Newspeak for the Oldest Profession

For those of a certain political persuasion, the phrase “sex worker” has replaced the word “prostitute”. “Prostitute” itself replaced the word “whore” back in Victorian days. Each substitution arose from the zeitgeist of its era, but the reasons for the successive euphemisms were quite different: Victorian circumlocutions arose to screen distasteful immoral activity from the public discourse, while postmodern ones are used to empower the affected individuals and remove stigma from them. In other words, the former served a communal social purpose, and the latter a narcissistic one.

Similar euphemistic transformations of other words are:

• From “cripple” to “handicapped” to “disabled”, and recently to the ludicrous “differently abled”.
  
• From “idiot” to “imbecile” to “retarded” to “special needs”.
  
• From “deaf” to “hard of hearing” (the Victorians seemed to have no need to euphemize this one).
  
• From “sodomite” to “homosexual” to “gay”.

When, as is inevitable, the phrase “sex worker” develops its own stigma, will it have to be replaced by yet another euphemism?

My candidate for its successor is “pleasure consultant”.

The original word for the oldest profession has an appropriately ancient pedigree. According to my tattered copy of The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, the word whore is derived from the Old English word hōre, which came from the Common Germanic root χōrōn, and has very similar relatives in all the Germanic languages. The Germanic root in turn is derived from an Indo-European base, qār-, and has descendents in many Indo-European languages. Among those that have made their way into modern English are caress and caritas via Latin, and charity via Latin and French.

Somehow the word’s original connotation of affection evolved into one of opprobrium when it was applied to a person whose affections were for sale. This is a deep and natural human response, and presumably speaks to an instinctively ambivalent reaction to prostitution.

But modern political ideology deems these natural sensibilities to be benighted and archaic, and requires that they be overthrown by linguistic engineering.

The Victorian fad for prudish euphemism eventually faded, leaving us with a few incongruous remnants such as “drumstick” and “white meat” for the leg and breast of a chicken. I presume that the current politically correct fads will fade in their turn, to make way for the ascendancy for some new rule of euphemism.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
I bring all this up because of a comment that came in last night on an old post, made by a sex workers’ advocate named “pick”. Pick was reacting to my essay about the Sex Workers’ Art Show, which, as you may remember, was brought to the campus of the College of William and Mary by official student activity funds and your tax dollars.
- - - - - - - - - -
Here’s what pick had to say:

Hi Baron,

Couple of things…

Does it bother you at all to hold such a virulent opinion on a show that neither you nor your progeny have ever actually SEEN? Are you really content to let fox news tell you what it was all about, and then make your decisions from there?

How is it at all feminist for you to compare women to turds? You claim to be so opposed to the degradation of women, but you say that sex workers and turds are both distasteful things that need to be kept out of the public eye. How is calling women shit not degrading?

If you don’t think you should have to pay for shows on campus that you disagree with, what about people who don’t care for football, or ballet, or visual arts, or choir concerts? Should those be abolished on campus as well? Clearly your truck is with the actual content of the show, not with the fact that you had to ‘pay’ for it, otherwise you would not support funds for any arts and recreation. The complaint about funding is just a distraction from the fact that you support censorship, which is highly un-American.

By the by, your links are all messed up. You conflate the SWAS with the sex work matters conference, referring to one at the beginning of a sentence and then linking to the bios of the other.

I hope you’ll consider what it is that REALLY threatens you about the idea that sex workers might be able to make decisions for themselves, and might have something worthwhile to say.

Although my first impulse was to ignore her, I decided to answer at length. Below are her words in italics interleaved with my responses:

Pick —

Does it bother you at all to hold such a virulent opinion on a show that neither you nor your progeny have ever actually SEEN? Are you really content to let fox news tell you what it was all about, and then make your decisions from there?

No and yes, respectively. The argument that one can’t judge something that one hasn’t witnessed is fallacious. That logic would prevent me from offering an opinion on the Gettysburg Address or the Holocaust.

If one has sufficient information, it’s possible to offer an opinion on an event without being present. There was a large amount of detailed information on the show available in various news articles.

How is it at all feminist for you to compare women to turds? You claim to be so opposed to the degradation of women, but you say that sex workers and turds are both distasteful things that need to be kept out of the public eye. How is calling women shit not degrading?

I didn’t say that I was a feminist. And I didn’t compare women with turds. I questioned the validity of the unexamined premise that it’s a good idea to air everything in public, no matter how vulgar, inappropriate, or distasteful most people find the material. No one has ever offered a convincing argument to support that premise.

If you don’t think you should have to pay for shows on campus that you disagree with, what about people who don’t care for football, or ballet, or visual arts, or choir concerts? Should those be abolished on campus as well?

If the vast majority of the people who actually pay for them disapprove of them, then, yes, they should be abolished — or, rather, de-funded. Let the interested people who comprise the audience be the ones to pay for them.

Clearly your truck is with the actual content of the show, not with the fact that you had to ‘pay’ for it, otherwise you would not support funds for any arts and recreation.

My “truck” is that people are forced to pay for something that the vast majority don’t approve of. That’s all.

The complaint about funding is just a distraction from the fact that you support censorship, which is highly un-American.

The assertion that a refusal to fund an activity is tantamount to censorship is an old one, but it is not true. Censorship only occurs when expression is forbidden by law.

By the by, your links are all messed up. You conflate the SWAS with the sex work matters conference, referring to one at the beginning of a sentence and then linking to the bios of the other.

I followed links within these groups which clearly indicated that all were associated with one another. They shared a link base, just as Gates of Vienna does with Jihad Watch. I don’t mind if you conflate us with Jihad Watch; it’s appropriate.

I hope you’ll consider what it is that REALLY threatens you about the idea that sex workers might be able to make decisions for themselves, and might have something worthwhile to say.

The vast majority of “sex workers” are exploited drug addicts, many of them underage. A huge trafficking of them goes on, especially in Europe. It is to the eternal shame of the Left and the feminists that they have turned a blind eye to the overwhelming evidence of the immense harm done to young women by sex trafficking. Calling it a “choice” for these underage refugees is an Orwellian use of the language.

What’s interesting in all this is pick’s conceit that I am “threatened” by her ideas. This is a common formulation on the Left — that conservatives are somehow threatened by the ideas of the progressives.

Can you say “projection”?

This topic is also important because it presents four themes which have been drilled in by postmodern theorists for so long that they have become dogma:

1.		The fallacy, most commonly seen in the “chicken hawk” argument, that someone who has not participated in nor observed an activity is disqualified from commenting on it.
2.		The conceit that turning a private activity into a public one is a self-evident good, even when that activity is, in most cases, considered shameful and degrading by both parties to it.
3.		The assertion that the removal of public funds from an activity is the same as censoring it.
4.		The notion that the prostitute’s occupation is always a matter of choice, and that she is not being harmed by what she does.

The last one is the most pernicious. Many thousands of women and girls, some as young as thirteen, are abducted, sold, and live in a condition of virtual slavery as prostitutes in Western Europe and the United States. There is copious documentation for the callous and cynical exploitation of these children, yet the bien-pensants avert their collective gaze.

It would be better for them if great millstones were hung around their necks and they were cast into the sea.