Hookers, Floozies, And Tarts–The Good Life Gone And Done With In Righteous Days

“Look to the Lord Jesus”, pleaded Barton Love, pastor of the Third Baptist Church of Christ, minister to thousands as his chosen disciple.  “Only he can save you from the raging fires of Hell, the burning flames of eternal doom.  Only he…” and here the Reverend Love turned his eyes and arms to the rafters in ecstasy  - Jesus was not just the Son of God but a living, breathing being who came down from heaven for the redemption of sin – “…only he can can deliver you from evil, protect you against the Evil One, keep you safe and sound within his embrace and away from the spiteful, hateful sins of the flesh”.

Pastor Love had a particular animus against these particular sins, sins of temptation and sensual deviance.  Sins of concupiscence were worse than treachery, perfidy, or deceit, for they denied the holiness of our bodily sepulcher, cast us into the dark reaches of sensual mire, spit in the face of Our Savior and open the doors to the Devil’s kingdom.

“Sin is all around us”, he shouted angrily at his congregation, “and you…weak, shallow, insubstantial followers of Satan…welcome it, embrace it, take its foul, stinking slime into your bodies.”

Here the Reverend Love paused for breath and solace from the Almighty.  Serving him was a Herculean task, a thankless and lonely one as the sea of iniquity rose like a storm tide; but he had to go one.  His rewards would not be in this life but in the next, alongside the Savior.

Not far from Pastor Love’s church was a striptease joint, floating offshore in compliance with the states’ modesty laws, a floating rookery of sin but well within the legal limits prescribed by the legislature.  “Why, good ol’ boys got to have a little fun now and again”, said Beveridge Channing, legislator and part owner of Heaven on Earth, all pasties, glitz, glamour, after hours bordello, and the best damned time this side of anywhere. 

The show at Heaven on Earth was indeed a worthy rival to Las Vegas, and because of the state’s liberal interpretation of the decency clauses of the Constitution and the political influence of men like Channing, it became the nation’s trifecta – a glamourous, tinselly, sequined strip show, the most beautiful, available women for pleasure, and a chandeliered, gilt, Baroque hall of mirrors. 

Heaven on Earth was always in the news.  Forbes ran a cover story on its business model (‘careful navigation through political, religious, and social waters to rake in millions’) and no less than a major Chattanooga journal applauded its ‘giant step away from the righteous bullying of progressive MeToo hysterics.  At the same time it was the scene of all feminist outrage.  ‘A disgusting display of misogynistic, abusive, woman hatred, pandering to the lowest, sickest form of deformed male desire.

Once Joe Biden’s Vice President got wind of Heaven on Earth, she joined in the chorus of male-hating, sex-baiting, howling.  She called for federal action to shut the place down, to burn it, and dump the ashes in the Passaic River.  Her metaphor struck home with the  Newark Mafia which had used the Meadowlands as their private dumping grounds and the Passaic River for those bodies they wanted found, and resonated with the woke hoi-polloi for whom the most ignominious fate of Heaven on Earth would be too good for them.

Most of the rest of the country wondered what the fuss was all about.  Hookers, floozies, and tarts had always been part and parcel of every society for millennia – prostitutes were not being exploited but were, in the very words of progressive feminism, ‘commercial sex workers’.  They prostituted themselves before no man but executed a contract, deserved to be unionized, organized, and militant.  Of course once such liberal protectionism was implemented, the whole allure of the bordello or the Rue St. Denis hooker was lost. Once sex becomes a negotiated contract, it loses all appeal.

The Honorary Consul, a novel by Graham Greene is about two men’s love for a prostitute the frequented at a local brothel.  They both saw beyond the transaction and found Clara a particularly desirable woman.  Eduardo Plarr could never understand what it was about her – perhaps something as insignificant as a mole on her cheek – that gave her a personal allure; and Charley Fortnum wanted love no matter how previously contrived; but there love was, and the distinction between prostitution and ordinary sex was blurred.

In The Quiet American, Greene reprises the same theme of love and prostitution.  Phuong is a call girl loved by both Fowler and Pyle.  Fowler admits that he does not want to die alone, and a woman in his bed for his later years is satisfaction enough.  The much younger Pyle is taken with her Asian beauty, her complaisance, and her dependence.

Until he met Phuong, Fowler was a frequenter of Saigon’s many brothels, a way of life for many women and certainly part of the expatriate life of European and American men. 

In Wayne Wang’s movie Chinese Box, a desperate Jeremy Irons is obsessed by a prostitute, and fills his last days with pursuit of her. The world of New Orleans was populated by octoroon prostitutes who serviced young white men in elegant surroundings.  The brothels were not shameful places of disrepute, but respectable places of friendship and pleasure. 

Men do not frequent prostitutes simply for sexual release, but for a much more intimate satisfaction.  The Jane Fonda character in the movie Klute is proud of her skills as an erotica therapist who is canny at understanding what men’s fantasies are and how to realize them.  It is hard to imagine that in the cleansed, monitored, and safe world of legalized prostitution that any psycho-sexual relationship would ever be established.  The ‘cages’ of Bombay where cheap, garishly painted prostitutes advertise their wares and beckon passers-by are there because of male fantasy, not simple intercourse.  The prostitutes in an early Amsterdam, displayed in large show windows were no different. The The Night Porter, a disturbing film about sex and prostitution in Nazi Germany deals with exaggerated male sexual fantasy and expresses the very primitive and ineluctable male sexual drive.

In America the official censure of prostitution has made its way through the byways of social opprobrium to such a degree that sex itself even among consenting adults is considered suspicious, harboring within its dynamic the potential for misogynistic male sexual abuse.  The hysteria of MeToo has infected the most simple and uncomplicated heterosexual relationships.  Anything that even suggests the exploitation of women  - girly magazines, Las Vegas runways, sexually alluring covers of Cosmopolitan and Elle – is by nature corrosive, corrupting, and anti-feminist. All this despite the fact that women are hardwired to attract a mate, are as given  to sexual fantasy as men, and that interior sexual dynamics, despite woke MeToo-ism have never changed.  The movie Belle de Nuit is the story of a beautiful, haute bourgeoise woman (Catherine Deneuve) who becomes a prostitute to live out her fantasies.

The age of neo-Puritanical, censorious, sexually woke America cannot last.  Sooner or later the faux sexuality of transgenderism, the championing of LGBTQ+, and the demotion of heterosexuality as the norm will disappear and the dynamics of D.H. Lawrence will return.  Sex is a market – not in the sense of commercial sex work but in supply and demand.  Prostitution, strip shows, after hours sexual clubs, and strange fantastical intimations in sex shops and S&M parlors will return in an unregulated, un-sanctimonious age.  Hookers, floozies, and tarts will be back with a vengeance.