On the Nature of Whoredom

A friend casually remarked today that a whore is one of the oldest "occupations" in human history. While it certainly calls into question the variable objects of exchange for a certain service predating currency, more broadly understood, I think my friend was far more right than he knew with his cavalier comment.

Though it clearly has a sexual connotation, the term whore today has come to broadly refer to anyone who abuses a commodity of sorts. An attention whore. A crack whore. A shopping whore. These are all acceptable usages of the word by today's colloquial understanding. For those of us who truly do appreciate the contextual role of words, we mourn the liberal application of them to the expressive folly of juvenile whims. Slang has degenerated the nuances of semantics.

Even so, such a liberal adoption of the term indicts the critical mind to discover what nuanced pith has been widely recognized, even if not consciously, that it has been re-appropriated so successfully. Without mulling it over much, the answer seemed self-evident – embedded in our nuanced cultural understanding of the word itself. What it comes down to, as far as is clear to me, is a compromise of integrity as a means to an end. Put differently, a whore is someone who does something that he or she would not normally do in order to attain something subjectively important. Mutatis mutandis, a whore is someone who unabashedly offers an illicit service that would not otherwise be offered for personal leverage. Therefore, an attention whore is such because he or she would not act in a manner demanding attention in order to feel good about his or herself if there was no one else around from whom to demand attention. So it is with the objects of other whores across the typology.

With this understanding, I wonder how pervasive the ethos of whoredom is in our capitalist society? How often do we do things that we don't want to do in order to attain something greater? I don't mean paying taxes so the IRS doesn't come after you or taking your child to daycare so your wife doesn't badger you, but more along the lines of things that don't actually need to be done but that you do for a personal boon. For instance, for those of us in the academy, how many will stay up extra hours, reading extra books to write this extra paper to try to present at a conference just so your CV looks that much better. It doesn't need to be done, especially when you have a full load of courses, a significant other, and a part time job. But you do it. You're an academic whore.

Playing politics, maintaining superficial pretensions, and pandering to the interests of others all fall under the umbrella of whoredom. Sure, maybe it doesn't have the nuanced illicit quality previously mentioned, but the means-to-an-end, immolating character of the action screams whore to me. Just as with pornography, you know it when you see it. Just as our adolescent culture has been desensitized to violence and sex, so too has the concept of whoredom been so seamlessly naturalized into our culture. Our capitalist democracy is an entire culture of whores governed by those who have best mastered the erotic art of political seduction.