Les Schaffer wrote:
> someone speaketh thusly:
>
> >> being a sex worker will always be a potent metaphor for selling
> >> out.
>
> seems to me there is no metaphorical path, natural, strong, weak,
> whatever, that leads from the working lives of women in the sex
> business to the lives of the media priests or the wall street pimps.
>
> but by all means, go ahead and try to flesh out a concrete mapping
> between the life of, say, a sex worker in the combat zone in boston
> (is it still there????)
I don't need to go to the combat zone in Boston. There are severaldrug addled sex workers who regularly hang out on the corner of the street on which I live in the West Side of Manhattan. They are a very sad lot and I can't help but feel sorry for them--I have also met some higher-end sex workers whose lives did not seem so steeped in misery.
> and that of a Tom Brokaw or a Michael
> Milliken. show how a snapshot of their daily lives feels the same,
> operates on similar principles, whatever.
It's not my metaphor. It already exists in the language (which iswhy calling men and women in that industry "sex workers" is, I do agree, a good thing). Just open any dictionary to "prostitute" or "whore" and you can read ". . .(v) to devote to corrupt or unworthy purposes" . . ."(n) a person (as in a writer or painter) who deliberately debases himself or his talents (as for money)." I would say that definition could describe Tom Brokaw or Michael Milken. Apparently, long, long ago, people made a connection between the debasing act of selling one's body for money and the debasing act of selling one's integrity for money. It is admittedly unfair to sex workers, but in that way they have been they have been linguistically linked to the likes you described. And, yes it's a very lame point. But I do find it interesting that it's perfectly fine to vilify someone as a "media priest" but absolutely beyond the pale to vilify the same as a "media whore." While I'm as anticlerical as the next guy, I certainly have known many decent priests in my time and really don't see what their lives have to do with the likes of Barbara Walters et al. For that matter, I've only gotten to know one ex-pimp in my life, and he was an decent and kind man who had entered that profession as many sex workers do, by a combination of proverty, drug addiction, and a ghetto milleau--I'm told he never exploited the women under his charge and he kept them safe, and I believe it based on the person I later came to know. What would he have to say to "Wall Street Pimp"??
He would laugh his ass off, that's what he'd say. I probably shouldn't have chided Maggie and Yoshie for chiding Wotjek, but I'm trying to quit smoking right now, and it seems I'm easily piqued. In any case, I mentioned the observation of my extremely miserable, Wall Street working friend, to wit that traders love to call themselves "prostitutes" and "whores" because I thought that some out there might be interested in hearing that the industry truly is the frat house from Hell that we all imagine it to be.
Regards,
Inrid