Yesterday my hetero lifemate, my meat, and I went to see ” IT’s all gone Pete Tong” thanks to Darris, and did we see the funniest events unfold. It is these events that have inspired the thought of the day: BE NICE TO YOUR HOOKER! There was the greasiest old man at the premiere, who happened to plop ‘er down right in front of me. What comedic luck. He had brought with him to a free movie premiere his hooker. Or more politely his transient lover, pay-for-play, street walker, prostitute, call girl, B-girl, harlot, hustler, lady of the evening, scarlet woman, whore, or working girl.
A funny aside from dictionary.com: Word History: In his Personal Memoirs Ulysses S. Grant described Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker as “a dangerous man… not subordinate to his superiors.” Hooker had his faults. He may indeed have been insubordinate; he was undoubtedly an erratic leader. But “Fighting Joe” Hooker is often accused of one thing he certainly did not do: he did not give his name to prostitutes. According to a popular story, the men under Hooker’s command during the Civil War were a particularly wild bunch, and would spend much of their time in brothels when on leave. For this reason, as the story goes, prostitutes came to be known as hookers. However attractive this theory may be, it cannot be true. The word hooker with the sense “prostitute” is already recorded before the Civil War. As early as 1845 it is found in North Carolina, as reported in Norman Ellsworth Eliason’s Tarheel Talk; an Historical Study of the English Language in North Carolina to 1860, published in 1956. It also appears in the second edition of John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1859, where it is defined as “a strumpet, a sailor’s trull.” Etymologically, it is most likely that hooker is simply “one who hooks.” The term portrays a prostitute as a person who hooks, or snares, clients.
Back to the story. So there is a man there with his ‘lady’ who was of aboriginal descent who was quite obviously high on some snuff. She was so high shw would just start yelling out stuff. It was quite a sight. The ‘lady’ kept asking the guy what his name was and dancing around to the music. In the beginning of the film, as Frankie Wilde is a DJ, there is a long musical, mainly dance club music, interlude at which point the ‘lady’ decided to dance. At one point the music volume lowers and the ‘lady’ was just dancing away whilst the rest of the theatre was laughing at her. Her dancing was too vigorous that people around her kept moving spots.
Eventually about twenty minutes in she could not concentrate and had to leave, rather noisily. The man was pissed cause he probably hadn’t seen a movie in a while and had spent all of his money on her lucrative ’services’. He reluctantly got up and left for his well paid services. Which brings me to the moral of the story: BE NICE TO YOUR HOOKER. Don’t just bang them, take them out. Show them the finer things in life as hookers are people too, not just expensive diseased sexual partners. She was probably a hooker with a heart of gold, purest of intentions, who is just down and out on her luck.
HOOKER WITH A HEART OF GOLD:
The hooker with a heart of gold (also the whore with a heart of gold or the tart with a heart) is a stock character in which a fallen woman, a prostitute who sells sex for cash or drugs, is in fact a kindly and internally wholesome person. This character is often a pivotal, but peripheral, character in literature and motion pictures, usually giving key advice or serving as a go-between. She is sometimes established in contrast to another female character who is morally perfect but frigid or otherwise unyielding. The stereotype owes a debt to Mary Magdalene.
A variation on the theme, the stripper with a heart of gold, is a tamer version of the character, a stripper and sex worker but not a prostitute.
Examples
Donna Beck on All My Children
Calpurnia in I, Claudius
Gloria (Doris Dowling) in “The Lost Weekend”
Iris Steensma (Jodie Foster) in Taxi Driver
Lana (Rebecca De Mornay) in Risky Business
Linda Ash (Mira Sorvino) in Mighty Aphrodite
Ophelia (Jamie Lee Curtis) in Trading Places
Poppy (Sissy Spacek) in Prime Cut
Rose in the song “Bed of Roses” by the Statler Brothers
Sera (Elisabeth Shue) in Leaving Las Vegas
Inara Serra (Morena Baccarin) in “Firefly”
Chandramukhi (Madhuri Dixit) in Devdas
Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) in Pretty Woman, that also shares traits of Cinderella and the Pygmalion myth.
Never on Sunday shows a somewhat different character
List of famous prostitutes and courtesans
This is a list of famous prostitutes and courtesans:
Real-life and historical
Brenda Allen, 1940s Los Angeles madam
Aspasia, hetaera companion of Pericles
Laura Bell, the “Queen of London whoredom”
Theresa Berkeley, 19th-century dominatrix
Divine Brown, caught in a compromising situation with Hugh Grant
Sydney Biddle Barrows, the Mayflower Madam
Annie Chapman, one of the “canonical five” victims of Jack the Ripper
Claudia Drexelius, German prostitute exposed through national TV
Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood Madam
Nell Gwynne, courtesan to Charles II of England
Janie Jones, entertainer and madam
Christine Keeler, involved in the Profumo Affair
Mary Jane Kelly, one of the “canonical five” victims of Jack the Ripper
Margaret MacDonald
Madame Alex, the Beverly Hills Madam
Madame Claude
Draga Masin, prostitute turned Queen of Serbia
Mata Hari (born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle)
Gerda Munsinger, Soviet spy
Mary Ann Nichols, one of the “canonical five” victims of Jack the Ripper
Cynthia Payne
Barbara Payton, 1940s film starlet who turned to prostitution in the late 1950s after the end of her career and collapse of her marriage
Cora Pearl
Phryne, Greek hetaera
Victoria Price, alleged victim, perjurer in the Scottsboro Boys case
Valerie Solanas, street prostitute turned attempted assassin
Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of Sid Vicious, murder victim
Elizabeth Stride, one of the “canonical five” victims of Jack the Ripper
Martha Tabram, a possible victim of Jack the Ripper
Sunset Thomas, porn star
Thais, Greek hetaera who lived during the time of Alexander the Great
Saint Thais, repentant Egyptian courtesan
Theodora, Empress of Byzantium
Fictional
Belle Watling, Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Fanny Hill, Fanny Hill by John Cleland
Holly Golightly, Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (more of a kept woman than a prostitute proper)
Nana, Nana by Emile Zola
Juliette, in the Marquis de Sade’s “Juliette”
Tra La La, Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby
Tamara Sperling in Robert A. Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love.
Sonya Marmeladova, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Mrs. Rosemary Palm, head of the Guild of Seamstresses in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels
Rahab, Biblical prostitute who assisted the Hebrews in capturing Jericho
Tamar (Bible, Genesis 38) posed as a prostitute
Tilt, from The Monolith
Tristessa, Tristessa by Jack Kerouac
Alleged prostitutes
Catherine Eddowes, one of the “canonical five” victims of Jack the Ripper
Mary Magdalene
La Malinche
Billie Holiday, allegedly, when out of work early in her career
Yoko Ono, according to Albert Goldman’s book The Lives of John Lennon
Eva Peron, early in her acting career, before marrying Juan Peron.
Bonnie Lee Bakley - Robert Blake’s murdered wife allegedly also worked as a prostitute, while posing as an escort and a nude model.
Elizabeth Short, the victim of the Black Dahlia murder
Belle de jour (author) - an anonymous British author who claims to be a high-class call girl
Symbolic or allegorical prostitutes
The Whore of Babylon
Oholah and Oholibah
The prostitute in The Harlot’s Progress by William Hogarth
Male prostitutes
Herbert Huncke, male prostitute, Beat Generation figure
Jobriath, rock singer, male prostitute prior to launching his musical career
Alleged Male prostitutes
Dee Dee Ramone, rumored to have been a former rent boy
Laurence Harvey, allegedly worked as a male prostitute before acting career
ABOVE courtesy of answers.com
