Unsanitized

June 2, 2021 by Maggie McNeill

Today is International Whores' Day. It is not "Sex Worker Day"; that is March 3^rd. Today is a day to shamelessly celebrate our shameless history, not a day to cater to the precious fee-fees of amateurs by neutering our terminology so as not to offend their delicate sensibilities with a raw, unsanitized word like "whore". But for the past several years, I've seen a number of sex worker organizations and social media accounts doing just that, and in doing so participating in the same process of sexual sanitization which inspires modern picket-fence gays to absurdly claim that huge fascist corporations and gangs of uniformed thugs employed by the state to inflict violence on sexual minorities are more welcome at an event commemorating an anti-cop riot than kinky queers are. While the neo-Victorians who dominate 21st-century public discourse ...

...reject the belief that sex is innately bad, they also believe against all reason and evidence that it's something like a radioactive material which must be handled with special and elaborate precautions or else it becomes the single most destructive force on Earth. They imagine that engaging in sex for the "wrong" reasons, or without the benediction of elaborate rituals of consent, or with people separated from one another by more than a very few years of age, is terribly harmful... the desire to describe...sex...as "good" or "bad" is a very strong one, and for the neo-Victorian mind to accept sex into the "good" category it must be ritually purified by amputating all of its darker aspects, branding even the discussion of them as "violence", and even pretending that they aren't even sex at all. This belief flies in the face of reality; sex, fear, dominance and violence are inextricably bound together, and only by living in a state of complete denial can someone pretend that the only valid, "healthy" and legal sex is that which is so sanitized and neutered that it resembles the real thing about as closely as a hamburger does a heifer...

Today is not a day for sanitized words or concepts; it is, in fact, exactly the opposite: a day to fight society's attempts (via law and police violence) to sanitize the wilder, unrulier, more chthonic aspects of sex. This is a day for sexual outlaws, not well-behaved "workers"; it is a day to celebrate the triumphs of criminalized human beings against a society that would rather we didn't exist. It is a day to oppose censorship, not to engage in self-censorship; a day to honor a means of survival that predates laws and governments by eons; and a day to celebrate a power which will always defeat even the most pernicious attempts to domesticate it.