Now’s as meaningless a time as any…

I keep using the word whore and then at least once have said I would explain what I meant by it.  And then I left millions of people waiting on the edge of their seats!  Ahem.  Regardless of whether anyone else or only me, from another computer pretending to visit the blog to drive my stats up by a count of one, reads this, I am still uncomfortable enough with the whore thing to need to blurt some things out about it.

I think I disagree with myself, from what I was thinking about this several days ago.  What happened is, I was thinking that everything people mean by the word “whore” when they spit it at women, I am those things.  If they mean “is easy to get in the sack,” it is my experience that I am that, with anyone I find attractive.  If they mean “does or has accepted money from people for sexual encounters,” I do or have done that.  If they mean “will or has fucked around with someone else’s husband or boyfriend,” I have done that, both during the money-exchange thing and outside of it.

And initially my thoughts were – aside from the wrongness of messing around with someone else’s partner - it is possible for me to separate out, in my mind, the value judgements that go along with those descriptions.  Not to replace them with *positive* value judgements and pretend to do that whole empowerful! reclaiming thing, but to just have it be descriptive of flat-out facts rather than character assessments.  As in, whether someone thinks it’s good, bad, or indifferent, it would be a lie for me to say “no I’m not!” when someone says “you are a whore!” if what they mean is any of the above. 

Plus, it has always always angered me that people use it as a) an insult at a woman they’re mad at, whether they do in fact think she “is a whore” or not and b) a reductive qualifier, to tell any given woman who supposedly really is a whore, and to tell everyone else, that she is not an actual human being but is a small set of negative characteristics, trash, etc.

So that last part, though, the subhuman thing and the effect it has, and has alway had, on women who are any version of whores – that has stuck in my craw for the last couple of days and it’s why I disagree with my earlier self about the whole I’m-not-reclaiming-and-positive-izing-the-word-whore-but-it’s-true-that-what-people-mean-when-they-use-that-word,-I-am-those-things, thing.

I’m not really understanding anymore what I thought the point was to try and say that it’s possible to be a value-neutral version of a whore.  Because I don’t think anyone except tee-hee-it’s-a-transgressive-good-thing people, and better-that-the-serial-killer-went-for-the-whores people, ever really use that word.  I mean I don’t think it ever gets used in a way – I don’t think it exists in language in a way that I thought I was going to decide to use it.  I don’t remember now why I thought that would be possible.  I can’t stress enough, however, that it wasn’t to advertise my sex positivity (I don’t have any) or my sexual availability, although I think it may sound like bullshit/a contradiction to claim the latter after having said I’m easy.

This might be a tangent.  What is difficult for me is wanting to be able to talk about my experiences of myself as well as other people, in the sex realm, while not liking how any of this is going in the first place.  And by any of this, I mean accepted norms AND deviations of human sexual behavior.  I don’t like that my whorish behavior, for example, is often seen as proof that I can’t possibly mean all of the critiques I have of how sex plays out in a patriarchal chokehold over everybody.  (Seen as proof by people who want to dismiss those critiques.)  I also don’t like that people who think I am serious about all those critiques think the answer is to try and persuade me that I ”think too much” and am ruining a good time for myself by not just deciding there is such a thing as “…as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody it’s fine…” and going on about the business of happily getting laid.  Like, why do I gotta kill the buzz for myself or anyone else! 

What I don’t get is how I’m supposed to talk about any of it without talking about all of it.  I can’t do the glamorizing-to-feel-better-about-it dance.  I can’t adopt the double-speak of claiming empowerment and happiness and freedom where I see none.  Well, I would say actually that I can’t claim there is empowerment and freedom where I see none, but it is dishonest for me to pretend like I don’t get happy during and immediately after participation in some exchanges that I think are generated in corruption.  I would like to be able to look at that enjoyment and talk about it without it being assumed that I am at ease with it and then someone wanting to celebrate it with me.  I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I am not ever going to be joining that pride parade.

I also want to be able to hear critiques about all the things I’m open about, and that is a tricky-feeling thing to me because I don’t always know what to do with that part, interpersonally.  As an example -

I agree with what I (not you, so please don’t come here trying to quote her fiction at me) have read of Andrea Dworkin’s assessments of BDSM.  And, although there have been a couple of periods in my life where that agreement was enough to put me off engaging in it, I have always ended up engaging in it again. 

What I am not clear about right now is whether it is harmful in itself to ever talk about the ways I am hypocritical, or whether it is the worse hypocrisy to pretend like all I am is the person who agrees with her critiques of BDSM.  To not mention the part where it’s something I sometimes do, even feeling how I feel about where it comes from and who it serves and what it perpetuates.  And yes I do even include queer versions of kink, even when queer kinksters think they are outside the “bad” types of BDSM practiced by obnoxious straight white dudes who are into domination.

Given all of that, it is problematic for me to try to talk about my sex stuff openly.  Also, because I am vain and narcissistic, and although I don’t want *everyone* to find me sexually interesting (I think I am succeeding incidentally!), it’s sometimes part of what I write, that I hope someone *I* find compelling will be attracted to me through my writing.

So.  I have not at all worked out the full scope of what I believe when it comes to sex and oppression, and I also have not worked out what I’m willing to do about any of it.  I feel like it matters, though, how I talk about it while I talk about it.  And it is that part, not a sex-is-bad or sex-is-good party line, that makes me hesitant. 

End of tangent.  Nothing more at this time about the word whore.  Over and out.