A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world. – Alan Watts
I often write about the meanings of words, and how writers replace neutral terms like “escort service” with negative ones like “prostitution ring” in order to stir up negative feelings; the “goodies” do this just as often as the “baddies” do, and for the same reason. For example, I often use the term “murder” to describe cases in which cops kill citizens, while most journalists go the opposite way and use passive-voice construction to create the impression that the event was just some sort of natural phenomenon which wasn’t anyone’s fault: compare “he was killed” with “it was raining” and you’ll see what I mean. Words are tools, and tools are amoral; it is the use to which they are put by sentient beings which defines morality, which is one of the reasons that laws against inanimate objects (drugs, weapons, “proceeds of crime”, etc) are so morally repugnant.
This is why it’s important to cultivate a healthy degree of skepticism. When most people read an essay in The Honest Courtesan (or any other blog) they expect some editorialization, but when they read something which purports to be objective, there is a tendency to overlook sneaky emotional manipulation accomplished via word selection; they don’t recognize that a cop who refers to a suspect as a “perp” has already biased his audience by casually using a word that denotes factual guilt rather than the mere suspicion of guilt. One of the reasons I favor very strong language is that I never want to be thought of as emotionally manipulative; in other words, if I’m going to appeal to your emotions I want y’all to recognize that I’m doing it. My aim is to convince you fair and square, not to trick you with doubletalk and propaganda.
Recently, I came to the realization that a word I use frequently might be misinterpreted, so I want to make its intended meaning absolutely clear: that word is “myth” (and by extension, “mythology”). In common parlance, the word is often synonymous with “lie”, but that isn’t what it means at all; lies are sometimes used to support myths by those who employ them as tools of control, but that doesn’t mean any given myth is itself a lie. A myth is basically a framework or paradigm used to explain and interpret observable phenomena in the absence of (or contrary to) hard data, usually via the involvement of a supernormal force or entity which is not discernible by ordinary means and therefore must be taken on faith. Mythology is a body of related myths and procedures derived from those myths which act together to provide a faith-based world view. So even though a myth is factually untrue, those who actually believe in it are not willing parties to deception; they are simply trapped in an irrational mode of thought which values belief above fact and are thus easily manipulated by those who know the myth to be false and promote it with deliberate lies in order to further their own agenda.
Let’s take the religion of Imperial Rome for an example. The Roman people believed in their gods just as people today do: some devoutly, others less so. But there is considerable contemporary evidence that many of Rome’s ruling class had ceased to believe by the time of the Caesars; they recognized religion as an effective tool of social control and so promoted it despite that disbelief. Furthermore, even those who did believe in the mythology as a whole were perfectly willing to promote the “big picture” by falsifying specific details in order to shore up the framework of myth in the minds of the people. Even the most devout atheist had to accept that thunderstorms existed; that was a verifiable fact. The skeptical mind recognized that the undeniable existence of some phenomena attributed to Jupiter did not automatically prove the truth of all statements the priests made about him, nor that he was the anthropomorphic being described by the poets, nor that he existed at all. And even if a believer’s faith in Jupiter’s existence was unshakeable due to answered prayers or other such manifestations, that still didn’t prove that the lightning actually had anything to do with him as opposed to some other entity, or to a law of Nature to which even the gods were subject.
The problem, of course, is that the average believer in Roman mythology, or Norse mythology, or Christian mythology, or Buddhist mythology, or the elaborate mythology prohibitionists have built up around prostitution, does not have a skeptical mind. He is therefore unable to discern the difference between fact, fiction, faith and falsehood and accepts them all as supportive of his belief system; having embraced it, he is also unwilling to consider any alternative explanation for any phenomenon encompassed by the mythology. Faced with evidence that multiple aspects of his faith are demonstrably untrue, he will continue to cling to it like grim death and point to the few indisputable facts as evidence of the entire mythic fabric; it’s a bit like insisting that a raisin on the kitchen table constitutes proof of one’s allegation that Queen Elizabeth II, Barack Obama and Elvis Presley had held a tea party there which included raisin scones.
Nobody denies that some women are coerced into prostitution, that some hookers are underage, that some women in desperate circumstances are tricked by evil men via false promises and usurious debt, that the conditions under which whores in developing countries work are frequently deplorable, that there are some predatory men who use violence to steal the earnings of sex workers, and that some women are undoubtedly harmed by the experience of prostitution. But accepting these facts does not in any way necessitate accepting the paradigm into which prohibitionists have fit them, nor claims that they represent any but a minority of cases, nor the existence of invisible international criminal cartels making billions from the sex trade, nor the pretense that women who refute the mythology are either lying or delusional, nor the evil doctrine that the personal, sexual and labor rights of all women everywhere must be violently suppressed by armed men “for their own good”. The people who promote this mythology, like the ruling classes of Imperial Rome, either don’t believe the mythology at all or else feel that lies are an acceptable means of encouraging others to believe in it. In either case, they are dishonest and their efforts to aggressively promote their own agenda do nothing but confuse the populace and obscure the truth by cloaking it with an elaborate, destructive and false mythology.
One Year Ago Today
A “Parable” is in a sense a type of myth, but while the latter is meant to be believed the former is simply a tale intended to illustrate a specific moral point.
Insightful.
Mark Blasini
Thank you, Mark!
Maggie, Your title of today’s post reminded me of Joseph Campbell’s “Power Of Myth” book/interviews with Bill Moyer. Campbell’s interview is long and entertaining. The book is awesome too. If you haven’t, then go get the book/interviews and enjoy. This media is from like the late 80s early 90s I believe. William S Burrough’s quote is one of my favorite’s “Language is a virus from outer space.” I seem to remember that someone else added to that later on so the quote became “Language is a virus from outer space, put here on Earth to have people kill one another”. I can’t find that quote on on an internet search. I can only find the first quote.
The reference is wholly intentional, and I agree about that series (which we recently re-watched on disc). 🙂
I had a feeling you already read/saw Campbell. =)
Nice article 🙂
I think it’s a sad fact that when debate occurs, people naturally (and rightly) accept that there are two opposing ‘sides’, and assume (wrongly) that each side’s opinion is exactly opposite to the other’s. So when the prohibitionist side states that all women in prostitution are victims, that women therefore ought to be infantilised and ‘rescued’ (even against their will), that all men are evil rapists and traffickers, and that there are hordes of traffickers just waiting to snap up our daughters and sisters and whip them away into a life of miserable ‘slavery’, then some people quite naturally believe that the opposing argument is that none of these things exist, that the ‘happy hooker’ is all that exists, that pimps are always good businessmen permitting adequate rights to their employees, etc. There is a tendency not just to suck up the myth, but to suck it up wholesale without further investigation, and to then hold it sacred and tight, and to assume that any challenge to any part of the myth will make the whole fall apart. Which is of course the very reason that a sceptic would not accept any judgement, statement or ‘side’ on face value.
I owe my interest in sex-worker’s rights to a proponent of the Swedish model. With arguments such as “how would you feel if your sister were doing it”, and “when you become a prostitute you turn yourself into a public toilet”, and many, many statements beginning with “as a woman…” – as though I had suddenly become an androgynous being sans vagina by having the audacity to not buy the doom theory wholesale. Not to mention her calling my partner a misogynist (he has been a proponent of sex-worker’s rights for far longer than I) and bursting into tears and running out of the room when facts and figures were brought to the table.
Anyway! My point is, it’s sad that people will suck up the most emotive argument and run with it, assume the other side’s opinion is opposite in all ways, and never question their stance thereafter. I think it’s time that first language classes started accounting for the power of language, and teaching students from a young age how to spot emotive propaganda that they might at least give pause before nodding and accepting what they read as fact.
>“when you become a prostitute you turn yourself into a public toilet”
Really? This is what the person you talked to thought?
Shows what they think of sex. Look, I did sex for money for years, and never once considered myself to be a “public toilet”. Some people have real problems with sex and a woman’s right to choose her path.
I’ve heard that “public toilet” comment but guess what? You don’t pay to get into “public” toilets. 😉
Those would actually be the FREE ones.
If a woman having sex is akin to being a toilet – what does that makes wives and girlfriends? Which is why I tend to think this kind of language came from neo-feminists who detest the sex act and probably do view it this way.
It’s the same kind of comment soldiers used to get (and sometimes still do) when they’re called “baby killers”.
Same thing for male patrons of whores … “Rapists”.
I’m often self-effacing when it comes to my own intelligence but I will tell you that I HAVE NEVER been swayed in public arguments by the use of these kinds of terms to push an agenda.
I love that sentence “One of the reasons I favor very strong language is that I never want to be thought of as emotionally manipulative; in other words, if I’m going to appeal to your emotions I want y’all to recognize that I’m doing it.”
Can I put it on my blog’s quote page? Pretty please 🙂 With a reference to your blog, of course.
Be my guest. 🙂
I just started a quote page on my blog so that I could include this quote. http://crypticphilosopher.com/quotes/
I’m honored! 🙂
I’m not disagreeing with you, but I think that “myth” can include more than you suggest. Wasn’t it Humpty who said “words mean what I want them to mean, nothing more or less”? You may say that myths are stories of supernatural powers; to me, they are these but include stories passed down by word of mouth, histories of the past, albeit ones modified by the experiences of the poet: and, today, expressions of how things ought to be by people who know better that you or I do.
Under “myths”, what about the stories in the Iliad? Schliemann believed them, and excavated Troy and Mycenae: the stories about these places did have elements of truth. And Sir Arthur Evans excavated Knossos on the same basis.
I can add a personal experience: very many years ago, I went to Newgrange in the Boyne Valley in Ireland — my father was keen on antiquities. We were told, and I remember it clearly, that the sun shone through the light box [a transom] to light up the interior at midwinter. This was years before the phenomenon was described in the academic literature. More here: http://www.newgrange.com/ .
So I’m inclined to believe that some of these ancient “myths” contain some truths.
And at the same time I was exposed to “myths” that said, for example, that women were the intellectual inferiors of men; that “nice” girls didn’t like sex; that a woman’s place was in the home — the “myths” of the patriarchy. Yet these “myths” were “true” when I learned them. It’s been a difficult journey for me, trying to expunge these “truths” and to understand the reality of life.
For me, the “myths” of antiquity may contain actual truths, even if these are well hidden; and more modern myths do seem to contain expressions of what people (read: men) wish things were are. And the closer I look, the more these latter sorts of “myths” crumble.
Then there are “urban myths”; stories and explanations that, prima fascia, are believable, but which on closer examination are no more than propaganda served up by people and groups with an agenda ( often along the lines of I know better than you). And haven’t you and Dr Maganti (in “The Sex Myth”) laboured to disprove them — to present an alternative explanation — even if you call them “lies” rather than “myths”?
Look carefully at that line; I didn’t say “supernatural” (i.e. outside the bounds of nature) but rather “supernormal” (i.e. outside the bounds of everyday experience). Jupiter would be supernatural, but a super-powerful, mega-rich international criminal conspiracy is supernormal.
“Supernatural” and “supernormal”: a delightfully clever use of words, and isn’t this type of usage another example of how the element of truth in a myth can be hidden or disguised?
Thanks for pointing this out. I too had read the word as “supernatural.” It’s a word I encounter much more often than “supernormal” so I guess my brain edited it as if it were a typo or something.
Ug, and my browser’s spell check doesn’t even recognize “supernormal” as a word. It does suggest “super-normal” for a correction, though, and it knows “subnormal.” Ah well, that’s easy enough to fix.
{add to dictionary}
I have to add words to my spell-checker dictionary (both in Word and in WordPress) about twice per week. It’s astonishing that my use vocabulary is larger than the recognition vocabulary of the entire spell-checker design team for both companies. I don’t think it’s that my vocabulary is so incredibly huge, but rather that theirs is so incredibly limited.
One of the first things I have to do with every new spell checker is convince it that no, I do not mean “barroom.” As an ERB fan, I’m sure you have to do the same.
I was always a little bothered by describing sex trafficking as a myth because that implied that it was completely made up. Thanks for clearing that up.
I don’t think you should use myth because that word doesn’t have that common place definition. Most people don’t recognize myth as being anything other than a lie.
I’m not responsible for people misusing a word, though; “myth” is the term that fits best. “Paradigm” and “narrative” are good, but they don’t really cover the whole sense of a grand faith-based construct used to combine small amounts of data with huge lies and cockeyed “explanations”.
You could alternately say the ‘ubiquity-of-sex-trafficking’ myth. Then it would fit either way.
Never got caught up in that satanist scare myself, thank goodness. I remember it, though. Sensationalism tends to trump reality far more than it should.
“…nor the existence of invisible international criminal cartels making billions from the sex trade…”
We definitely have those cartels. They’re called governments.