The moral principles of an immoral woman
I think I know who I am. I am a parvenu, an intruder. I do not belong in the cultural sector, which by chance discovered me in its vacant boredom. Just as I didn’t belong in the red-light milieu with my literary ambitions – a luxury courtesan with a higher sensibility. And I also did not belong to the multi-gendered students at Humboldt University. I was an outsider who wasn’t interested in how to plan an academic career. And at the end of my studies I stood there with nothing more than a diploma and the escort job with which I had financed my studies. I held onto that. I didn’t belong anywhere. Meaning anyone can attack me, finish me off without having to fear hurting themselves. I’m an outlaw, an odd fish, the little canary bird. I enjoy the light of the public very much, but I know that any day it could be over. I have no friends, not even on the editorial staff of my newspaper. And it would be of no consequence to sacrifice this column to higher interests. I only hope, if it happens, that I won’t have lost face. I’ve never written anything just to smarm over myself. Only that which is heartfelt.
Provocation based on ingrained mistrust
Rousseau was, as his writings were becoming famous, passed around the salons of Paris. He thought that was the beginning of his philosophical impact, but it was actually the purest infamy – he was a curiosity the decadent salon members made fun of, the bear, he was called. A dancing bear one made to look like a fool. I suppose I’m similar. Yet I don’t want to presume to compare my texts with those of Rousseau. Besides, unlike him, I know what happens to me. And I don’t mind it. I don’t care for a career at any price. I just want to emerge from it in one piece, with my spine intact. It can’t last that long. I read Balzac’s Lost Illusions and am forewarned.
I don’t want to belong. I don’t want respect. I don’t want to be accepted, nor proper, nor fitting. I want the resentment, the hate of all who say of themselves they are normal. At every party I’m invited to. For the rejection is mutual. The normal ones are deeply suspicious to me. These people who you never know if they really want to live as they live, or if they’re doing it out of cowardice, not to be ostracized. Thereby affirming the circumstances to which they succumb.
I prefer the laughable existences that provoke merely on principle, although they perhaps secretly don’t like their provocativeness so much and are bourgeois in disguise – but don’t want to be mistaken for people who at any price conform to the majority due to spinelessness, a lack of position.
After all most are suspicious. One is vigilant against participating in something only because everyone else is. A banal insight, really, anything but creative, the moral of every other great novel. Everyone dies for themselves alone. Nonetheless, people don’t get it into their heads that they’re alone, transcendentally lonely, solo, and can’t talk themselves out of it by saying they’re only doing what everybody does, that they’re adapting to the circumstances. Could Stasi spies talk themselves out of it by saying many would have done the same, they were just conforming to the circumstances? The comparison hits close to home for me. My father and my boyfriend were monitored by the Stasi, however, without throwing all the culprits in one pot. Yet the disdain remains for the conformists, the cowards who fail in the moments one must act rather than behave oneself. If you’ve experienced it once you see it everywhere, even today. I grew up with this perspective. Yes, yes the world changes faster than you think, and in the end you are alone with your deeds. The setting they fit into, where they were even rewarded, is gone.
A Geiger counter for conformity needs
That’s why I’m so alarmed concerning conformity. When I say I became a prostitute because I like to provoke, here’s the context. My job is a Geiger counter for conformity needs. For there are in fact no reasons to be bothered about my self-chosen occupation as a prostitute. At least not for an informed person without doctrinal blocks in the head: I really enjoy doing it. And even if that wasn’t so it would still be my own choice. It is nobody’s business whom I pleasure, in utmost discretion and for whatever personal reasons, with my body and my sexual energy. It is my body. It is not on loan. Just as no pimp may exploit me, no guardian of public morals is entitled to deny me this opportunity for livelihood. All arguments against prostitution as such are pseudo-arguments, lies to restore a traditional religious worldview, particularly under the pretext of a feminism hostile towards men. It is indeed absolutely mad to ban sexuality and nudity from the public as if it were injurious. There is no good reason why someone should be harmed by the beauty of naked bodies. Only those who try to convince us thusly harm our human dignity. Female breasts are not a danger to society, rather the ban on showing them. Those bothered by sex or sex work, although there is no good reason to be bothered by them – except of course regard for the common moral – are exposed for me.
Alas, neutrality does not exist: if you’re not against discrimination, you’re for it. This indicator function makes me like my job even more. It shows me who I can rely on. Because if people cannot even vouch for sex work permitted by law, how should one expect them to overstep the boundary of the legally permissible to dare to fight against a dictatorship? If people in a democracy, rushing ahead of conformism, already want to regulate others’ private lives, what are these people capable of in a totalitarian regime?
In fact, German history alone in the last century should show how fast all values and dogmas can be devalued at a single blow, how empires and republics fall, and in the end, nothing is left other than naked conscience: Why did you participate?
Of course, the example of prostitution is arbitrary. I share my position with all discriminated fringe groups and marginal figures. For the discrimination against those who are other there are ultimately never good arguments, only one cause: everybody’s doing it. That someone is not normal, does not belong, is permission to let out all hate on that person, this unfounded, inexhaustible, ever-smouldering hate the conformists harbour within themselves, ever-emergent via the pressure to conform. This constant craving to destroy that which could redeem them.
By the way, there is no reason to worry about me. You should know that I am always merry in my arrogant beyond. The secret to happiness is freedom, but the secret to freedom is courage. Said Pericles – the enlightened lover of a prostitute.