Whore Stories (28 page)

Has anybody ever told you to “go fuck yourself”? It’s called “autocopulation.” But if you’re thinking of making a superpower clone warrior baby, you’re out of luck, says my narrow-minded therapist, Dr. Guerrero. Even if you have both sets of parts, you can’t reproduce, unless you are a species of hermaphroditic worm, like
C. elegans
. And for your XXX files, there is also something called “autopederasty,” and it’s not as felonious as it sounds, but it’s a doozy. Defined as an “uncommon occurrence of a man, one with an unusually long penis, inserting his penis into his own anus. Due to the position and detumescence of the penis, ejaculation is not considered possible.” Nothing is impossible, you cynical dictionary.

As for the blindness, there are two possibilities. One, Tiresias may have seen Athena naked—something that drives Athena
crazy
—thus incurring her wrath and in a fit of furor, she poked his eyes out. The other, much more plausible explanation is that eventually, Zeus and Hera got around to querying Tiresias about what he had learned in his time as a woman. They asked her/him, “Which sex enjoys greater pleasure in the act of lovemaking?” Now, Hera was still pissed at her/him for the snakes thing, and she was increasingly furious with Zeus for being such a philandering oaf. In fact, the couple almost came to thunderbolts, when Zeus claimed he had a right to sleep around, because women derived more pleasure from sex than men. When posed with the question, Tiresias answered,

If the sum of love’s pleasures adds up to ten,
nine parts go to women, only one to men.

Hera wasn’t pleased with this response, and promptly had Tiresias’s eyeballs removed from their sockets. Zeus, feeling bad about his wife’s poor sportsmanship, gave her/him the gift of foresight, which was nice, but still doesn’t explain why the old galoot didn’t duck out of the way when one of Apollo’s arrows sailed across a lake and ran Tiresias through a few years later.

OSHUN

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Creationist

CLAIM TO FAME:
African river goddess

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Nigeria

Oshun has seen it all, literally. She was (and is) said to be present at all functions and family gatherings as a kind of mother/spirit to look over the proceedings. But if you’re thinking this goddess is some matronly old crone who spends her days baking bundt cakes, you’ve got another think coming. And as far as mothers go, they don’t get much tougher than Oshun.

“Madaming is the sort of thing that happens to you— like getting a battlefield commission or becoming the dean of women at Stanford University.”

—Sally Stanford

In African Yoruba legend, Oshun was one of seventeen deities, or
orisha
, whose charge was to civilize the untamed Earth. Sixteen of these deities were male, and only one—Oshun—was female. As you may have guessed, all sixteen male deities misspent their time on Earth. They may have thrown some rocks around and played in the mud, but they did nothing to improve the world. The Earth remained a bone-dry wasteland, uncivilized, thirsty, and howling for happy hour. Oshun tried mightily to convince these obstinate ogres that she was holding some pharmaceutical grade water and that a little H
₂
O could make a big difference, but she was unsuccessful. The world began to rot. Finally, at a loss, the guys went to consult an oracle, which rightfully gave them what for. There is absolutely no record of the following exchange:

• Oracle
  : (
  impatiently mashing up a bunch of yams
  ) What’s up, bitches?
  

• Ted
  , one of the sixteen
  orisha
  : (
  to colleagues
  ) I got this, fellas. Uh . . . yeah, hi there, oracle. We’re in a bit of a jam.
  

• Oracle
  : Why am I not surprised?
  

• Ted
  : Hey, why all this attitude? We said we were sorry—we’ll never ask for Lotto numbers again. So, anyway, this Earth thing is turning into a real turkey. The land looks good, but sort of arid, and we’ve got all these beach chairs and cocktail umbrellas with nowhere to put ’em.
  

• Oracle
  : Have you asked Oshun over there for help?
  

• Ted
  : Oh, come
  on
  ! She’s a chick. She’s going to invent rom-coms or
  Us Weekly
  or some other damned shit.
  

• Oshun
  : Ted, if you say one more word, I’m going to rip off that eerie excuse for a child’s penis of yours and throw it into the North Atlantic Desert.
  

• Oracle
  : She’s not kidding, Ted. Look, I’ve seen her do it. Why don’t you just let her do her thing with the water?
  

• Ted
  : What in the
  fuck
  is water? Why do we come here?
  

The Oracle nods at Oshun, who snaps her fingers, inundating the Earth with rivers, lakes, oceans, rum runners, and piña coladas. Ted and the other orisha fellows roll their eyes contemptuously and storm out of the Oracle’s studio, a schooner in the (as of a few moments ago) North Atlantic Ocean. The cries of orisha echo in the distance, as they float out to sea, until one of them invents kickboards, saving the deities from certain doom.

But let’s not get all hung up on this mythical twaddle. According to
documented
legend, the oracle explained to the
orisha
that if they had only bothered to satisfy the needs of women (read Oshun) they would not have run into problems in the first place. Not being complete fools, the men all begged forgiveness from Oshun and urged her to let them please her in the sack.
Oh, hell no
, thought Oshun, making sure that none of her male consorts gave her pleasure until they paid up and paid early. And they did. Perhaps not coincidentally, Oshun is also the goddess of the marketplace and of driving hard bargains. Sorry, fellas.

MARY MAGDALENE

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Sinner

CLAIM TO FAME:
Palled around with Jesus

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Galilee

It’s curious how hackles rise when someone goes and mentions that Mary Magdalene, Jesus’s BFF with whom he hoofed it around Galilee, was a flatbacker. The problem is that a lady looking a lot like Ms. Magdalene betrays a foot fetish and anoints Jesus’s funky bunions with her tears and a variety of ointments. Luke 7:36–50:

And behold, a woman in the city who was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at the table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of fragrant oil, and stood at His feet behind Him weeping; and she began to wash His feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head; and she kissed His feet and anointed them with the fragrant oil. Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he spoke to himself, saying, “This Man, if He were a prophet, would know who and what manner of woman this is who is touching Him, for she is a sinner.

You’ll admit there is some sexy ambiguity during this exchange. Also, when it comes down to it, everybody likes a foot rub, and what’s more, when is a foot rub just a foot rub? Never. To quote John Travolta’s character Vincent Vega in
Pulp Fiction
:

I ain’t saying it’s right. But you’re saying a foot massage don’t mean nothing, and I’m saying it does. Now, look, I’ve given a million ladies a million foot massages, and they all meant something. We act like they don’t, but they do, and that’s what’s so fucking cool about them.

He does have a point. Well, a little later on down the line, we learn that there were “certain women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities.” One was “Mary, called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils.” This passage has led some to conflate the godless prosty grooving on Jesus’s toes and the woman who is at Jesus’s side during his crucifixion and his burial, the one who first discovers the empty tomb after Jesus hits the road. A fierce debate continues to rage about whether or not Mary Magdalene was in fact a prostitute. Some of the faithful just don’t want to hear it. A typical exchange:

• “She was.”
  

• “Was not.”
  

• “Was too.”
  

• “Was not.”
  

• “… ”
  

• “… ”
  

• “Was.”
  

Of course, the Mary Magdalene dispute is a mere squabble compared to the correlation-causation brawls concerning Jesus screaming at a fig tree in chapter 11 of Mark. Why the tree wilts overnight after Jesus gives it a hollering is the source of a quarrel that has split theologians and arborists into two snarling camps, creating a powder keg environment and a rift that may never heal.

After the fig tree goes down, Jesus offers a challenge to Peter (and anyone else who cared to listen):

For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.

One of the great biblical mysteries is why nobody takes Jesus up on this offer. I, for one, would relish shouting, “be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea!” at various inanimate objects, even if nothing happened.

PHRYNE

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Model; blasphemer

CLAIM TO FAME:
Pulling a “Kanye” at the Festival of Poseidon

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Ancient Greece

“Hey there, I’m Mnesarete—looking for some company?”

“You’re
who
?”

“Mnesarete!”

“How do you spell it?”

“You don’t spell it honey, you take it out on the town. Maybe a little conversation, a little night life; you know, some
companionship
.”

“This seems like a sting. I’m going down to the agora, where the
real
whores are,” the insensitive ancient Greek frat boy would say, and Mnesarete would walk back to her crib, broke, incensed, and cursing her name.

Luckily, Mnesarete possessed a beauty rivaled by few mortals, which is still impressive even if you acknowledge there were far fewer mortals back then. She was also possessed of enough business savvy to recognize that changing her name to “Phryne” (literally,
toad
) would arouse much more interest among members of the local john population of Athens. The name-change worked wonders for Phryne, and her beauty is celebrated to this day in works of prose, paint, and plaster all over the world.

The Greek cynic, Diogenes, was an extraordinarily far-out individual. He lived in a bathtub in an Athens marketplace, where he made a lot of noise about the “simple life” being the virtuous life. He claimed to be emulating the virtues of Hercules, who would never have slept in a bathtub and must have been embarrassed to death by this patchouli-oiled hothead wannabe. After seeing a man drink water with his hands, Diogenes even gave away his last bit of crockery, a cup, and spent the rest of his days lapping up drink like a be-togaed baboon and subsisting primarily on a diet of rancid onions. That’s not all. Most Athenians saw as obnoxious his desultory daylight treks through the city while carrying a lit lantern and claiming to be searching for “one honest man.” Nobody was devastated when pirates finally captured Diogenes and sold him into slavery.

Phryne knew it was important to make an eye-catching entrance when she re-entered the market and set out to court new clients. After some career-counseling and real-time training on the island of Lesbos—the alleged training ground for up-and-coming prostitutes—Phryne announced her presence with authority at the Festival of Poseidon in Eleusis, where she took it all off “in sight of the whole Greek world.”

As you can imagine, the calls came roaring in. Not only did Phryne serve as the model for Praxiteles’s statues of Venus, she became courtesan to the Greek elite: the philosopher Diogenes (for whom she gave it up for free), the King of Lydia, and the Athenian leader Demosthenes, among other notables, were among her clients and confidants.

When the beautiful blasphemer finally roiled up enough jealousy and scandal in Athens, it was decided that her little nudie shuffle into the Aegean foam was a profanity against Poseidon, and folks demanded she face prosecution. Her case was taken up by the Johnnie Cochran of the day, a famous orator named Hypereides—another of Phryne’s celebrity clients.

Plutarch describes a circus trial:

When she was on trial for impiety he became her advocate; for he makes this plain himself at the beginning of his speech. And when she was likely to be found guilty, he led the woman out into the middle of the court and, tearing off her clothes, displayed her breasts. When the judges saw her beauty, she was acquitted.

If she shows a tit, you must acquit. Now that’s both working it
and
owning it. After the trial, much of Phryne’s life was the subject of speculation, which is good, because it’s titillating to speculate on Phryne easing into an even steamier existence, away from the prohibitions of Athens and deep into the drug-fueled rave/courtesan scene gaining traction on the island of Ibiza.