We all sell something.

 

Surgeons sell their specialised skills. Architects sell their designs. Creative professionals sell their ideas. Our circumstance in life tends to determine what we’ve got to sell. We all have a price tag and seeking a buyer is essential in keeping our store up and running - the very key to our survival. 

 

Making transactions is like brushing your teeth. It’s something you do every day but never give it much thought. As social creatures that are part of this machine called the economy, we move the world along every day by making exchanges with one another.

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There’s this particularly thriving market I know in Thailand where over 200,000 girls are looking for their bidders. As the witching hour rises over the city of Bangkok and the stench of sin and gluttony at their most poisonous begin to fill one go-go bar after another, an industry that reaps in 6.4 billion dollars a year dances the night away.

 

Step inside the world where a woman’s appearance is her currency, nothing more and at the same time, nothing less. Her body is up for sale and the things it can do are listed on the menu. 

 

Every night on the seedy streets of the town that never slumbers, as men of all walks of life bank their night out on purchased physical promises, the women in barely-there sparkly dresses and dainty high heels become the masters of transactions - the prettier the body, the bigger the price tag.

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Humans gravitate towards what we find beautiful - what pleases the eyes, what pumps the heart. The way you look dictates your life experiences. Much like these Thai women, our looks are also our currency, we also sell - in the way we flirt, the way we pose for the cameras, the way we tease, the way we swipe. While the compensation for these women is money, we feel we are simply too good for cold hard cash - we are after different instant gratifications. We sell for love, for admiration, for Likes, for intimacy, for envy, for anything but that.

 

These are the transactions we make every day - on and offline. 

 

Selfies, for instance, are the print advertisements of modern times. They are the perfect example of how we are putting our physical selves out there in hopes of getting something in return. There are 35 million selfies posted on Instagram (so far), 55% of plastic surgeons report that their patients would undergo procedures to look better in selfies and an average person will take about 25,000 selfies during their lifetime.

 

Society’s endless quest for admiration is enough to prove that we are all looking to get paid. 

 

The difference in the returns we seek divides us from these women, but in the end, we are all crammed under the same currency: our bodies.

 

The consequence of this affects every one of us in different ways. Like I’ve said before, what we can sell is based on our own circumstances. These women sell sex while we sell our own variations of sexy, all for the same reason - to survive and thrive in a society that requires you to be an economic player. 

It’s easy to look away. A lot of us would even go as far as classifying these women as nothing more than a stubborn stain that’s set in the fabric of society. It’s even easier to discount the point I’ve made because selfies seem to be of a completely different pursuit from selling sex for cash. At first glance, posting selfies and selling your body may seem too extreme to compare, but with a closer look at the principle of the transaction itself, they are pretty damn close - the same product, just different promises and returns. 

 

Some of the common grounds we have with one another can sometimes exist outside our comfort zones. We are closer now than ever through the transactions we make, but somehow the space between us and the people who sell their bodies is still as wide as it was centuries ago.

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To see the common ground we have isn’t the most comfortable thing to do, but it’s the most human. Because without getting outside our comfort zone, they might never get out of the many evils that live in their world - violence, extortion, stigmatism.

 

Just to name a few. 

 

So from one merchant to another, what’s the price tag on your empathy?