Be a whore and own the insult

It seems incredible that living in the West and surfing the murky waves of exclusive feminism and racism, we still have to explain notions of equality, such as the powerful reappropriation of the insult. Itziar Ziga said it in her bible Devenir perra [Becoming a whore]: “You can only be a whore, bitch or slut when someone else says it, not when you say it.” Because otherwise all hell breaks loose. We did not leave the spectators’ stand during the European feminism tournament against European feminism until we did.

A few weeks ago, in this newspaper, Tokischa, a young, Latin woman of color, called herself a whore. Tokischa demonstrated that she didn’t need anyone, least of all a journalist or a Spanish fashion magazine, to say it, and flagged up the concept of being a whore as something that goes beyond the sexual. She also engaged in a critique of the prostitution system. But maternalism is characterized by not listening to its daughters. Civilized feminism sees them as naive victims of the system and of themselves.

Moroccan-Spanish writer Najat el Hachmi does with whores what white feminism — that feminism which she has internalized — does with headscarf feminists and trans women. Either we are submissive or we are men. She wrote in a column: just because I am sexually liberated, do not call me a whore because there is only one whore and that is the slave. I don’t look for nuances in this political agenda. Tokischa talks in EL PAÍS’ SModa fashion and beauty supplement about labor slavery, but prostitution abolitionists do not like to talk about economic inequality because then they would no longer be total victims. If they ever ate poorly, they’ve already forgotten it. Let’s look at racism not through the eyes of others, as I didn’t notice anyone throwing up their hands when Paula Ribó's feminist Spanish musical act Rigoberta Bandinl sang the words: “I was born to be a whore.”

I would like to live in a world in which the exploited did not point the finger at others who are also exploited. But I live in this one. To proclaim an identity that was once oppressive, but today is liberating — including whore, sudaka (an insult towards South Americans) and mora (insult towards North Africans) — is disciplining. It triggers incomprehension on the part of those who continue trying to fold identities into the old conventional boxes.

When the word whore is in fashion, whorephobia spikes. “Even our own people want to padlock our mouths,” said feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa, adding: “Hear how the language of the frontier barks.” I hear that bark every day, I can’t forget that I once jumped across the border and wore the muzzle. We learned so much from the whores Tokischa talks about — the paid and unpaid ones — and from the vagabond whores in our poor and peripheral neighborhoods. The crises taught us reciprocity. The emblematic figure of the willing female on the one hand, raped and beaten on the other, has long been a mirror for radical tenderness. Seeing ourselves in the other makes us strong against the Nazi wolf packs. In her short story Bestias, Chilean author Arelis Uribe describes an encounter between a girl, alone and drunk, who wants to get home, and a female dog furtively mated by a German shepherd. We know that this pair of whores will walk away together but without a leash tethering them together.

“We women can be horrible,” says one of the characters in Perras de reserva, a book by Mexican author Dahlia de la Cerda that portrays several whores who remonstrate in their own way with violence. Ecuadorian María Fernanda Ampuero imagined a woman saving herself from being auctioned off thanks to the blood on her tongue and her brutally coordinated sphincters. Not everything that a woman is capable of doing to escape male violence has been written. But it will be.

So, this is an invitation to be whores. To show it when we’re horny and hopefully with the cash register ringing madly. Let’s not apply supremacy to desire. And don’t appropriate mine. Let’s be whores in and out of bed, against the State, before the boss, in the street and on the borders. I invite you to disregard the conservative judgments of the new libertarians. And to come crawling out of the history of the sexual revolution, of philosopher Michel Foucault and freedom as privilege. Keep your theories; we already make our own stories, says the Tucuman philosopher, Carolina Meloni.

In what Najat calls “villages in the middle of nowhere,” seeds of revolution sprout daily. We teach our offspring to respect the older whore. Respect them too. Call us what you want, but with respect. Don’t colonize us.

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