Funny Little Whore

Sonja (1928) by Christian Schad

There are statistics. They tell us things about . . . the numbers of casualties in war, the amount of time the average person spends standing in front of the average painting in the average museum, the number of slaves that fit on a triangular trade ship. Statistics. They provide some type of comfort. But they tell us nothing about the way any of these things feel or what they mean. We invent that part or intuit it because we are rarely told.

I am not an expert in the subject area I am about to embark upon. It is weird that I am not an expert because I have been hearing about it my entire life. I don't feel as though I know many of the facts. It would be comfortable to frame my suppositions in numbers and rely on mathmatics as if 'math' was the same thing as 'truth,' but I am going to do something much more radical than that. I am going to tell a story about the world through art and direct observation.

Before I get started I need to provide some context to the reader. I am a United States citizen writing in the year 2007. I am 27 years of age. I am queer.

Recently my lover and I went to a show at the Metropolitain Museum of Art entitled "Glitter and Doom: German Portraits From the 1920s." The show features t ten Weimar German artists doing portrait work between the world wars. I had studied the artist that recieved the bulk of the focus at the show, Otto Dix, in school. Without digging out my notebooks for specifics, I remember feeling indifferent towards his work and, if forced to choose, I guess I would say I had felt more positively than negatively about it.

I had a professor in art school who tried to make the argument once that Diane Arbus' photographs were "funny." I found it infuriating that he read her work as humorous. My teacher said she was, "allowing us to laugh at all the freaks of nature." I felt very differently. I think Diane Arbus purposely sought out the biggest freaks she could find, the most stereotypically marginalized individuals to show us their humanity: the old, overweight drag queen with a bored little dog nestled in the crook of her elbow, the porn star overwhelmed by the graphic prints in her ultra-modern apartment, the beautiful woman in a bikini top with the marks from her outdoor chair pressed into the flesh of her back.

At any rate, I think my teacher was much more accurately describing the work of Otto Dix. His work is all bored contempt, disgust, bigotry and hatred. The paintings are described as veristic, but really they go beyond verism into chariacature. And they are mean chariacatures. As we walked from room to room I became more and more disgusted with Otto Dix. Maxine Gerber was shown as an old snobbish ghost, black jazz musician were painted with pure black pigment and their features were distorted until they looked subhuman.

Finally my girlfriend, The Activist, and I stopped in front of a recently rediscovered Dix painting, Woman with a Mink (1920).


Woman with Mink (1920) by Otto Dix

I grunted. The Activist grunted back. She said, "I am really sick of this Dix shit." I said, "Me too. His work lacks all compassion."

Just then I heard a squeal over my shoulder, "OOOOhhh, I LIKE that one." A thirty-something, well-to-do former sorrority sister came breezing by us, smelling like *rich people and dripping in well weighted, yet understated fabrics (supple leather, natural hemp, linen, etc). "Just look at the funny little whore. Hahaha. This makes me laugh."

In shock I reached for my notebook.

The picture shows, cruelly, a woman who has been ravaged by poverty, hunger, brutality and unsafe sex. It is mean. It is accusatory. It is savage. I was struck by how incredibly dumb this woman was and how it was quite likely that she offended people all day long, taxi drivers, door men, checkout clerks. It was hard to stand there and have a person with money, power and good looks laugh cooly at an image of a person who had nothing but a vagina to get her through the world.

I have a number of friends who have been involved in the sex industry to one degree or another. Most of them are women. Most of them did sex work because they were poor. None of them were professional prostitutes. But for all of them, it seems like it started as the most casual of things. One friend was dating a drug dealer, she would give him head in exchange for coke. One friend would blow her ex for rent and grocery money. To me these relationships don't seem any different than marriage with the exception that the bartering is much more open and honest and each person has the option of looking elsewhere.

I could tell, though, that the woman with the fabric didn't know too many "whores." She probably thinks all the sex she had with frat boys in college was concesual. She probably doesn't think that her sexual prowess or lack there of was a bartering point in her marrying rich. She may even feel a little trampy, now, when she has sex without the express purpose of having children. And that little kinkiness, sex for sex sake, really turns her into a wild woman. She sometimes wears red silk underwear and waits for her husband at the door in a little black robe. When he arives she pushes the leather briefcase from his hand and puts her arms inside of his full-length double-breasted winter coat. He smells the $300 perfume he bought her. He looks at her $10,000 face, bought from the best plastics man on Manhatten. He touches her $400 haircut. She grabs him by his strong, round back muscles bought by a $1000 gym membership and 400 hours of hard labor. He loosens his $250 necktie. She scratches him with her $150 manicure and presses her $8000 breasts against his manly pink designer $200 shirt. They move to the bedroom, she is wild with excitement. Her eyes flash. He unzips his gold-plated fly and unleashes his priceless cock. She get on all fours on their $200 sheets. She is moaning and clutching the Egyptian sateen. He pushes into her, "You like that, whore? You want me to give it to you?" She squeezes her eyes shut in anticipation, "Oh, yes, daddy, give it to me hard."

Okay, maybe there is some truth in the numbers.

We were tired when we left the museum. It was New Years Eve. We had walked there 25 blocks from our hotel because no trains were running uptown on the East side of Manhatten. We walked to the nearest downtown train and stuffed ourselves, literally into the car with all the folks looking for a wild time.

As we sat and listened to some opinionated prick go on about all the different express/local train combinations that might be better or faster than tthe one we were on I started to think about Weimar Germany. I wonder if Hitler, too, had been disgusted by Otto Dix. I had heard he was a self-proclaimed artist and that he wanted to paint the world with beautiful people. I wondered if it might have been German Verism that threw him over the edge.

Later, in our hotel room The Activist and I had a bitch-slap fight. It was the kind of fight you have with your siblings when you are home alone. I think she won, as evidenced by the fact that I went for the face first and by the large bruise I had for a week in the place on my left leg where she managed to land 4 or 5 blows in a row because I was giggling too hard to pdefend myself. Afterwards we snuggled.

I would never call her a whore. Not even in play. I just like her too much. It doesn't turn me on to degrade her. Don't get me wrong, I will tie her up and paddle her, or tickle her with feathers on a waterbed or do whatever she asks me to do, but I don't want to hurt her. I don't want to hurt anyone.

Anyway, there was an artist in the show that I liked a lot. His name is Christian Schad. His paintings were of quiet, pained and ghostly people. They were feminist in their emotional quality. They showed women who were liberated not so much through will as necessity. Afterall, we all simply need freedom. We need justice. They aren't ideals, they simply are.

* My sister bought me an expensive face cream for the holidays. When she went to cash out it was quite a bit more expensive than she realized, but she felt pressured into buying it. I actually love it a lot. It smells divine, or as I have taken to saying, "It smells like rich people."