Plazm Magazine: Documenting Creative Culture Since 1991
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Creative Whoring: The Husband, the Cabana Boy, & the Gigolo
Tiffany Lee Brown
I am a whore. Let’s just get that out of the way and have done with it: I am a whore.
Whores do stuff for money. We suck cocks. We work for small, local, mom-and-pop operations with sustainable business practices, and we help multinational corporations take over the world. We pay rent. We scramble for opportunities to show our artwork, publish our writing, sell our music, and perform. We suffer employment at the underfunded hands of nonprofit organizations and educational institutions—groups that invariably receive donations, scholarships, endowments, grants, commissions, membership dues, entrance fees, and/or tuition money from businesses and individuals.
In the past, I liked to consider myself a not-whore. I set some guidelines about who I’d help, who I’d work for. I was ethical. I was ethical and I could wear it on my recycled sleeve, dance about it in my hempen shoes, and proclaim it on my sweatshop-free American-made organic cotton T-shirt. I was ethical, and self-righteous, and I could use my stance to challenge people to think about who they’re taking money from and who they’re making money for. To use a Biblical allusion—I’m afraid there’ll be quite a few in this story—I wanted to choose between God and Mammon, and I wanted other people to see that they were serving Mammon. Especially people who didn’t seem to mind using their beautiful, creative talents in the service of Nike, Starbucks, Microsoft, AT&T.
By refusing to play the game, I was going to change the world.
Nuts & Berries
There are a few people living on nuts and berries, out in the woods, hiding out, off the grid. Many more live in squats. I admire all that. But at some point, I decided that I didn’t want to be completely alienated from my world and my society, however intrinsically fucked up that world and that society may be. I wanted to stop defining myself by what I was not, by my otherness, by my refusal to participate. Why the change? Age, undoubtedly, and the slow epiphany of honest self-assessment. I recognized my own hypocrisy, and once I saw it, it was kinda hard to turn back.
So why did it feel OK to sell drug paraphernalia at a head shop for six bucks an hour, live in an illegal warehouse, dumpster dive, and amass a lot of bad debt, but later feel shitty and uncool to work for a corporation, make decent bank, maybe even have health insurance? I’ve lived both scenarios; and both involve, however reluctantly, an engagement with the world and its monetary systems. What I would’ve been loath to recognize at the time, though, is that the former situation just sounds more interesting and “alternative.” Its real premise is shaky: “By not having money, I’m going to affect a world that is inextricably intertwined with monetary and consumer-based economies.”
For me, the best protest against mainstream culture was to drop out of that culture, at least a little bit. Like most prim, politically correct, socially integrated hipsters, I still wanted a computer and musical instruments and fountain pens and clothes. And whether obtained at Free Geek, a thrift store, or straight from Circuit City, these items are all made from unsustainable materials assembled for eleven cents a day by people with darker skin than mine who worship unfamiliar gods and live in “developing” countries. I still wanted these conveniences of middle-class American life; I still bought, borrowed, stole, or used them.
Who but a sellout whore would do such things?
Bitchin’ & Whorin’ with Liz Wurtzel
The parallels between selling out, making any sort of a living, and sex work sat uneasily in dark corners of my mind for years. They finally came to light in the late 1990s as I was writing a snarky, subjective review of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s book Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women for Anodyne magazine.1
Wurtzel, best known for her drug-addled, pity-poor-me, depressed waif act in Prozac Nation, posed for the cover of Bitch with her beautiful blonde hair, her nice makeup, her sultry eyes, and no shirt. No bra, either. To add to the effect, this good-looking, whacked-out third-wave feminist had her middle finger pointed straight up. I didn’t object to Wurtzel whoring out her body by posing half-nude on her book cover. I didn’t even really object to Wurtzel whoring out her writing by putting her book out with a major publishing house, part of the few gigantaur crazy-ass multinational conglomerates that dominate mainstream media and literary consumption. No, what I objected to is that Wurtzel posed half-nude on her book cover and then had the, well, the balls to talk smack about sex workers in her book. I ranted:
“Though sex-positive writers and activists often gloss over some of the sex industry’s uglier realities, Wurtzel assumes the worst and makes rash generalizations based on it. In regards to stripping, she says ‘if it’s your life, your livelihood, it eventually must dehumanize you. The fact is that you’re really begging with your body. Every last dollar you make is on the basis of some man or group of men’s approval… and that’s just plain degrading.’ Well, Ms. Wurtzel, why is it such a fucking treat that you and I, with our university degrees and our silly jobs as writers, our transparent pretensions and snap judgments, pour out our minds for a living? Who owns Doubleday? Some group of men, I reckon, whose approval you need if they’re gonna dole out the big dosh for your next book advance. I’m not denying that sex work can be degrading, hurtful, or confusing; it’s just that everything else can, too. Anyone with the edge of their tit hanging out on their book cover should not be talking shit about strippers, who have the decency to be up-front (so to speak) about the fact that their bodies bring in the bucks.”
Bodies bring in the bucks. Minds bring in the bucks. This is how we get by, how we participate.
Fingering Gender
Prostitution is by no means confined to any particular gender. However, our use of these words outside of the strict denotations of sexual commerce does, shall we say, finger a certain gender.
It is no coincidence that when discussing whether our creative compatriots should be accepting money from corporations to design logos and whether our favorite indie or punk band sold out by signing with a major label, we rarely say, “Those guys are such gigolos!” or “Man, she is such a cabana boy, serving that nasty multinational.” Instead we say stuff like, “Hey, those dudes from Plazm are prostituting themselves to Nike!” and “God, what a sellout. She totally whored herself out to Condé Nast by submitting that poem to the New Yorker.” Etymologically, we’re drawing from the tradition of looking down on girls and women who engage in extramarital sex and, as the definitions of those words evolved, women who engage in sex for money or other material favors. The words “whore” and “prostitute” as we understand them were originally applied only to women.2
The historical assignment of women into the archetypes of mother, maiden, crone, or whore is both fascinating and repellent to those of us who have inherited those roles. In The Sacred Prostitute, however, Nancy Qualls-Corbett elevates the most vilified of these archetypes, the whore, to a status of beauty and spirituality. She celebrates the notion of the Sacred Prostitute, particularly as practiced by the classical Greeks, arguing that we can restore our vitality and ability to enjoy sensuality and sexuality, and heal the break between spiritual life and passionate love, by exploring this archetype in contemporary ways.3
The tradition of the Sacred Prostitute revolved around a spiritual rite in which priestesses or other women engaged in sex with supplicants, strangers, or kings, depending on the culture and spiritual practice in question. The “prostitute” tag comes from two sources. One: men paid the religious organization for this spiritual, ecstatic experience. Two: committing adultery has been conflated with prostitution in some languages and in some cultures. As described by Qualls-Corbett and others, the priestesses of Astarte were the prime examples of sacred prostitutes, engaging in the spiritual and fleshly pleasure of pleasuring men with as much enthusiasm as nuns engaging in the ascetic ecstasy of self-denial. In feminist thought, Christianity’s Mary Magdalen became a lightning rod for this concept, though she was not literally identified with ritual or religious sex.4
In MatriFocus magazine, Johanna Stuckey writes, “Most scholars did not distinguish between ritual sex and sexuality for pay. However, ritual sex would not have been prostitution even if the act produced an offering for a temple. Rather, it would have been an act of worship.”5 In this tradition, whoring is a means of connecting with spirituality—channeling god, channeling goddess, tapping into the primal energies of nature, the Universe, whatever you want to call the aetheric forces
that can manifest in true states of ecstasy. The fact that money changes hands during these exchanges greases the wheels of commerce and attends to the practicalities of existence. It does not automatically obliterate the sacred, ecstatic virtue of the act.
The same can be said for the act of creativity in relation to monetary transactions. My own tendency has been to abhor money and the culture that spawned and relied on it. Using my sacred powers of creativity for financial gain seemed as horrifying as spreading my legs on a street corner. As an artist, a maker, a performer, a writer, I eventually had to confront the same false dichotomy discussed by many feminist writers. Money itself, I have only recently and begrudgingly come to accept, does not have to taint our sacred artistic acts.
The Sacred Ecstasy of Creation
To personalize and contextualize all this: many other factors have pushed me to this conclusion as well. Spending time in places like India and West Africa magnified the incredible sense of entitlement that lay behind the position I’d assigned myself in the world, that of a poverty-stricken starving artist. Who but a middle-class intellectual would have the audacity to turn up her nose at opportunity so often? Being around people who simply never had any opportunities, and people who came from very disadvantaged backgrounds and then made their way in the world, caused me to question my naïve, stubborn alliance with poverty. Dealing with three debilitating medical conditions eventually wore me down, too. How am I going to create amazing stuff if I’m living in a cardboard box, half-paralyzed by fibromyalgia and tendonitis, too proud and self-righteous (and too disabled) to get a job? How am I to make the world a better place if I’m dead by my own hand, too proud and self-righteous to pay those devil dogs at the major pharmaceutical companies for those expensive medicines that keep me sane?
Hovering around the margins of Plazm, and then becoming an editor of the magazine, has also been an influence. Most of my projects tend to be weird little underground things, created for small communities, costing next to nothing to create, costing nothing or close to nothing to read, consume, or view. I’ll likely do such projects for the rest of my life. But I may expand my reach a bit, too. To some, Plazm may seem like a strange, alternative, exclusive phenomenon, but compared to the work I do on projects like 2GQ or my ongoing series of street performances/interventions to which no audiences are invited, Plazm is practically mainstream. It is certainly well-regarded, respected, and the magazine is read by a big chunk of people. Formidable artists, writers, and designers offer us their work—free—because they want to be part of this phenomenon. Through this network of supporters and readers, I’ve been able to advance political and creative agendas that are aesthetically and ethically important to me. We create and disseminate work that deals with war, Iraq, civil liberties, gender and gender preference issues, and the ethics of art. I have fierce feelings about those issues. Damned right I want to promote my views and give other writers and artists the space to provoke difficult questions.
All of it is made possible by whoring. We sell ads. The magazine is subsidized by the commercial juggernaut that is Plazm Media, a design firm that takes on clients including Nike, LucasFilm, Jantzen, and yes, even Starbucks. Before joining up with Plazm, I watched its operations—carefully and quite critically—from the sidelines. I had admired the magazine from afar in the early 1990s, and some ten years later art director Josh Berger and I became life partners. Frankly, I didn’t approve of the whoring part, not that it was any of my business how he wanted to earn his living. But this was a man of serious political conviction and a man I came to respect more and more with each passing day, so I paid attention to how he worked. I observed his Robin Hood technique in action: Take from the rich, give to the poor. Earn money from the corporations, use it to promote artistic and political goals that otherwise go underfunded. When possible, inject commercial, well-funded projects with values and aesthetics that mean something to you. Use your razor-sharp mind to pay the rent, but then apply all that you learn in the commercial experience to issues you care about.
If we are going to be part of the world and its systems at all, we are going to be whores. We may as well be really good whores, hot whores, whores with hearts of gold and tongues of fire. We may as well do it with pleasure, with gusto, with relish. Like priestesses in the temple of Astarte, like Michelangelo chugging away at some ceiling painting in a chapel on a commission from the Church, like Wallace Stevens selling insurance by day and writing stunning poetry by night, we might as well whore our creativity as well as we can. We can use it to invoke the sacred ecstasy of creation.
We can use it to channel god.
Notes
1. Brown, Tiffany Lee: “The Self-Indulgent Bitches’ Social Hour: a reviewish thing relating to Elizabeth Wurtzel’s book Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women.” Anodyne, June 1998, pp. 35–36. Portland: 33% Testosterone Inc.
2. Harper, Douglas: The Online Etymology Dictionary, www.etymonline.com
3. Qualls-Corbett, Nancy: The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspect of the Feminine. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1988.
4. Haskins, Susan: Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor. London: HarperCollins, 1993.
5. Stuckey, Johanna: “Sacred Prostitutes,” MatriFocus, vol. 5 no. 1, 2005.