If you search “Kai Greene” and “grapefruit” on Google, the first thing you’ll see is a link with “the reason Kai Greene will never be Mr. Olympia” in body text. The next thing you’ll see is a video of this guy fucking a grapefruit.

I am not going to link a picture of it.

If you are unfamiliar with this drama, Kai Greene has consistently placed 2nd in the Mr. Olympia bodybuilding competition despite how competitive his physique has been. A subset of Olympia followers suggest Kai Greene will not be Mr. Olympia because, apparently, fucking a grapefruit is just beneath the stature of a sport where competitors must not only dose steroids at grams per week year-round but also supplement with insulin and growth hormone to reach levels of lean muscle mass that dwarf Arnold Schwarzenegger at his prime. Merely using steroids alone and looking like Dwayne Johnson in Hercules would be unacceptable to the dignity of IGF-1-induced intestinal growth.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that left-ventricular hypertrophy and ultra-supraphysiological body mass are much more deleterious to your health and organ function than sticking your dick in citric acid. When you talk about things that debase or degrade a person, the only actual damage that can occur is physiological, and this includes any mental or emotional damage since the brain is an organ and emotions are part of the body’s physiology. To refer to something as non-physically damaging is to invoke some non-empirical and immeasurable value that doesn’t have any base in the real world external to your perception; people who talk about being ‘impure’ from promiscuity are invoking an imaginary metric that exists only with respect to how belief in this metric influences human behavior, and it only influences human behavior because you believe it exists. It’s not totally superstition, but it’s close.

In other words, the only downside to grapefruit-fucking is that you might perceive it to be low-status, but this is arbitrary as the act of grapefruit-fucking isn’t deleterious to health, and you can change your perception of status to fit a more empirical standard. I haven’t ever eaten hemp protein powder in my life, and I think hemp protein powder is dinky, but if I woke up tomorrow and a study indicated that hemp protein was thoroughly more ideal for protein synthesis than any other protein, I’d immediately buy 10lb of hemp protein powder and figure out a way to like it. You perceptions are simultaneously biased, subjective, and malleable; extraordinarily few people actively adjust their beliefs in light of conflicting evidence, so your perceptions are probably not based on facts. When your perception clashes with some kind of fact, the onus is on you to update your perception into concord with that fact. If you don’t like the taste of something even if you know it’s great for your health, or if you feel uncomfortable about something even if you know there’s nothing wrong with it, that’s your fault and your responsibility to fix your biases.

Here is another empirical and descriptive metric everyone seems to ignore: the amount of work relative to the dollars per hour earned. If you can earn $300 for an hour’s work and this doesn’t significantly interfere with your ability to work more hours in the week, then this is a great proposition and you should do it. In general, being able to earn $2,000/week working 20 hours is better than being able to earn $2,000/week working 80 hours. That is 60 hours weekly that you’ve gained, which by the way is double the cumulative lecture time of Yale OpenCourseWare’s Freshman Organic Chemistry I course, so assuming a generous three hours of work for every class hour you’d have enough free time to learn Organic Chemistry I to Yale’s standard in two weeks of this workload change. Over the course of a whole semester you’d have enough free time to learn 10 classes of material. (This might seem impossible, but colleges are time-inefficient due to lecture length, transportation time, and time spent trying to get laid or fuck around with people you won’t talk to after college.) If your job is intellectually stimulating on par with or exceeding college, then good for you, but for most people I doubt it is, and my doubt increases alongside your yearly salary amount.

Most people will work really shitty jobs for spare cash and find some kind of bizarre dignity in doing this, but find sex work distasteful. I have no idea why, and by “I have no idea” I don’t mean this in the “I would like to ~understand~ you” way; I mean this in the “I have no idea what stupid shit is going on in your brain but I’m going to think you’re even dumber than I thought when I figure out what it is” way. If you think this way, reflect on your belief: you are willing to work 40 hours/week at WalMart or two jobs at fast food chains and find it distasteful that a prostitute or stripper or porn star works two hours weekly and makes the same amount as you? Maybe you need that kind of rationalization, but if this were any other kind of work, you’d feel like your job is a colossal waste of time, and some kind of social perception about the job doesn’t change its financial sensibility.

Oh, and then there’s this kind of guy:

“I wouldn’t take it up the ass for a MILLION dollars homie.”

Bullshit. Yes you fucking would.

There is nothing that indicates a man has thought less about the value of his time than a man who says he wouldn’t take a dick up his ass for some obscene amount of money. You are downplaying the equivalent of thousands of dollars and months of work at WalMart for a few hours of work. Any guy who says this sort of thing is lying on a scale comparable to “muscular guys are gross :(“ or “I find you more attractive without makeup :)”, and perhaps lying harder than both of those statements combined. Then again, maybe he’s not actually lying and in fact just stupid, but either way this kind of financial incompetence isn’t something you want pumping sperm into you.

I used to have these conversations at work. I thought I was in the “I wouldn’t do something weird and sexual for money” school of thought, then this happened:

“Alfred, let me ask you a question.”

“What?”

“Would you let someone stick a finger up your ass?”

“It depends on the person.”

“Just a random person.”

“Probably not.”

“What about for $500?”

“Still probably not.”

“Really? I would. I think if someone came up to me with $500, cold, and put it in my hand, I’d drop my pants and make them stick it in.”

Seeing tangible money enables your thought process to appreciate the triviality or significance of what you have to do for it. Knowing the quantity of money and having a visual of that money or an understanding of what that money can do are very different things, because the human brain is bad at grasping large numbers. Bad to a point where people quote Joseph Stalin in a defeated acceptance of how bad it is. Bad to a point where xkcd had to make a chart for already smart people to grasp how much a trillion dollars actually is. If humanity was good at grasping numbers above 10,000, genocides would receive far more attention from the general public than individual murders. They don’t, because humanity sucks at this.

From experience, I think most guys would let someone fuck their ass for $1,000 or less. $500 if they work at a shit job and maybe even less than that if they’re okay with sex work, but I think $1,000 would cover the majority of guys across most income ranges. If you came up with ten wadded hundreds and stuck it in front of an average guy in a hotel room, their mind would change rapidly. They’d figure out ways to be comfortable with a dick in their ass, and figure out ways to maintain an erection while someone they found unattractive was pounding their rectum. People find ways to enjoy work at the most mundane places, so it’s certainly not out of the spectrum of possibility that you could find a way to think positively about a demonstrably good offer for your time, though huge demographics of men work as hard as they can to act like this isn’t financially amazing.

I remember reading a thread on a steroid forum that epitomized this level of serial bullshitting. Someone was approached about stripping at a gay club for a median of $600/night, and every post that followed showed the homophobia typical to a message board frequented by men in their late 30s who have traditional ideals of masculinity.

The responses were absurd. One poster said that he declined an offer of $25,000 for a blowjob. Not $25,000 payment to him for a blowjob he’d give, but $25,000 payment to him for letting someone give him a blowjob. In the halls of shit that didn’t happen this is definitely in the throne room, but the principle of the matter is outrageous — someone felt the need to communicate this idea with other people as if he was communicating a virtue. Thankfully, a lone light of reason glimmered toward the end of page 1 to tell this guy how fucking stupid he was if that offer was even remotely real, but several people thought rejecting the work was legitimately principled.

“Once you go down this road, where does it stop? First it’s grinding ass on penis for $400-500/night, next it’s sucking off some guy for $2,000, next it’s getting ass-rammed for $5,000…”

If I could average even $450 nightly with $5,000 ass-rammings on weekends I’m looking at about $8,000 weekly, which is $32,000 monthly which is $384,000 yearly, which over four years is 1.5 million dollars. You can buy a house, fund your college education, get a handful of master’s and professional degrees after that, pay for your girlfriend’s tuition and set up a trust fund for your future kids with money left over. People graduate top 10% at Harvard Law to make that kind of money. People get Ph.D.s in engineering from MIT to make that kind of money. People study quantitative finance from Carnegie Mellon to make that kind of money. People spend four years in medical school and four years in residency and some uncertain amount of years in fellowship training to make that kind of money.

And you’re telling me I can do it by stripping and taking a dick up my butt? It took me three months working 55 hours weekly at a low-level service job to save $5,000, and there is ostensibly a way to do this for a few hours of work, and you’re telling me I should be repulsed by this?

Let me go on record as saying that if all I have to do for $5,000 is take a dick up my ass, you can obliterate my rectum no questions asked.

But probably part of the high price of assfucking originates from its risk, and more specifically the perception of its risk, because the actual risk is not that high. While it’s true that the risk of HIV from receptive anal sex is higher than any other sex act, this is like saying the risk of diabetes from sweet onions is higher than any other bulb vegetable, because the risk wasn’t that high to begin with. We can know this because actual probabilities are available that trump whatever anecdotal probability someone might want you to believe.

The National AIDS Manual’s Aidsmap website and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention actually break down risk scenarios for various sex acts. Aidsmap in particular gives insight to transmission rate, which assumes that the partner already has HIV, and distinguishes between receptive (in your butt) and insertive (in someone else’s butt) sex. From “HIV risk levels for the insertive and receptive partner in different types of sexual intercourse”, there are a buttload of ways to estimate risk.

In a high income country (if you are reading this you are probably in a high income country) the risk of transmission for a female having sex with an HIV-positive male is 1 in 1250. But if you are the target reader for this article you are not a female; you are a male who is disputing the value of fucking a grapefruit and taking a dick up your butt for $5,000.

In the event that your worst-case scenario is unprotected sex, these figures account for that event and assume you are fucking someone who already has HIV and that neither of you are using a condom or some other form of protection:

“The most widely cited study of per-act anal-transmission risk was published in 1999. (Vittinghoff E. et al). It found that amongst men in high-income countries, unprotected anal intercourse with an HIV-positive insertive partner carried an estimated 0.82% risk of infection for the receptive partner per sexual act, or a 1-in-122 risk of transmission. It estimated the risk for the insertive partner as 0.06% per sexual act, or a 1-in-1666 risk of transmission.”

A second study by Jin F et al. used data from Sydney which “support a recent meta-analysis of all previous studies of the per-act risk of receptive anal intercourse to ejaculation for both heterosexuals and sex between men, which was estimated to be 1.4%.”

“To ejaculation” is an important phrase here, because ejaculation doubles the risk. Here are some figures from the study, paraphrased in ways that I’m sure register more clearly to you. Again, they assume unprotected sex with a person who already has HIV.

If you fuck someone with HIV in the ass unprotected and you’re circumcised, your risk of HIV transmission is 1 in 909.

If you fuck someone with HIV in the ass unprotected and you’re uncircumcised, your risk of transmission is 1 in 161.

If someone with HIV fucks you in your ass and pulls out, your risk of transmission is 1 in 154.

If someone with HIV fucks you in your ass and jizzes in your rectum, your risk of transmission is 1 in 70. And for the record:

If you fuck a grapefruit, your risk of any STD transmission is 0.

Let’s suppose you simply refuse to take a dick up your butt but are willing to stick your dick in other people’s butts, or if you are willing to take a dick up your butt but only with a condom, CDC and Aidsmap have probabilities for that too.

CDC: “…consistent use of condoms reduces the risk of getting or transmitting HIV by about 80%. Using both condoms and antiretroviral therapy reduces the risk of HIV acquisition from sexual exposure by 99.2%.”

Aidsmap: “The per-contact risk of acquiring HIV from unprotected insertive anal intercourse with any partner (HIV status unknown) was more than ten times lower (0.06%, one in 1666).”

Per CDC, reduce any of the above probabilities by 80% to get your risk with a condom, or by 60% if you want to be conservative. Your risk of transmission when fucking someone’s ass with a condom, HIV status unknown, could be as low as 1 in 8300 or less; the risk of transmission via receptive anal sex, HIV status unknown, could be about 1 in 1850 or less given Vittenhoff’s data. This factor also changes based on demographics, e.g. college-educated people have less HIV in general so if you only fuck people with a college degree your chance of HIV infection is even lower than the above numbers, and if someone is willing to pay you $5,000 to fuck your ass then they’re obviously not dumb about making money.

But most people are bad at grasping large numbers and this applies especially to probability. To fix this, you can consult figures from the Bureau of Labor statistics for normal things people do for money that you probably don’t consider that dangerous, but which are far more dangerous and far less lucrative than taking a dick up your butt with a condom for $5,000.

The annual fatality rate of fishermen is 127.3 per 100,000 or 1 in 785. The median annual salary is $25,590, or five dicks up your butt.

The annual fatality rate of logging workers is 104 per 100,000 or 1 in 961. The median annual salary is $32,870, or 6.5 dicks up your butt.

The annual fatality rate of airline pilots and flight engineers is 51.6 per 100,000 or 1 in 1782. The average of median annual salaries for both airline and commercial flights is $105,065, or 21 dicks up your butt.

The rate of fatality from BASE jumping as determined by Bandolierwas 1 in 2,317. Slightly better rate than taking it up the ass with a condom indiscriminately, but zero return on your time, and yet your career will not be negatively affected if someone knows you have BASE jumped.

Oh, and the fatality rate of fucking a grapefruit is 0.

You probably don’t know many people who BASE jump or have jobs like fishing, but I bet you know someone who is a trucker or have at least met one. Check this out: Truck drivers? 25.9 fatalities per 100,000, or 1 in 3861. Median salary $38,200 or 7.6 dicks. Less risk than taking it up the butt with a condom, but half the risk of fucking other people with condoms. If the risk was proportional to pay, that would still mean you could make $1,000 from fucking a person in their ass, which is phenomenal value for your time.

This data hopefully establishes a good sense of return on investment based on activity, and the risks of gay sex are important because they provide a frame of reference for not only the ROI on paid gay sex but the ROI on risk-free sex work, like fucking a grapefruit. Though when you get to this point where every other objection a person can make to sex work has been defeated, the remaining cries of objection are always the same: “but it’s still weird.” This is exclusively comes from people who can’t overcome their kneejerk feelings, and therefore can’t update their beliefs in light of new evidence. If they could, they would have gotten over the weirdness a long time ago.

But yes, it is weird. No shit. “Weird” means abnormal which means statistically deviant which means anyone who deviates from some kind of average is weird. People who make $500,000/year are weird. People who have IQs of 160 are weird. People who bench press 400lb are weird. People with abs like Ryan Reynolds or asses like Nicki Minaj are weird. But I’m sure someone is going to make the argument that when they object to something “weird” they mean statistically deviant in a way they dislike or are made uncomfortable by, which is subjective and no suitable basis for an objection and by the way was the same argument traditionalists of the past gave against interracial marriage and homosexuality.

You know what’s weird? Fucking bodybuilding. Using insulin and growth hormone and tolerating distended guts just to have a fat-free mass index in the 99.99999th percentile of humanity; shaving your entire body; regularly tanning to the point where your skin at 40 looks like you’re pushing 60. Drugs do not influence every sport to the same degree, and drugs matter much more in the NFL than they do in soccer. Surely you’d think powerlifters would take tremendous amounts of drugs, right? Not compared to bodybuilders. No one takes more drugs than bodybuilders. Bodybuilding competitions are won and lost by drug intake.

But hey, a guy fucked a grapefruit.

If something is ‘weird’ and that’s a barrier to you accepting it, you need to update your perceptions and feelings to be in line with what the thing you’re finding difficult to accept actually is. Society does not stigmatize people who are deep sea fisherman, even though they do something considerably riskier than taking a dick up their ass for $5,000 and for far less money, yet perceptions of gay prostitution are far worse than those of deep sea fisherman. This is why the men who say something like “you wouldn’t catch me taking a dick up my ass for a MILLION dollars” are either full of shit or horrible at understanding return on investment, and I bet that if you asked these same men whether they’d be willing to enter the logging industry they’d have far less reservation, which demonstrates that their only objection to gay sex for money is not risk but in fact a quasi-superstitious perception about sex’s effect on imaginary virtues.

Taking a dick up your ass would be a good time investment. But Kai Greene did not take a dick up his ass. He didn’t even stick his dick in anyone else’s ass. He stuck his dick in a grapefruit, which is a plant that could not possibly transmit HIV, and he was paid for it. He was paid considerably for something that was effectively risk-free and at most a few hours of work, which is an excellent time investment. Yet for understanding how to get the most value out of his time, his actual worthiness of victory in Earth’s most notable bodybuilding competition is downplayed by homophobic camps of the bodybuilding scene who object to his sex work on unempirical, subjective grounds.

Someone who does sex work is doing something not that much more dangerous than trucking, and getting tremendously more value out of their time. If you find out that someone has gotten good value out of their time by doing sex work, you should be encouraging them, because they are far smarter with their time management than most people.

That Kai Greene is stigmatized based on his sex work is not just a flaw in the bodybuilding scene, but the result of an absurd perception about sex that doesn’t withstand scrutiny. This perception extends to societal beliefs about sex as a whole. When society can collectively update its beliefs about sex to a more descriptive and objective view, we will be more in line with reality and therefore better off.

So if you can get paid well for an extremely simple task like sticking your penis in a fruit, I don’t know what’s stopping you from doing that, but I know it’s irrational.

This post originally appeared at alfredmacdonald.com/