When it comes to some moral subjects or groups of people, the Bible often goes out of its way to specifically mention men and women, as with male and female slaves/servants in the Torah's laws (Exodus 20:8-11, 21:20-21, 26-27, 32, Leviticus 25:1-7, Deuteronomy 5:12-15, 12:11-12, 17-18, 15:12-18, 16:9-11, 13-14). With prostitution and prostitutes, there are sometimes references to just women (Leviticus 19:29, 21:9), and there is also a set of commands directly acknowledging male and female prostitutes and regarding them identically in Deuteronomy 23:17-18. Not only is prostitution already by logical necessity still prostitution no matter the prostitute's gender, but men and women are declared to be equals even ahead of Mosaic Law (Genesis 1:26-27, 5:1-2). The absence of Deuteronomy 23:17-18 would not change any of this. Indeed, the passage still affirms the blatant gender equality of Christianity in its moral obligations and its acknowledgement of people and practices that deviate from popular stereotypes of men and women. Some, nevertheless, assume that these verses are about prostitutes of either gender who tend to male clients. Here is the text:
Deuteronomy 23:17-18--"No Israelite man or woman is to become a shrine prostitute. You must not bring the earnings of a female prostitute or of a male prostitute into the house of the Lord your God to pay any vow, for the Lord your God detests them both."
Absolutely nothing in the passage itself indicates that it is speaking of prostitutes of either gender, uniting their profession with religious expression, working with clients of exclusively one gender. More specific to the fallacious interpretation of some, fallacious in the sense that it holds to things either not presented in the text or that do not follow from its concepts, or fallacious in the sense that it literally relies on outside philosophical errors/assumptions, Deuteronomy 23 does not say that the male and female shrine prostitutes both serviced men. Moreover, if the activities in question amounted to fertility rituals as some claim, then this would be idiotic even apart from the gender stereotypes that would lead some to assume the clients were all male. Fertility prostitution would very likely not be homosexual for men or women, as there is nothing about same-gender sex that is tied to procreation. The idea that this passage is about illicit fertility rituals already contradicts the sexist idea that male prostitutes would only find male clients who are interested in them. However, the idea that women would never seek out male prostitutes for the same reasons men might seek out prostitutes conflicts with reason and the Bible.
Any sort of gender-specific expectations or norms for prostitution one way or another would by logical necessity be socially conditioned at best. There is nothing about having a penis or vagina that compels one to seek out or not seek out prostitutes (or any kind of sexual interaction with the opposite gender); psychological traits are individualistic, for it does not logically follow from having specific genitalia that one has a certain personality trait or from one man or woman being of such a disposition that another will have the same, or they are shaped by social expectations or demands, however subtle, that a person gives into on an individual basis. These characteristics are in reality irrelevant to gender, so gender is strictly a bodily status. In either case, a person is by logical necessity of a certain personality only because it is their own natural state or because society shaped them in some way and they gave in.
It is logically false that gender stereotypes are true even in light of social experience in communities heavily dominated by gender "norms." For instance, if men were all aggressive brutes because they were men (a logically impossible thing in light of the aforementioned necessary truths) instead of some men being brutes as individuals and some others being brutish only because they yielded to meaningless and misandrist cultural pressures, then there could be no exceptions one would encounter and all of their brutishness would be equal from male to male. It would already be true due to reason that gender behaviors could only be because of individual personality or societal manipulation, but aside from this, it would also be impossible to find any variation at all in people of a given gender [1].
If the Bible or a scientific/psychological paradigm contradicts reason, it cannot be true, because logic is true by necessity independent of all else and is what all truth and all genuine knowledge stems from. Not only does the Bible never deny that men are not sex-crazed beasts or that women are not asexual or demisexual beings, at least not because someone is a man or a woman, but it also gives many examples of women who absolutely are very sexually "visual" or teaches moral doctrines that utterly contradict gender stereotypes regarding sexuality. In Genesis 37, for starters, Potiphar's wife does not stop at trying to entice Joseph to commit adultery with her because she is very attracted to him based upon his bodily appearance (the Bible mentions many physically beautiful men elsewhere): she sexually harasses him in her egoistic desperation, and then she grabs him in an attempt to rape him. As an aside, this is not the only sexual assault of a man by a woman in Genesis. Ezekiel 23:5-7 and 11-21 describe women standing in for the idolatrous Israel and Judah who are inflamed with sexual desire for large numbers of handsome men. One of the women is full of sexual excitement upon seeing representations of men on a wall. In 1 Timothy 5:11, Paul mentions some young widows who want to marry when they are overcome by sensual desire.
Obviously, the narratives, allegories, and general statements of the Bible, from these verses alone, already distinctly acknowledge that women are sexual beings and are not uninterested in the male form (except on an individualistic basis, having nothing to do with being women). What about the moral prescriptions of Mosaic Law, the central moral revelation of the entire Bible? Exodus 21:10-11, though some translations ambiguously mention the third item in the list as "marital rights" without specifying what exactly the plural rights consist of, allows a woman, and by logical extension a man (Genesis 1:26-27, 5:1-2), to divorce her husband for neglect. Whether depriving her of fulfillment of marital rights explicitly entails sexual neglect, or even just in light of the fact that sexual neglect is still neglect and thus by necessity would also be grounds for divorce, Mosaic Law literally articulates the rights of a wife and by extension a husband to sex from their partner. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7:2-5 that husbands and wives, writing in a very overt gender egalitarian manner, are not to deprive each other of sex unless mutually agreed upon. Never do its authors pretend like women cannot relate to deep attraction to male beauty (of the body, not personality) that might make a male prostitute appealing to them, or like all men are attracted to all women (if they are not asexual) so that they would even be tempted by a female prostitute in any situation to begin with.
It is not the case that the Bible by its explicit wording condemns female prostitution, with male prostitution only being condemned as sinful by its logical equivalence. No, the Torah does not pretend like there are such gender-specific sins--and even if Deuteronomy 23 did not mention male and female prostitutes alike, it would not follow that it is not condemning male prostitution or in any way prescribing gender stereotypes about sexuality. It would have to actually say or logically necessitate such things to teach them. Women are more than their sexuality or sex appeal to others and men are not unattractive to women or animalistic slaves to alleged hypersexual passions. Women do not have some special sexual power over men because of their physical beauty (and beauty and sensuality are utterly nonsexual on their own!) that is not inversely the case, and no one of either gender has truly uncontrollable sexual behaviors. Biblical ethics does not tolerate any double standards for sexual expression or the gender stereotypes that feed into them, which liberates men and women alike from dismissal of any part of their nonsinful selves.
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