Like any storied tradition, prostitution is fraught with its share of hearsay, fables, false Gods, magical beasts, and bogeymen. Most Western religious texts are rife with whore stories; ancient Asian lore abounds with tales of mystical courtesans and debauched deities; and in some cultures they just invent harlots to serve as foci for annoying ditties. Were any of these elusive sexpots real? Depending on your level of gullibility, you might find the following stories of this randy gang useful for understanding where many of our most debased notions about sex have their genesis. To understand the phenomenon better, it helps to take a closer look at our myths, where the imagination runs rampant and truth and booty are often not what they seem.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Reigning over the kings of the Earth
CLAIM TO FAME: Satan’s main squeeze
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Babylon
The Whore of Babylon (neé Mystery) had it rough. Hell, she still has it rough. For over two millennia this poor creature has put a real fright into unsuspecting Sunday school students and sundry other readers of Revelation. Sometimes thought of as Satan’s “Pretty Woman,” this whore pops up in the Bible wearing an outrageous purple ensemble with gold accoutrements, and she is holding up a cocktail featuring the “abominations and filthiness of her fornication.” If that means what I think it means, the Whore of Babylon should feel lucky she ever got a date at all. It’s amazing, really, how disorganized and (to be quite honest) unattractive many of these early/mythological prostitutes were. Thank goodness for progress in both fashion and prostitution, because the Whore of Babylon sounds a lot like a garden-variety monster, as opposed to a sultry, swinging lady of the night.
“Being a hooker does not mean being evil. The same with a pick-pocket, or even a thief. You do what you do out of necessity.”
—Samuel Fuller, American director, screenwriter
With a large tattoo on her forehead that reads, “MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH” one is left marveling at (A) what lengths some people will go to for attention, and (B) how big her forehead must have been.
A close reading of the text suggests that not only was “Mystery” a tattooed ghoul, she was also as big as a house. Actually, she’s even bigger than a house: “And the woman which thou sawest is [a] great city, which reigns over the kings of the earth.” That’s thick. The Whore of Babylon might be just a metaphor, but in any case, if you’re the devil, you’ve got to take pretty much any piece of ass that comes your way.
Fat, faithless, freaky streetwalking fiends drunk “with the blood of saints” aren’t for everybody, but the Bible tells us: “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Does this admonition apply to the Antichrist, one wonders? Even a fiend needs a friend once in a while.
PROFILE
DAY JOBS: Resident skeezer; temple harlot
CLAIM TO FAME: Civilizing mankind
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Mesopotamia
It’s 2500 B.C. in Mesopotamia, and Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, is sitting pretty in Sumer. He’s two parts God and one part man, and he’s running around acting like a damned fool. Meathead that he is, Gilgamesh challenges every man he sees to a heavy-lifting competition, which he knows he will inevitably win, as do the men he challenges. It is nowhere near sporting, and the men of Uruk are getting fed up. Aggravating the situation further, after Gilgamesh exhausts the men of Uruk, he moves from house to house having sex with their wives.
Luckily for the male population of Uruk, the goddess Aruru, who created mankind, took note of Gilgamesh’s habit of taking unfair advantage, and she sought to create a foil, a rival of sorts, for Gilgamesh. The ancient poem The Epic of Gilgamesh explains what followed:
Aruru washed her hands, she pinched off some clay, and threw it into the wilderness.
In the wild she created valiant Enkidu,
born of Silence, endowed with strength by Ninurta.
His whole body was shaggy with hair,
he had a full head of hair like a woman,
his locks billowed in profusion like Ashnan.
He knew neither people nor settled living,
but wore a garment like Sumukan.
He ate grasses with the gazelles,
and jostled at the watering hole with the animals;
as with animals, his thirst was slaked with water.
Aruru must have been a little disappointed in her creation, because a dude who eats grass and jostles animals is probably no improvement over Gilgamesh. Where is his wit, his tact, and his ability to engage in airy persiflage? Is he even a grown ass man?
This is where Shamhat, the Mesopotamian streetwalker, steps into the jam:
Shamhat unclutched her bosom, exposed her sex, and he took in her voluptuousness.
She was not restrained, but took his energy.
She spread out her robe and he lay upon her,
she performed for the primitive the task of womankind.
His lust groaned over her;
for six days and seven nights Enkidu stayed aroused,
and had intercourse with the harlot
until he was sated with her charms.
Having taken all the starch out of Enkidu, Shamhat convinces him to go into town and give Gilgamesh a run for his money; man up a little, you know? A bunch of shepherds clean him up, give him a nice haircut and send him off to the city of Uruk, where folks think he looks a lot like Gilgamesh, the guy he is supposed to stop from cock-blocking every man in town.
Shamhat encourages Enkidu to relax, try to fit in with the locals. She urges him, “Eat the food, Enkidu, it is the way one lives. / Drink the beer, as is the custom of the land.” Enkidu gets a little carried away. He “ate the food until he was sated, he drank the beer—seven jugs!” Uh-oh.
Drinking seven jugs of beer in one sitting is a pretty solid showing, but do you ever wonder who among us has been the most hooched-up, like, ever? Though you won’t find it in any reputable book of records, in 2004, Pyotr Petrov, a sixty-seven-year-old Bulgarian national’s blood alcohol content (BAC) was measured at an astonishing .91 percent, the highest BAC on record. The lethal limit usually kicks in around .40 percent. According to doctors, Mr. Petrov was not only not dead, but he chatted amicably with his doctors. Petrov’s curriculum vitae is presumably under review by the League of Extraordinary Alcoholics and the Blind Drunk Avengers.
Enkidu heads out to ambush Gilgamesh, but Gilgamesh puts the over-served new guy on his prat. Alas, after the first two tablets of The Epic of Gilgamesh, Shamhat doesn’t figure, and so like some shitty Sumerian buddy movie, Gilgamesh and his foil, the now calm, relatively collected, and sober Enkidu, take off on a juvenile camping trip around Mesopotamia playing grab-ass and “slaying monsters.” So in spite of Shamhat’s best efforts, The Epic of Gilgamesh, a seminal work from one of the world’s most formidable empires, ends up reading a lot like Tango & Cash.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Food cart proprietor
CLAIM TO FAME: Ireland’s favorite moll
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Dublin
Molly Malone is not just the name of a seedy Irish bar; it’s also the name of an iconic figure in the annals of whoredom. The eponymous Molly may or may not have been an actual streetwalker in Ireland during the closing years of the seventeenth century. Legend and lyrics, however, have it that one Molly Malone, a down-on-her-luck fishmonger-cum-part-time hussy was found dead on the corner of what are now Grafton and Suffolk streets in Dublin. A woman of unsurpassed beauty and infected with any number of venereal diseases, Molly was said to have plied her trade from Grafton Street and St. Stephen’s Green to the ivory tower at Trinity College. University environments are notorious havens for cockles, mussels, and assorted deviants.
How and why did sweet Molly die? Some claim VD; the more naive presume food poisoning (cockles and mussels can go bad before you know it). But more importantly, how did Molly live? What was she like? The truth is, nobody is really certain. Some historians claim that she was the mistress of King Charles II, while others stick closer to the script, arguing that she was just an omnipresent nuisance to most of Dublin who went up and down the streets screaming about crustaceans. Still others aver that she was simply the personification of your every-day Irish harlot.
Whatever your gullibility quotient, you can travel to Dublin today and behold the statue of Molly Malone erected at Grafton and Suffolk. In what is assuredly a warped interpretation of how a destitute seventeenth-century Irish prostitute might actually look, the Molly in the statue appears vigorous and free of cooties, though she is pushing a wheelbarrow full of dead fish and wearing a revealing dress out of which her breasts are jockeying for egress.
In many ways, the Irish are much like us, creating their own peculiar religions, mythologies, superheroes, and saints to explain away another society gone maniac. Take the story of St. Brigid, Ireland’s unofficial patron saint of the open bar. As one legend goes, Brigid was doing community service in a leper colony when the lepers ran out of beer, so Brigid stepped up and changed the lepers’ bath water into brew.
And if you’re looking to say the official Irish prayer in honor of St. Brigid, here it is:
“I’d like a great lake of beer for the King of Kings.
I would like to be watching Heaven’s family drinking it through
all eternity.”
Amen.
Nobody can say for sure if Molly was indeed real, although the Dublin Millennium Commission proclaimed June 13, the alleged date of her death, as “Molly Malone Day,” which the Irish celebrate by getting trashed and having messy sex. This is pretty much like all other days in the land of Erin, but at least on Molly Malone Day they have a somewhat legitimate excuse.
PROFILE
DAY JOBS: Largely ignored advice columnist/prophet
CLAIM TO FAME: Lived as both a man and a woman
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Ancient Greece
Zeus and Hera, as you know from Clash of the Titans (the old, good, bad version, not the new, bad, bad version) or maybe from school, were always fussing at each other. One argument they couldn’t settle was the one about whether men or women get more enjoyment out of sex. You could make the argument that it only makes sense to discuss this issue on a case-by-case basis. However, if you are one of the gods living high on Mount Olympus, you can manipulate mortals any old way you want. You can even set up an experiment in which the control variable is also the dependent variable, and thereby get a definitive answer about who gets more pleasure out of a roll in the hay.
Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, was the subject of just such an experiment. You may recognize Tiresias from The Odyssey, Antigone, or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, stories in which he gives people excellent advice that they rarely take. Indeed, Tiresias was the Rodney Dangerfield of the Aegean: He got no respect.
As if he didn’t have enough to worry about, Hera punished Tiresias severely when he killed two snakes with a stick while the snakes were making sweet, serpentine love. Outraged, the goddess sentenced Tiresias to spend a period of seven years as a woman. If you’re wrestling with the question of whether this punishment fits the crime, just give it up—the Greeks had a dizzying system of torts.
As a woman, Lady Tiresias totally thrived, finding that (s)he really cottoned to the idea of prostitution. (S)he, accumulated all sorts of wealth and valuable experiences from the other side of the gender fence, too. One has a finite amount of energy of course, sexual or otherwise, and toward the end of his tenure as a woman, Tiresias ran out of steam and had to eventually settle down, marry a nice man, and give birth to a son. One wonders how family reunions, locker room hijinks, and bachelor/bachelorette parties were handled during—and after—Tiresias’s “transformation.”
Has anybody ever told you to “go fuck yourself”? It’s called “autocopulation.” But if you’re thinking of making a superpower clone warrior baby, you’re out of luck, says my narrow-minded therapist, Dr. Guerrero. Even if you have both sets of parts, you can’t reproduce, unless you are a species of hermaphroditic worm, like C. elegans. And for your XXX files, there is also something called “autopederasty,” and it’s not as felonious as it sounds, but it’s a doozy. Defined as an “uncommon occurrence of a man, one with an unusually long penis, inserting his penis into his own anus. Due to the position and detumescence of the penis, ejaculation is not considered possible.” Nothing is impossible, you cynical dictionary.
As for the blindness, there are two possibilities. One, Tiresias may have seen Athena naked—something that drives Athena crazy—thus incurring her wrath and in a fit of furor, she poked his eyes out. The other, much more plausible explanation is that eventually, Zeus and Hera got around to querying Tiresias about what he had learned in his time as a woman. They asked her/him, “Which sex enjoys greater pleasure in the act of lovemaking?” Now, Hera was still pissed at her/him for the snakes thing, and she was increasingly furious with Zeus for being such a philandering oaf. In fact, the couple almost came to thunderbolts, when Zeus claimed he had a right to sleep around, because women derived more pleasure from sex than men. When posed with the question, Tiresias answered,
If the sum of love’s pleasures adds up to ten,
nine parts go to women, only one to men.
Hera wasn’t pleased with this response, and promptly had Tiresias’s eyeballs removed from their sockets. Zeus, feeling bad about his wife’s poor sportsmanship, gave her/him the gift of foresight, which was nice, but still doesn’t explain why the old galoot didn’t duck out of the way when one of Apollo’s arrows sailed across a lake and ran Tiresias through a few years later.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Creationist
CLAIM TO FAME: African river goddess
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Nigeria
Oshun has seen it all, literally. She was (and is) said to be present at all functions and family gatherings as a kind of mother/spirit to look over the proceedings. But if you’re thinking this goddess is some matronly old crone who spends her days baking bundt cakes, you’ve got another think coming. And as far as mothers go, they don’t get much tougher than Oshun.
“Madaming is the sort of thing that happens to you— like getting a battlefield commission or becoming the dean of women at Stanford University.”
—Sally Stanford
In African Yoruba legend, Oshun was one of seventeen deities, or orisha, whose charge was to civilize the untamed Earth. Sixteen of these deities were male, and only one—Oshun—was female. As you may have guessed, all sixteen male deities misspent their time on Earth. They may have thrown some rocks around and played in the mud, but they did nothing to improve the world. The Earth remained a bone-dry wasteland, uncivilized, thirsty, and howling for happy hour. Oshun tried mightily to convince these obstinate ogres that she was holding some pharmaceutical grade water and that a little H2O could make a big difference, but she was unsuccessful. The world began to rot. Finally, at a loss, the guys went to consult an oracle, which rightfully gave them what for. There is absolutely no record of the following exchange:
Oracle: (impatiently mashing up a bunch of yams) What’s up, bitches?
Ted, one of the sixteen orisha: (to colleagues) I got this, fellas. Uh . . . yeah, hi there, oracle. We’re in a bit of a jam.
Oracle: Why am I not surprised?
Ted: Hey, why all this attitude? We said we were sorry—we’ll never ask for Lotto numbers again. So, anyway, this Earth thing is turning into a real turkey. The land looks good, but sort of arid, and we’ve got all these beach chairs and cocktail umbrellas with nowhere to put ’em.
Oracle: Have you asked Oshun over there for help?
Ted: Oh, come on! She’s a chick. She’s going to invent rom-coms or Us Weekly or some other damned shit.
Oshun: Ted, if you say one more word, I’m going to rip off that eerie excuse for a child’s penis of yours and throw it into the North Atlantic Desert.
Oracle: She’s not kidding, Ted. Look, I’ve seen her do it. Why don’t you just let her do her thing with the water?
Ted: What in the fuck is water? Why do we come here?
The Oracle nods at Oshun, who snaps her fingers, inundating the Earth with rivers, lakes, oceans, rum runners, and piña coladas. Ted and the other orisha fellows roll their eyes contemptuously and storm out of the Oracle’s studio, a schooner in the (as of a few moments ago) North Atlantic Ocean. The cries of orisha echo in the distance, as they float out to sea, until one of them invents kickboards, saving the deities from certain doom.
But let’s not get all hung up on this mythical twaddle. According to documented legend, the oracle explained to the orisha that if they had only bothered to satisfy the needs of women (read Oshun) they would not have run into problems in the first place. Not being complete fools, the men all begged forgiveness from Oshun and urged her to let them please her in the sack. Oh, hell no, thought Oshun, making sure that none of her male consorts gave her pleasure until they paid up and paid early. And they did. Perhaps not coincidentally, Oshun is also the goddess of the marketplace and of driving hard bargains. Sorry, fellas.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Sinner
CLAIM TO FAME: Palled around with Jesus
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Galilee
It’s curious how hackles rise when someone goes and mentions that Mary Magdalene, Jesus’s BFF with whom he hoofed it around Galilee, was a flatbacker. The problem is that a lady looking a lot like Ms. Magdalene betrays a foot fetish and anoints Jesus’s funky bunions with her tears and a variety of ointments. Luke 7:36–50:
And behold, a woman in the city who was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at the table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of fragrant oil, and stood at His feet behind Him weeping; and she began to wash His feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head; and she kissed His feet and anointed them with the fragrant oil. Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he spoke to himself, saying, “This Man, if He were a prophet, would know who and what manner of woman this is who is touching Him, for she is a sinner.
You’ll admit there is some sexy ambiguity during this exchange. Also, when it comes down to it, everybody likes a foot rub, and what’s more, when is a foot rub just a foot rub? Never. To quote John Travolta’s character Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction:
I ain’t saying it’s right. But you’re saying a foot massage don’t mean nothing, and I’m saying it does. Now, look, I’ve given a million ladies a million foot massages, and they all meant something. We act like they don’t, but they do, and that’s what’s so fucking cool about them.
He does have a point. Well, a little later on down the line, we learn that there were “certain women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities.” One was “Mary, called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils.” This passage has led some to conflate the godless prosty grooving on Jesus’s toes and the woman who is at Jesus’s side during his crucifixion and his burial, the one who first discovers the empty tomb after Jesus hits the road. A fierce debate continues to rage about whether or not Mary Magdalene was in fact a prostitute. Some of the faithful just don’t want to hear it. A typical exchange:
“She was.”
“Was not.”
“Was too.”
“Was not.”
“… ”
“… ”
“Was.”
Of course, the Mary Magdalene dispute is a mere squabble compared to the correlation-causation brawls concerning Jesus screaming at a fig tree in chapter 11 of Mark. Why the tree wilts overnight after Jesus gives it a hollering is the source of a quarrel that has split theologians and arborists into two snarling camps, creating a powder keg environment and a rift that may never heal.
After the fig tree goes down, Jesus offers a challenge to Peter (and anyone else who cared to listen):
For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.
One of the great biblical mysteries is why nobody takes Jesus up on this offer. I, for one, would relish shouting, “be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea!” at various inanimate objects, even if nothing happened.
PROFILE
DAY JOBS: Model; blasphemer
CLAIM TO FAME: Pulling a “Kanye” at the Festival of Poseidon
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Ancient Greece
“Hey there, I’m Mnesarete—looking for some company?”
“You’re who?”
“Mnesarete!”
“How do you spell it?”
“You don’t spell it honey, you take it out on the town. Maybe a little conversation, a little night life; you know, some companionship.”
“This seems like a sting. I’m going down to the agora, where the real whores are,” the insensitive ancient Greek frat boy would say, and Mnesarete would walk back to her crib, broke, incensed, and cursing her name.
Luckily, Mnesarete possessed a beauty rivaled by few mortals, which is still impressive even if you acknowledge there were far fewer mortals back then. She was also possessed of enough business savvy to recognize that changing her name to “Phryne” (literally, toad) would arouse much more interest among members of the local john population of Athens. The name-change worked wonders for Phryne, and her beauty is celebrated to this day in works of prose, paint, and plaster all over the world.
The Greek cynic, Diogenes, was an extraordinarily far-out individual. He lived in a bathtub in an Athens marketplace, where he made a lot of noise about the “simple life” being the virtuous life. He claimed to be emulating the virtues of Hercules, who would never have slept in a bathtub and must have been embarrassed to death by this patchouli-oiled hothead wannabe. After seeing a man drink water with his hands, Diogenes even gave away his last bit of crockery, a cup, and spent the rest of his days lapping up drink like a be-togaed baboon and subsisting primarily on a diet of rancid onions. That’s not all. Most Athenians saw as obnoxious his desultory daylight treks through the city while carrying a lit lantern and claiming to be searching for “one honest man.” Nobody was devastated when pirates finally captured Diogenes and sold him into slavery.
Phryne knew it was important to make an eye-catching entrance when she re-entered the market and set out to court new clients. After some career-counseling and real-time training on the island of Lesbos—the alleged training ground for up-and-coming prostitutes—Phryne announced her presence with authority at the Festival of Poseidon in Eleusis, where she took it all off “in sight of the whole Greek world.”
As you can imagine, the calls came roaring in. Not only did Phryne serve as the model for Praxiteles’s statues of Venus, she became courtesan to the Greek elite: the philosopher Diogenes (for whom she gave it up for free), the King of Lydia, and the Athenian leader Demosthenes, among other notables, were among her clients and confidants.
When the beautiful blasphemer finally roiled up enough jealousy and scandal in Athens, it was decided that her little nudie shuffle into the Aegean foam was a profanity against Poseidon, and folks demanded she face prosecution. Her case was taken up by the Johnnie Cochran of the day, a famous orator named Hypereides—another of Phryne’s celebrity clients.
Plutarch describes a circus trial:
When she was on trial for impiety he became her advocate; for he makes this plain himself at the beginning of his speech. And when she was likely to be found guilty, he led the woman out into the middle of the court and, tearing off her clothes, displayed her breasts. When the judges saw her beauty, she was acquitted.
If she shows a tit, you must acquit. Now that’s both working it and owning it. After the trial, much of Phryne’s life was the subject of speculation, which is good, because it’s titillating to speculate on Phryne easing into an even steamier existence, away from the prohibitions of Athens and deep into the drug-fueled rave/courtesan scene gaining traction on the island of Ibiza.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Doing the best she can
CLAIM TO FAME: Mention her name twice in a row and see …
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Jericho
Another of the Bible’s more popular whores is Rahab, a wily minx from Jericho, the city featured prominently in the Book of Joshua. Note: She is not to be confused with Rahab, the teeth-gnashing sea leviathan that haunts Isaiah. That is an entirely different Rahab whose livelihood depends on a more biblically acceptable occupation of eating (as in consuming) her fellow human beings.
Our Rahab is equally ferocious, however, in her horizontal way. We first encounter the hooker, Rahab, managing a brothel in downtown Jericho, where two Hebrew spies who need to lay low and maybe party a little, approach her. Rahab is sympathetic to the spies, and is kind enough to hide them in some flax when local soldiers arrive at her place to arrest the operatives.
“Rahab! There’s a rumor going around that you’re harboring a couple of Jewish spies. Is that true?” the uppity Egyptian cadre want to know.
“What would ever give you that idea?” the coquette replies.
“Well, if I’m not mistaken, I see a couple of circumcised fellows hiding under that pile of barley oats behind you,” says the head of the search party.
“Any society that can’t distinguish between flax and barley deserves to fall,” says Rahab portentously. The soldier murmurs his annoyance, but local custom prevents men from entering Rahab’s whorehouse uninvited, so they eventually disperse. In Joshua 2:9–13, Rahab then explains her end of the bargain to the spies with a kind of entrepreneurial spirit that inspires prospective MBAs to this day:
Now then, please swear to me by the LORD that you will show kindness to my family, because I have shown kindness to you. Give me a sure sign that you will spare the lives of my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them, and that you will save us from death.
Looking to satisfy your wildest desires, or just browse around, visiting live sex shows, sex museums, and night freaks on display in the windows? Here is a quick roll call of some of the world’s top red-light districts:
BOY’S TOWN, NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO: Here, prostitution is controlled by the state, which is odd, considering the many available activities that just couldn’t be legal.
DE WALLEN, AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS: The grand dame of red light districts, this area is an unforgiving maze of alleyways where you can get really, really lost.
REEPERBAHN, HAMBURG, GERMANY: Once home to the Beatles, the Reeperbahn area today contains more pictures in shop windows of people eating literal shit than you could ever imagine.
KAMATHIPURA, MUMBAI, INDIA: This red light district is Asia’s largest, and was originally imagined as a refuge for British soldiers during the Raj.
SOI COWBOY, BANGKOK, THAILAND: The district is named after T. G. “Cowboy” Edwards, who opened one of the first bars there in 1977. Because you go there for the history.
The spies agree, telling her to hang a piece of red cloth outside of her house, so they’ll know not to butcher her and her family along with the rest of the city. On a side note, this instance of hanging something red outside one’s window is said to be the genesis of the idea behind today’s “red-light districts,” the low hum of the bulb now replacing the flutter of the fabric.
In one of the more lopsided victories in history, the Jews walked around the perimeter of Jericho for a week, playing little trumpets and waiting. Then, at the end of the week, Joshua tells everyone to either shout really loud, or start blowing on his or her trumpet. It works and the walls of Jericho fall, leaving the city to be sacked and every man, woman, and child killed except for Rahab and her peeps.
All Biblical savagery aside, perhaps the most compelling fact about Rahab is that, according to the Babylonian Talmud, one only needs to mention her name twice in a row to inspire paroxysms of lust, and instant ejaculation. This goes way beyond the pedestrian positions employed by your average prostitute, and it goes a long way toward explaining the inevitable approach/avoidance conflict a young boy suffers when reading the Shlach Lecha at his bar mitzvah.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Indentured servant
CLAIM TO FAME: Texas hero, maybe
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: The Lone Star State
The Yellow Rose of Texas is one of the truly enigmatic figures in whoredom. Some folk claim that the most famous (or infamous) whore in Texas was indeed no whore at all. If we are to believe the legend, Emily West, a “freed woman of color,” was integral to the Texans’ defeat of Santa Anna’s army at San Jacinto.
While travelling to Texas from the north, Ms. West runs into Captain James Morgan, who offers her a bright future as an indentured servant and prostitute on his Texas ranch. She weighs her options, recognizes that as an African American woman she has few, if any; and becomes the captain’s concubine. When Santa Anna’s army comes charging through in 1836, West literally charms the pants off the opium-addled general himself. Santa Anna kills everybody else on the ranch and picks up West as a replacement for his stay-at-home wife in Mexico City, along with his “travelling wife” who had to turn back when her ornate and unwieldy carriage was unable to cross a particularly treacherous puddle.
One of the really compelling myths out there is that “The Yellow Rose of Texas” is a tune written by none other than the recluse of Amherst and one of America’s greatest poets, Emily Dickinson. How the hell did this rumor get started? Perhaps because Dickinson often uses a form called “running (or common) meter.” Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins explains:
This is the meter of a lot of ballads. It’s the meter of Protestant hymns. It’s the rhythm of many nursery rhymes … almost every one of [Dickinson’s] poems can be sung whether you like it or not to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
Like it? We love it.
Then, just before the Battle of San Jacinto, West seizes the moment: she entices Santa Anna to blow a little opium and get naked before the Texans’ attack. Things take a turn for the worse for the Mexicans, who are forced to flee over shouts of “Remember the Alamo” from the Texans and “¡Pinche mierda! Somebody grab my pantalones,” from Santa Anna. The order was apparently ignored, as the general was captured the next day in nothing but a linen shirt and his undies. Emily West is then celebrated as a hero of the Texas Republic, and even today, patriotic, potbellied Texans gather around campfires to sing about the Yellow Rose of Texas.
What the hell does that anachronistic claptrap have to do with Emily West? Not much, really. Her actual life was one of unbelievable hardship and oppression, void of the romantic notion that she somehow sacrificed her body for the good of the Texas Republic. But, we love our myths, and so the Yellow Rose of Texas endures as a symbol of Texas independence and whoredom across the ages, while the song that bears her name also remains in circulation, serving as an inspiration for besotted yokels who see nothing wrong in uttering the word “darky.”
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Spinster
CLAIM TO FAME: Infamous samurai groupie
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Ancient Japan
Everybody knows that when a spider turns 400 years old, it is granted special powers. Specifically, the spider can shape-shift into a super-hot hussy, lure busters into her trailer, and rock a lute solo that so entrances her audience that they sit there grooving to her licks while she spins a spider web around them, eventually devouring her captive clients whenever she’s feeling a little peckish. Sounds familiar, right? No? Well it would, if you were a three-centuries-old half-digested samurai, or perhaps a historian.
Jorogumo (literally “prostitute spider”) was an alleged hustler during Japan’s Edo period, and she’s not for amateurs. Y’all just ain’t ready. As legend has it, the Jorogumos’ (there are a few scurrying about in the literature) primary concern is to marry a samurai, or at least eat one. If you were fortunate enough to possess samurai characteristics (loyalty, obedience, and perhaps a letter of recommendation) you were, unfortunately, fair game for Jorogumos. Here’s how it would typically go down:
A samurai, fresh from some battle, comes upon a lake fed by a silver waterfall and squats to wash all the blood and crap off himself, take a drink of water, etc.
SAMURAI: All this killing. And for what? A stratospheric bill from Takeuchi’s cleaners, that’s what. Ah, me.
Jorogumo, in spider mode, creeps up on the samurai, showing an octet of thin naked legs. As described in legend, she “has a long, slender back, and a pointed rear end with long black limbs. Its thread is sticky like bird-lime and is tinged with yellow.”
SAMURAI: Eek! A spider! Beat it!
The samurai flutters his hands wildly at Jorogumo, and then falls into the lake. The samurai’s awkward attempt to right himself and regain his composure causes his metallic armor to clang. He sees Jorogumo, now in smoking super-model form.
SAMURAI: Oh my! Hi there. How un-bushido of me. Jesus, I feel like I could just die. In fact . . .
The samurai readies himself for seppuku, or ritual suicide.
JOROGUMO: Hey, not so fast, sweet cheeks. No need to go overboard.
SAMURAI: You don’t think so?
JOROGUMO: Nah. C’mon, come over here and kick off your boots and armor. Let’s party at my place. Get you out of that wet steel.
SAMURAI: (pumps fist) Yes!
JOROGUMO: (rolls her eyes) Dipshit.
Then it’s back to Jorogumo’s place for some heavy petting and lute playing. They make love for a few minutes, the samurai collapses in amorous exhaustion and in the morning, there’s Jorogumo, back in spider mode, tying up loose ends in the web she’s made to contain the samurai. The samurai tries to move, but he’s stuck in the brilliant, gossamer thread.
SAMURAI: Damnit! You’re that whore-spider everybody’s been talking about.
JOROGUMO: (laughs deviously) Indeed.
SAMURAI: Perhaps we could compromise? Like you can spider out during the day, but then you whore-out again at night? What say?
In this moment, Jorogumo spits hot acid on the face of the samurai, sucking away his skin with a staccato, arachnoid slurp.
JOROGUMO: Eat your heart out, Peter Parker.
Jorogumo lets loose a happy belch, then plops down on her futon, fondling her throbbing lung slits and rearranging her epigastric plates, slick with love and digestive fluid.
Myths often feature grains of truth about nature, and the legend of Jorogumo is no different. Researchers at the Zoological Institute in Hamburg, Germany, performed experiments at a kind of spider orgy, discovering that a female spider normally enforces a “ten-second rule,” which ensures her mate makes things snappy and gets the hell out before she loses patience and devours the boys, Jorogumo style.
PROFILE
DAY JOB: Succubus
CLAIM TO FAME: Sacred angel of prostitution
THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Eden and surrounding area
The Zohar is the chief text of the Jewish Kabbalah, and it’s typically seen as an allegorical or mystical interpretation of the Torah. Since the Torah has most of the good action (the Bible is more Merchant/Ivory, the Torah is all Michael Bay), you can imagine the Zohar gets pretty radical. And it is in the Zohar that we encounter Naamah, although to be fair, like most religions, there’s cross-pollination all over the place, so the Zoharistas can’t totally claim her, nor can anyone else (even the Satanists have tried to bring her in). That said, apologies if your religion claims Naamah as the queen of Tupperware or the wife of Criss Angel or some other damned thing. The point is, she’s all over the place and she’s coming to bonk your brains out, then take your soul, if not your bankroll.
First of all, Naamah is the daughter of Cain, whom you may remember from such holy episodes as “Killing My Brother with Agricultural Tongs” and “Wandering around East of Eden with a Note on My Head.” And yes, Naamah was probably another fiery redhead, like her pops. You don’t hear much about her, though, which is surprising, since she was, according to many sources, the most beautiful woman in the world, although we’ve heard that one enough to know better by now. And, she was a demon, which everyone can get bullish about.
In the Zohar, Naamah is portrayed as the wily witch of fuck—a little demon who creep into a man’s room while the moon is waning, has sex with him in order to become pregnant so she can spawn more demons. No money changes hands, nothing tangible anyway like ducats or shekels, and it doesn’t really seem like rape, so why is she considered a prostitute? Because ancient religious texts tells us so, that’s why. This logic will frustrate a historian every time.
“To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo.”
—Valerie Solanas
In the Bible (Genesis 4:22), Naamah is the daughter of Lamech and Zillah. In the Talmud (Genesis Rabba 27), she’s Noah’s wife. What? Did you think Noah’s wife was Emzara, the daughter of Rake’el? Complicating matters further, some scholars claim that Naamah was a male. An issue like this calls for primary sources, but the quest to locate the genesis of the Naamah prostitution myth in the holy texts is a fool’s errand. She (or he, or it) is a vital virago in the racy retinue of sex workers, but like a succubus, it’s there, you just can’t feel the damage until the cock crows.