Lacewing wrote: ↑Tue Mar 12, 2019 8:01 pm
Furthermore, men often hurl the label at women they don't even know, as if it's simply the worst insult they can think of.
It just doesn't make sense to me. It seems archaic and primitive and ignorant. Can anyone here offer more perspective and personal opinion about this?
Dear Lacewing,
I don't think any of us have properly addressed your query
at all to date.
You are correct that when men call a woman a "whore" it is intended to be the worst, i.e; the most vicious and hurtful insult they can throw at her. I, for one, cannot think of a more vile and poisonous barb a man could possibly hurl at a woman than the slur: "Whore !" So, why is calling a woman a "whore" such a grievous thing to do? The reason, I think, is because since ancient times, prostitutes have been consistently damned as extremely wicked and the lowest of the low. For thousands of years they have been characterised as unclean/diseased, obscene, depraved, vulgar, devious, duplicitous, cunning and mendacious, etc; And today, in 2019 nothing has really changed. In short, prostitutes always were, and still are, almost universally despised; they are perceived by the majority of persons (especially in the West) as being profoundly immoral women and a loathsome blight on society.
We generally tend to focus on how degrading, dehumanising, demeaning and humiliating it must be for prostitutes to sell their bodies to men for coitus (vaginal intercourse) or other kinds of "sexual "services", Right? BUT have you ever considered the psychologicaland spiritual impact and ramifications that a male (a "john") experiences when he pays to have sex (oral/vaginal/anal) with a prostitute? (in particular on a regular basis). What if I told you that the "john" experiences the same kind of suffering (mental pain/hurt) as prostitutes evidently do, and not just that, but he also experiences it for precisely the same reasons. What if I told you I could put together a good argument to convince you that what I say is correct? You might say, "Go ahead, by all means!" But then I would have to warn you that the foundations of my argument are drawn from Kant's moral philosophy. And this means that you would probably not be interested in reading what I had to say because Immanuel Kant is a quintessential DEAD, WHITE,(EUROPEAN) MALE and lots of people these days hate "DEAD, WHITE, MALES" with a passion; they are definitely not hip or Postmodern - Cool; in fact they are blamed for just about every social problem that blights Western civilization today. Also, educated women (like you, Lacewing) seem to loathe them to a extreme extent, because they symbolise the hegemony of our oppressive white, Western patriarchy, Right? I wont even mention the fact that Kant wrote that all women are morally deficient because they were all (ahem) basically stupid and irrational; that they should never be allowed to vote because they were too silly to ever obtain any kind of rational understanding of politics; he also made uncharitable remarks about intellectual women, saying, to give one example, in a mocking tone that "that they might as well have beards !" Kant was also - as is well known - a buttoned - down square - bear of the first order.If you imagine someone whose personality was the absolute opposite of what we call a "party animal", then you'll have a pretty good idea of what Kant was like in his day-to-day life. He was the Enlightenment's most tedious and boring philosophy nerd. It is hard to imagine a drearier , less adventurous existence than that of Immanuel Kant's. He was born in the German town of Konigsberg and died there. He never travelled, never left his native town, and spent 95% of his time in his study reading books and writing.
In modern terms he was more boring than Taylor Swift and Hillary Clinton combined.
In his defence, it has to be said that Kant was an extraordinary clever man, who is universally acknowledged as the European Enlightenment's greatest philosopher, and if his life was painfully boring, his ethical theory was not; not, at least, to any philosopher who had an interest in the subject of morality and read his "Metaphysics of Morals" at any point during the past 234 years.
I think that I can answer the questions you asked in your OP by applying some general principles of Kant's ethical theory to the issues involved, i.e. prostitutes and their male clients, so here goes...
Kant produced a number (four, in fact) of different formulations of his Categorical Imperative. The second is called
"The Formula of the End in Itself":
"
Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, WHETHER IN YOUR OWN PERSON, or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end."
In other words, we should not use ourselves or other people as objects, but instead recognise the inherent dignity (Moral worth/value) that we all have. A good way to understand Hant's point is to distinguish between things that have a merely INSTRUMENTAL value and things that have an INHERENT value. Some things in life are valuable only as instruments to obtain something else.My motorcycle keys, for example, are very valuable to me, and when I lose them, my life grinds to a halt. But my motorcycle keys are only valuable as tools that perform a task - namely, the task of starting up my motorcycle. Even the value of my motorcycle itself is mainly instrumental, as a tool, or a means, which allows me to travel from one place to another. By contrast, other things in life are inherently valuable, and we appreciate them for what they are in themselves, and not for what they enable us to do.Companionship and the enjoyment os music and poetry are good examples. I have a tattered, 110 year old volume of
"The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Byssche Shelley" at my bedside. For me, this old book has great inherent value as it contains some of the greatest lyric poetry ever written in the English language. I purchased it at an antiques store for £20, though for me it is something priceless - it is an end in itself. I view this book not an merely an object of paper and ink, nor as being something intended to be used as an instrument to achieve some further material goal. I appreciate it for what it actually is in itself - a transcription of the thoughts of a great human soul , a young man endowed with a dazzling rational genius who many literary authorities today declare was the greatest lyrical poet England ever produced.
Kant believes that human beings have inherent value, and should never be treated as instrument/objects (I would add certain animals, as well, definitely mammals like dogs, horse, cows, mice; and also birds such as robins, pheasants, cockatoos, crows, etc). He says, with regard to people,...
"In so (improperly) acting man reduces himself to a thing, to an instrument of animal amusement. We are, however, as human beings, not things but persons, and by turning ourselves into things we dishonour human nature in our own person."
Think now about the male who visits a female prostitute and pays to have sex. Is he not reducing HIMSELF to a mere object, a mere thing? He is intentionally treating himself - his own humanity (which has inherent value and should be respected as an end in itself) - as a mere means to to the end of satisfying his carnal desires through a lewd physical act (oral/vaginal/anal sex) that is completed in some relatively short period of time. In doing this, Kant would say that he is dishonouring his nature as a human being to reduce himself to a mere "tool" (pardon the pun), a mere instrument
to be used in gaining the degrading end of short-term carnal hedonism. If he is a rational man he will, after his encounter with the prostitute feel a sense of shame, humiliation, irresponsibility, and degradation in respect of his own behaviour.( I'll get back to this point in a minute as it the basis of my answer to your questions in the OP).
To continue. The reason humans have inherent value, according to Kant, is because, generally speaking, we have the ability to rise above our brute "animal" instincts and freely make crucial decisions in shaping our lives and the world around us ( NB
:I said "generally speaking" because there are certainly cases where this ability is absent to a considerable extent. Take for instance some of the many cases of adults who are afflicted with an IDD (i.e; an Intellectual Deficit Disorder, which is the technical term psychiatrists now use for what was once officially called "Mental Retardation. Young adults with Down Syndrome, which is an IDD, are, for instance, notoriously sexually promiscuous and , in consequence, many of them are still routinely sterilised by doctors today because Down Syndrome is highly inheritable. One of the problems with Kant's moral theory is that he presumes all adults possess a sufficient amount of reason/capacity for rational cognition, to "naturally"/intuitively comprehend the key principles of his ethics, unfortunately that's just not true. Still, the majority of people in society, I think ,do; that is, people who have at least an average level of IQ would intuitively affirm Kantian moral laws. What I mean to say is that most ordinary people in the West KNOW that abortion is wrong, and most average, everyday people KNOW that prostitution is wrong; it's just that they are too busy with their own lives and families to be writing books of moral philosophy on the subject, or organising Pro-Life demonstrations across the country. BTW, I realise that IQ is not at all a perfect means a determining morality, as there have been, and doubtless still are, some individuals - a small number I would think - with genius -level IQ who are undoubtedly very immoral human beings, though it is a fact that impulsive sexual promiscuity is significantly correlated with low IQ). To continue. Everything else in the world, is, Kant argues, driven by purely mechanical forces, but we human beings are different with our ability to make free choices. This freedom of will is a feature of human reason, and it confers on us an inherent dignity that is valuable in and of itself. We have a moral responsibility, then to treat people
(INCLUDING OURSELVES) in ways that reflect their inherent value, and not to reduce people
(INCLUDING OURSELVES)to mere objects of instrumental value. So when I treat someone
(INCLUDING MYSELF) as an end, I respect his/her/my own inherent value; and when I treat someone as a means, I see her/him or myself, as having only instrumental value.
Kant goes on to explain there is both a negative and a positive component to his Second Formulation. I will only mention the negative component which is this: that we should AVOID treating people (ourselves included) as a mere means. This tells us only to abstain from using ourselves or other persons as instrument/objects and is seen by Kant as a
BARE MINIMUM OBLIGATION.
Finally, getting back now to prostitutes and their male clients. When most men visit a female prostitute and pay for sexual services some kind (typically oral and or vaginal sex), they have in the majority of cases allowed their brute "animal" instincts to overwhelm the free will they have as rational agents. They are therefore degrading their own inherent dignity and value as human beings who are ends in themselves. They are reducing themselves to purely brute, sexual instruments (in precisely the same way as do the prostitutes who agree to "service" them).
So, in conclusion. When a rational adult man pays to have sex with a prostitute, after he has satisfied his carnal desires ( which, generally speaking, will not take long- a matter of minutes ?), he will be left to reckon with the fact that he has just degraded his own humanity, by succumbing to base sensation of "animal" lust. He will be left to ponder how he has failed to respect the responsibility he owes to himself not to reduce his person to an object, to strive to always remain an inherently valuable and dignified end in himself.He will, if not initially, then inevitably come to feel a haunting sense of of contempt and disgrace for his own conduct. He will become angry at himself for his own moral weakness, but rather than confront his personal shortcomings and accept he was at fault, very often he will prefer to externalise the anger and disgust he feels, venting his frustration on women by calling them "whores" for no other reason that that they may be young and attractive ("sexy") or wearing revealing clothing. The women he abuses are proxies for all of the prostitutes he visited, and who he still trying to blame for his own humiliation and disgrace and dehumanisation.
Finally Lacewing, I can't imagine any civilised male in the West calling women he barely knows, "whores" no matter how many prostitutes they may have seen. It sounds to me more like the kind of insult an uneducated/working male would use?
I'll tell you one truth about young men and young women that I think is pretty universal, Lacewing, and that is this : for whatever reasons, young guys, say 19, 22, 25 years old, will, almost universally, have absolutely no respect for a female in their age group if they know that she sleeps around a lot. I'm not saying that this is right or wrong or fair or unfair, but trust me, rather that it's just the "way of the world"; and its the same in Australia as it is in England as it is in the US. Funny isn't it how when it comes to how to their views about how the fair sex ought conduct themselves (sexually), young guys in the 21st century have got morals just like a Victorian lawyer in a Dickens novel. So my advice to you Lacewing is that if you're a young women, you should avoid sleeping around too much, because if ever you get a reputation for it, no boys will hang out with you.
Regards
Dachshund
APPENDIX TO POST: "The Prostitute's Revenge"
I saw an utterly astonishing (staggering, breathtaking) television series in England that documented the lives of six street prostitutes who were working in the Holbeck Lane neighbourhood of Leeds. The tragedy of their lives was often heartbreaking and I can't describe for you because the suffering/misery was incommunicable/ineffable, no words could ever express the sadness and despair that this series laid bare. Every adult in the West ought watch it in order to advance their moral education. Anyway getting back to Holbeck Lane. A pilot-program was being run here by the government, and the upshot is that provided prostitutes only work in the Holbeck Lane "zone" (whose defining borders have been determined by the local authorities in Leeds), the police would turn a blind eye to what the girls were doing (i.e. touting for business on the streets); in other words, street prostitution was/(and still is, I think) currently legal in the Holbeck Lane district of Leeds. There are some funny moments in the series as well as sad. One scene that made me laugh was kind of like hearing about a planned poetic redemption that was soon to take place, where instead of being metaphorically "shit upon" by male clients who use street prostitutes as though they were merely cheap, trashy, throw-a-way sex objects, one of the girls gains an opportunity to "turn the tables" ! Here's a transcript of the relevant dialogue (as best as I can recall it) You might think it's sick, but I saw an amusing side to the incident, which is transcribed below...
In the episode I'm talking about, one of the Holbeck Lane girls (Sandra, I think it was) walks into her shabby flat and says to another prostitute who is there, (her flat -mate, Debs):
SANDRA: "Got a call from a regular, Debs, so I'll be out tonight, orrite"
Debs: "How long?"
Sandra: "Three or four hours; gotta get the fuckin' bus to Bradford- its a guy called Dave, I've seem 'im before."
Debs: "Bradford''s flippin' miles away, girl."
Sandra: "Yeah, but it's good money -a hundred quid - and the job's a doddle."
Debs: "What is it, then ?"
Sandra: I just have to strip and then shit on him - on his tummy."
Debs: "How do you sort that? I mean, you know, how do you..."
Sandra: " First of all he takes me to a curry house and buys me a curry, after I have that, we go back to his and chat a while - half an hour like. Then I snort some crystal (an amphetamine drug that promotes intestinal peristalsis) and in a few minutes I do the business . Then he likes me to feed him a few teaspoons of shite, after that, I take off home. Easy."