I'm Praying in Here, That's All! Go Away!

I’ve been reading Mormon websites, researching Mitt Romney’s religion. It’s a rich vein and deserves more time. But in the meantime I found this little tidbit given out to Mormon youth during the seventies to keep them away from masturbating. If anything this proves that you should never let your spiritual guidance be in the hands of the repressed.

The entire list can be found here.

I’ve culled the more laughable parts:

A Guide to Self-Control:

1. Never touch the intimate parts of your body except during normal toilet processes.

3. If you are associated with other persons having this same problem, YOU MUST BREAK OFF THEIR FRIENDSHIP. Never associate with other people having the same weakness. Don't suppose that two of you will quit together, you never will. You must get away from people of that kind. Just to be in their presence will keep your problem foremost in your mind. The problem must be taken OUT OF YOUR MIND for that is where it really exists. Your mind must be on other and more wholesome things.

Sounds like someone had a bad experience doing a circle jerk.

4. When you bathe, do not admire yourself in a mirror. Never stay in the bath more than five or six minutes -- just long enough to bathe and dry and dress AND THEN GET OUT OF THE BATHROOM into a room where you will have some member of your family present.

Sounds like a horror movie. Get out of the bathroom! The call is coming from inside the bathroom! The steam will make you horny and then will kill you!!!! Doesn’t the toothbrush look like a dick? Doesn’t the folds of a towel look like a pussy? Get out! Get ooouuutttt!!!!

5. When in bed, if that is where you have your problem for the most part, dress yourself for the night so securely that you cannot easily touch your vital parts, and so that it would be difficult and time consuming for you to remove those clothes. By the time you started to remove protective clothing you would have sufficiently controlled your thinking that the temptation would leave you.

I have a friend who works at a store called "Chaps" that might have some secure clothes you can wear. You can also pick up a cock ring.

6. If the temptation seems overpowering while you are in bed, GET OUT OF BED AND GO INTO THE KITCHEN AND FIX YOURSELF A SNACK, even if it is in the middle of the night, and even if you are not hungry, and despite your fears of gaining weight. The purpose behind this suggestion is that you GET YOUR MIND ON SOMETHING ELSE.

Enough with the shouting. I’m repressed not deaf. Say did you hear about the rising obesity rates in Utah? I wonder why that is.

7. Never read pornographic material. Never read about your problem. Keep it out of mind. Remember -- "First a thought, then an act."

Does looking at pictures involve reading? It does? Are you sure?

9. Pray. But when you pray, don't pray about this problem, for that will tend to keep [it] in your mind more than ever. Pray for faith, pray for understanding of the Scriptures, pray for the Missionaries, the General Authorities, your friends, your families, BUT KEEP THE PROBLEM OUT OF YOUR MIND BY NOT MENTIONING IT EVER -- NOT IN CONVERSATION WITH OTHERS, NOT IN YOUR PRAYERS. KEEP IT _OUT_ of your mind!

Again with the shouting. Have you heard of the theory about the white elephant, in which you are told not to think of a white elephant and then it’s all you can think about?

Suggestions:

3. When the temptation to masturbate is strong, yell STOP to those thoughts as loudly as you can in your mind and then recite a prechosen Scripture or sing an inspirational hymn. It is important to turn your thoughts away from the selfish need to indulge.

It’s been a long day. You finally hit the sheets after saying goodnight to the kids. Then you’re jolted awake by a shout from your son’s bedroom. First he screamed “Stop!” and then started singing hymns. Do you:
A) Call the mental ward and book him a room
B) Throw a Penthouse and a towel in his room and tell him to shut the fuck up.
C) Remind yourself to send the Elder a basket of muffins for his guidance in making your son a repressed wreck.

11. In the field of psychotherapy there is a very effective technique called aversion therapy. When we associate or think of something very distasteful with something which has been pleasurable, but undesirable, the distasteful thought and feeling will begin to cancel out that which was pleasurable. If you associate something very distasteful with your loss of self-control it will help you to stop the act. For example, if you are tempted to masturbate, think of having to bathe in a tub of worms, and eat several of them as you do the act.

That’s not aversion therapy, that’s the start of a fetish. “Honey, I’m feeling randy tonight. I’ll be in the garden digging up worms.”

12. During your toileting and shower activities leave the bathroom door or shower curtain partly open, to discourage being alone in total privacy. Take cool brief showers.

Discourage being alone or encouraging voyeurism? The Mormons are so kinky.

17. Avoid people, situations, pictures or reading materials that might create sexual excitement.

Walk around with a bag over your head.

18. It is sometimes helpful to have a physical object to use in overcoming this problem. A Book of Mormon, firmly held in hand, even in bed at night has proven helpful in extreme cases.

Sure it might look like a pocket pussy or a dildo, but I call it my Book of Mormon.

19. In very severe cases it may be necessary to tie a hand to the bed frame with a tie in order that the habit of masturbating in a semi-sleep condition can be broken. This can also be accomplished by wearing several layers of clothing which would be difficult to remove while half asleep.

I’ve tied a few hands to bed frames in my day.

21. Do not let yourself return to any past habit or attitude patterns which were part of your problem. Satan Never Gives Up. Be calmly and confidently on guard. Keep a positive mental attitude. You can win this fight! The joy and strength you will feel when you do will give your whole life a radiant and spiritual glow of satisfaction and fulfillment.

Now I know why Mormons play so much basketball. I have to remember to bring really dark sunglasses when I go to Utah; all that spiritual glow is hard on the eyes. Have a good weekend and lock the bathroom door, kids.

Blood 'n Strippers

Jim Mitchell’s funeral was held today. He died of a heart attack, and he was buried next to his brother, Art, whom he shot 16 years ago. Even though San Francisco has a relatively short history compared to London or even New York City, its history is as colorful as a rainbow flag.

The Mitchell Brothers built a pornography empire, including making the famous porno Behind the Green Door. Even though I’ve never been inside their strip club (I’m way too cheap to pay for blue balls), I’ve always found the mural of the whales on the side wall to be pretty funny. I also liked how they battled our ex-mayor Senator Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein is highly respected, although I find her petty and more Republican than Ronald Reagan. But as Noah Cross says in Chinatown, “Course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” She became mayor when Mayor Moscone was shot by Dan White, a fact she exploited in her Senate campaign.

Anyhoo, Feinstein tried to close the Mitchell Brother Theater for two decades and lost every time. The brothers knew the nasty art of San Francisco politics:

The battle resulted in the brothers obtaining Feinstein's unlisted phone number and placing it on the theater marquee with the words, "For a Good Time, Call ..."

The brothers entered the rarified air of SF history when Jim shot Art:

It was February 27, 1991. Jim went to see Artie and they got into a bad argument. Even as Artie's girlfriend was screaming to a 911 operator, gunshots could be heard. Officers came and found Jim walking around in a daze and carrying a .22 rifle and a .38 Smith and Wesson Special. Inside Artie's house, they found Artie in the bedroom. He had been shot through the eye, abdomen and right arm by a .22, and he was dead. Eight spent cartridges were picked up in the room.

Jim was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, which is a strange term innit? Does anyone want to volunteer to slaughter this man? He was sentenced to six years. I’m not sure why a man who brings a rifle to a “intervention” and then proceeds to shoot his victim three times (and apparently is a bad shot since he fired eight shots) is not in jail longer than that, but in America if you have money you can kill with impunity.

With Jim’s passing is the passing of a certain San Francisco time period. The seventies in SF were violent, sexual, and insane. Jim Jones was preaching and booking a flight to Guyana. Dan White climbed in a basement window on the capitol building. The Zodiac Killer was taking lethal cab rides. It must have been a hellova time. At least rent was cheaper back then.

So goodbye, Mr. Mitchell. I assume you’re going to hell, where your brother is waiting for you. And, ooh boy, is he going to give you such a pinch!

Next Spokesperson: Virgina Crossleggs

Will you look at this girl from the photo from a recent New York Times article? She stands near a field; salt of the earth, she is. And even though she has cutesy heart jewelry, she wears a jaded, world-weary look. Actually, she looks pissed off. Her name is Jami Waite, and she is the public face of Virginity Rules, an abstinence propaganda machine.

Teen pregnancy is down, although abstinence programs are not the reason for the decline. I’m guessing pregnancy is down due to better information being available. Studies have shown no difference between those who have abstinence indoctrination and those who don’t. Because of the lack of success, funding for these religious programs is being threatened, thank God.

I have no problem with people abstaining from sex, especially teenagers. Sexuality is a complicated beast (with two backs) and pregnancy and diseases can happen. What bothers me is the message that sex in a monogamous marriage is worth waiting for and completely satisfying. These kids are being sold a flesh pipe dream and that fur pie in the sky turns out to be not so tasty. Instead of giving these kids all the information and letting then make rational decisions, they give them bizarre metaphors. Here’s a quotation by Eric Love who runs Virginity Rules: (Eric Love? Jami Waite? Who named these people? Charles Dickens or perhaps Thomas Pynchon?)

…Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt, lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips. “Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.”

Besides the risible dorkiness of the symbolisim, the message is premarital sex amounts to a piece of tape on a dirty floor. Why don’t they just force sexually-active girls to wear a red S on their shirts to announce their sluttiness. And this is mostly aimed at women. Why have the girl up above be the spokesperson? A double standard exists, and since these programs are faith-based the onus is on the woman to hold off and her reward is a relationship in which she is subservient to her husband.

Another sad fact is people change over time and not necessarily in sync with their spouses. According to statistics, 43% of new marriages end in divorce. And that’s not including all the people who stay in miserable marriages for the sake of religion or kids. I hope the best for Ms. Waite as she waits, but I advise her to have pre-martial safer sex. She should get to know her body, her likes, dislikes and her level of kink (or her complete lack of kink. I assume she has a low libido.). Knowledge of yourself will help a marriage far more than the religious platitudes about sex.

Slouching Towards Euphoria: Pink Saturday

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence asked for a media blackout about Pink Saturday this year. It didn’t work out, KTVU did a report on the requested black out. I read about it in the Bay Area Reporter, a LGBT newspaper. The Sisters were trying to keep the party from turning into Halloween, in which people tend to get shot or stabbed. The control of the party opens up a hornet’s nest of racial, class and sexual issues—way too complicated to cover in a blog post, especially a Slouching Towards Euphoria post, which is dedicated to bars.

Pink Saturday is not a bar per se, but it is celebration of a kind that you find in bars and clubs. Quick lesson: The Pride Parade, which San Francisco and many other cities throw in remembrance of the Stonewall Inn riots, is usually celebrated on the last Sunday in June. The Saturday night beforehand, the streets of Castro are shut down and people dance and drink and carouse. It’s much wilder than the parade itself.

My roommate and I decided to throw a barbeque and then walk down and enjoy the festivities. The party started out as simple affair, but much like America’s waistline, it grew tremendously. The house was cleaned and washed and dusted, which took the attendees a few hours to reverse. Our place looked like it fell off the rainbow tree and hit every branch; we had rainbow flags, candles, towels, and garlands. I put out a party game of Name the Homo, in which you had to identify the pictures of famous homosexuals throughout history. On the box in which you put your answers in, I taped gay and lesbian porn pictures. That naughty little detail took me a surprisingly long time to put together.

The pièce de résistance was the ice sculpture my roommate had made especially for the party. Basically, it was a naked backside of a man. Running through the ice sculpture was a plastic tube attached to a funnel at the top of the sculpture. You would pour a shot of Jägermeister through the sculpture and the ice cooled the liquid as it ran through it, pouring out into a shot glass at the bottom. We dubbed it the Jägermeister glory hole.

Guests arrived slowly but surely. And as parties usually go, one moment there are a few guests then in an instant the place is packed. Beers are being opened; food is being devoured; the nose level creeps up. We had put together a dance mix on the computer, which we played at loud levels. Had my roommate’s subwoofer been working properly our guests would have felt it in their gut.

Around nine p.m., we decided to see what was happening out on the street. Two blocks of Castro street was closed to traffic. The Sisters were asking for donations to enter the area. The street was packed with people. D.J.s played on different street corners. The bars overflowed with patrons. Our group separated within the crowd. I had a bag of frozen Otter Pops and offered the pops to people walking by. Some folks took them, effusively thanking me. Other folks blanched, as if I was handing out right-wing literature.

On top of a truck people boogied to the beats. One guy stripped in the cold night air. The crowd was by and large people in their twenties. Although there were some straight couples, mostly, it was groups of young gay men and women. The crowd certainly held the rainbow: African-American, Asian, Latino, Caucasian. I assumed a lot of the crowd lived in the suburbs, and this was a chance to hang out with their sexual community. And with the drinking, people puked and pissed in the doorways. I thanked my Irish luck that my doorway was close enough to walk to the Castro but far enough away to avoid the drunkards expelling their toxins.

We danced for a while, then I went back to my place to start the party up again. A younger crowd took the next shift. The stereo was turned up even louder. The living room became a tiny dance club. Bottle and cups sat on every available open space. The ice sculpture crashed to the ground when one wayward youth put his head in the area where the shot glass catches the liquid. The Jägermeister was gone by then, so the loss was trivial. I hid in my room and played acoustic guitar with some new-found friends. Finally rosy Dawn spread her fingertips over the horizon. This meant one thing: get out.

The guest left. The house was in sticky shambles. I laid down and the cool mist of sleep came upon me.

On Your Knees, Boy

7:1 Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman.
Epistles of St. Paul
1 Corinthians

The great thing about being secular is that your sexual outlook is your own and is not governed by what some asexual obsessive wrote thousands of years ago. Morals are what keeps us civilized, by keeping us from hurting one another; they shouldn't govern what is pleasurable and hurts no one. I bring all this up because of an article in the Los Angeles times about ex-gay leaders admitting that sexuality is innate and not a choice. This is a good thing: people admitting the obvious, but there are details from the article that drive me crazy.

Here's what they say about the head of an ex-gay movement, Alan Chambers:

With years of therapy, Chambers says, he has mostly conquered his own attraction to men; he's a husband and a father, and he identifies as straight. But lately, he's come to resent the term "ex-gay": It's too neat, implying a clean break with the past, when he still struggles at times with homosexual temptation. "By no means would we ever say change can be sudden or complete," Chambers said.

"Mostly conquered." Doesn't that sound like Bush pronouncement of the war? It's a good thing we've mostly conquered the Iraqi insurgents. He hasn’t conquered anything; he’s repressing.

But even gay counselors are backing this new pronouncement. The role of therapy is to bring happiness, I guess at any cost. Here's a quotation from an ex-ex-gay, Michael Bussee:

He and other gay activists — along with major mental-health associations — still reject therapy aimed at "liberating" or "curing" gays. But Bussee is willing to acknowledge potential in therapy that does not promise change but instead offers patients help in managing their desires and modifying their behavior to match their religious values — even if that means a life of celibacy.

So what's wrong with a life of celibacy? I know what it's like; I was married for a while. But here's the crux: sex is major component of love. You love a friend, mother or pizza, but love with a partner is partly erotic love. So those who choose celibacy are limiting themselves immensely. Plus, what about those poor religious women who have to put up with the Ted Haggards in their life? Who wants to be with someone who doesn't desire them? Can you imagine a society where heterosexuality sex is only for procreation and not for pleasure? That’s a view of strict religion. Seriously, fuck that.

Between the repressed sexuality that religion brings and violence it inspires, secular humanism is the way to go.

When Love Comes Tumbling Down

I couldn’t pass this up. The military briefly looked into making a gay bomb. Let’s let the article tell the story:

Edward Hammond, of Berkeley's Sunshine Project, had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.

As part of a military effort to develop non-lethal weapons, the proposal suggested, "One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior."

The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon.

"The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soldiers to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistibly attractive to one another," Hammond said after reviewing the documents.

"The notion was that a chemical that would probably be pleasant in the human body in low quantities could be identified, and by virtue of either breathing or having their skin exposed to this chemical, the notion was that soldiers would become gay," explained Hammond.

The Pentagon told CBS 5 that the proposal was made by the Air Force in 1994.

The full article is here.

So many jokes…and stereotypes. It sounds like a plot for porn film. Man, there’s war going on, but my armor is really chaffing me. Mind if I take off my pants? (cue bad seventies funk music). Or maybe they thought the enemy would throw down their weapons and start singing show tunes? Or maybe make bitchy remarks about the enemy’s uniforms? Ask for a minimosa with their MRE?

I know this is Ohio in 1994, but really, who has this job? This is an example of the Peter Principle. This really illustrates the oxymoron, military intelligence. This is why, satire is impossible.

Butterfly on a Wheel

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Honey, I Shrunk the Porn

It was like coming across an old friend and not recognizing him or her at all. I was waiting for a haircut in the old style barbershop in my neighborhood. I perused the magazines and found Penthouse. Being that the Castro is a gay mecca, it’s a bit strange to find a nudie girl magazine, but these types of mags are a part of barbershops. So I flipped through it.

I sort of grew up with Penthouse. My brother would bring one home, or my friends might have few copies taken from Dad’s nightstand. Even back then I understood the hierarchy of the nudie magazine. Playboy was pretty but dull. Hustler was way sleazy. Every model had to be greased up for a Hustler shoot. I imagine they had a 10 gallon bucket of grease at the studio. Penthouse was a nice middle ground: they showed more than Playboy but had nicer models than Hustler. Back in the seventies, they showed genitalia. As a kid I poured over the pictures wondering at the model’s beauty, wondering what it would be like to have sex with them. At that age I wasn’t even masturbating yet, but I was intensely curious.

They had articles like Playboy, but they were more about sex. And there was the Penthouse Forum. The Forum was letters from readers describing their sexual adventures. It was all fake, of course. I had one of those Santa Clause/Tooth Fairy moments of clarity when I thought, hey, wait a minute, these stories sure are familiar. So people don’t quite have these random hookups described by the Forum writers, but I sure learned an arsenal of descriptive words: tits, bazongas, bodacious tatas, prick, dipstick and my personal favorite, raging manhood. Great name for a band if it’s not already taken.

So as I flipped through the Penthouse at the barbershop, I searched for any similarity to the mag of old. It’s a lot slimmer these days, and perhaps smaller too. The Forum was two letters only. The articles were all about stuff you could buy, or they were bullet points—lists of cool things, but not any interesting articles. Penthouse now resembles those stupid lad mags like Maxim or FHM, whose readership apparently has the attention span of gnat.

And strangely enough, Penthouse is coyer these days. I only saw a slight glimpse of genitalia. I don’t think I miss the gynecological photos they use to do, but it does seem a bit more tame. The pundits proclaim the pornification of society, but Penthouse is toning down the raunchiness. Of course, you can see all sorts of wild and wacky stuff on the internet for free, so to be coy is sort of a fresh idea. And, unlike Playboy, the women didn’t have breast implants.

But in the end, Penthouse was a dull read. I flipped through the entire magazine in 10 minutes. If you took the nudity out, you would have a minor Esquire magazine. But I suppose Penthouse will survive. Times change but the enjoyment of seeing naked people is eternal.

My Deconstructed Humps

Deconstruction is a dense and difficult theory to learn, and to read texts by its creator, Jacques Derrida, can be compared to driving a tractor with a heap of sleeping pills coursing through your veins. The basic definition is texts are unstable because of the multiple meanings attached to every word, and because of this instability a text’s meaning can be subverted, which means a text’s meaning can be changed 180 degrees from what it supposedly says. That’s still pretty vague, but what can you do? Texts are unstable.

An excellent way to understand Deconstruction is with music. A musician can cover a song and deconstruct its meaning very easily. Jimi Hendrix’s version of the “Star Spangled Banner” is a superb example. He doesn’t even sing the words and yet he takes our militant national anthem and makes it into a protest song. How does he do this? At the climax of the song, the part with the highest notes, the part that most singers hate because it is so difficult to sing, Hendrix adds sound effects. The line is “And the rocket’s red glare / The bombs bursting in air.” After this line, Hendrix imitates a bomb screaming down from the air and blowing up. You can hear the shrapnel dispersing and destroying all in its way. What is supposed to be rousing and proud sounds terrifying and painfully real.

Another example is making the rounds on YouTube. Alanis Morissette covers The Black Eye Peas' song, “My Humps”. (See Youtube for vids.) The Peas’ version is a light dance track with repetitive rhymes of a woman stating that her humps bring her cash and drive the men crazy. It’s a lark and fun to dance to, but there isn’t much underneath nor is there supposed to be any deeper meanings. But then Morissette covers it with a bare piano and turns in into a mournful, bitter song. She also covers the video, making fun of the Peas’ posturing, but also has a shot of her crying with her makeup smearing like Courtney Love or Tammy Fay Baker. So she not only deconstructs the song but the video as well. Good job, Ms. Morissette. Derrida is smiling, as he shovels more coal for his satanic overlord.

Rock & Roll Whores

So I says to myself, self, I says, why do these rock & rollers always have songs about prostitutes? Maybe it’s the outsider status they both share, although, now, rockers are hardly outsiders. Maybe it’s because sex and money is what they both are all about. Also, the ones I choose were all English rockers, so maybe there is some stuffy English attitudes in there somewhere. Whatever it is, it needs scrutinizing. So I picked a few I knew and checked ‘em out. Won’t you join me? But first are you a cop? Cuz you have to tell me if you are a cop. Okay, here we go.

“Roxanne” by The Police

The most well-known ‘ho’ song. The Police took reggae music and extracted politics and sex to make safe pop music. Later on, Sting threw in references to Jung and all that, but no ganja references can be found. The narrator is in love with the whore and, lucky her, he doesn’t “talk down to” her. He is her knight in shining armor, bringing his chalice through the teaming crowds for her thirst. No more will she have to sell her body through the night. We never hear what she has to say though. We are stuck in his continuous chant, turn off the red light. Sounds ominous doesn’t it? Kind of like Othello’s chant of put out the light? All we know about Roxy is she doesn’t care if it’s wrong or right. My kind of woman. Maybe that’s the English attraction, since morals are about caring what your neighbor thinks, and the English love that shit. Personally, I don’t think the relationship will last. He’s too needy and bossy, and she looks great in red.

“22 Acacia Avenue” by Iron Maiden

The most straight forward and therefore lame streetwalker songs. And like most Iron Maiden songs, it’s in E and chugs along like a train. It has two narrators, but, again, not the prostitute’s view. The first narrator is a pimp telling the client about Charlotte the Harlot (from another Iron Maiden song). She only costs 15 quid, which is roughly 30 American dollars—not a bad deal, really. The song changes tempo and then we get the lovesick client begging her to stop, much like Sting’s wet-bag narrator. He warns her of disease and going past her prime. He asks if she loves to lay or the pay—looks like someone bought a rhyming dictionary. The pimp comes back and lists the various things you can do to her, the British are so exact. And in the end the narrator tells her to pack her bags, for she is coming with him. Yay! In Adrian Smith’s defense, he did write this when he was eighteen, but really, this song sucks. A heavy metal band should never be sincere, and that is what this song is.

“Sweet Painted Lady” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin

This song probably influenced the preceding two but as a far as lyrics go, it’s much better. Taupin is a weird lyricist, usually substituting wacky for emotion: “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids / In fact it’s cold as hell. And there’s no one there to raise them, if you did.” Hmm, okay, I won’t argue that Mars sucks to raise your children, but you could rocket up a nanny from earth I suppose. In “Sweet Painted Lady”, he tries to capture a relationship rather than a fantasy of men saving broken women. The narrator is a seaman—we know this because he is on dry land, there is a squeeze box playing in the background, along with the sound of seagulls—who apparently has tricks that he wants to show off. Where did he learn these tricks? On board the manly ship, perhaps? We also have a madam, promising beer, sex, and a warm bed to sleep in. That’s all I ever wanted. What’s nice about the lyrics is the lack of moralizing. The narrator shrugs, saying that sex for pay is the name of the game. And the olfactory mnemonic of the “smell of sea in your beds” is both post-coital, and a great symbol for the loneliness of the sea and its workers. Sex at its heart is a face slap to loneliness.

“Trick of the Light” by The Who

I suppose I should warn you, I thought John Entwistle, the writer of this song, was the cat’s meow for a very long time. You see, I played bass for many years, and I wanted to be John Entwistle. The guy was one of the best bassists to walk the earth. He also was a coke addict with a weak heart. So falls one of my idols. Anywhoo, he wrote one of the best working girl songs (working girl, now isn’t that a quaint title?). The song has the typical Who roar, especially since Entwistle is playing an eight-string bass on it (the bass has each string set with a higher string making for a very thick sound.).

Again the narrator is the prostitute’s john. The scene starts after the sex. The prostitute is reading True Confessions, a woman’s magazine. The john thinks those supposedly sordid stories are fairy tales compared to her life. But he has fallen in love with her and asks her if she had an orgasm. He thinks he might have seen a flicker of emotion on her deadpan face although it could have been a trick of the light—Apparently, there are prostitutes who advertise giving a girlfriend experience, that is to say, they act like they love you when they fuck you. I suppose I can say something snarky about it, or maybe say tisk, tisk, but small amount of feeling nice even with a price tag isn’t so bad.

The narrator then breaks down into a series of clichés: “What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? / They don't make girls like you no more / And I'd like to get to know you on closer terms than this.” And finally he asks her, like most other narrators, to steal away with him. Although we still never hear the prostitute’s point of view, she does get to roll her eyes and kick him out. With the red light shining in his eyes, he still wonders if her made her come. I’m betting, he didn’t. This song really captures the monetary relationship of whore and john. The job is sex, but that doesn’t mean it’s not as dull as any other job.

Summation

So what have we learned? One thing, we need songs from the prostitute’s point of view. I’m sure they are out there. We also learned if you fall in love with a streetwalker and ask her to run away with you, the cliché police will come knocking on your door. We’ve also learned the red light symbol, with its intimations of passion and tumescence, is too hard to pass up. The prostitute is romanticized by rockers. She is a woman in dire straits, needing her knight for salvation, but like Entwistle’s whore, she more likely will roll her eyes and kick the knight out on his armored ass, red light reflecting the metal.