LET'S TALK ABOUT SEX
ISSUE #42
Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.?– Charlie Munger
TABOO
Sex is simple. You do it when feel like doing it or you don’t do it when you don’t feel the feel. No Biggie. But we all know that sex is a tricky topic of conversation in companies and social circles. Even between lovers, spouses, and friends it is tricky to be too honest about your sexual desires. There are so many taboos, hidden agendas, and sensitivities taking out much of the spontaneity which is an essential building block of good sex. Despite all the bullshit surrounding sex, people still have sex.
Bishakha Loskar was a teenager when she gave birth to her son in the early 1990s. A sex worker in east India’s Sonagachi, Asia’s largest red-light district, Loskar began menstruating abnormally a few months after giving birth and could not take on clients. Her illness prevented her from having enough money to buy milk for her baby or medicine for herself. She borrowed 5,000 Indian rupees ($61) from a private moneylender, unaware that she would have to pay five times the amount as interest over the unsecured loan.
This post is not about sex but about how vulnerable people come together and try to solve their problems. The simple fact that we are highlighting sex workers in India does not change that fact. In future posts, we will deal with other perspectives on sex. ?
Sex workers in India typically lead precarious lives with no safety net, according to Meena Seshu, director of Sangram, a nonprofit working with sex workers and other marginalized populations in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Caught in a vicious web of debt, exploitation, and criminalization—mainly owing to social stigma and ostracization—sex workers do not have savings, access to bank loans, or any other financial services.
?
SEX WORKERS
Why do people condemn sex workers? Why do they bother to have and express an opinion about people they don’t care about? If you don’t give a shit about a person, why even think about them? Does it make you feel superior to show your contempt for people who work in difficult circumstances?
I respect sex workers; they play an important role in society.
It is a line of work that I never have dreamed about but I would be a sex worker if the situation calls for it. You have to do what you have to do to survive. Providing a good service is a lot better than offering misleading products like some (many?) do in the prestigious banking sector.
In 1995, Loskar and 12 other sex workers established USHA Multipurpose Cooperative Society Limited, the largest sex-worker-led financial institution in South Asia. It is, in essence, a bank run by sex workers for sex workers.
?A bank run by sex workers for sex workers. Wooow. It does not get more IkoCiti than that; it does not get more Peoples’ Impact than that. These sex workers are heroes and they need our full support.
Before USHA, most sex workers in Sonagachi were humiliated and denied services by formal banking institutions. They did not possess the requisite documents to open bank accounts. For instance, since sex workers live in rented rooms without contracts or rent receipts, they could not furnish proof of address. Largely uneducated and with little financial literacy, the women would lose their money to extortionist police, violent lovers, and deceitful madams.
?
领英推荐
SAME JOURNEY
So, how do we support them? Well, essentially they would simply follow the standard journey of any Maveriq. They register, they train, form a group (tribe), design a project (sex worker's bank), list it on the exchange, negotiate a fair transaction price, and implement and run the project.
The project of the first sex worker's bank could then serve as a blueprint for others in other locations. All the knowledge input that the tribe does not have, they could find on the platform by collaborating with the Pro.Crowd. For us, a sex worker Maveriq is just a Maveriq, and a Maveriq is a builder regardless of what. And in IkoCiti builders are regarded with high esteem.
?
Financial discrimination against sex workers is a global phenomenon that exponentially increases their vulnerability to exploitation, poverty, and crime, according to the UK-based nonprofit Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP). In their 2020 case study about the cooperative, NSWP observed that USHA “has demonstrated how financial inclusion and recognition of sex work as work empowers sex workers and allows them to access better health services and citizenship rights, as well as safer working conditions.”
IkoCiti makes a big deal about freedom for all which includes a culture of acceptance. In our sex module, we Salt n’ Peppa a lot on Sex in the CITI. And we encourage lawmakers to get rid of those petite bourgeoisie morality laws that do not protect anybody; on the contrary, they stigmatize people making them more vulnerable. Also, we need to (re)focus our attention on the hard abuse cases. We need to come up with solutions to clear more rape cases.
Despite #MeToo, 'clearance rate' for rape cases at the lowest point since the 1960s
Sex influences human behavior and interactions far beyond physical interactions. Think about the obsessive jealousy behaviors engrained in many societies casting suspicion on any type of male/female contact, which – in my 99.1% unscientific opinion – cost societies trillions of dollars annually.
HAVE SEX AND BUILD
In IkoCiti, we care less about your sexual identity or your sexual work. We care about those who build. We respect those who don’t build as boring people. (semi-serious) The rest are footnotes written in empty air. We encourage men and women to collaborate. Collaborating means sitting together talking freely, enjoying the conversation, and provoking each other with dumb, brilliant ideas without having to think twice about – huh what will other people say if they see us laughing together?
But we are digressing. IkoCiti empowers the powerless. And sex workers all over the world are pretty powerless, not only in countries like India that – by the way – counts more than 800.000 sex workers. Sex work is a big industry, probably one of the biggest around. Sex work offers women and men an opportunity to put food on the table. Sex work is just a way of living.
What percentage of the working world population has sex -professionally and non-professionally - in which there is some sort financial incentive? ?
ChatGPT does not know the answer. I estimate that between 10% - 15% of all sexual interactions have some sort of financial basis. That is a trillion sex acts per year that are not based on being horny, romantic, or playful. Money talks but money has sex as well. And it does so … everywhere .. underlining that we all are species of one human race.
The world would be much better off if we just accept sex as something boringly normal – something like C-Walking on the beach (it gets better with experience). And on a personal level – just like tennis, watching a great movie, or singing karaoke (yuck) – it is better to have sex than to talk about it.
But if we talk about sex let’s make it worthwhile. And for IkoCiti, we will try to make it much easier to talk about sex.