by Donovan Cleckley
“Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex.”
- Emma Goldman, “The Traffic in Women,” Anarchism and Other Essays (1910)
swept along with the surge of visitors in the gallery, a lone woman looking ahead sees Georges Rouault’s 1906 painting Before a Mirror in which a prostitute, naked except for her stockings, brushes her dark hair.
the woman in the painting stares in loathing and contempt at her own reflection, her mouth clenched and tightened. while tending to her appearance, she takes care to avoid dislodging the scarlet flower placed within the black mass of locks, knowing well she must maintain an appealing visage.
after all, the johns, like all gazers of their sex, do not buy anything which does not look appealing. when writing about “condemned women” in his poetry, Baudelaire was the john who pitied the prostitute and loved her only because he could see himself as infinitely superior to her: “I love you as I pity you.” After all, Baudelaire was a man.
although deprived of light, the prostitute’s pale, yellowish skin casts its glow. if she had experienced more pleasure than pain in her life, then her glow could be called an afterglow. pleasure, however, has always submitted to pain, leaving bruises and burns on her brain. yet, perhaps in defiance to the darkness around her, she radiates a light, not thirsting for satisfaction with anguished sighs, as Baudelaire thought, but rather so utterly thirsted after by men’s hungering eyes.
overlooked and forgotten, she rises to stand like a lighthouse consumed in the dark fog and damned to withstand tempests that slam into her body one after the other. with each new storm, she feels etched upon her body a fresh layer of marks, new scars made upon aged ones from a life ago. shadows of times past lurk beneath her eyes as if burned ashes lay smeared, exposing the dirtiness of her aging face, a visage rejected
by the men who demand more and more youth. weathered, covered in grime, aged with time, her eyes clearly indicate that she knows how to remain awake and, if the impulse strikes, cry.
what time is there to cry when the whore must wipe her eyes and ready herself for the best going price? a skilled businesswoman keeps marketability in mind, and, in the selling of flesh, advertisement is of the utmost importance. wearing only stockings, she sees her vagina and her breasts reflected back at her in the looking-glass. she sees each man who has touched her, whether he has done so violently or intimately. she sees the women with whom she has shared the deepest intercourse, for love and not for money.
living and dying in this moment of being, she sees other prostitutes in her reflection, a vision of sisters like her. for she is Everywhore: the female body offered up as a sacrifice so that other women, even in their alterity, as Simone de Beauvoir once put it, may live married lives as “honest women,” respectable in the man-made world.
when she laughs and smiles with the men, their laughter echoes shrill and thin. like in Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Harlot’s House,” Strauss’ “Treues Liebes Herz,” meaning “True Loving Heart,” plays on horn and violin as the dancers rigidly dance nearby. she sits, adjusting herself for her next customer as the sounds of music and dancing swim around her, framing her profound misery in performed gaiety.
how the creatures must move their mechanical arms! ah, the perceived order must indicate no hurt or harm!
momentary peace between the sexes transforms into war, revealing the truly awful, rotten discordance beneath the harmonious noise. as Wilde wrote, “Love passed into the house of Lust. / Then suddenly the tune went false.” The whorehouse is a place of money and business, not of emotion and love. all throats struggle for breath and singing turns into death due to the fragmented apple core choking both man and woman,
forcing them into the bondage of pain with very little pleasure awaiting them. knowledge awaits.
dishonest men prefer “honest women.” Simone de Beauvoir observed in The Second Sex that an existing caste of “shameless women,” represented in the existence of the prostitute, allows the “honest woman,” at least in theory if not always in practice, to be treated with the respect deprived of women shamed not only for their sex but also for men’s sexual demands upon them. man rejects her, ignoring the way in which his lust perpetuates her condition.
the prostitute’s body tells far more truths than the body of the “honest woman.” men see her as filth, special only when they can use her in secrecy and discard her when convenient. “cleanliness is next to godliness,” the “honest” husbands and wives may say, cheating on each other all the same. free from a life shackled to one man while subject to a life dependent on many men, no man claims her in public as his daughter and every man claims her in private as his whore.
known only as harlot or strange woman, she will soon be the nameless mother of Jephthah the Gileadite. Jephthah will be a mighty man of valor and, as the Bible says, he will be the son of a harlot. he will sacrifice his virgin daughter, the granddaughter of a strange woman, as a burnt offering to God in Jephthah’s thanks for the children of Israel triumphing over the children of Ammon. the blood of a “shameless woman” will run through the veins of Jephthah’s sacrificed virgin daughter.
far away, removed from Jephthah’s life, his mother will never know the name of her sacrificed granddaughter. the aged whore will never know of the youthful virgin whose father spilled her blood in the name of his God, hating the dirty and the clean, hating all that he finds female.
unrealized and yet awaiting the harlot’s realization, her reflected loathing foreshadows the very loss within her. what if she desires to embrace her granddaughter?
in body, mind, and soul, the woman endures pain which kicks inside of her womb, strangling her, stunting her growth. although the loss remains unknown to her, she loses the flesh which is her flesh, but her perceived impurity obscures the human beneath her skin. she, the whore, is also a human. likewise, her granddaughter’s perceived purity eclipses the human beneath the spilled blood of Jephthah’s sacrifice. she, the virgin, is also a human. useable and destroyable, defendable only as property, thoroughly possessed, the prostitute and the virgin both appear as animals, as female, before the eyes of men.
why does the whore receive more rebuke than the john whose sexual demand drives the traffic in women? why am I the woman made into the whore, punished for what man makes me? why must I, not man, receive scorn for my sex?
am I not a woman who is indeed a human being denied her humanity by the pimps, the johns, the police, the husbands, and the wives of the man-made world? am I not human, existing within and yet exiled from the “honest” world of my brothers and sisters alike?
do I not breathe, speak, and sing— alive and hidden where the eyes of the moralists dare not see me?
unclean, condemned in the eyes of supposedly righteous men and women, all of them so honest themselves, she lies and lies and lies. she lives her life as Miss World, the wanted and unwanted bitch with blackened tears streaming from her eyes. she glares at herself in the mirror, seemingly free of man’s eyes for the moment and yet, in reality, never truly free from his hungering gaze. she hates not herself but what man has made of her sex.
on the surface, she appears sexually liberated from the possession of one man, but she cannot truly free when exchanged through countless hands. how many men view her as a commodity, as if she is a piece of land to colonize and plunder for the moment?
even after the transaction, the men carry her image with them, masturbating to the woman whose name they will forget long before they lose remembrance of her body.
created in a man-made world, she exists as Miss Begotten, twisted into the scapegoat of sexual immorality, used when most desired, destroyed when least desired—misbegotten.