The sacred whore
a meditation on what it means to be called a ‘whore,’ and why this term has been used weapon to silence and erase so many girls and women
“You lie down with the beloved in so many forms, the purists will call you a slut. ”
“Yes I did want attention. I am an attention seeker, and I don’t apologize. ”
whore;
verb
“the sin of wanting too much” (pleasure activism, amb)
i.e. — the feminine curse of demanding something larger than the crumbs of life on her plate.
“....constraining me as the tools of shame and weapons of patriarchy meant to serve as gatekeepers of my ego and ability ”
“Attention is power. When you command attention, you command power, so patriarchy has muddied the waters around attention with “whore.” A word intended to shame is used to convince women that to want attention is to want something shameful. Much like sex. ”
— Mona Eltahawy, Seven Necessary Sins
***
The missed train of desire
I am the horse, and the rider— in pursuit, and persued.
I want so much.
And in the impossible affair between wanting and silence, between possession and loss, between invitation and absence — in the time between a man wanting you and a man changing his mind, you’ve run your hands over the hairs of everything you’ve ever wanted — passing you.
What you want has to want you too.
And it does.
It comes close and often to you— but doesn’t pause long enough for you to untangle your body out of its hesitation.
Again and again, your late and whispered yes spills into the empty space of a visitor you missed. Shame, that suffocating ribbon around the gift of desire, makes a statute out of you at that precise moment when life asks that you come towards her, to receive what she’s come with, for you. When it passes, when it’s too late, suddenly your body becomes a desperate rush of water, seeking again what has just passed.
And each time desire rises, you feel the echoes of the word slut mocking you in the wild storm it pours through your body, shaming you out of a possibility. Conquered by a word, you don’t dare touch what comes to you — this passing scent, seducing you in the almost, in the proximity promising permanence, the desire rising, then falling onto the same empty page, the same quiet room, the same yellow longing. The enormous mountains of this wanting…each day is a touching of the summit, and the valley. I know I am still alive in the way desire punishes me. Like a hungry child, sometimes desire screams, and sometimes it surrenders to the long sleep of a wanting spilled too long into disturbing silence.
I owe it to her punishment that I am still alive today.
***
“When she realized what her situation in the world was and would probably always be she threw away every assumption she had learned and began at zero. First off, she cut her hair...then she tackled the problem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her. When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world? ”
“Attention is power. When you command attention, you command power, so patriarchy has muddied the waters around attention with “whore.” A word intended to shame is used to convince women that to want attention is to want something shameful. Much like sex.”
To remember…
Do you know what it feels like to remember?
To trip over your own escape, and in the falling, stumble on something lost, lost so long ago it never occurred to you even once to recall it back into your life—
a soul inheritance, discarded in the war of your childhood, remaining loyal to you through your long amnesia. It waits for you. And in the intensity of its longing, in the desperation of watching you search, it delivers an enormous rupture, knocking you breathless. From your vulnerable and wounded position, it walks towards you. In the encounter of this stranger, the stolen memory becomes your possession …
There is an exile that rescues, and an exile that buries. A running away that becomes a running into, and a running away that fails you into a running from. A departure that takes too much with it. An escape, caught in the possessive threads of guilt. You leave your father— and with your father.
You carry a no, and beside it a submissive yes you use when the hunger’s too strong. A wild woman has her tools, and in territory where touch is water, she will use the language of the country she arrives in. She laughs when she means to cry, folds her intuition like a winter blanket at the end of the season, and marches open-pored into the forest of men who speak the language of skin. Lying under each touch, she confesses her destruction in the anonymity. And still, she prefers the water that erases her over the earth that calls on her to speak. She’d rather offer her skin than her words. She’s rather the false touch in exchange for the permission to remain silent, than a true love burdening her with the need to speak herself into something he can carry.
Let her un-be, your becoming asks for too much.
I believe we — Arabs — are some of the world’s most sensuous people — and we suffer deeply, deeply from pretending not to be. For forgetting, a forgetting so profound you’ve forgotten there was anything you needed to recall.
We suffer for lying about its insignificance in our lives- for spraying it again and again with the pesticide of haram…haram.
Sensuality drips from our bodies. It screams. And when we don’t answer to it, it becomes the poison against the tribe — assaulting women beneath desperate grasps of skin, a hunger that could once be answered with a touch and now can only be satiated with violence against the body. The body’s revenge against its shamed desires.
I remember my uncle — standing by my bed in the middle of the night, a distorted, broken, and dangerous monument of desire — and what happens to it when it’s only given the dusty carpets of a mosque to touch..
Enough! How many desires have we sacrificed before the alter of the mihreb?
“...[Octavia Butler] understood that the moral essence of the species was unveiled in these complications around what we desire and how follow or deny it.”
The measuring tape of desire
The body can’t tell the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ desire. Having been taught that there is only one desire, and that it will be your doom, we dismiss every I want to as danger. If I follow that whisper, to be a writer, to perform on stage, to touch that man, to read that book, to gather those women, then I am leading the body away from the safety it desperately craves. And because we were taught that safety is in contradiction with desire, we watch the passing of a longing calling to us from the prison of our bodies that read her departure as a danger spared.
And were you to dare, to misread your longing as danger and still try, it’s a very delicate game, measuring the distance between you and this desire.
The defeat that arrives in confessing the distance, far larger than you believed it to be, comes with it too the whispered instructions of how to shorten it. The opening of the eyes is rewarded with the closing of the distance.
It’s important to know this too: religion extends that distance in its perversion of desire. And ever since you could remember, you carried both that religion, and the desires that contradict it.
But what is desire? And can we rescue the life contained within it in the redemption of its meaning?
Desire is the body responding to its divine inheritance, to the calling that separated it from the anonymity and birthed it into its individual form on earth. It’s this life-force of the soul, pushing against the stiffened body, urging it to travel back towards the territory of sin, where all desires lay disguised as contradictions, and where the body tasted its first danger and learned quickly and well how to stay far.
Desire is the whisper in eve’s ear, guiding her in the direction of life, contained in the apple, guarded by a lie. Desire is every stolen womb confiscated in the tender and script-less transition into womanhood, where the vulnerable body asks to know itself in the eyes receiving its new form, its new impulses. Understanding from their gaze that what feels natural will distance her from god, she surrenders her body. She lengthens the distance between her life and its original desires in exchange for a shorter distance between her and god. It will take her years to understand that the sacrifice that lengthened one doubled (not shortened) the length of the other.
“I am tired of the history of loss. ”
Re-wilding {read ‘Fall of the Imam’ by Nawal Saadawi}
Ever since I was a little girl, I loved the character of the prostitute and the slut in literature and films.
I always saw her as an archetype for society — revealing openly what others concealed privately. And because she carried it without disguise, without apology, she suffered deeply for it.
There was something in the young image I carried of that rebellious woman, desired and making the ones who desires her wait until her body felt ready. Exiled from the tribe, she lived deep in the homeland of her body. She laughed when they sneer, poked through the disguise of their piety. Despised publicly, desired privately. They force-fed her from the poison of their envy — they punished her careless way of displaying a sensuality they were all dying from pretending not to have.
But she remained untouchable. Her power was in knowing she could walk her way out her exile through the disclosure every lie she’s witnessed — but chooses to stay where she is. She could undress the falseness of a ‘holy’ man as easily as she undresses each lover. But most days, she let them be. She survived on the joy her exile delivered, the obligations it relieved her of.
I meant to become her. I wrote about her in my poetry, among the scattered pages of a life that couldn’t find its end. I opened something that had wandered off the pages of my life. Sometimes we stumble on each other. For a moment we touch, and I remember the intention: to be bad. That any other freedom I’ve stumbled is a lie. Every country I travel to, every man I escape from, everything that is not that is untrue. Amb defines freedom as the degree to which you can experience pleasure. According to her definition, I opened my eyes to life and found myself in solitary confinement.
“My voice got quiet, my dreams got small.”
Oh to be a whore. To dare to be a woman who makes a mess, who doesn’t sugar her rage, who lets her skin breathe and the fabric slip when it wants to, who bites the hand extending towards her, who loves many at the same time, who screams her prayers, who spills what she receives into the earth because to her it’s all water and it all comes back. To be the whore I’ve always been mistaken for. To live the image of the sin they read in my body. To be all the things witnessed in me that I never got to live. To un-break, to open, to witness the consequences of this opening in all its beauty, and all its horror. To swim in the tears of pleasure making a river of me. To breathe life into the monument of pain I’ve become. To melt under the heat of the truth I begged for, a truth that will have me on my knees, breathlessly watching the birthing of all that laid still-born behind the locked legs of the women I’ve become, and the woman I will no longer remain.
“ All that was left in the wake of my dazzling and silly personality was a desire to never feel like an outsider again. Being weird and bossy and theatrical and curious had always been the best things about me. But those qualities attracted attention, and attention was emotionally dangerous. All that was left was a traumatized approval-seeking girl with no sense of her own magic. It was disproportionally at the hands of boys my age that I was tuaght that I was worthless. The justification was that they didn’t find me desirable and this was a punishable offense to them. ”
— You have the right to remain fat by Virgie Tovar
“I fucked the shame out of my system. ”
— Mona El Tahawy
“There is nothing shameful except shame itself.”
— Lebanese proverb
Whore.
A word that carries the intention to break a woman — to have her digging through the wet mud of her unfinished becoming for the self that was named for her before she had the chance to know it herself.
This word and its sisters (slut, prostitute) has been used against me ever since I was 13 years old, before I had even touched the world, before I had ever spoken to a man. It took me a while to realize that this word actually had nothing to do with men, not at all.
It had more to do with society’s inability to receive a woman’s appetite for life:
her organic sensuality (which also has nothing to do with men), her full-of-life laughter, the natural shaping of her body (and god forbid if a woman has breasts — girls/teachers can be incredibly nasty when it comes to this)!
But perhaps ‘whore’ is a term that contains within it the highest compliment, if a woman has it in her to open it all the way up and understand what it contains. So here it is, let’s enter this word together!
“When something really scares, it’s an indication that it’s something you really need, because it’s really going to unsettle all the things that you need to shake up in your life. ”
— Mona El Tahawy