There are messages that begin with hello.
Others prefer efficiency.
This one went more or less straight to PayPal.
The proposition was explicit: if I wanted to see more, I could pay.
No seduction. No curiosity. No pretence that two people might first discover whether they were interested in one another.
There was a body, a price and the serene confidence that desire had already been established.
I remember thinking that the strangest part was not the selling.
People sell images, attention, time, access. That is not new.
The interesting part was the certainty.
He was not asking whether I desired him. He seemed to assume that I should.
That assumption felt familiar.
We live inside a culture that constantly assigns value according to attention.
How many people want you? How many would pay? How many would choose you? How many would stop scrolling?
We begin to confuse demand with worth.
Price and value
A price is useful. It tells us what something costs.
Value is more difficult.
The two are not the same.
The fact that somebody is willing to pay to see you does not prove how much you are worth.
It proves that a transaction is possible.
That is all.
This sounds obvious until we realise how often we apply the same logic without money.
A beautiful person messages us and we feel promoted.
Somebody desirable chooses us and we read it as evidence.
Attention arrives and, for a few minutes, we feel more valuable.
Then it leaves and we need another measurement.
The mechanism is almost identical to a market.
Only the currency changes.
The body as quotation
Apps make this especially visible because everything is compressed.
Photograph. Age. Distance. Height. Body. Position. Availability.
The person arrives after the specifications.
Sometimes they never arrive at all.
A body can attract attention.
But attention is not intimacy.
And desire is not automatically interest.
A body can make somebody look. It takes a person to give them a reason to stay.
I am not against exhibition, pleasure, erotic images or people earning money from them.
The moral panic around bodies bores me almost as much as the obsession with them.
What interests me is what happens when the market enters our internal vocabulary.
When we start thinking: if many people want me, I must be worth more.
At that point the rare thing is not the image.
The rare thing is presence.
The duty to feel lucky
There is another trap in desire: the idea that we should feel grateful simply because someone attractive has chosen us.
As though being wanted creates a debt.
As though declining desire from someone considered valuable were almost irrational.
The duty to feel lucky.
The right to say: I’m not interested.
Not everything other people consider valuable has to become valuable to us.
We can recognise beauty without wanting access to it.
We can be desired without having to return the favour.
We can be impressed and still say no.
I did not send money.
No moral victory. No speech.
I simply realised that what was being offered did not interest me enough to become a transaction.
And perhaps that is the useful part of the story.
Not that desire can be sold.
We already know that.
But that somebody else’s confidence in their market value does not have to become our measure of them — or of ourselves.
Continue the Thought
How much of your worth are you still measuring by the desire you manage to provoke in other people?