Bitches, Hookers, and Sluts: What in the hell is wrong with us?

It was Saturday night at Fundição Progresso. My feet floated from the dance floor as Natiruts performed on a stage illuminated by red, yellow and green lights. I stood in the back of the indoor amphitheater with a third caipirinha in my palm. As I savored the stinging sugar cane rum, Luso-Reggae poured from the loud speakers, inciting the mass to swish hips to the triplet cross rhythms. Fans of inhalation planted herbal and cigarette smokes in the atmosphere, while a minority snorted lines of white powder off their ticket stubs in plain sight. The other hundreds of young people occupied their mouths with the rims of Skol cans, in between labial unions with old and new acquaintances.

As the band sang a translation of Concrete Jungle, nature began to call my friend and I, so both Marcela and me opted to break for a quick skip to the loo. We pushed through the couples and made our way to the banheiro line in the corridor. As we stood chatting in Portuguese, a classmate from one of those back-up UC’s came out of the bathroom and upon spotting her compatriots, she yelled out in English, “Hey Hookers! Like, how ARE you guys!”

Her first offense was that she spoke at me in English, and LOUD ASS Valley Twang English at that. Here we were trying to blend in when this Anglophone twerp shined a foreign spotlight on our heads while complimenting us with insults. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure where to begin. I did not desire to get confrontational and get myself thrown in a Carioca jail, so I jokingly spat, “Woman, who are you calling a hooker?” I wanted to get her away from me so we exchanged few words before she sloshed back to the show to rejoin the group of foreign students that had congregated a few rows behind Paulo and me.

Marcela and I had a brief conversation about the irritation of renaming us hookers as if we were supposed to feel honored that this over-made-up Californian had felt so comfortable with us that she embraced us in her community of pseudo street walking comrades. Whether she was commenting on the fact that she had just seen the two of us ficando with friends acquired an hour prior, or whether she actually thought it was appropriate to call a female friend a hooker, we were not sure. What I did decide, at that moment, was that I was pissed but had nowhere to direct those energies so I returned to the dance floor and solely grinded the memory of her idiocy into the ground.

That was the last conversation I had with the Hooker-sayer and I would turn the other way any time I saw her at PUC. She did, however, become a frequent theme in the narratives that my friends and I created on daily verbal exchanges in the living room of the apartment Kenyetta and I rented in Leblon.

It was a complete conundrum why young liberal college women would be so unconscious of their auto-linguistic battering as to embody the years of misogyny through their own vernacular. Weren’t we trained to think critically? Hadn’t we learned enough about our foremothers to know better? And since when did opening up the door of your mouth to a new lingual guest equate transactional sex? I was confused.

The other part that peeled my skin back was that I would hear her bantering with other female classmates in the same way, some on her neo-misogynistic page, others smiling awkwardly but always in silence. We didn’t want to get into fights in paradise so we cursed out our enemies behind their backs, which never solved our problems, and even before I had ever read anything by Audre Lorde I knew that she was right when she said “your silence will not protect you.” Now, I don’t know why it took me four years to speak this.

There are many women who will claim that they have taken back these words and reappropriated them, but those are the women who don’t own dictionaries.

Look up the word Hooker and tell me that is who you want to be:

An old worn out and clumsy ship
A prostitute
A Slut
Someone who is immoral, slovenly
Impure liquid

This poetry of female hatred is recited in the daily vocabularies of women of all echelons of society. I’ve heard high school girls call their female friends sluts and bitches without so much as a raised eyebrow. Is this the new language of female bonding? I’ve heard college girls say to their friends, “Oh my god girl, you are such a slut.” And then laughter occurs and I observe and wonder how much devirgin activity has to occur for one to be sentenced to the sluttery?

It seems redundant to mention the fact that the titles afforded to glutinous sexuality are almost exclusively reserved for women. Yes, a man can be a prostitute but the word conjures up notions of the female in the mind’s eye. The Spanish and Portuguese word for whore or slut is “puta” and it’s male equivalent “puto” doesn’t really exist, because this immoral activity that the word implies doesn’t apply to men who engage in sexual activities as their moral nature.

The biggest debate is likely to be over the word, Bitch, which has been integrated into our vocabularies in a more complicated way, and is also the title of one of my favorite feminist magazines that I used to read at Pegasus books on Shattuck religiously during the height of my Slam days. Here is a found poem on Bitch:

A female dog

Malicious
Unpleasant
Selfish
Lewd woman
Awful sound of voice
Spoiled
Negative

To think of the way in which women verbally abuse one another unconsciously is much the same way in which children who are victims of violence turn violent in adulthood. These cycles of self-hatred are difficult to break, and become tolerated. I consider hitting children as violence, my mother would call it an appropriate punishment. I would never hit another person and then expect them to be peaceful. Non-violent social change should extend to non-violent verbal exchange. How can we expect to be treated as equal to our male counterparts when we are bringing ourselves down.

Sexual revolution? Still unresolved.

Now let’s just take a little gander at some popular music, and if you have seen Chris Rock then you know what I am talking about. He has this great sketch about the confused moment in popular hip-hop music, with special attention given to the womanizing lyrics of some rap. He talks about the whole skeet-skeet phenomenon but my personal favorite is the song by Ludicris that chants, “Move Bitch, get out the way, get out the way.” When Chris Rock pointed out that most women singing along and throwing up their firsts say, “He’s not talking about me, “ I agree. He is not talking about you or me. He is talking about We.

In a survey of American pop music we could turn our attention to the pre-psycho Britney Spears and post-virgin Christina Aguilera. When Christina released her sophomore effort “Stripped” and wore jeans and nothing else but her hair, she had been transformed into this over sexual freak show that couldn’t be shown to young impressionable girls. People couldn’t handle the fact that she was dueting with Lil Kim and pointing out the contradictions between sexually liberated women who are marginalized and the glorified pimp princes who bind them to the periphery. Parents complained about the effects that Miss Aguilera might have on young innocents, who if anything like me, already knew what sex was by they time they were five thanks to the love scenes on day time television and interpreted these roles during their episodes of playing house. Whereas Britney Spears was out there submissively begging, “I’m a slave for you,” she was welcomed as a slave for us, well, probably not for me because I haven’t grown a penis yet, but that’s how we like our women, begging and in chains.

The problem, too, is that even if we attempt to redefine these words, it’s impossible to rid them of their etymological histories. A slut, hooker, or whore is by nature a negative, questionable character who is selling herself and therefore unvalorizing the self. Men, who buy them, of course, are simply supporting their sexual economies and why is it that sex workers are the ones in jail as opposed to the ones who cause the demand for this service? Johns in the slammer? Highly unlikely.

One can obtain money from a great number of services, some of which border on the profane – like massages. I had a neighbor who used to give massages in her bottom floor apartment but also added in other services including something that, at 7 years old, I wasn’t quite sure what it was because the word “blow-job” was new to my vocabulary, but it sounded like work for which a person ought to earn money.

Why is the transaction of sex such a threat? If anything, Transactional Sex Workers, or TSW, if you will, should be afforded the same sort of protection that, say, soldiers in Iraq get, if not more. On a battlefield of penises, one never knows when they might meet their masculine maker.

We are constantly being reminded that oversexing ourselves will bring us impending doom. A few years ago on the evening news in LA I witnessed a female psychologist say that it was the fad for university women to be promiscuous. Well, unless she was talking about lesbians, she could of at least had the sense to say University students, but anyway, she said that these promiscuous ladies were going to all end up with STI’s as a result of too much sexual fun. Instead of promoting condemnation, why not promote condoms? I say stop investing money in propaganda, and put those funds into the development of microbocides. Stop putting money into fundamentalist Christian teachings on abstinence, simply prepare and protect. And provide and market female condoms that are less that 16 dollars at the drug store. In Ghana, female condoms are as cheap as a male ones, so tell me who is still developing?

It’s worth mentioning the importance of not referring to women who actually do operate within the various sexual economies as prostitutes, sluts or whores as a way of derailing the trains of thought that circulate in this vicious linguistic cycle. To utter the word “prostitute, slut or whore” is to pass on a judgment, even when attempting to Switzerlandishly state facts. To call someone a Transactional sex worker, or even a sex worker provides a more gender equal notion of the trade. Because essentially a sex worker is a social worker, of the body. It is a vocation of mutual exchange in which one individual pays for the services of another. When you want a grande mocha, the baristas indirectly pleasure your mouth with the taste of chocolated coffee in exchange for a dip into your dollar stash. So what is the difference between consulting a sexual specialist on a chilly night and warming your taste buds at Starbucks? Whoops, I mean, Slutbucks…

...

And now, I leave you with this quote I saw on a friend’s wall:

"Think of my vagina as a vase. If you've had sex with me, it's time to send flowers!" -Bethenny Frankel



To be continued