Thoughts From The Peacock Angel

Dear Tina, 

As a girl who grew up having the word slut thrown at her in school hallways, I do not appreciate your using the term to describe women who you find threatening because of your perception that their sexual attractiveness is greater than yours.

As a woman who works happily in the sex industry and has an IQ of 140ish (not that that means anything) and has written three novels, and is a published writer, and is smart enough to survive in a world that is less friendly to me (queer, genderqueer, sex worker) than it is to you (straight, cis, celebrity comedian), I do not appreciate your insulting my intelligence.

How mean were those girls to you in highschool, Tina, to make you take pleasure in mocking women like me?  Women who society sees as moving targets at best for jokes like yours and at worst for fists, knives, guns, and laws to deny us bodily autonomy.  I know you’ve got a sense of inadequacy because you’re not Pamela Anderson, because somewhere along the way you got it into your head that women like Pamela Anderson, are treasured and treated as precious, lauded in some way you are not.

Well, Tina, if it makes you feel any better, men jerk off to you too.  Really, that’s as far as that’ll get you in terms of acclaim, and frankly, Tina I don’t think you should be allowed to complain, not when there are women whose bodies are so much more stigmatized than your slender, socially acceptable cisgender white self.  Not when the phrase “How do you expect to get a real man with fake nails, fake hair and fake tits” is bandied about, not when adorned artifice decked bodies (particularly those of sex workers like myself) are endlessly the but of jokes, by men, by you, by everyone.

So I hope if by some twist of fate you end up reading this, that the next time you go to make a joke about “whores” or “bimbos” or “fake bitches” like me, you think of the teenage girl who went through hell at school every day, who girls wouldn’t speak to because of her undeserved reputation.  A girl who had a girlfriend for chrissake, and still dealt with the leering and the behind the back whispers EVERY fucking day.

I hope you think of the woman who survived an abusive relationship and built her own business, who SURVIVED to make her world a better place, who people still call whore for what she does for a living, and I hope that fucking joke dies on your lips, honey.

Sincerely,

Madeira Darling