling as reality and then shoot themselves in the foot because they don't attend to reason at all. As usual, resolution is not the middle way but full feeling and full reasoning coming to inform our decisions.