Sex Futures

An immodest proposal

May, 2008, Speculator Column, IR magazine

Ian Williams gets excited about the sex trade

Former New York governor Elliot Spitzer always kept abreast of the imagination and invention of the derivatives markets. Some of the creativity he saw there may well have rubbed off.

In his contract negotiations with the now famous Kristen and the Emperor’s Club, the company that represented her, he was – perhaps inadvertently – pioneering sex futures. He was certainly investing in them. How else would you describe putting money down up front for anticipated needs?

There is already a futures market; surely the wizards of Wall Street cannot be far off slicing and dicing sex transactions for tradable options. If we consider domestic consensual copulation as an example of subsistence production and consumption that takes place outside the markets, it’s perfectly possible to differentiate commercial sex as a commodity. And once you accept that sex has moved from a subsistence level to a commodity-trading basis, there are serious market possibilities.

There is a technical hitch in Puritan hangover laws against prostitution, but criminalizing acts between consenting adults simply because there is money involved goes against every trend in our modern world. Today everything from medical care to psychotherapy comes with a price tag; in a free society, the nanny state should butt out of the axiomatically preferable market-based solutions.

Consider the options. If you buy pork belly futures, you don’t actually put your dibs on a particular physical side of bacon. Rather, you are buying a sort of metaphysical abstraction of a slab of pig meat, confident that the actual goods will be there when the time comes to bring home the bacon in the real world. Indeed, most traders in the derivatives chain would not know the snout from the tail of the actual beasts whose bits they are notionally hawking and buying.

After all, a tradable commodity has an abstract life of its own, separate from its physical reality. In the oil market, each barrel is bought and sold numerous times between the wellhead and the refinery, but at no time do any of the traders have the faintest smudge on their well-manicured fingertips as they manipulate their keyboards to churn the abstractions on their screens.

Like many sites in the world of commercial sex made possible by the internet, the Emperor’s Club website showed contractors with fictitious names, no faces and homogenized images posed to represent eroticism rather than real people with individual personalities. It was the transaction, not the parties to it, that had value.

New technology apart, old biological imperatives suggest sex futures could have increasing value. Unless you are stuck on a desert island, in which case your options for trading are somewhat diminished anyway, abstinence from bacon is not likely to boost the value of your future holding. However, as history teaches us, anticipation of sex actually enhances its value. And you can always go long on sex. Never mind the bulls and the bears – invest now in the birds and the bees!

Adrift on the Mayflower

Up on Guardian CiF,
Wednesday


My cleaner in Sullivan County, New York, charges over twice the minimum wage, but it would take her 40 days incessant hard toil on her hands and knees polishing floors to get whatever Ms Kristen got from New York state's governor, for a few hours work, possibly also on her hands and knees, but probably on a soft mattress.

While Governor Spitzer has a host of legal issues to contend with as a result of his meeting with Kristen, not the least is that he presumably violated the Mann Act, a piece of legislation dating back to 1910 that was designed to combat "white slavery," a quaint term which implies that it was more reprehensible than the more acceptable black slavery. It made it illegal to transport women across state lines for prostitution, "or debauchery," and of course, that was a legal device to make it a federal offence.

Even more than most of the puritanically-cast prostitution laws, the Mann Act has frequently been used for highly suspect purposes, whether imprisoning black heavyweight boxing champion for Jack Johnson for sending a railway ticket to his white girlfriend, or going after Charlie Chaplin for being subversively funny.

It seems that if anyone transported Kristen from New York to Washington DC and into the arms of Governor Spitzer, it was Amtrak, a Federal government-owned corporation. In addition, far from being drugged, bound and threatened, and railroaded, she would appear to have been an eager volunteer, rushing down to Penn Station, which is understandable when an hour's work weighs in at three months' worth of minimum wage toil.

Indeed, one has to admire the professional integrity of the model concerned. The cheers that greeted the news on Wall Street, made it plain that there were people out there who would pay far, far more for her evidence than she could earn in a month of trysts with destiny in DC. One may also commend the green-ness of her and the governor for taking the more ecologically sound Amtrak train instead of the shuttle.

However, it's those cheers from Wall Street that dull my otherwise natural schadenfreude at seeing a hypocrite laid low. As New York's attorney general, Spitzer put serious brakes on the Wall Street machinery for skimming off the savings and investments of ordinary Americans. He spoke truth to power and ticked off Hillary Clinton with his eminently sensible proposal for driving licenses for undocumented immigrants, and - not to be forgotten - tried to enforce the labour and pay laws on his state's employers.

In the end, it's the hypocrisy. Bill Clinton did not resign for his various affairs in which he paid his partners with vicarious access to power, despite parading his church-going familial lifestyle. Several Evangelical luminaries and their political allies did, quite rightly, resign for doing things that they had so piously denounced. And Spitzer as a state attorney general had boasted of his prowess in busting exactly such prostitution rings as the one he was patronizing so lavishly.

With this White House's propensity for politically-inspired prosecution, it is entirely possible that "Client Nine" was actually "Target One" not least since the Department of Justice's so-called Public Integrity Section is conducting it, which suggests that politics, not prostitution is in their sights.

The Democratic Governor of New York, highly unpopular with many influential and unscrupulous people, put his testicles and perhaps a bit more on a plate with a side order of ketchup. I hoped he had the balls to refuse to resign, but rather suspect he left them in the Mayflower Hotel. I suppose his last claim to prestige will be that he came in the Mayflower.