“New types of adult establishments are doing very well offering niche or added services. Newly opened Strawberry Box in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro is one such place. Its customers can be serviced by hand while watching an erotic movie in a private room, allowing Strawberry Box to offer three essential factors — low price and time efficiency… [At another establishment] men can masturbate as many times as they like for 60 minutes while one or several women sit on a nearby chair and watch them without ever getting involved… ‘Eventually, we want to stop girls shedding their clothes and guys shedding their loads,’ Yono’s operator tells Spa! ‘Our women are of a quality so high it’s hard to believe they’re sex workers. But we figure guys will consider 20,000 yen a small price to pay to have their desires sated, even if in a manner more mental than physical.’” — Mainichi Daily News (Japan)

The core service of the “oldest profession” will no doubt always consist of women offering themselves up to men in one way or another. Of course, given that there are really only a finite number of ways a woman can please a man, it’s hard for prostitution to evolve in any meaningful way. Or rather, prostitution does evolve — but it’s not the sex so much as the technology and the business that have to keep pace with the times.

That being said, it sounds like this is a great direction for sex work to evolve in. It’s kind of a middle ground between stripping and prostitution. For the customer, it’s do-it-yourself sex work with a bit of voyeurism and exhibitionism to spice it up. For the provider, it’s prostitution without fucking. All told, the encounter is safer, cheaper, and more efficient than traditional services. It offers variety and convenience. It’s not too exploitative for the girls. What’s not to love about it?

Of course, you could be cynical and say that the lack of intercourse is sympomatic of the alienation of the Information Age. Masturbation replaces sex, looking replaces touching, and so on. And perhaps it really is symptomatic of a deep alienation that pervades society, but so what? If you think that prostitution is not alienation anyway, you’re kidding yourself. A hooker wants money. You want sex. Your interests are fundamentally different. There’s no communion of the soul. There’s no mutual understanding, except in the transaction fee. So why shouldn’t the physical relations mirror the social relations? Even when you have genital intercourse with a hooker, really you’re only using her body as a masturbation aid anyway. It’s never really sex to her. Sex she saves for her boyfriend, not for you.

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