The Rescuers

There is no more defiant denial of one man’s ability to possess one woman exclusively than the prostitute who refuses to be redeemed. –  Gail Sheehy

Every whore who has worked for more than a few weeks has met them:  The ones who want to “save” us.  They come in four main types, but they’re all characterized by the same delusion that sex work is “degrading”, “disgusting”, “filthy”, “sinful”, etc, and the same unwavering belief that we all really want to be out of it no matter what we say or how eloquently we say it.  Some of them really do believe that we’re victims, so their efforts are earnest albeit wrongheaded; others just want to use us as pawns to further their agenda, whatever it may be.  But all of them are characterized by the bizarre yet prevalent notion that sex is somehow intrinsically different from every other human activity even when it has no chance of resulting in pregnancy.

The worst of the four types of self-appointed messiahs is of course government, because it is both the most powerful and the only one which can get away with enforcing its edicts by violence.  At many times in history prostitutes were classified as “undesirables” much as Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals or members of other minority groups were; for example, whores were rounded up by the Nazis and shipped to concentration camps along with all the others the “master race” wished to purge from its ranks.  They were identified by a black triangle, and forced to do hard labor in order to “cure” them of their “aversion to work”; whores were among the first inmates of Auschwitz and were forced to help build the camp, laboring through the winter in evening gowns which the Nazis mockingly issued them instead of work clothes.  Unsurprisingly, most of them died.  But in one way, the Nazis were more moral than many modern Western governments; at least they weren’t hypocrites.  They were a fascist state which taught that individuals were only parts of society, so their evil, tyrannical treatment of “asocial elements” was at least consistent with their evil, collectivist rhetoric.  The majority of modern Western governments, on the other hand, pay lip service to individual civil rights yet harshly suppress the right of women to do as we like with our bodies and have sex on our own terms, justifying their actions with the excuse that they’re “protecting” us from our own choices.

The typical 21^st –century Western governmental rhetoric against prostitution can be summed up by this statement issued to the Secretary-General of the U.N. by the soi-disant “Coalition Against Trafficking in Women”:

Prostitution is inherently degrading and humiliating to the woman or girl who is being sexually exploited.  When a woman or girl is reduced to a commodity to be bought and sold, her fundamental human rights are violated.  Traffickers, pimps, and buyers degrade her humanity.  Men purchase the right to insult, slap, and rape women and girls.  These acts include forms of sexual violence that women’s advocates and human rights groups have long sought to eliminate from women’s beds, homes, workplaces and streets.  A survey of 854 people in prostitution in nine countries (Canada, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, United States, and Zambia) revealed that 71% experienced physical assaults in prostitution, and 62% reported rapes in prostitution.

It would be difficult to cram a more absurd collection of logical fallacies, propaganda and fake “statistics” into one short paragraph if one tried.  From the very first unsupported statement (“humiliation” is a wholly subjective condition, and “inherently” is a very strong term which must be supported by objective proof) to the idea that danger makes a profession immoral, every sentence is either factually, logically or morally fallacious.  The second choppy little sentence is a restatement of the persistent and absurd idea that it is a woman’s body that is bought in prostitution rather than her services, the next equates voluntary actions with slavery and assumes all whores have pimps, and the one after it makes the utterly ridiculous assumption that all clients are violent; finally, we’re asked to accept that 854 hand-picked survey respondents in nine countries (with a combined population of over half a billion people) constitutes a meaningful survey.  Yet asinine collections of nonsense exactly like this one are taken seriously by “authorities” all over the supposedly-enlightened Western world, particularly in Norway and Sweden.  If I were to say “Religion is inherently degrading to the child who is being socially exploited,” or “When an employee is reduced to a commodity to be bought and sold, his fundamental human rights are violated,” or “Women purchase the right to insult, rob, and exploit men through modern marriage,” or “A survey of 854 people in sports in nine countries revealed that 71% experienced serious physical injuries in sports, and 62% reported permanent disability from sports,” my statements would be dismissed as prejudiced, false, extreme or statistically absurd, but when people make equally ridiculous statements about prostitution they are magically conferred with an aura of sanctity which excludes any attempt at rational scrutiny.

Now, I don’t believe for one minute that governments really give a damn about us; a few years ago we were the dregs of humanity, and now suddenly we’re poor victimized angels?  Governments care only about power, and the oppressive and often conflicting laws about prostitution are actually only a way to control us while buying the support of the second and third groups of “rescuers”, religious puritans and neofeminists.  Government rhetoric about “protecting” whores from “exploitation” is therefore nothing but the latest politically correct rationalization for controlling us, just as branding us “asocial elements” to be imprisoned and worked to death was the politically correct rationale in Nazi Germany.  The repression continues; only the excuse changes.

But what of those other two groups?  I don’t think I need to say much about religious prudes; the austere, desert-dwelling Hebrews were so scandalized by the sexually liberal, goddess-worshipping Canaanites that they established a set of anti-sex laws and mores which became deeply entrenched in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  To the devout Judeo-Christian all sex outside of marriage (and most of it in marriage) is inherently sinful, so the harlot automatically becomes a merchant of sin.  Her refusal to submit to male dominance only makes her worse to the patriarchal Christian or Muslim, and the fact that she is an avenue of pleasure seals her fate in the eyes of the fun-hating puritan.  For the past two millennia Western religion has alternated between reviling us and attempting to “save” us, but even the latter is usually pursued by subjecting repentant whores to imprisonment accompanied by torture and hard labor, the better to wring our sinfulness from our bodies.  To be sure, there have been periodic attempts to wean us from harlotry by providing other means of support, but these invariably fail because there isn’t enough money to support more than a few “born again” whores in anything like the manner we can easily support ourselves.

Then there are the neofeminists, whose rhetoric has largely been adopted by both government and religious groups because so many men are afraid to challenge it for fear of being branded “sexist”.  You want a real example of sexism?  When a man uses his natural, physical, gender-based abilities to make money as a bouncer, bodyguard or boxer, everybody thinks it’s just great and he might even become a big “hero”.  But when a woman does exactly the same thing she is insulted, demonized and persecuted by governments.  Nobody claims using size and toughness to make large sums of money is “inherently degrading and humiliating to the man or boy who is being physically exploited,” or agitates to ban police work because men run the risk of injury or death in it; this is because nobody questions a man’s right to make these decisions for himself, not even the so-called “feminists”!  And this, of course, is why I refuse to use the term “feminist” to describe the type I call “neofeminists”; they are far more sexist against women than the vast majority of men are.  Lesbian neofeminists hate sex workers because they hate men and therefore oppose anything which might make men happy, and heterosexual neofeminists hate us because we provide modern men with an option to escape the rigged game of sexual extortion practiced by childish, self-centered modern women and enforced by the tyranny of divorce and paternity law.  But if they admit the truth they will alienate the majority of normal women, so like the government they must cover up their campaign to control and suppress whores with the excuse that they are trying to “protect” us from the bad old patriarchy which wants to “exploit” us.  Apparently, neofeminists exploiting us to further their ends is perfectly acceptable.

The last and least annoying of the types are found among our customers.  Men who suffer from the Madonna/whore duality are often confused when they meet an intelligent, charismatic, educated prostitute; I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked something like, “Why do you do this?” or even told, “You’re too good for this!”  And often when I referred to myself as a whore I got an almost-angry “You’re not a whore!”  The Madonna/whore fallacy instructed them that good, sweet, noble women could not be harlots, therefore they had to reconcile the dilemma by either denying I was one or somehow explaining the “paradox”.  Some of them apparently did this by deciding that I must be somehow victimized, either by circumstances or a specific person; their predictable response was to offer to rescue me, either by “keeping” me or by actually proposing.  Obviously, such proposals came from their hearts rather than their heads; they were the product of the male drive to protect women directed against a condition propaganda calls a degrading and humiliating one, therefore acceptable for whores but not for Madonnas such as they perceived me to be.  Of course, some men who issue such offers do so out of the simple desire to own something they see as valuable with no real concern for the girl as a person, which makes these specimens exactly the same as the leadership of the other three groups.