"I like your hair," the displaced man on the bench slurred as I made my way to the crosswalk at the end of the block. I said nothing in reply. Naturally, he mustered up another compliment for me:
"Whore!"
This is what we ungrateful women are. We're whores.
The whore, definitively, is a woman who has sex for money. Some dictionaries will define a whore to be categorically beyond the scope of womanhood exclusively, but many do not. And so, for the brunt of it, whores are women. To that extent then, women are whores.
It is a word with a lot of weight to it historically, and contemporarily.
The woman having sex for money is a whore. The woman who took part in an affair is a whore. The woman showing her cleavage is dressed like a whore. Better yet, the girl showing her cleavage is dressed like a whore. So many of us are, it seems, and yet some of us don't have to be.
What I mean in saying this is a reflection on the names we give to pleasure-seeking men. The man who pays for sex, or participates in an affair, or blatantly stares at the woman or girl showing her cleavage evidently is not a whore by definition. He is but a man.
When we want to punish a man for his sexual endeavours, we become creative and donne him with a name unique to his manhood. That trifling tramp is the man-whore. Perhaps you might have heard of him? See, he goes by other names, too. Man-slut. Womanizer. Lady Killer. Gigolo (a man who is compensated by an older woman for pleasure, often misused to describe any man in transactional sex work). It's possible you've heard of one whoremonger if you have an evangelical extended family stuck in the 1800s. However it is you have come to know this man, you were likely never asked to turn up your nose at him higher than you were taught to at the women he lays with. Thus we come to understand the man-whore in direct relation to the women he is fucking and "killing." At times, this man kills women sans a twisted euphemism.
Conceptually, the whore has been with us for quite some time now. She arrives in our mouths as early as 1503 from the Middle English hore, from the same word in Old English which translates to "prostitute" or "harlot". However, it is as early as 1200 that we see the formation of the whore through a more generic Old English word horh or "moral corruption". This was a word which entailed a woman's lewdness, irrelevant of monetary compensation. What is interesting about the whore, or rather, the way we think about the whore, is in the comparison between the word and the likely influence of another Middle English word hore, meaning "physical filth". We have been enthralled with the whore from as early on as the 13th century, and to us she has always been dirty.
As I write this, I am thinking of the ways I choose to dress, and whether or not it makes me a whore. There is a lot of black and white and a 2-inch heel minimum on that list, and at twenty-one I am still figuring out what characterizes my style. When I was entering adolescence though, my mother often pleaded with me to wear less revealing clothes in fear of the men who would treat me like a woman--which is perhaps an idyllic way of saying like an animal.
My mother was not being dramatic in asking this. I remember more than once choosing denim shorts that revealed more than just a little cheek. I remember being a hefty B-cup with an affinity for deep V-necks. Most painfully, I remember being in a place of limbo between my body and my mind, both of which I undervalued. While I do believe forcing young girls to cover up their bodies is a thoughtless punishment for having fat in places other girls their age do not, that didn't make my mother's decisions entirely unfair either.
The problem with this approach to dressing girls, whether or not it is fair, is that in all my years of being a girl and a woman I have never once felt more safe simply for wearing more clothes. Grown men chose to speak to me as though I were an adult from the time I was twelve years old, regardless of what I wore.
Men have never had to be in need of medical attention or intoxicated to call me names and vocalize their lewd assumptions about my sex life, as the anecdotal man I began this story with was. Even much before it was appropriate for me to even consider having sex.
Now as an adult, my wardrobe is engaged in checking many boxes. Form-fitting silhouettes? Check! Short skirts? Check! Cold, braless nipples? Double check! Admittedly, that last category is more of a consequence of my distaste for underwire than aspiring to compliment whatever kind of fruit Cosmo might tell me I am. But moral of the story: not ticking any of those boxes has never guaranteed me safety or respect. I have no security of my bodily autonomy in regards to how I dress.
Truthfully, there is no rhyme or reason for why I dress the way I do when I do, and there is no formula for how often all my whore-like style choices are manifested into a singular outfit.
I dress myself by how comfortable I feel, by how beautiful I feel, or even how ugly I feel. I feel ugly when my clothes are tighter than I expect them to be, this is true. I feel ugly just because I woke up feeling that way, too. But nothing feels as hideous as the ugly of being whistled at from a stranger's dinky Honda Civic, or the ugly of having my ass grabbed when I don't respond to a man trying to buy me a drink I already declined, or other more devastating kinds of ugly. This is the kind of ugly a whore is asked to feel on account of her being. It is no accident.
The reason so many women are knighted with the title is that the whore is arguably more complex in practice than in conversation. What has become abundantly clear is that it is a word that we have not the slightest idea of what to do with, and it's no wonder why.
She is not only, if you recall, the woman who makes you pay to use her body and enjoys it. Indeed, her deviant agenda is diverse in its activities! She may have sex for free (thank heavens), but she does so with far too many people, for little to no commitment in exchange. She might be having sex, or she may have never done more than use an electric toothbrush for self-pleasure, but she certainly wore that little skirt like she wants to have sex tonight, so that's how you know she's a whore for certain. She may have sex, involving or not involving an ATM run, perhaps too often, with too many people, or just one person infrequently, or only ever with herself as often as she would like, and dresses with the intent to reel in night walkers, or just as much as she's comfortable in; but none of that matters as much as the woeful fact that she isn't having sex with you. And that is the defining moment in a whore's career.
So the real question becomes: am I an ungrateful whore, or am I just not having sex with you?
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