A L S O_ T O D A Y

Battling stag/nation
By Jill Priluck
Radical hag Mary Daly stands up to Boston College for forcing coed classes

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BY ISAAC ZAUR | Prostitution seems to have a grip on the undergraduate imagination. In the last two weeks two different parties at Haverford, my campus of a thousand people, took "Pimps and Ho's" as their costume theme. As far as I am aware, this was a coincidence -- both parties were planned well in advance, and attendance at the two did not overlap much. I went to one.

I may as well confess from the outset that I am a prude and a geek. I spent several minutes puzzling over an invitation in the mailroom of the campus center, standing in the middle of the hall, bumping into people, and explaining myself confusedly: "I'm sorry ... It's an invitation ... I have to be a pimp on Saturday ... Excuse me ..." Eventually I sat down, still muttering: "I don't know ... What does this mean?"

A friend sat down next to me, by chance one of the only people I know who has actually known prostitutes. Of her adolescence, she once said to me, "We were all having fun, and the next thing I know my best friend's being sold down the shore for little to nothing!" My friend had no patience for my "ideological reservations," however.

"Would you have reservations if a bunch of people wanted to get drunk and pretend to be accountants?" she asked, exasperated. I replied that I wouldn't have reservations, but that I was confident that would never happen. "Of course not," she said, "it wouldn't be fun."

It was supposed to be fun. I knew this in some way right from the beginning, but it still somehow seemed unethical, insensitive or at the very least peculiar. My only reliable descriptions of actual pimps are from a friend who comes in contact with them in her work at a needle exchange in Philadelphia, and they seem from those descriptions to be miserable and despicable people.

One other person -- my roommate Cassandra -- seemed to feel that the theme required some kind of ethical exertion. She wanted to make a connection to the reality of prostitution. She costumed herself with unwashed hair, bruises on her arms and a black eye. For a final touch, she stuffed three T-shirts near her belly to simulate pregnancy. When she asked me if the bruises looked real, I said I thought so but didn't pimps more commonly beat their "sex workers" in the stomach, where the evidence would be less apparent and the retail value thus not so much degraded? My other roommate, Stephen, perfecting his own image in the mirror, shouted out that he was appalled I even knew this. That was when I realized that my friends had a highly manufactured image of "pimps and ho's" and one that I hadn't been exposed to much. I asked about its origins. Blaxploitation films, I was told. Blaxploitation films and Puff Daddy and Notorious B.I.G. videos. This added racial stereotyping to my list of things to be angsty about for the evening, so it didn't particularly reassure me that I was going to have fun.

Luckily for me, Stephen added some less politically charged academic explanations. "The pimp is a pure image of power," he said. "He controls people, hurts people, satisfies people." I kept this in mind as I tried out a couple of outfits: shirtless with vest (showed my scrawny upper body too much), checked dress pants with unbuttoned shirt (too closely matched my usual attire). I settled on black jeans and a brightly printed synthetic top with outlandish lapels, originally intended as pajamas. I worked on my facial hair (shaving my Trotskyite goatee down to a mustache and a vertical dark strip under my lower lip) and tried to figure out who I could control, who satisfy and how that would be fun. My prudishness was starting to disintegrate. It was time to go to the party.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. College boy pimps and coed ho's