A Harlot’s Heritage

Philumena, a 4th century B.C. Grecian courtesan (or hetairaie as they liked to be known back then) once wrote this to one of her lovers:

Why do you bother writing long letters? I want fifty gold pieces, not letters. If you love me, pay up; if you love your money more, then don’t bother me any more. Goodbye!” (Source: Sex in History, Reay Tannahill)

I’m sure any modern day hooker can relate to that sentiment on some level, what with the clients who insist on authoring a letter campaign equivalent to Barrett and Browning – declarations of undying devotion, poetry, and the like.  However, this is not what this post is about.

One way I stay sane and grounded in this business is to be reminded that I come from a long line of women who were quite comfortable defying societal norms, religious protocols and silly, oppresive laws in favor of authentic, self-expressed sexuality.   Consider Janabai, a bhakti woman poet in the 12th century India:

Cast off all shame, and sell yourself in the marketplace;

then alone can you hope to reach the Lord.

Cymbals in hand, a veena upon my shoulder,

I go about; who dares to stop me?

The pallav of my sari falls away (A scandal!);

yet will I enter the crowded marketplace without a thought.

Jani says, My Lord, I have become a slut to reach Your home.

(Source:  Women in Praise of the Sacred, Jane Hirshfield)

Right on, Jani.  That’s my girl, out there half-naked in the streets, defiant and sexy and proud.   I have to admit I was somewhat naively impressed that the word “slut” has been around that long, but I was most touched by the sacred prostitute-type reference of using commercial sex as a path to spiritual enlightenment.

Jump up several hundred years later to Anais Nin’s story, The Queen, where she describes the very essence of a whore:

“Somehow in the whore the…womb, constantly subjected to desire, produces a phenomenon.  All the eroticism comes to the surface.  The constant living with a penis inside of one does something fascinating to a woman.  The womb seems to be exposed, to be present in every aspect of her.”

The focus of the short story is on a whore named Bijou, the Queen of Whores.  “When we first lay in bed [her skin] was cool, and then it would become warm and feverish.  Her eyes — it was impossible to describe her eyes except by saying that they were the eyes of an orgasm. What constantly happened in her eyes was something so feverish, so incendiary, so intense that at times when I looked straight at her and felt my penis rising and palpitating, I also felt as if something were palpitating in her eyes.”  When Bijou laughed, “it was the sexual laugh of a satisfied woman, teh laugh of a body enjoying itself through every pore and cell, being caressed by the whole world.”  When she walked down the street, even urchins followed in the wake of her truly sexual animalism.

Over the years, in and out of sex work, I have identified with this story strongly.  It’s like this is who I really am underneath the silks and satins from French boutiques, without the jewelry clanking on my wrists and at my neck, without a lifetime of wincing inside at dead hooker jokes and staying silent to protect those around me from my personal choices.  Once, I was a Janabai in the marketplace, but I was neither proud nor defiant.  I was just young and scared.  It took a sexless marriage and re-emergence into the full body of my sexuality for me to connect with my own Bijou.  These women are my heroines.