What a set-up.
Through a convoluted series of events (that *did* involve a possible Britney-Spears-on-the-lam sighting) your whore finds herself sitting in on a ivy league undergrad Adult Psychopathology class. It's the first class back after Spring Break in a stadium-type lecture hall. I'm already sick to death of professors' glib references to their student body's tans. Was it really like this when I was upper-middle class on the East Coast? I guess it was.
The teacher who also has a private practice, comes in and starts a spiel about his spring break, seeing patients. Actually, I'm not sure if he's a psychiatrist or psychologist, so maybe they're "clients". Anyway, he starts right in with "So have you all heard much about the Elliot Spitzer scandal?" "Uh-oh", I say to my enrolled friend, not really under my breath, "this is going to piss me off."
And sure enough, it did.
Teacher is a middle aged white man with glasses and a smugly apologetic face, like he's practiced looking like a likable, compassionate oaf with a sense of humor when really he's just a small-minded manipulative jerk. Now, I admit, I am greatly biased based on my experience with East Coast mental health care providers, but this guy had one of those faces and mannerisms that I think they teach in psych school over there: 'trust me, like me, so i can ignore and control you.' But I only saw him for an hour, he may be a perfectly good clinician.
Anyway, Teach is talking about his patients/clients, and how last week they all wanted to talk about Spitzer. My friend warns me that this is just an opening monologue, some musings that have no real relevance to today's class. Teach goes through the various takes and reactions of his patients/clients, and I'm just waiting for it, but he's making a point. And then he delivers:
(approximate quotation) "And some people felt it was a victimless crime, which is outrageous if you think about how these women are enlisted and treated and why they do that work."
A $4000 escort to politicians is really a depraved, desperate victim!?! Really!??!?
My face is hot and I'm fidgeting in my seat and just as I predicted, I'm pissed.
This man thinks with his mock-insight and pseudo compassion he knows anything about the multiplicity of realities of what being a sex worker might mean? Of course he does, he teaches psych at an Ivy League school. Now I'm making idiotic generalizations, but then again, I'm not "teaching" them to 300 college students, some of whom might actually be intellectually curious and trying to learn how to think. The worst is that his comment is the "twist", in his narrative, *he's* the one taking sex workers into consideration. It's amazing how ignorance can be so infuriating.
And how many of those students with their massive tuition and big, hard student loans have turned a trick or danced a shift or sold phone sex on niteflirt? And how many will soon? Does he really presume that at a school full of presumably curious young people with $36,000 a year price tags on their education, none are supplementing their income or their scholarship with sex work? I mean what's more classic than the clueless asshole psychiatrist if not the cute young escort working her way through school?
As far as I can tell, in cases like these the exploitation and victimization all starts with the media invasion of privacy and sentiment that sex workers are easy grist for the mill, less worthy of protection. "Kristen" may be using the scandal to further her singing career, which would be a shrewd spin on having your life broken into and your given name suddenly synonymous with "scandal" on a Google search.
Anyway, the "reality", or rather the media fabricated simulacrum of reality of the story of Kristen and Elliot Spitzer has been covered enough. I'm more interested in how this story gets passed down to intelligent, hard working young people as a reinforcement of the 'common sense' theory of sex work, that all sex workers are pitiable victims; even though this story seems to pretty clearly defy the mainstream vision.
I've been putting off writing an email to that psych teacher. I wanted to confront him after class when the fire was still in me, but a wave of anxious students immediately subsumed him. It seems so much harder to defend and explain about the great spectrum of people and experiences that constitute sex work when I loose the power of connection from a face to face conversation.
I wonder how many of the students in that room paused when he said that? Or did they all just swallow it, as I once would have; as a good point, as common sense.
Oh, and the point of Teach's monologue? You guessed it.
Mr. Spitzer is a very sick man.
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