Are Actors Worse than Prostitutes?

This idea struck me while I was out running errands this afternoon.

Why is it that prostitutes (or sex workers as they are referred to as now) are considered to be so immoral? What is it about there profession that we find so repulsive? This got me thinking.

Sex workers essentially are selling a service. They are selling the rental of there body for sex or for sexual things. I am going under the safe assumption that to the sex work it is entirely meaningless sex that is strictly a means of making money to support themself. They do not enjoy it per se, anymore than any other profession in which a person is reasonably happy with there job. To the person who is purchasing these services they are also just receiving a service which has little if any emotional depth. The sex worker is selling a service which is assumed to have emotional meaning. People have sex when they love each other, as the classic belief goes. In this sense the sex worker is deceitful in that they do not have any emotional attachment to the phsyical act of sex that they are selling. So in economic terms, this is a simple matter of supply and demand. There are two people who are fulfilling 2 very physically primal needs.

This lead me to the second part of my idea.

Why is it then that we love television and movies actors (male and female) with such awe and interest? How are these individuals any different than sex workers?

Actors make a living by creating a fake personality that fluctuates based on the current acting project. In a plethora of tragic cases actors can in fact lose a majority of there own off-screen identity due to the breathe of on-screen personalities they put themselves into. These people place virtually no emotional attachment to the identities they take on while doing a film. They are essentially lying to everyone who is watching them act in a way that is not there true off-screen identity. To put into economic terms, there is a demand for movies in which the public masses can detach from there day-to-day struggles and escape into another world. Due to this demand, actors fulfill this need by taking on identities in which they are not emotionally attached.

The summary of this idea goes like this: two very different professions that both fit into a pattern of supply and demand. The only difference between the two professions is that one is providing physical deceit while another is providing emotional deceit.

There are several possible reasons behind the differences in public opinion about these two professions and there aforementioned differences in the type of deceit. The difference between being physically deceived and being emotionally deceived is based on current public opinion. Modern culture as a whole is focused on physically outward beauty. For all of the talk in chicken soup for the soul books about inner beauty there is still a surprising lack of anything but physical beauty. Due to this sad truth, people are far more likely to cast a neglectful glance at being emotionally deceived. Actors are essentially very good liars. The only reason they are not perceived as such is because people are far too lazy to address the emotional deceit that they are accepting. It is far easier to see someone who is physically deceiving and to judge them with the same awkward standards that hold physical beauty on such an unbalanced pedestal in comparison to emotional beauty. People are far too lazy to spend the time to interpret what the uneasiness they feel actually means when a much simpler scapegoat is seemingly the apparent cause.

Are actors worse than prostitutes? No, but they definitely aren’t any better.