The Political Cannibalism of the Showgirls Defense

Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls is a classic for so many reasons—Elizabeth Berkley’s eyes throwing daggers all over his grimy, stylized Las Vegas, Gina Gershon’s wicked smile, and that pool scene—but its most enduring appeal is its sharp depiction of ruthless, hustler women and the rationalizations they use to keep their story straight. Berkley’s character, Nomi Malone, goes from a hitchhiking fugitive to the most sought-after showgirl diva on the Strip, reiterating the same mantra from beginning to end: “I’m not a whore.”

Initially, it feels strong enough as an assertion of purpose, a statement of professional boundaries, even if unbearably naive, but as Nomi shimmies down stripper poles, waves tasseled tits at the 2am crowd, and fucks her producer in his pool, the mantra wears thin, taking on a more desperate and trapped emotion as the story goes on. It is striking that this vagabond woman, surviving under a fake name, only ever describes her own self with a statement to the negative, highlighting what she is not. And when her vain illusion collapses under its own weight, she doesn’t try to adapt to the life she has earned; she gives it all up instead. 

That desperation to separate actions from labeling, to claim a spot on the pecking order rather than allow it to be assigned to her, is a central aspect of all social striving, but it is especially felt in the world of female hustlers. Ambitious women are easily labeled with pejoratives, surveilled, and cut down; it is natural to be defensive, to posture bravely like we have the power to change our social labeling through sheer force of will. “I’m not a whore” functions so well as a narrative mantra, highlighting each social and emotional shift in the story, because it speaks to a deeply ingrained desire in all women under patriarchy to attempt pre-emptively to dictate appearances. 

The innocently shrouded whorephobia that passes these days is the complaint of “sex worker tactics” invading “traditional dating spaces.” Courting, however, has much overlap with whoring; one is almost always best understood as a subset of the other, and indeed it is the thread that preserves both performer and client. Women are taught to fear whores who can give their husbands “everything that [we] can’t.” We too often overlook that the whores are actually showing us just how giving men can be.

We are wasting our energy resisting a merger of roles that is already underway when we actually have an unprecedented and perhaps vanishing opportunity to blur the lines to our advantage. The most successful sex workers know that getting paid depends on packaging a transactional exchange in the perfect girlfriend package; their domain is using the container of dating and courtship to craft a business relationship. By the looks of today’s dating landscape, it seems that civilian women are in dire need of education in this lost art.

Sex workers use civilian respectability as an exit strategy all the time. So, too, do civilian women in want of a husband constantly fall back on these dreaded sex worker tactics to get what they want in their marriages. “Whore” is treated as a discrete category of women, but it’s really a particularly mobilized phase of womanhood with strong connotations of youth, beauty, and overflowing reservoirs of desirability to mold reality to your will. Hoes have energy, real-time savvy, and the temerity to struggle for their dignity—and their bag—on the front lines of womanhood. Sex work grew up alongside the institution of soldiering; it is unsurprising that hoes thus often evoke similar emotions in women that soldiers do for men: varied degrees of politicized admiration, plus nostalgia tinted with hues of shame. And, like soldiering, whoring is high-risk and low-reward for the vast majority of people who engage. 

For all the dust kicked up in women’s scramble to distance themselves from those women, I must say that I don’t know any women who have successfully used a man for his money—or social capital—and walked off unscathed. For all the rhetoric about gold diggers, women are the ones paying, exorbitant sums sometimes, for literal dirt. Perhaps because so many women do not see themselves as laborers, the labor aspect (emotional, sexual, or otherwise) still fails to galvanize some women. Well, perhaps the language of rewards and selective kindness will be more convincing, because men are getting absolutely rich off of the women around them. This is a fact: men extract capital from women as easily as pissing off a bridge; mothers break their backs for sons, sisters cough up money to help their brothers get married, girlfriends keep a roof over their man’s head while he builds his streetwear brand by barking at baddies on Instagram scrolling his phone on the couch, and a wife is little more than a sex maid just waiting to pivot into elder care. I don’t think the dull realization of how bad women have it is half as motivating as the outrage over how good men have it.

Whorephobia works not because it deters the hoes from their hustle, but by goading platoons of civilian women to discount and discount again their own selves just to prove to men that their love is superior because it’s “free.” 

Women are fond of pointing the finger at each other when it’s time to blame someone or something for the decline of courtesies in contemporary dating. It’s easy to vilify ambition when you feel like your own inferiority is inescapable, and whoring is a prime target for accusations of shitting in the pool.

Yet it is indisputable that those most responsible for eroding the foundation of courting niceties are, in fact (and perhaps have always been,) civilian women! Shall we take a survey of the civilians frolicking in the world of working girls?

Civilian women post up at the bar in strip clubs, inviting men to drink and dance with them for free. Civilian women baiting on OnlyFans as “nice girls in a sea of hoes.” Civilian women crawling out of the woodwork in droves on Twitter, reassuring imaginary men that times may have changed but you don’t need to get her a car to take her to dinner, no; she’ll brave the sidewalks and the subways for you, because she’s just a nice girl looking to be treated right. :) Civilian woman standing by, mealy-mouthed and slack-jawed, as whores get thrown off of BackPage, rounded up digitally by SESTA-FOSTA, and caged by the mantra “I’m not a whore,” no longer a simple line of dialogue but a monster in its own right, a festering cloud of id and ego battling to control fundamentally uncontrollable perceptions of respectability,  laboring under the unrelenting gaze of a patriarchy that is happy to watch the girls fighting, to take the video, to monetize the brawl over and over again for men scrolling with one hand. 

I think that unless we can act in a collectively political fashion, every lady’s long game is doomed to fail. Trying to draw the line between proper ladies and working girls is a deeply humiliating, exhausting exercise that only exposes our own insecurities. The boys are ready for your strenuous, desperate denials; they feed off of them. They are prepared for insecure women to enforce their spot on the pecking order, to cling to their rung on the ladder like it’s their salvation; what nobody is prepared for is a person who is brave enough not just to blur the line, but to embarrass you for acting like it even matters. I need the civilian girls to wake the hell up. You may, like me, know deep down that you will never have what it takes to get out there and use a mark for his money, but you cannot, like I did, labor under the delusion that your defection from the hoe army saves you from the gender war.

Lynn Wang is a diva soprano and writer born and raised in LA. Her writing concerns the academic intersections between opera and women’s lives while her recitals focus more on the emotional aspect. On Instagram @lynnspiracy.