Those Who Walk the Streets

Let me talk of a forbidden subject: streetwalkers.

- The writer is a US-based international development advisor and had worked with the World Bank. He can be reached at [e-mail]

That is about the politest term I can find for the profession. Hooker and harlot, tart and trollop, slut and strumpet—all the pejorative terms given hypocritically to the profession by men who have used them and profited from them. Men make shameless use of whores, talk lewdly of them in bars, then shun the subject in polite society.

I have often lived in troubled societies where taxi drivers flaunt a catalogue of young women, readily available. Or where you cannot check into a hotel without being obliquely told about congenial company, 'school girls or beautiful mestizas,' accessible at a suitable price. Neither a quest for virtue or purity nor the fear of venereal affliction has deterred me as much as the distaste for a transaction that, my instinct says (perhaps wrongly), can only be a spurious substitute for a genuine connection with a living person.

K, a close friend, told me he had gone to a brothel with three friends, but, after he had placed the agreed amount of money in the proffered hand of his chosen companion, realized with a shock that he was about to receive an experience that would not be at all comparable to the joy he had known with his last girlfriend. He surprised the woman by asking for a drink, guzzled it and left without a word of explanation.