Never Admit It
That day for lunch I was making bean stew, called fabada when it is made with the large white beans typical of Asturias (fabes de la granja) along with morcilla (or blood sausage) and chorizo. “You eat fabada?” someone who knows that I’m a pescatarian will question. “Why yes,” I answer truthfully, “but just the beans, not the meat.” As we all know, the meat flavor makes the stew, and the rich broth is infused with meat juices. Should anyone point this out, I say that I eat around the flavor. And that should be the end of the conversation, with my wink-and-nod admission that, occasionally, I give in to the flavor, if not the substance.
Not everyone, however, knows when to appreciate a wry smile and a fanciful notion like eating around the flavor. Some people will pull out charts, cite lie-detector results, and announce that 73.5 percent of vegetarians eat meat occasionally and never admit it. All I can answer is that those people do what they think fit, just as meat eaters consume what they think fit. I don’t give anyone a hard time, so why give me a hard time?
And what is this person’s stance, anyway? A staunch carnivore who bristles at the holier-than-thou attitude of some vegetarians? Or an uncompromising purist who can’t stand having any backsliders among the faithful? An attack, in other words, can come from within the ranks as well as from outside.
But when the quoted figure concerns the number of men in Spain who visit prostitutes, the jokes are louder—and so is the outrage. In such conversations, you’d expect the more judgmental voices to be women and the supposed backsliders to be men. At least, that was the idea that surfaced during a dinner conversation one night when my brother and sister-in-law were visiting. Eighty percent was the figure mentioned. My sister-in-law was astounded. The practice of prostitution already offended—the notion of ordering sexual gratification simply because you have money in your pocket, money that allows you to purchase what ideally is freely given. And yet help and favors of all sorts—things that might be freely given—are often bought and sold. Couldn’t a man with strong hands object that his strength has a price? Or a woman with a sensitive nose, who can detect—thanks to her exquisite sense of smell—the subtleties of a dish and improve it? Or any labor?
Interestingly, men who visit prostitutes do the opposite of vegetarians: where vegetarians abstain from flesh, these men partake to excess. But as with food, who’s to say what excess is? If you can afford crocodile, or monkey brains, or the rarest truffle, why not? If you’ve got the money for a safari or for an alpine excursion, why not? Or for a full-scale orgy, why not? There are laws, but there are legal ways around many of them, and one excess may resemble another in the lineup of ways to satisfy outsize appetites. Eighty percent! We talked about the Franco dictatorship, and about how the suppression of so many burgeoning social trends, ones that were becoming openly established elsewhere, may have shaped attitudes here.
My sister-in-law noted that 80 percent meant that, of five male friends, four, according to the statistic, had visited a prostitute. Not one of them would have admitted going, she remarked. Better, I thought, than bragging about it.
The next day, I looked up statistics for Spanish men visiting prostitutes and found figures of 39 percent, less than half the number we’d discussed. It turns out that even so, Spain is typically cited as the European country where more men visit prostitutes than in any other. I reported this to a friend. He snorted. No doubt he felt the censure of his sex in hearing that statistic invoked. He turned the tables neatly. “The country with more whores than any other,” he said. That felt like a low blow. My answer? I’m from a Puritan culture with a strong work ethic. “Or where they work harder,” I replied. What else could I say?
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