In Defense of Whores

Because we are all whores, yes, you too.

Hello girls and gays,

I'm writing this wrapped in the cloth my mother gave me before I left France. I'm naked underneath, it's hot and humid, I work from home so the people I live with constantly see my perfect breasts peeking out here and there. That's when I don't go completely topless in the living room. Even if they're men, they don't care, they're my relatives and we're in Africa (the continent), the place where, less than three generations ago, most of us were walking around topless (still angry about puritanization via colonization by the way, wearing clothes in this weather is torture). If you're an African woman, you are familiar with the principle of “naked under the wrapper” when it’s too hot, it's an “aesthetics”, as the youngins say. I'm sure that already makes me a whore for a lot of people. How can I be half-naked on our balcony, drinking a cold beer while the wind slaps my naked fat belly, in the company of my equally topless father? Whore. The internet is an equalizer, we're all on these mainly Western apps writing in English, but we come from different backgrounds. However, one thing that unites cultures is the hatred of women owning their bodies and their sexuality. Me ? I don't mind, I'm a whore, we're all whores. Everybody Ashawo, as one Nigerian woman famously put it.

The most interesting thing about the fact that I walk around half-naked is that my wrapper is a religious one. In Africa, anyone's face can appear on a piece of cloth. Politicians, dead relatives, religious icons, anything goes. When my mother gave me this wrapper, she told me: “I thought it was the virgin Mary, but the choir members made a mistake and put Mary Magdalene. I know you're not a Christian anymore, but do you want it?” I said yes, because my mother and aunts always gift me fabrics and I never say no. She was right, I'm not a Christian anymore, but I would have accepted even if it was the Virgin Mary’s face on it because my girl Mariam? She was a bad bitch. Being a teenager and managing to convince your people that you got pregnant but you're still a virgin, and on top of that your baby is nothing less than the son of god ?! It is the kind of smart move I respect coming from women. I was even happier that it was Mary Magdalene, because she was supposed to be a prostitute and my heart always goes out to women who are not respectable. I support women's rights, but more importantly, I fully support women's wrongs.

Besides, in Jesus' days, you already know that it didn't take much to be called a prostitute. She was probably caught talking to some hot boys on the way back from fetching water or a man wanted to marry her and she said no, so he went and said she'd slept with everyone in the region, from Galillea to Tiberias. Of course, everyone believed him and she ended up with a reputation as a prostitute and her life was ruined until my boy Yeshua gave her importance. We know how that goes, it's not much different today, is it? That's why I laugh when I see women personally offended because someone proudly said they are a whore. Please put your Madonna/whore complex in a bottle and throw it into the nearest body of water (Yes a toilet counts). I thought we all knew that the only entry ticket to being considered a whore was to be a woman? You can have a body count of less than 5, you can only have sex with people you're seriously committed to, you can only get fucked in the missionary position on Sundays after mass or Friday after mosque; you can fuck the text man for texts, but as long as you don't have sex for reproductive purposes only or if you don't cover your face while doing it as they did in the Middle Ages, my sister in Christ, I will hold your hand and say this: You're no better than a whore.

When I was living in Nairobi, I befriended Kendi, the girlfriend of one of my flatmates. She was 21, doe-eyed, rich and sheltered. I was 27 and none of those things. Actually I was in a whatsapp group composed of East-African twenty-somethings into kinky stuff (told you I been a hoe) . Bottom line is : I needed to instill some pepper in my girl Kendi. During one of our discussions, she told me that her current boyfriend was the first man she'd ever slept with and that she didn't want to sleep with too many men before marriage. I laughed. Didn't she know she was already a whore? If you want to sin, go all the way girl, what's all this nonsense about sinning halfway if in your mind, you’re already going to hell? Honestly, it made no sense to me. But I know the reasoning: a woman's value decreases in proportion to the number of men she sleeps with. This leads me to wonder if lesbians are considered pure entities by this logic. Anyways, the sooner you will stop stigmatizing whores, the sooner you'll stop tap-dancing for the patriarchy to look like a good, respectable woman to marry by contrast, the sooner we will be free. Here lies the real liberation. By the way, in case you didn’t know, marriage is also a type of sex work. The only difference being the number of clients and the length of the contract. When these people repeat without thinking ‘the man is a provider’, what do you think they're saying my darling? He provides in exchange for what? Domestic work and compulsory sex. That's why marital rape doesn't even exist in most countries. It's also why I laugh when I see you self-proclaimed respectable women shitting on whores. You're just a socially accepted whore. A whore with status, but a whore nonetheless. We're all in this together.

In an ideal world, there would be no politics of respectability, no good women, no bad women, just women sailing through their sexual lives as they please. See how we never talk about male sex workers? Because it doesn't matter whether a man sells sex or not. Regardless of what they do, men's human dignity always remains intact, and conversely, all it takes for women to lose their dignity is to breathe air. I know, I know, the very last frontier when it comes to women's rights is SEX WORK (I'm writing this in caps for dramatic effect, to continue scaring the West-African so-called feminists who are still surfing respectability politics as if their lives depended on it. I have a reputation of being a wicked witch in those circles; a reputation I have to maintain. I love proving people right.) You know, I used to think that this last frontier, the one that automatically makes people angry with you, the one that makes them froth at the mouth with rage, I used to think this last frontier was choosing to be a childless woman. But no, sex work is at the top of the list. I don't know what it is, sex? money? The choice to make money through sex? People don't even know why they're viscerally angry. It's called conditioning.

To help you get rid of your own conditioning-if you want to, I’ve already understood most of you are so attached to your false sense of superiority because it is all you have- I'm going to tell you how I got rid of my conditioning and gradually stopped being whorephobic. Back when I was a baby feminist doing internships at non-profits, they were trying to pass a law criminalizing clients of sex workers in France. That was circa 2012. They called it the ‘Swedish model’. I thought it was a good idea. In the end, those are the guilty ones. No more clients, no more prostitution. Duh ! why didn't anyone think of this before? It was a big societal debate. The girls were fighting! I was on the side of those who thought it would protect women. As I grew in my feminism and started campaigning with fewer white feminists and more black and queer activists, I learned that it would actually do the opposite and that the first women affected by this law would be women like me, immigrants, women of colour, poor women, transgender women, women who don't have papers to work legally and who only have this resource to survive. It would force them to withdraw further and further into the Bois de Boulogne (a park in Paris known for its paid sexual activities), where they would be beaten and killed by clients, as it happens all the time.

‘A transsexual prostitute was stabbed to death by a client in the Bois de Boulogne yesterday’.

A common title yet a tragic one. Okay, she was stabbed but she was a prostitute though, did her life even matter? Sex workers bear the brunt of male violence, they don't create it. Some people even think that if they didn't exist, all this male violence would be directed against ‘normal women’, as if the most dangerous place for a woman isn’t her home, whatever her profession.

(I used to read this white ass french feminist magazine religiously and in hindsight, the piece and drawings they published about this societal debate were so horrible, racist, transphobic, everything. I feel like crying when I remember I used to support them. Ugh thank goddess for the work of Afrofeminism in my life.)

I remember it was around this time that I met my dear Colombian friend Catalina. One day she sent me a link to a film set in Choco, the region where most Afro-Colombians are located. It was about a poor single mother raising two children who ends up sleeping with a shop owner to get a birthday cake after her daughter begged her for one for days. This film showed me that sex work can look like a lot of things. The cliché of the girl walking down the streets in an urban area is such a small part of sex work. You will be surprised by the number of women who have turned to sex work at some point in their lives. If you live in Africa, the lack of social protection only makes the situation worse. Transactional sex is commonplace everywhere on this continent. Yet we all claim to be respectable religious people. It is well oh, let's keep being delulu together (contains irony).

Then down the line, I became friends with real sex workers: strippers, porn stars, online hookers, real life hookers, PUTAS, in a nutshell. Of course, even with my political views, hearing about what they do was a shocker to me at first, like “oh wow, there some real hoes in this house.” I told you sex work is the last frontier. We were all brought up in the same world. It is called conditioning.

_I want to mark a pause here to write a message to my French carribean whore friend, I stopped being friends with because she forcibly brought her new man to our girls night in and then had the audacity to accuse me of trying to steal her man : Anaelle (fake name) don’t nobody wanted your broke and ignorant man. He was an African American who thought he descended from the Zulus. NO ZULU WAS DEPORTED TO THE NEW WORLD !!!) . I was just being extra friendly because I’m African and he was a stranger in my house. _

Phew! I needed to get this off my chest. Okay moving on.

So, there were the girls who did it temporarily because they were financially marginalized and had no other way of making money at a particular time, those who could have done something else but did it for the love of sensuality (and for the money), those who were earning minimum wage or below minimum wage and just wanted a bit more money, and everything in between. See, money is the common denominator here. Befriending those women humanized las putas in general for me, because one of the things whorephobia will do is dehumanize whores and, by extension, dehumanize women in general.

I think the last thing that made me reconsider my views on sex work was when my mother said to me: ‘These women need money, you want to take away sex work okay, but are you going to give them money?” It was as simple as that. My mom made me realize that most women don't do sex work because they enjoy making men cum en masse, but because they need the money. Just like a burger flipper doesn't do it because they like flipping burgers. They do it to get the money they need to survive in this world white men have turned into a capitalist hellhole (still angry at capitalism by the way). My mom contributed to a lot of my social justice values, one sentence at a time because, she is just so matter-of-factly.

Let's be clear, if I ruled the world, women wouldn't need to fuck men to have a roof over their heads and food on their tables. But here's the thing: if I ruled the world, the survival of anyone, man or woman, would not depend on their work. You want to stop women working in the sex industry? Well, look at anti-capitalism, immigration justice, a general universal income, I don't know man, anything that guarantees that everyone, no matter who they are, will have the bare minimum to get by because frankly my darling, your pearl-clutching isn't doing much for the women condition.

Look at me, even though I'm mostly abstinent these days I still consider myself a whore because 1. I have the freedom to do it without suffering heavy societal consequences, as you can tell, my family isn’t conservative and neither is my country. (Alhamdulillah) 2. I've destigmatized sex work in my mind to the point where tomorrow I might decide to partake so I might as well go ahead and call myself a whore. In fact, I've been feeling like trying the dominatrix way for a while now, it's the kind of work that suits me. It would combine my disdain for heterosexual men and my authoritarian nature. Sign me in! Plus, I'm already an author of erotic novels, so I'm pretty sure that's in the grey sex work area already.

Here it is. I didn't think it needed repeating because it's 2025, but history has a funny way to repeat itself, fascism is on the rise and Puritian US.American women slut shaming those who don't subscribe to their brand of delulu were starting to piss me off on this platform. Every day “this celebrity didn't get married before she made a baby” (does everyone need to be obsessed with marriage like you or can we live?), every day “sex work isn't liberating” (no one said it particularly was), every day “I'm shackled by the sexual freedom I'm afforded”, please abeg oh release us. Sexual freedom is also the freedom to make sexual mistakes and have sexual regrets. Mistakes and regrets are part of the human experience. There are still many places in the world where you'll be married off at 16 to a man chosen by your father, to be a baby-making machine for the rest of your life if that’s what you would prefer ( And I don’t say that because I’m African. The US is one of the few Western nations where child marriage is still allowed. As the French expression goes, sweep your own doorstep first.)

So, as I'm walking around wrapped in a piece of cloth with a whore's face on it, I'm thinking maybe I'll even put Mary Magdalene on my altar. Even though I'm not a Christian anymore, it's an energy I could work with. Sainte Marie-Madeleine, protégez-nous because the powers that be want us to close our legs and only open them every nine months to pop big-headed babies that will later go to war for empire, or work to the breaking point, just to make another white man richer. We are in danger, we need your help. Protect us. See, that is what I like about traditional African spiritualities by the way, some entities are hypersexual and there's none of that Abrahamic purity bullshit. Howwwwever, this piece is already too long so I’ll write about it another day (maybe, you already know you can't believe my writing promises hehehe).

In the meantime, I leave you with this legendary video. Don’t forget to be nice to a whore today. Viva la putas! and see you later.

Bye !