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Veronica Monet

Lady Aster

Averen Ipsen

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SWOP Commentary on the Whore Babylon (Revelation 17-18)

I just have to say that this text reminds me of being blamed for everything, for whatever is going on: serial killers, drugs, crime, bad neighborhoods, drug problems, moral decay of the family, husbands cheating on their wives; that’s all laid at the feet of the whore.Spread of STDs, we’re blamed for everything. Plagues, a lot of this is about disease. It is a scapegoating. They need a scapegoat that they don’t know personally. They have to take it away from their lives.It’s too close, so you attack people that are ‘out there’. And they talk about how dangerous sex work is. Then acknowledge the fact that if you are a woman between the ages of 25 and 45, and you get murdered, it is probably from your husband or boyfriend. But it is like, a “whore” is bad, you know what I mean. A whore is a nasty woman who doesn’t deserve to mix with the likes of anybody.

And it says in here they strip and beat her, or something? She is burned like a sacrifice, that’s what it always reminds me of, she is the sacrificial lamb who is burnt forever and ever and ever. They eat her. Eat her flesh. Her demise is within, what, one hour? She is done, this powerfully huge, powerful woman is undone within a matter of moments. Because God judges her. Because it starts out ‘come to see God’s judgment on the whore of Babylon.’ And it is so violent because we justify all violence with God, right? That is because, if God says it, let it be so, get out the ax and chop somebody’s head off!

If you were Gary Leon Ridgeway (the Green River Killer) and you were reading this, you’d feel like you were on a holy mission of God wouldn’t you?Well there are right wing religious fanatics who send me and other sex workers hate mail every month. And they have the nerve to say prostitutes and whoremongers are all going to burn. And then at the bottom they ask me for money… “and if you want to help us send our message please send money to ministry blah blah blah.

When I was on Fox news two years ago and a congressman asked me, ‘Veronica, have you read the bible?’ I said ‘yes, I have read it cover to cover, have you?’ And he said ‘well what does your bible tell you?’ And I said, “It says, kill the whore.” And he and the other woman who was representing this right wing organization said “Oh no, Jesus didn’t want to kill the whores!”

The problem with this bible text is that it is all metaphoric, none of it is reality, it is all like some crazy psycho babble nonsense, and the fundamentalists believe this shit and make laws out of it. The message is that you’re a whore and unworthy and disrespectable. It gives a lot of power, all of this, the bible imagery and everything, it gives a lot of power to people that are against prostitution and against sex, and against women. It isn’t just against prostitutes. It is against women, to keep them in their place. What is the first thing a man does before he rapes or kills a woman? He starts calling her a whore. It doesn’t matter if she has ever made a dime from sex, you’re a whore if you’re going down and you’re going to get called a whore all the way down. Revelation doesn’t just legitimate violence towards prostitutes, but it legitimates violence towards wives, towards all women. Yes it does. Just ask Gary Leon Ridgeway. How did he vindicate himself every day when he went to bed? He read it in the bible that it was OK to kill some whores.

I mean, I can see clearly how somebody was trying to be poetic and create it as a metaphor, I can see that so clearly but then when you bring up the point that these people were slaves, they actually did live terrible lives, and if I had existed in their times I would have probably been on their side. I have a tendency to be on the side of the underdogs. But there is a psychology that happens when reality is not going to get you out of your slavery, but things are the way they are and there is absolute force and violence keeping you where you are at, like people who have had sexual assault when they are children, like, you just go somewhere else and you create a different reality for yourself, so I can, like, I think that is how they were, in a really bad position and created this awful thing. I think that when we look back and read it the term “whore” means so much more to us then it did when they were writing it. But obviously they still thought of “whore” as bad because that was the word that they used to describe this terrible power that was oppressing them.

Even though scholars may identify the whore as being a Roman matron, not a real sex worker, but an upper class woman, the statue Roma who is a personification of all the good values of Rome, I see her as a courtesan. I don’t necessarily see her as somebody who is seeing a ton of men wearing her body out. I just see her as having 5 or 6 protectors and they she is at the top of her social hierarchy and that is what happens to courtesans. Even if she is wearing purple which was not allowed for sex workers. But from what I have studied about courtesans they have pretty well existed down throughout the millennia, and they were always in another category off from the regular prostitutes. They were allowed to be some of the most wealthy of women, visible women, celebrated women. Sometimes they would have parades to honor them. Statues made after them. So I have a hard time believing that all those celebrated courtesans were slaves wearing white togas.

Speaking of clothing, one of the things that you were talking about, I’d like to going back to, thinking about the way that she was dressed, and the kind of power she has over all these different aspects of commerce, and like the height of luxury, and you are talking about why you want to do sex work when I talk about why I did it, money was part of it but money wasn’t all of it, and that is certainly how it is being portrayed here, it is this very focused on trade, let’s not talk about anything else, so the whore herself, Babylon, is not any whore I have ever met. I can tell you that much. I’ve never met her.

I really want to know what it means to dress like a hooker! Because I keep getting ‘what, you’re a hooker? You can’t be!’ You know, when you go out you realize and all the little girls are dressed like hookers and you’re not. The last Halloween party that I went to about five years ago all the women were dressed like hookers and I realized that reason that all of them were dressed like hookers was that it was cheap and they all has the clothes already in their wardrobes. They just put on a little bit higher heels. This is a party at my husband’s bosses’ house and you know all the wives came dressed like whores and you know what I came dressed as? A 1940’s Red Cross nurse. That was probably the only one in a real hooker’s outfit that was there.

Today there are courtesans. Pamela Harriman is considered a courtesan, by some. She actually married her money.But if you look at the art that travels around the world right now, the great Monet works of art, her name is at the bottom of that, an incredibly wealthy woman, she died a billionaire.But, most historians will not probably consider her a whore, and so it is not in the history books. And I am just saying that I have got a hunch that there were women that were like her all along and why not during Rome’s time?

I feel that we get written out of history.I feel that the reason that this passage is so hateful, and has so much energy, is because the whore was so powerful, and I am not just talking about a woman who exchanges sex for money, I am talking about a woman who is not owned by a man so she might be getting her money from a lot of different things. She might have become a widow and gone into his business, and I think they would still call her a whore because she is not legitimated sexually and I think that is a really important point.I think one of the reasons that Pamela Harriman was considered a whore is not because she wasn’t doing some thing that other women have not done which is like, marry for money, but because she did it with so much self interest. That people really hated. They wanted her to be suffering for her kids and suffering for her husband. And she was interested in her own advancement.So I don’t think “whore” as it is used in this verse is just about ‘oh she gets paid for, you know, a half and half’ I think it is about a much huger concept, which I think is why prostitutes are so vilified, and why people just want to focus on street prostitution. They don’t want you to know there is so much money attached to it or power attached to it or anything else.Because a lot more women would do it! Since reproduction is the most powerful thing going on the planet earth, if we are in charge of our own reproduction, then we are in charge.

I have a photo that a client brought me printed off the internet, it is a real photo, and you may have seen it, and I have it up in my closet and it is a woman who has a pair of black bikini panties on and across it says. ‘I have the pussy, so I make the rules’ I think if enough women realized that, we would run the world. We would say ok make your choice, are you guys going to fight, are you going to make a war or you going to have pussy?

You don’t want to give women that power. Where I come from, which was really dire poverty and you get that I used prostitution and dancing to get myself through college that is how I got to college, that is how I got to the point where now where I work now in the field that I love, in public health, and I am going to medical school, but you know what? The first thing that people say to me, now, when they find out that that is what I did, oh my god, it is like now everything that I have done since then is totally delegitimized, you remember at that one thing, I had a professor from Berkeley come up to me and ask me ‘now there are a lot of universities around this town, do you really mean Berkeley?’ Because you are such a dumb little stripper you don’t even know what campus you are going to! This was during my final year I was graduating! Even now that I have a degree from Berkeley, even now that I am going to medical school, even now I have been doing all this other stuff, because I was busted, I can never actually rise above that status, this is about power, and its about keeping me from utilizing what I got out of it to even be in that part of the world.

When I was 12 years old and I got physically ill, reading it. I didn’t have any concept that there had been sacred goddesses, I knew nothing about sacred prostitution; I knew nothing about any of that at all. I was just into the bible and I thought it was the inspired word of god. But as I read this part of the bible I was struck with what the bible hates.And what I came away thinking is that the bible hates a woman who is powerful, the bible hates a woman that dresses in a way that is conspicuous, the bible hates a woman who is carefree and a little obvious. I got it that the bible hated a woman that was sexual. So she feels good about herself, she is powerful, she is not married to a particular man, and she is not owned by a man, all those things, sexually autonomous, all those things is what the bible hated. And my feeling as a 12 year old child was to feel immediately ashamed, and fearful, and the one thing I had to do was make myself smaller. So regardless of the historical resonance I think the really important thing is what kind of cultural impact does this have, and I think the cultural impact has been to make women smaller.

And if you take the name ‘whore of Babylon’ yes there is no doubt that that is an image of Roma, for all the reason that this is a sea city and Babylon ain’t on the ocean. But the whore of Babylon is chosen both because Babylon is an archetypical rich and powerful city, the same thing you get with Cecil B. De Mille on Egypt in contrast to the heroes. The image of the whore Babylon is one that echoes over and over in the bible, both in the old and New Testament, although it is not presented in that name. The figure is obvious because the whore Babylon is literally the prostitute goddess.

There is a deep symbolism here with woman, vagina, and death, and why men particularly, but women as well, want to squash that, why they want to kill prostitutes, kill the vagina, kill that which bore them and to which that they have to return. Because you are a goddess, you are absolutely a vector for all the love and the hatred that people hold around on sexuality, and that is god, god is that force, that creation, that creative force, that birth force and that is what a vagina is, and that is what women symbolize as prostitute, specifically as prostitutes and it is very frightening for men to confront.A free vagina, does that make sense, a vagina in control of itself. Look any culture that oppresses women in that way specifically, the most blatant examples are those which will put women under blankets and shove them in a room and shut the door and paint the windows black, oh my god! Kill, kill it, kill it!

I think it is proper to talk about Jezebel as a whore especially because of her royal status, in many Mesopotamian societies coronation was done with a rite of sacred prostitution, and her having a religious position as a priestess and a queen, especially with the images of her decking herself up, it just screams an image of sacred prostitution. I hear what is present in so many places in the bible is condensed here, just the slam, slam pounding of fists upon the goddess image. I am not saying this figure is a sacred prostitute, I am saying that this image of her that is being picked up, is the whore of Babylon, no author is going to pick that if it has a resonant image and if you look at Jezebel who is similarly this archetype of the luxuriously rich and powerful woman who was brought low by a society that just won’t stand for this sort of thing and John very much speaking the voice of the other Israelites there. The emotions are so similar, I can’t just help seeing an echo of the earlier image.

Soon after joining sex work I found myself worshiping the goddess, I had been an atheist my entire life. I am endlessly confused by the metaphysics of it all. I know I can’t help it, when looking at the goddess, I am staring into my mother’s face because I know she sacrificed herself for me and for my sister. I wonder. I may have found happiness there but why is it I couldn’t find happiness in that life? Yeah, I had a choice, I had a choice, I have been shouting that so loud. So, I am finally out, I finally put myself in a place beyond all possible doubt that I am a rebel against society and not part of its power structure. But I don’t know, I think there was a part of me deep down inside that knew there was no other place for me. I just, nothing else in life could be working. And I have being shouting loud and proud to be a part of SWOP.

One of the reasons why doing this interpretation it is important to me is because when you are caught up in it and it is not so much a choice for you, and then you are raised with all these beliefs in terms of it already being bad, because I too experienced the bible, it is like it compounds the fact if you have got any biblical beliefs going on, it compound like how you must be a really bad person for having anything to do with sex work. I know that I am not a bad person and I know now that as my adult self with my experiences behind me that I might make a conscious decision to do sex work in an empowering way. But it is a whole different world than when you need a little extra time and do sex work to feed your kids, it is totally different than to feed you man or feed your habit. When you’re doing it through fear, and that is how I started too, I did it through fear, I was starving to death.

I am worried about the hip hop culture and what is going on through Rap I don’t think hip hop is the only musical culture that is doing it though. But right now they are doing this whole thing around prostitution and that is kind of bad. It is not kind of bad, it is tough, it is really bad, it is really really really bad, it is really pro pimp, pro pimps up, hos down. What is sad about the hip hop that I have heard was that there is all this yeah ‘be powerful,’ and ‘I respected my mom, even though she went through some hard shit’ but then in other songs is still like ‘fuck those bitches and slap those hos,’ and whatever, so the real problem is that all these good messages that you talked about, where they are talking about their oppression and wanting it different, but they are not seeing the women as part of their same struggle, they are saying ‘this is the black man’s struggle.’ That is what a lot of people say about Revelation, they say that it is written by men who are oppressed but they can’t necessarily see women as allies, because you got to be above somebody right? You gotta be better than somebody.So that it is not a perfect liberation message and you can’t squeeze a perfect liberation message out of it because oppressed people sometime don’t have a perfect liberation message, only a partial one. You know, I have to say I like hip hop, even though I hear the ‘ho’ and ‘bitches’ and what ever, but I like the music. What do I think of the use of the metaphor? For example the “holice”? It is the whore metaphor, they are using the whore metaphor to talk about the police. I think it is the same thing as saying ‘you’re a pussy, your nothing but a pussy man,’ every time you want to put somebody down you refer them back to a woman…either you’re talking about a woman of ill repute or you’re talking about a woman’s genitals. One of the worst things you can say. But are they using it in a political sense? Everybody uses it to talk about politics but are they justified? Is it just perpetuating the problem or is it making a statement? If it is making a statement, I don’t think it is necessarily an anti-prostitute statement. But if we were in the Gay Liberation movement we would be beyond this conversation. Because it wouldn’t be OK to be saying ‘fag’ for any political purpose.

We could learn a lot from the Gay movement. We need to get our own sitcom dammit!

I was at the women’s rights conference and I did this panel for the queer women in the sex industry and a lot of the women there were like the anti’s who were like ‘this is so bad and you’re making things worse for all women’ and whatever, and I said ‘You know what? Look, you may not support prostitution and you may not like that I do it, but our enemies are the same.We may not have a lot in common but the people who want you a dead are the same people who want me dead. And we are so much more powerful if we combine forces against these ignorant, bible thumping, fundamentalist psychos. Colgate can use tits to sell toothpaste but we can’t sell our own bodies, heaven forbid we have control over it ourselves, you know! But they can use it anyway they want.

I just have to reiterate what I said, about the other passage too, that I am not going to find any of this liberating until she says ‘fuck you motherfuckers’ and starts fighting. I haven’t seen any prostitutes fighting yet, I haven’t seen prostitutes standing up for themselves, everything we did just got written out of history. We need a Zena or something. But I bet we had a Zena! It is just like she said, but that is not going to be written because women didn’t write this book. We need a comic book character; you know Annie Sprinkle was a comic book character for a while. ‘The whore of Babylon fights back.’On the other hand, when we think about the metaphor, Rome was fighting back and Rome really was evil. What needs to be happening is, we need to be saying is ‘Wait, no, you can’t take our name; we are the whores! You are not a whore, you are a scoundrel!’ Stop co-opting!The whole notion of queer was re-co-opted by the gay community, they re-embraced it.

If you realize that the whore of Babylon is so powerful, that the god of Israel was intimidated into acting petty and vengeful, then you can take solace in the fact that she is the object of his hatred and jealousy, not the perpetrator; she remains innocent even as she is reviled. You need to put something in there about the little scared men who were penning Revelation. They were so overwhelmed by this self owned woman. Like ‘you got the power’ you can imagine, she must have been like fire! Can you imagine? They have got this religion that tries to tell them that by god’s power they are in charge of women and they go to Rome and they see these powerful women. When she walks down the road, they had to part like the Red Sea, it probably just made them burn, burn. They go home and probably beat their wives some more. Whore of Babylon has to be like ‘oh yeah, exactly, you are petty and insecure, you want to fight? Let’s go.’ He is probably like, ‘you’re a woman, move to the side and she is like, what, I am a woman, you move to the side! And not because I am servile and so much more delicate than you’ she is probably like Zena. I am a loudmouthed woman, but because it is a man’s world, ‘you, women be down, you fucking woman!’