Horse. I meant, whores.

It's entirely possible that She Hate Me (a Spike Lee Joint) is the worst movie ever made. Now, I do not take that proposition lightly. I've seen Showgirls and that's a bad movie. I've seen a few Hilary Duff movies and her oeuvre, by and large, contains an extravagance of badness. I even saw the Tom Cruise version of The War of the Worlds and was so offended by the exploitative badness of that movie that I can't really think about it without rolling my eyes like the snob I am. But She Hate Me is a movie that probably did not set out to be bad (as one might argue is the case with Showgirls or, say The Perfect Man (Heather Locklear is not aging well...)), but certainly succeeded in being one of the most egregious misuses of Hollywood money in cinematic history.


And I marvel at the manner in which it manages to be bad on So. Many. Levels. of possible badness. It's not just that the script and dialogue have all the grace of a belligerently drunk rhinoceros. It's not just that un-tough actors (uh, Ellen Barkin) attempt to seem tougher by inserting a needless and gratuitous quantity of f-word-usages into their speech. It's not just that the film's sick octopus of a narrative arc overshoots its own trajectory to the point that's it's basically unintelligible. It's not just that John Turturro plays a mob boss with a flat Long Island accent while Italian-accented Monica Belucci plays his daughter (so, he's American and she, uh, studied at Italian boarding school?). It's not just that the film entertains every possible permutation of the Racist White Asswipe stereotype that it can think up (and every other stereotype about pretty much every ethnic group other than American blacks (Asian women practice Tai Chi during sex? Really?)). It's not just that it attempts to fetishize lesbians while simultaneously blaming them for all the ills of the world. It's not because it indulges in some pukily cheesy anthropomorphizing-of-sperm animation sequences. And it's certainly not just because it portrays hordes of lesbians (most of them are porn-star gorgeous, and a few are the obligatory ugly dykes put forth to, what? "engender realism?") having gasping, sweating, multiform and enthusiastic hetero humpfests with one dude over the course of 4 nights


(Note to Mr. Lee: Lesbians like innies, not outies. No matter what our culture's collective fantasy would have us believe, real lesbians don't actually like cock. Sad news, I know. I am but the messenger.)


It's that it accomplished its badness through ALL of these avenues AND that it takes an interminable 2 hours and 18 minutes to do it!


Honestly. I would have satisfied my lousy movie viewing quota for this lifetime if all that offensive political grandstanding and and clumsy dialogue could have been captured in a much more weildy 86 minutes. But no. Clearly ol' Spike must've thought he was onto something big.


He was not.


Unless by "big" you mean "hugely bad."

I've already alluded to the fact that this film attempts to take on too many topics. It wants to talk about corporate corruption (and does so in a simplistic and grandiosely moralizing way). It wants to talk about gender identity and male anxieties about being abandoned by women as women become more and more self-reliant (in my opinion, lesbianism is too loaded a concept to bear the weight of this discussion, but the film certainly tries to broach it via that route). It wants to talk about institutionalized racism in corporate culture. It wants to talk about organized crime. And it wants to talk about gender role reversal and the objectification of the male body. Much like my post about Spitzer a couple posts back, the film's scope of concerns is simply too vast and it's clear that Lee lost control of it. And that can happen. There's a lot of stuff in our culture about which we can all worry ad nauseum. Trying to cram all that into one film (or one blog post) makes for poor story-telling (and poor post writing... alas).

So in an effort to not overshoot my own scope, I'm going to talk a little about the prospect of male whoredom as it pertains to this movie and then segue into some other thoughts about prostitution. And I'll leave the rest of the mess of that movie for another day. Sound good?

A basic summary: A big-deal business dude discovers some corruption within his company. He goes public with it and subsequently gets fired. To make fantastically affluent end meet fantastically affluent end, he allows his ex-girlfriend-turned-homo to pimp him out to a passel of lesbians who all want babies. And then he fathers 19 children. And then he mends his ways by "doing the responsible thing" and forming a family with a lesbian couple and the two kids he fathered with each of the two women. Nevermind that he signed his parental rights away prior to the conception of each baby (and as such, actually being responsible would entail his leaving the women alone). Nevermind that lesbian couples in real life tend to be rather guarded against male intrusion. Nevermind that... well, you get it... obviously, I think the story is far-fetched to the point of hilarity.

My question then becomes, is his selling his semen actually prostitution? He charges the women $10G to get them pregnant thru the tried-and-true method, yes, but they're not actually after sex. Wikipedia defines prostitution as "sexual activity in exchange for remuneration." And yes, the simplest way to make a baby is to have sex. But is selling a single act of intercourse for the strict purposes of procreation the same thing as exchanging sex for money? I don't know. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.

My point in asking this question, though, is that I'm wondering if prostitution is an equally viable enterprise for both men and women. By and large, I expect that it's not. And here, I'm limiting my discussion to hetero prostitution for the sake of convenience. It's not that I think women with a lot of power and money are above seeking dick-for-hire. And in theory, men are every bit as plausible targets for predation as women are, within the context of sex work. But in real life, we all know it doesn't work that way. It's rare that women hire men simply because they are in need of getting their rocks off. I don't really know why that is-- I don't think it's because women have an easier time getting laid or because men are all little more than sex-starved zombies-- but that IS how it is. So be it.

There is a scene in this film where all the lesbians sit in a circle and demand that Jack, our hero, disrobe so that they might "check out the goods." They begin to catcall him and whistle and make him spin around. It's a scene obviously designed to describe the character's humiliation and degradation. Then one of the women says, "So now you know what it feels like to be objectified." The whole scene rings so false! I mean, here are a bunch of women with, ostensibly, no real sexual interest in this man. They're ogling his DNA, sure, but they don't actually want him. HE isn't their object-- his semen, well, maybe-- but not HIM. And this is not the same thing as me, at 16, getting chased down a street in LA just because I got off the bus a stop to late and had to walk by a dive strip club late a night. Yep, I felt pretty object-like just then. Sure did.

So, I question his plausibility, as a healthy, attractive, strong hetero man, as a whore. As much as I might want to deny it in the name of gender equality, the dynamic is just not the same. And it's not that I think women aren't capable of viewing men as little more than sexual playthings. Trust me. We are. I just don't think that's what's going on in that scene described above.

And also? I kinda don't think objectifying each other is the worse thing in the world. In fact, I don't think it's avoidable. Part of what attracts us to each other is our outward visage and pretty much all of us, if we're being honest, put at least a little effort into our presentations. The nature of sexual desire is one that necessitates that we see each other as nothing more than an amalgam of body parts sometimes. Now some of us pointedly objectify ourselves more than others-- there's power to be had there, isn't there? In being the thing that grabs attention, rather than gives it?

For kicks, I just took a clever little online quiz about my relative value, were I do pursue sex professionally. Here are my results:

Interesting, eh? The site tells me that the average is $217 per hour, based on market price averages tabulated from several private escort websites. Is it wrong that this analysis does lovely things to my ego? Actually, I thought my results seemed a little inflated, given that I'm totally over the hill by sex work standards. But, I gather advanced degrees carry some cache... which is heartening in that it's nice to know johns like a little conversation with their cocksucking. Still, I'm perfectly content exchanging my own orgasms for those of my partner. As I'm sure I've said a million times, sex is enough of an end unto itself. Getting money to have sex just seems like too gross an imbalance, yeah?

And now I'd like to return to the Spitzer fiasco one more time. My voyeuristic meanderings through the online sex-worker community have informed me that anxieties are running high amongst the high-class hussies. Many are arguing that prostitution should become legalized... as it's the women themselves who are hurt by the current laws, not the rich and powerful men who employ them and partake of their services. And many are waving their "It's a freakin' victimless crime! What's the big deal?" banners. And some say, if the free-market economy supports the cottage industry (also known as the putting-out system), why shouldn't it be legally sanctioned?

Of course there are those, both in the industry and out, who argue that most prostitutes could never earn $1117 an hour, that most of them are utterly destitute, that they are subject to the abuses, and sometimes homicidal tendencies, of their pimps and johns. And faced with this statistically factual argument, the victimless-crime banner droops substantially. Ultimately, I'm not sure where I personally weigh in in this debate-- I probably tend to lean towards the former, but I can certainly see the validity in the latter.

But what kills me is the ways in which these women are selling each other out with regard to the Spitzer case in specific. A few mornings ago, I had on The Today Show while I was getting dressed for work. They paraded out a few of these women from some escort service. And what did they do on national television but demure to the Puritanicalism of mainstream American media. That's right folks. They bemoaned how Spitzer was a "poor role model" for the public. They waxed all righteous about sexual morality. They decried the reprehensibility of selling sex, particularly to married men. Of course, I would speculate that a far higher percentage of their clientele is composed of married men than single ones. But that's only speculation. My point, though, is that not only are they acting all self-righteous about each others' activities, but they're selling out their clients, too! Who are these women to have opinions about the marriages of these men? Who are any of us to have opinions about ANYBODY'S marriage? Um, yeah, that's a digression...

So, I listened to these women being interviewed by Meredith Vieira and I wondered, if they really believe what they're doing is wrong, why are they doing it? These high-end girls are beautiful and well-educated and clearly capable finding other means of gainful employment. And if, as would seem the case, they're in the industry by choice, how SPINELESS are they that they can't stand up for their choices? My heroine, debauchette sure stands up for hers. Unfortunately, she's felt it necessary to take down her post wherein she more explicitly defended her line of work. But it was a nice, tough, toothed little post-- although she seemed stressed out, for sure.

In the end, I think the thing that makes prostitution morally questionable for me is not the idea of selling one's body. One's body is one's own and one can do what one likes with one's own body, yes? Ultimately, it's that whoring is a line of work available to women and gay men (boys, mostly) and it's men with power and money enough to afford it who avail themselves of said service. It reinforces a gender dynamic that doesn't do any favors for my presupposition of equality between genders. This is the thing that differentiates Ashley Dupre from Jack, the character in She Hate Me. As much as I'm disinclined to support any line of thinking that would have us (and our government) limit the rights a person has to his or her own body, I can't quite reason away my niggling reservations about whether prostitution really is victimless, as it posits everyone on both sides of the equation on nonegalitarian footing.

In the meantime, I guess I'll still be giving my milk away for free. If I were to embrace my proverbial cow nature, that is.