Ok here’s a weird one but it does count as a shower thought because it was a realization I woke with today out of nowhere. (long read)
Yesterday I had wikid a list of things that made headlines around the world and one was a gangrape on a bus in india. I had also just removed all the men from the game I’m making because looking at them was stressing me (yes im a weak person like ‘scared to walk alone on a street at night’ type). So today I woke up with an interesting thought. “if anyone could have sex whenever they wanted, I bet there would be waaay less scary predators”.
I started by googling comparisons of rape and prostitution and sure enough “Liberalizing prostitution leads to a significant decrease in rape rates, while prohibiting it leads to a significant increase.” Tho I would also go further and say the women I know that go around having tons of sex and ‘dirtily’ calling themselves ‘sluts’ shouldn’t have to have that dirty connotation. Thus Temple Prostitutes. Return to the waaaay old days where a woman could have tons of sex and be seen as sacred for it instead of dirty. I personally would fund it via the state so there are no barriers. I BELIEVE (since i woke up totally thinking all this today it must be true) that there will be waaaaay less of those horribly horny men we all see online doing awkward facepalm things, and the legitimate fear of being violently raped going away will help tons of people and maybe even let me add male characters to my game. It’s like lots of ppl currently are being starved sexually with playing the social game being their one avenue to solving it… or to use force. I think that’s wrong. I see the bad effects. And suddenly I know the superanswer, which is Temple Prostitutes.
You know, I’ve used the idea in one of my fictional universes.
Which is, unfortunately, where it needs to stay.
See, a temple prostitute is just a prostitute with a big organization pimping them out, which leads to the same kind of abuse prostitutes already face.
Any pimp, no matter how wonderful they might be, is taking money out of the pocket of the person opening their body up for others for money. When that’s a thing, abuse is inevitable (and I’d encourage anyone doubting that to go look into the actual reality of temple prostitutes). Prostitutes already exist. Any of those rapists that would actually rape for sexual satisfaction only can already access a sex worker with minimum effort. So why would they be any less likely to rape just because the sex worker is in a temple?
Which, btw, my town is kinda mid sized, but rural. So not exactly a place with a stroll to pick up street level hos. But if I wanted to pay for sex, I know of three women that will gladly take the money and the cock. We have prostitutes even out here in the hills. So availability is not the problem.
You also forget that we don’t have any religions that are devoted to a deity or principle that venerates sex in that way. Even the closest ones aren’t going to be setting up brothels of faith.
So, how would you staff the temple brothel? If the faithful don’t exist in enough numbers to fill the jobs, then the people sucking off johns for the temple are just regular prostitutes. So you’d essentially need to create or revive a religion, then convert sex workers to it, or recruit non sex workers and convince them to fuck and suck for god. You know what a church that does that gets called nowadays? A cult.
The only way it would work and actually be an improvement would be in an ideal world, which is impossible.
We’d be better off legalizing prostitution, regulating it with safeguards to reduce harm (and it would be reduce, nor eliminate, even in places with legal hos, there’s abuse and sex trafficking and disease) and making sure that the sex workers have full access to whatever they need to protect themselves and be able to opt out with zero consequences.
Because if the sex worker can’t quit at will, they aren’t a sex worker, they’re a victim. And yeah, legal sex workers aren’t being held against their will for the most part, but do they have unemployment if they quit suddenly? Can they easily access public services to retrain? How about housing, do they have access to stable housing while they’re between professions?
It isn’t that the rest of us have all those things, it’s that we aren’t being literally fucked involuntarily out of fear of poverty and homelessness. It’s just a figurative fucking.
As it is, people that genuinely believe sex is sacred, and will perform sex acts with strangers exist. They’re just incredibly rare. You likely couldn’t staff a single temple from just those in a given city. And I’ve known some people that genuinely believe that way, that will have sex damn near at will with anyone willing to condom up and be nice during the sex. But I’m fifty, and have met four. Four in all that time. I don’t see that being very successful as a world changing thing lol, they’d never be able to sleep and still wouldn’t be able to drain the poison from a tenth of a percentage of incels.
It’s an interesting shower thought, but you aren’t the first to explore the idea. And it simply doesn’t stand up on its own outside the shower.