Of Whores and Housewives
The biblical adage you reap what you sow has consequences, both in real life and in fiction. For women, you reap what you sow can have even steeper consequences and the adage is so deeply ingrained in the psyche of the masses, it will probably never be erased.
We don’t like whores, either in fiction or in reality. In fiction, the whore may be the slutty best friend or the scheming other woman but she is almost never the heroine. In real life, the whore has almost no recourse to address any real wrongs that might have happened.
No where is this a bigger problem than in the issue of rape. When we talk about rape, we talk about attackers and victims and this language muddies the waters in the minds of both men and women, because they call up images of masked men jumping out of bushes and dragging helpless women away by their hair. The reality of rapes is that they happen between people who have interacted together, maybe even live together in college dorms, apartment buildings or military barracks and they almost always involve alcohol.
Therein lies the problem. Because these assaults involve alcohol, it automatically falls on the woman to defend her choice to go out drinking, something that only ‘bad girls’ do. How many historical romance novels have you read where the hero is in a bar and wrongly assumes the heroine is a tavern wench. A fun misunderstanding ensues, but the overall message is still relatively consistent: tavern wench = good time, not good girl. Good girls don’t go to bars and they damn sure don’t get drunk. If they do get drunk, well, then whatever happens to them happens. They made the choice to go out drinking and therefore put themselves at risk.
The problem with this societal norm is that when we don’t teach our sons that it is not okay to go out trolling for drunk chicks to take home, we leave them vulnerable to the messages on MTVs Real World and Jersey Shore that drunk chicks are fun to take home. We don’t teach them about the risks of such behavior nor do we teach them about the morality of making such a choice and it’s a dirty little secret that yes, a guy will go home with you but he probably won’t date you if when he met you, he thought of you as an easy lay.
Romance novels have tackled this issue somewhat by beginning with a random encounter in a bar or a one night stand that turns out by the end of the book to have been the soul mate after all. Unfortunately, this is fiction not reality and women who have one night stands are often branded a whore and therefore un-marryable and un-defendable. How many prostitutes are killed and the police look the other way? How many girls got drunk, were raped and were told that, no you just changed your mind the morning after? Are these women not people, too? Or are they simply reaping what they sow? And can you really rape a prostitute? Legally and morally, no. But to the masses?
In order for us as a society to truly move forward, we must start with cultural change with the masses. Intelligentsia can sit in their ivory towers and argue that yes, a prostitute does have the same rights as a housewife, but until you can convince the masses of that, it is simply another platitude that has no impact on real life.
The fact that we cannot write a whore as a heroine in a romance novel speaks to a deeper truth in our society. Sexual immorality still equals credibility and worth no matter how much feminists try to tell us that our worth is not tied to our virginity or purity. One of the only whores I can think of in fiction who was not tarred and feathered because of her sexual appetites was Starbuck in the remake of Battlestar Galactica. She found true love and ran screaming and screwing in the other direction. Her character was complex but her worth as a pilot was not tied to her sexuality. A Starbuck, however, is much harder to write in a romance novel and even harder to find in reality. We as readers are unforgiving of our heroines and sins that we would forgive a hero for we still tend to crucify a heroine for. We as a society are even more unforgiving.
This is the exact problem we have when we talk about rape involving alcohol. Because the female was drunk, she surrendered her ‘good girl’ status and therefore deserved whatever she got. College campuses are a disgrace when it comes to treating women who come forward skeptically. But this stems from a deeper societal issue.
There are no easy answers for the whore versus housewife dichotomy that we still find ourselves in. Reality is not dictated by intelligentsia and no matter how much critical thinkers might decry the injustice, it will persist at the practical reality for most people. Reality will never reflect the utopian ideal of true equality for women. But that does not mean that we must continue to equate credibility with sexual morality, nor does it mean we have to continue to kill the whore in our fiction.
