How did you feel about that title? Did it make you angry at me? Did it seem nonsensical? Did you think it was funny? Were you like "whatevah"?
I'm asking those questions because of the recent news that someone in Jerry Brown's campaign in California called his opponent in the governor's race, Meg Whitman, a whore:
I'm also asking about all this because several liberal/progressive men didn't see where the problem is. After all, Meg Whitman sells away her principles so she is a whore.
The comment came after Brown called the Los Angeles Police Protective League in early September to ask for its endorsement. He left a voicemail message for Scott Rate, a union official. Brown apparently believed he had hung up the phone, but the connection remained intact and the voice mail machine captured an ensuing conversation between Brown and his aides.
With evident frustration, Brown discussed the pressure he was under to refuse to reduce public safety pensions or lose law enforcement endorsements to Whitman. Months earlier, Whitman had agreed to exempt public safety officials from key parts of her pension reform plan.
"Do we want to put an ad out? … That I have been warned if I crack down on pensions, I will be – that they'll go to Whitman, and that's where they'll go because they know Whitman will give 'em, will cut them a deal, but I won't," Brown said.
At that point, what appears to be a second voice interjects: "What about saying she's a whore?"
"Well, I'm going to use that," Brown responds. "It proves you've cut a secret deal to protect the pensions."
Now distance yourself from this particular example and note that I'm not advocating that anyone would vote for Meg Whitman in these elections. What I want to discuss is the use of insults such as calling a woman who is not a sex worker a whore. Or even calling a woman who IS a sex worker a whore. The two terms are not identical. The former term is neutral and descriptive whereas the latter is filled with contempt and loathing and moral judgments.
Why is this particular term picked among the many possible insults? What is it about the idea of a woman selling sex that is so horrible*? Consider that the vast, vast majority of female sex workers sell sex to male customers. Every single one of those men is exchanging money for sex. Yet we don't even have a good insult for them in English (Finnish has the term "whore-buck", buck as in male goat).
Then consider that it appears to be mostly men who use the insult "whore." Is it the idea of having to buy sex that they are really angry about? I don't think so, because another common insult is the term "slut" and a slut isn't taking money for sex. She's just having lots of it (though probably not with the person calling her a slut).
My tentative conclusion is that these insults are based on the old idea that good women don't have much sex and certainly not sex with many men. Any woman who violates that rule deserves our loathing and our contempt. Of course any man who violates that rule is a stud and deserves our congratulations.
It's the old double standard peeking through layers and layers of other stuff.
But that's not really what makes calling Meg Whitman a whore so dangerous in political terms. It's the fact that any woman can be called a whore or a slut or a bitch when she deviates (or is suspected of deviating) from established gender norms, and women know this.
It is this knowledge deep inside women that those liberal guys I mentioned earlier don't get. That's the reason why calling Meg Whitman a whore will backfire. Women know that there, but for the grace of goddess, go I.
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*This post is not addressing any of the problems of prostitution from a feminist point of view or sex trafficking or sexual slavery. There's clearly much that fills us with horror in those topics, but what I want to do with this post is ask the questions in isolation of the actual sex markets and how they work, to get at something different.