Veronica

Veronica still works in Rome; like most young people fresh out of college, she earns what is the typical entry level wage in Italy, a thousand Euros a month, lower, reports the press than either Spain or Greece. (O, horror, said the Italians and cracked down on Roma immigrants: a surprising train of thought, given that the Roma are despised precisely because they do not work and therefore do not deflate wages).

With her salary, Veronica cannot afford to live where she works, in the Centro Storico, where rents for small studios start at 1200; and instead lives in Ostia where the rent is 600. It does not take a financial genius to figure out that her 1 hour commute, twice a day, 22 days each month, for a total of 44 hours of her life – a full working week – is worth 600 euros savings – 120 euros in transportation costs = 480 euros, or about 10 euros an hour. That’s actually better than her job, which pays her only about 6.25 an hour. If she could only commute all day.

Or sell herself.

The girls who work at the city’s edge, I am told, charge 50 euros and up; but, if recent press reports are right, it shouldn’t be difficult for a girl like Veronica to make a few hundred dollars for a single assignation.

Veronica is of course no common whore; yet, it does not follow that she does not sell herself. She lives in Ostia with her boyfriend. This is called variously “love”, “relationship”, or even “engagement”, but the economic fact is this: sharing the bed with her boyfriend, Veronica saves another 300 euros a month on rent. Relationships are like long term contract in dry goods shipping: contract rates are much below the spot rates.

Veronica’s position isn’t different from that of the working girls of Tokyo, or Bangkok, or Jakarta. It’s hard to make the ends meet and impossible at all not to compromise one’s sexual liberty: the girls either must live with mom and dad, and thus have no sex at all, or with boyfriend, and thus have only one kind of sex; or live alone and be constrained to – accept gifts.

The comparison between the developed world (Italy, Japan) and the undeveloped world (Thailand, Indonesia) seems to suggest that several decades of economic development and political progress have not really done anything to reduce women's dependence on sex to secure acceptable standard of living; certainly nothing to secure for them real sexual freedom.