December 7, 2007
What’s wrong with being a Fucking Whore?


It’s just a short exchange, but it got me thinking. What, indeed, is wrong with being a fucking whore?

In an episode entitled “Popping Cherry” of season one of Dexter, the Showtime series about a benign serial killer, Dexter’s sister Deborah visits the clutch of street prostitutes to query them about being witness to the abduction of the most recent victim in a string of serial killings. Deborah, who had been working undercover as a hooker in Vice, now approaches the group of girls she used to hang out with dressed as a cop-all conservative pants suit and graphite blue shirt and flashing badge-a far cry from her previous outfit, the “slut suit” she used to wear when undercover, of hot pants, high heels and halter top.

“Listen,” says Deborah, “I have a confession to make. I’m a cop.”

“You’re not a cop,” screams one woman dressed in black short-shorts and a cut-off hot pink t-shirt, “You’re a whore.”

“I’m not a fucking whore,” Deborah counters, pointing her finger in the face of the hot pink t-shirt chick and shooting the intensifying adverb “fucking” like a bullet.

“Hey,” interjects Shanda, “what’s wrong with being a fucking whore?” It’s a question that she repeats in the episode, and it’s the one that got me wondering. What, indeed, is wrong with being a fucking whore? And how has my thinking about whores, and whoring, changed?

I remember standing on the playground during recess in third grade. “Hey,” said a friend of mine, “do you know what a whore is?” She wasn’t taunting me; she was simply asking for information. I was ready to supply it. I liked knowing words and their meanings and being ready to pull out an obscure definition like a rabbit from a hat.

It’s a woman who has sex for money, I replied, feeling completely neutral about the subject matter. I might have been defining “prerogative,” “chiropodist” or “oddment.” The nearest adult, however, did not share my neutrality. She was this formidable superannuated math teacher. When she overheard me, her eyebrows shot into her silver curls and her lips pursed tight. She inquired what my friend Lisa had asked me; I told her. I could see the effort it took her to forbear commenting on my definition. Discretion took the upper hand and she forbore adding anything, but I saw her struggle.

I grew up without much of a sense of a whore being a bad thing. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable proposition to me-women had bodies, men wanted sex, capitalism rules. I really didn’t get that it should be a morally or legally loaded issue. And in an abstract sense, I’ve continued to feel that way into adulthood. I have never understood why prostitution shouldn’t be legalized. Criminalizing sex work hasn’t helped deter either the purveyors or the purchasers; therefore, it’s always only seemed reasonable to legalize it, monitor it, regulate it, and make it safe for both the people selling and the people buying.

In the space of my intellect, that purely abstract and platonically idealized cave, I can reason out that there absolutely ought not to be anything wrong with being a fucking whore. Sex work should be treated with the same kind of paternal attention with which we treat other adult activities like gambling, drinking alcohol, or smoking cigarettes. Our culture and our legal system recognize that people aren’t going to not gamble, drink, or smoke, so we do what we can to make it safe for people to safely indulge in those vices. Often we fail-there’s no good way to regulate smoking, for example-and other times we have a marginal success-clearly our current system of carding minors to purchase alcohol is far superior to prohibition. In my mind, prostitution is certainly no worse than gambling, and it’s way better than smoking. We might as well make it legal.

But I have to say that my personal relationship with prostitution is far more fraught. For I have taken umbrage that anyone has ever thought I was a whore, and people have. I am, therefore, a hypocrite, and I’m not proud of it.

I remember one specific conversation happened when I was stripping. I had a customer, a somewhat regular customer, who came in about once a month and would drop a few hundred dollars on me. He owned race horses, the ones who trot along pulling the little buggy. He would make a small fortune betting on horses and then he’d blow a tiny portion of it on me.

One night, after I’d danced for him a while and he’d slipped me a fistful of hundreds, this man asked me if I would be interested in meeting him in his hotel room.

I’m not a prostitute, I said, smiling but mildly offended.

“Some of the finest women I have ever known have been prostitutes,” he countered. “You’d be proud to find yourself among them.” And then he stood up and walked away, taking his hundreds and his unrequited lust with him.

Stripping, I got asked often if I would go to hotels. I always laughed it off. But on the inside, I prickled. Sure, I might undress, undulate, simulate sex, and rub against your clothed naughty bits for cash, but I draw the line at actual prostitution! How dare you, I thought on the inside, I’m not a fucking whore.

Part of the issue for me was that girls who are selling sex in strip clubs have an unfair advantage. It’s kind of easier for them to make mad phat wads of cash if they’re willing to “go all the way.” Those of us who drew the line in the sand at undressing for money resented those who threw themselves over the line to the dark side. We also shored up our flagellated egos by consoling ourselves that for all that we did do-rubbing our naked haunches against the hardened jeans-bound prick, sitting on laps, sweeping our knee against bulges, or letting certain liberties go in the dark recesses of the Champagne Room-we weren’t fucking whores. We hadn’t sunk that low. We didn’t make as much money, but we weren’t fucking whores.

More recently, I’ve been approached by prospective customers via email because of this blog. At least in the early days of my pretty dumb things, when I was less committed to my boyfriend and writing more often about wild and crazily indiscreet sex, I would get letters querying my availability for cash. Once again would rise the umbrage. I am not a fucking whore, I would think, and punch “delete.”

But writing this blog and coming into contact with women who have been sex workers-and the blogs they write-has caused me to question my comforting knee-jerk reaction. You can’t know Audacia Ray, for example, and not question what’s wrong with being a fucking whore. You can’t read her book, Naked on the Internet, and not think about women who choose to do sex work. You can’t read, however infrequently, the many blogs by women who do or have done sex work without it challenging your preconceptions. At least you can’t if you are me.

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about once becoming, as I put it, “an accidental whore.” I exchanged a blow job for $200, and though it wasn’t exactly prostitution, it wasn’t exactly not prostitution either. It was a definite grey area, but I needed the money and he needed the blow job and we were both seemingly content with the exchange we’d made.

I felt shame over it, this tiny grey act. It weighed on my conscience. Why? Because I wasn’t a fucking whore. I had defined myself for years by drawing that line, and here, poor and crazed, I’d stepped over it. I felt burdened with this secret, so much so that I never told anyone until I wrote about it here on my blog.

Which is, I have to say, crazy. I have known a handful of women who have spent time escorting. I like them. They have been, without exception, smart, creative, articulate and interesting. Why would I need so desperately to define myself against them and their one-time profession? What purpose does it serve me? Why, in short, does it make me feel better about myself? I still don’t have a succinct response.

I do know that all of this elliptical solipsism has made me realize this: there is, in fact, nothing at all intrinsically wrong with being a fucking whore. There may be problems attached to it-not everyone can do it without suffering emotional scars. Not everyone does it free from coercion or drugs or fear or any of the many nefariousnesses that surround prostitution. Few people, I suspect, choose to go into prostitution without pressing financial need, but I could be wrong. That could be the vestiges of my preconceptions talking.

I suspect that there will be a chick-and-egg relationship between whoredom and acceptance of it. Prostitution probably won’t be treated with the kind of legal and social understanding it deserves until people see that there’s not much wrong with being a whore, and people won’t see that there’s not much wrong with being a whore until whoring gets the kind of legal and social understanding it deserves. I realize here that I’m conflating all the flavors of prostitution into one flat pancake, and that this conflation is problematic. We as a culture seem to have more compassion but less tolerance for streetwalkers, while we have less compassion and more tolerance for escorts, for example, and that’s a class thing, and it’s a problem. I am, for brevity’s sake, lumping all prostitution into one indiscreet bundle. Whatever the kind of prostitution, I suspect there’s a catch-22 relationship in effect in terms of public perception. It’s a shame.

I suspect, though, that as the Internet has changed so much, so quickly, it will change this matter too. For it has changed me. Reading the writing of women sex-workers I don’t know, as well as meeting a few of them, has made me confront my own hypocritical attitudes. And that’s a good thing.

No one, whore or not or something somewhere in between, wants to be a fucking hypocrite.


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