Thoughts on “The People’s Prostitutes”

Today a man was arrested in connection with the string of murders in the little town of Ipswich.  Over the past few weeks, five prositites have turned up murdered, naked, around the town, and the serial killer dubbed the “Suffolk Strangler.”  Today, 37 year old ex-police officer Tom Stephens was arrested, although as of the writing of this article it seemed unclear whether he was actually guilty or just involved in some John Mark Karr-esque bid for attention.

I will spare you, gentle reader, the discussion of why when a series of women are killed it isn’t a “hate crime,” although that is certainly something that we could talk about later.  But for the moment I have bigger fish to fry, having read an article by a man I can only assume is the Rush Limbaugh of the UK, one Richard Littlejohn of The Daily Mail.

 Littlejohn’s recent article, “Spare Us the ‘People’s Prostitute’ Routine,” is just about as ridiculous and offensive as the title suggests.  Sure, it starts off with a couple of paragraphs of disclaimer, designed to prevent people from saying about him all of the things which I am about to say.

Littlejohn opens his abomination of an op-ed with,

“Let’s get the caveat out of the way from the off. The five women murdered in Ipswich were tragic, lost souls who met a grisly end. I sincerely hope whoever killed them is caught, charged and convicted.

No one with a shred of humanity would wish upon them their ghastly lives and horrible deaths. But…” 

Wait for it…  Here it comes…

“Mother Teresa, they weren’t.”

Now, that is a fair point.  They weren’t Mother Teresa.  And lest you forgot, we aren’t supposed to get upset or feel indignant about murders unless the victims are nuns from Calcutta.  So calm down already!

In case you think I am overreacting, here are some other choice excerpts from the article:

“They weren’t going to discover a cure for cancer or embark on missionary work in Darfur. The only kind of missionary position they undertook was in the back seat of a car.”  Lest you call the man tasteless for making jokes about the recently murdered, may I remind you that these women were dirty prostitutes and therefore it is acceptable – nay, fantastic and worthy of publication! – to laugh at their deaths.  And in case you are tempted to shortsightedly accuse Littlejohn of sexism just because he makes fun of dirty whores, I should tell you that in addition to writing for the Daily News, Littlejohn himself does cure cancer and volunteer in Darfur, thereby affirming his superiority over you (and needless to say, over aforementioned filthy whores), and - more importantly - sealing his right not to be murdered and then made a joke of.  [See if you can find the sarcasm in this passage.]

The thing is, the yelping of all these bleeding hearts has old Liljohn just plain tuckered out!  “Frankly, I’m tired of the lame excuses about how they all fell victim to ruthless pimps who plied them with drugs. These women were on the streets because they wanted to be. “  Unfortunately, not everyone is as sensible as our friend Littlejohn, and apparently the UK has recently “been treated to the All Men Are Bastards/Rapists/Murderers mantra from assorted Glendas who ought to be old enough to know better.”  Now, I haven’t heard anyone say that all men are those things.  I think the idea was generally that the bastard who raped and murdered these women – just that guy is who we’re talking about – is a Bastard/Rapist/Murderer.  And I guess I find that point kind of hard to argue.

The thing about these women, Littlejohn argues, is they weren’t just prostitutes.  They were dirty prositutes.  (Cleanliness, apparently, being the requisite quality for being treated with an ounce of respect upon one’s violent death.)  I’m not even twisting his words here.  In sum, he writes that people are always talking about how we should legalize prostitution, but that is not necessary because “we already have legalized prostitution” in the form of massage parlours.  But “these five women were on the streets because even the filthiest, most disreputable back-alley “sauna” above a kebab shop wouldn’t give them house room.”  They were able to make a living, our sage reporter notes, because some men are attracted to “filthy, drug-addled street whores.”

I don’t want to wind up defending prostitution as a practice, because generally I think it’s a bad idea because of its effects on all parties involved, the moral implications of trading sex for cash, and the air of female objectification that is at the heart of it.  But what makes this essay so outrageous is that, faced with a killer and a prostitute, Littlejohn seems to find the prostitutes more offensive.  And while I am not a fan of the oldest trade in the world, prostitutes don’t even come close to murderers in terms of moral turpitude.  Anyone callous enough to sit around in the aftermath of a killing spree and talk what can only be characterized as mad smack about the victims because they were prostitutes (oops, I mean filthy whores) borders on the sociopathic, if you ask me. 

So, at the risk of being some “Glenda” who calls all men bastards, let me just say this:  in this case, it’s unclear who the Rapist/Murderer is, but the Bastard is most certainly Richard Littlejohn.