Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

this was also originally published a few years ago, 2007-01-01 00:51:11

reposted for archival purposes. It’s actually a repost of something written for the Bad Subjects zine by an anonymous writer. Don’t know if it’s still online but the link to the old issue is included below.

Dedicated to RenEv, you spitfire, you. heh.

Actually, the title is, I’d Rather Be a Whore Than an Academic

It’s up to each individual whore to decide whether she or he wants to make themselves visible and how they want to do so. But you can bet that some will find each other and talk about it.

Imagine you are a whore in a society where whoring is considered the most respectable profession, and academia the most repugnant. At a meeting of your fellow whores, you’ve finally confessed your darkest secret: you’re going to become an academic. This is what you might hear from a roomful of your fellow whores …

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this. I’ve heard a lot of women get into this kind of work because they have some kind of drug addiction. Why else would you want to do something that intimate with strangers? You’re smart, you’ve got a good education. There are lots of things you could do for a living without having to sell yourself in that way. Think about what you have. You have a high-paying job. You can choose your own hours and your own hourly rates. And your services will always be in demand wherever you go. Why would you leave all this for a job where you can’t make your own schedule and have to work long hours for considerably less pay?

“You’re also in a profession that provides a great service to society. We help people; we satisfy an immediate need. Can you say that of academic work? There’s little use for most of it, and even less demand. You won’t be able to choose where you live. You’ll have to search all over the country to find people who will pay for what you do, and everything you write, teach, say and think will be entirely dependent on what those few people are willing to pay for. You’ll be so desperate for work that the people who finally hire you will be able to exploit you to no end. They’ll give you subcontracts — part-time positions with no job security. You’ll have to move from one lectureship to another year after year. How can you give up your respectable job for something so degrading? And how will you feel as a feminist — being objectified in that way?

“What if you get arrested — and get a criminal record? On every job application, you’ll have to admit that you accepted money for academic work. You’ll never get a straight job in a brothel again. Think of your family! What will you say to them — you who come from a long line of madams, pimps and panderers. You’ll have to lead a double life — lying to those closest to you. Don’t you think this is really self-destructive behavior, and you should talk to somebody about it — a therapist maybe?”

<...>

For this reason, I’m reluctant to equate academia with prostitution. Calling academics “whores” is a denigration of whoring. It buys into the stereotype that the prostitute is the consummate example of objectification — the idea that he or she is somehow the most objectified person in our society, more object and less person than anyone else.

But there’s also another, less advantageous reason why academia isn’t whoring. Our society condemns the whore. Academics simply aren’t subject to this stigma, or anything like it. Academia is the kind of job where you sacrifice profit for prestige. In prostitution, you sacrifice prestige for profit.

As an academic, you spend years in grad school; then, if you’re very lucky, you get a relatively low-paying drudge job in the wilds of Wisconsin. This drudge job is, however, shrouded in the mystique of the Ivory Tower. This is clearly a gain in cultural capital. You wear threadbare clothing and worry that you will never get tenure. But people see you as “cultured,” and they think your absent-mindedness means that you’re thinking lofty thoughts.

In prostitution — at least in high-end prostitution — you sacrifice prestige for profit in a very big way. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that you sacrifice your acceptability in mainstream society for a very high value and respect among a privileged clientele, and — if you’re fortunate — a community of like-minded people. You may be a super-prostitute who jet-sets around the world and earns a thousand dollars an hour, even in transit. You may have a doctorate in art history and be secret advisor to the Prime Minister of France. But, if you tell people at your high school reunion what you do for a living, they’ll probably still think you’re a street hooker being beaten by your pimp. If you went to a Baptist high school, they may try to exorcise you. And, if you’re absent-minded, they’ll probably think you’re on drugs or just dumb.

<...>

But it’s no coincidence that whoredom also poses a serious threat to our society’s limitations of women’s power. Many people want to see whores as victims, because they don’t want us to own our power and embody this threat. Historically the whore has always represented a danger to the patriarchy, because she does not have to depend on any one man for financial support. She makes her living off of many men. This gave her financial freedom in times when women were forbidden to work to support themselves and the wife was her husband’s possession. Dependent on no one man, the whore was no man’s property.

Now that there are other ways for women to gain financial independence from men, the whore still threatens institutions such as marriage and monogamy. Whores like me who enjoy their work represent a happily ravenous polyamory. We provide sufficient evidence that at least some people like sex for reasons other than reproduction, and that not everyone is monogamously-inclined. Together the whore and client also represent a sexuality which clearly transgresses the bonds of monogamous marriage. The fact that the clients are often “monogamously” married makes this partnership all the more threatening.

Whores are ultimately threatening because we remind mainstream society that there’s nothing inherently degrading or private about sex, and that marriage and monogamy are not the necessary order of things, even though many people swear by them. While we sell sexual services, we do not necessarily sell anything more intimate, private, or personal than anyone else. In this sense, we do not “sell ourselves.” We are commodities only in the sense that we work under a capitalist system, which transforms all workers and their labor (sexual or otherwise) into commodities for sale on the market. And we are no more objectified than anyone else. Although many prostitutes are abused, the idea that all prostitution is exploitation is a scapegoat for capitalism: mainstream society projects all the abuses of capitalism onto prostitution, and this allows it to deny exploitation in the “straight” workplace. In this sense the stereotype of the ‘exploited whore’ represents the abuses that all of us endure and perpetuate.

<...>
Anonymous, Ph.D., loves being a whore in both the literal and figurative senses.