Auctioning off Virginity in 2014

There is something to be said for an education and there is something to be said for the artistry that we make of our lives once that education is obtained. That said, check out this blog by Elizabeth Raine, 27 year old medical student who is auctioning off her virginity. Currently, the bid is a paltry 550,000. A 22 year old back in 2002 auctioned hers off for 3.7 million. Let that sink in.

Now that those numbers are in your head, I have to comment. I can’t help myself, rather like a continental philosopher or even a common run of the mill everyday stalker, who says the objections of society and/or the individual can’t negate the validity of his feelings….or urges and desires as the case may be…

The age of Courtesans and Mistresses supposedly ended with the advent of secularism and the birth of divorce laws during the French Revolution, the 1960′s notwithstanding! It seems Miss Raine is the typical secular western woman or at least that is how she is handling her PR at this stage. It’s a lovely and to the point blog. I do hope she at least breaks a million in offers.

Because this topic has been on my mind the last week, I don’t know what it is that I expected to see…Geisha had a tradition of sex auctioning but they were arts people and there was a kind of ritualized role for them in Japanese society that lended itself to their mystique. Western society lost this angle with the end of the gilded age and nothing has replaced it since. Medicine is…sterile and makes me think about this long rambling quote from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science:

Why we are not Idealists. Formerly philosophers were afraid of the senses: have we, perhaps, been far too forgetful of this fear? We are at present all of us sensualists, we representatives of the present and of the future in philosophy, – not according to theory, however, but in praxis, in practice…. Those former philosophers, on the contrary, thought that the senses lured them out of their world, the cold realm of “ideas,” to a dangerous southern island, where they were afraid that their philosopher-virtues would melt away like snow in the sun. “Wax in the ears” was then almost a condition of philosophising; a genuine philosopher no longer listened to life, in so far as life is music, he denied the music of life – it is an old philosophical superstition that all music is Sirens’ music. Now we should be inclined at the present day to judge precisely in the opposite manner (which in itself might be just as false), and to regard ideas, with their cold, anaemic appearance, and not even in spite of this appearance, as worse seducers than the senses. They have always lived on the “blood” of the philosopher, they always consumed his senses, and indeed, if you will believe me, his “heart” as well. Those old philosophers were heartless: philosophising was always a species of vampirism. At the sight of such figures even as Spinoza, do you not feel a profoundly enigmatical and disquieting sort of impression? Do you not see the drama which is here performed, the constantly increasing pallor, the spiritualisation always more ideally displayed? Do you not imagine some long-concealed blood-sucker in the background, which makes its beginning with the senses, and in the end retains or leaves behind nothing but bones and their rattling? – I mean categories, formulae, and words (for you will pardon me in saying that what remains of Spinoza, amor intellectualis dei, is rattling and nothing more! What is amor, what is deus, when they have lost every drop of blood?…) In summa: all philosophical idealism has hitherto been something like a disease, where it has not been, as in the case of Plato, the prudence of superabundant and dangerous healthfulness, the fear of overpowerful senses…

Yes, she is no idiot and she may have other creative talents she is not disclosing and that may be a very wise move on her part.

I am presently reminded of my own lack of enthusiasm for my current Master’s degree, Health Care Administration, so this is a subjective commentary but again, a woman must pay the bills and I am an average woman of average means.