LAGS TO PETERS — “Grow the fuck up, dude.”

I have a bone to pick with Maxxx Peters’ article from last week, “The Half Hooker Economy.” It’s partly just a semantic issue, but it’s partly a matter of personal indignation, so I hope you’ll keep reading through my ranting, dearest raunchy readers, to realize that I’m absolutely right in saying that Maxxx Peters is a self-centered, juvenile, sophomoric writer with serious hang-ups about sex—probably because he’s not getting any. Bear with me here, people.

Mr. Peters, is perhaps the most perverted of the WHACK! staphers and also an ardent penner of pre-collegiate tirades about the degeneracy of the world in which he lives. He’s one of those weirdly paradoxical characters that fill the floors of Penn Station at night, but who has managed to salvage himself through writing for porn and making a few bucks elsewhere when he can. As such, and as one can clearly see in his writing, he acknowledges his ties with those many would call the scum of the earth. In his article last week he spent paragraphs waxing philosophic about how important and even necessary prostitutes are to humankind—he claims to have no negative feelings toward “whores” because their trade is an old and important facet of human life.

But despite his camaraderie with people who do what they have to to make a buck, he still says things like: “But shame on you, I say, for this whole half-hooker bullshit scam. You are what you are; dudes put their dicks inside of you and pay you for the privilege of doing so. … I don’t care if you get paid in nickels or Benjamins or trips to Maui; payment is payment, and sex work is sex work, and Rachel Uchitel and all the rest of the half-hooker girl friend experience chicken heads of America are fucking whores. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’ll probably suck you off for a Louis V purse.”

Now, what he’s saying isn’t necessarily wrong from a purely logical standpoint. The traditional definition of a whore is pretty much a woman who gets paid in exchange for sex, and on that front most of Tiger’s women, and the rest of their ilk who hang out in or work in clubs where they’re hooked up with rich men with whom they then have sex, certainly qualify as whores. As Maxxx put it: “these women live a lifestyle of exchanging the physical gifts god gave them (full thighs, round butt cheeks, puffy lips, limited gag reflexes, etc.) for the financial gifts of the rich… Sounds like the life of a prostitute to me.”

But here’s where I get pissed off at your sophomoric attempts to make a point, Maxxx: you go to great lengths to talk about how you appreciate “whores.” You talk about how necessary they are. You go out of your way to build up a toothpick structure of dignity for people you consider to be whorish. But then you knock down your little ivory tower by talking about them in a contemptuous, holier-than-thou, utterly bullshit tone to try to make yourself feel better than them because, deep down inside, you don’t really like them. You want to be better than them, but you’re not, really, so you’re bitter. You want to think that if you were a hot blonde with a terrific rack and a round ass instead of a hairy, smelly weirdo, you’d never do the same thing. But you would. And you damn well know it. And so do we, because you spend most of your article talking like you think being a whore is a noble calling—a duty, almost. But then you betray your own beneficence by falling into an age-old trap of outdated moral judgment and bullshit hypocrisy, and I just don’t like that shit, Peters. Not one little bit.

Shame on you, Maxxx Peters, for being so small-minded about whores. If you’re trying to say that these women, Rachel Uchitel and her cohorts, are whores for taking trips to Bali, drinking fine wines, and eating at five star restaurants exchange for giving up sex, then bear in mind that there are a lot of people who get married for that kind of thing. Are they whores? Some people—many, actually, and they’re generally labeled as “men”—are totally willing to give fine wines and nice restaurant meals in exchange for receiving sex and companionship. Are they Johns? Many of us who can’t afford those fancy things exchange other stuff for sex—our valuable time, some of our freedom, time with our friends, even our porn collections. The point is that all of us, all of us who are getting laid by anybody, are giving up some things, and are taking others from our partners because that’s what most human interaction is—an exchange of giving and receiving to get what we want. By your definition, Maxxx, we are all whores.

And according to your “whores are great” proffered ideology, Maxxx, we shouldn’t really mind being called whores. So what if we are? So is everyone else, and that should, by your logic, be ok. But you can’t embrace that idea, can you? You can’t stand the idea that when you take a woman out to dinner because you’re hoping she might sleep with you later… Wait, no, I forgot who you are. Ok, when you go to a bar and get some drunk woman much drunker on your tab in the hopes you can drag her home more easily by her hair after she’s had six shots of Old Granddad, you can’t stomach the idea that she might be a whore, can you? That she accepted your drinks and might bone you now, but wouldn’t before? No, you can’t. You don’t want to be reduced to the same level of men who pay for sex, so you have to try to reduce the women who take that payment via your “fucking whore” semantics and your “Louis V bag” line to make them seem undignified. Rather than using “whore” in a way logically consistent with your argument that prostitution is ok, you have to shit all over people who might qualify as whores. All over all of us.

Really, what is the deal with people like you throwing around the word “whore” as if it’s the be-all, end-all of insults? Oh no, you’re a whore! That means you do something that everyone else on the planet who’s lucky enough to get naked with someone also does! Egads! What an epithet! I see how some people fall more solidly into the traditional “whore” category than others—porn stars, prostitutes, and models are all literally making money by selling their bodies, and in our culture this is technically “whoring” oneself out. But we all make money by selling ourselves in some way; some by filling office chairs for eight hours a day and some by having sex with rich and powerful men.

The only difference between sex workers and other workers lies in one’s perception of the meaning of the word “whore.” Yours, Maxxx, is obviously dictated by the outdated moral baggage our predecessors attached to the term centuries ago. Being a whore is “bad” because women aren’t supposed to like sex, much less have much of it, and god forbid they have it with multiple men, and god forbid they do it with rich men who give them nice things as a way of saying thanks. I don’t want to get all dry and science-y all over your puerile attempts at scathing commentary, Maxxx, but here’s the truth: women exchanging sex for material goods is the oldest and best survival strategy known to humankind. We evolved to do this when we learned to walk upright and give birth to helpless little babies that required more parenting—we needed a man around to help out, and the more successful the man was at bringing home the bacon, the better for us. So what? Does that make us shallow? Maybe. But considering that in order to get the successful men, we had to evolve perfect asses, flawless skin, blond hair, big boobs, and puffy lips, as well as maintain agelessness unto eternity, it seems men might be shallow, too. Don’t blame the whores, Maxxx. Blame the system if you’ve gotta take out your adolescent rage on something.

Look, I’m not saying that Tiger Woods or Jesse James or most of the other men who meet women through the “Half Hooker Economy” are nice guys, and I’m certainly not saying that the women they were fucking on the side are any better in the worthiness department. The men were deceiving the people they loved and ended up hurting them badly, and that’s not ok. And the women they were fucking and paying in fine dining experiences were aware of those loved ones and their potentially damaging position in relation to them. But calling those women whores as if it’s some kind of life-ending label is just juvenile. It shows an astonishing lack of insight and narrowness of mind. So they’re whores, so what? One could say that you putting your sad little brain to the test by attempting to hold an intelligent one-sided argument with readers in exchange for their adoration and respect is a bit whorish, too, but who the fuck cares? Honestly, Maxxx. Grow the fuck up, dude. —Miss Lagsalot