On The Republican National Convention And Sex Workers.
I had a Tweet up for about twenty seconds that I then took down, which was this:
“Cleveland is hosting the National Republican Convention in 2016. I hope we have enough hookers.”
Which is funny to me, man. I honestly don’t know if Cleveland has enough prostitutes to service all the incoming conservatives, because past conventions have shown that man, these staid-in-the-wool motherfuckers go through sex workers like nobody’s business. We may have to import. I’m sure several of my sex worker friends are looking at their calendars and just planning a blowout weekend.
But I took the Tweet down, not because I thought it was inaccurate, but because I thought in a shorter version it’d pass on overtones I didn’t want to create. It seemed to degrade sex workers to me (and no, for some reason “I hope we have enough sex workers” didn’t strike me as funny in the same way).
Which is a weird thing about being careful with your communications: It’s not that what you say isn’t funny, but that it also encourages people to not question things. To me, a hooker or a sex worker or a prostitute or whatever the fuck you call them are people, worthy of rights and protections. But I suspect a lot of the people who might pass that gag along would be the sort of people who’d see selling sex as the incontrovertible evidence of bad morals/life decisions/etc.
The real joke here is how the Republicans try to make kinky sex illegal, and yet crave it the same way we do. But I’m not sure that Tweet got it across without punching downwards more than I’d like.
Okay, rant break over, back to work.
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- What’s in a Name? | Cryptic Philosopher - […] Ferrett made an interesting remark about the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland and the nomenclature of sex […]
“The real joke here is how the Republicans try to make kinky sex illegal, and yet crave it the same way we do.”
If you decide that food is Bad, and craving food is Bad (not without reason: excessive and mindless eating has all sorts of nasty consequences), and you try to limit your eating in unhealthy ways, you’re going to be hungry ALL THE TIME. It’s going to rule your thoughts, your emotions, and you’re going to find yourself doing all sorts of strange things to avoid giving in, including shaking your head and realizing that you’ve torn into a box of Yodels in the middle of the supermarket without even realizing you’ve done so. Unless you’re “lucky,” and you get the sort of zinc deficiency that causes anorexia. Then you just quietly starve to death, convinced of your moral superiority. But that’s beating a dead horse.
It’s funny, coming into that tweet with my mind-set, I took it as intended. (Maybe part of the humor (for me) is that I imagine the Republicans who can’t keep away from sex workers are the same who would try to put them down as “hookers.”)
Actually, with this scenario, I wondered if there were enough male pros who have practice telling people that they aren’t gay while they have gay sex.
Twitter seems like it would be a great place for putting up witty one-liners, but it would only serve that purpose if Twitterers were all simultaneously in a bar, drunk, and watching the same things happening around them. Instead… no. Twitter’s optimum role is for putting forward a carefully-crafted persona of sincerity.
Save the jokes for the places that either have the right context baked in, or where the context can be wrapped around the line before it’s delivered. And no, the answer isn’t for Twitter to make DrunkTwitter.com. Because then the lines would all be terrible, and context would again prove necessary to separate the dry husk of idiocy from the endosperm of wit.