Dear Prudence,

While I do not favor affairs, I do not appreciate the bigotry of your comments regarding a college student who has a married sugar daddy. As an academic who has written about male prostitution, and as a sometimes sex worker rights activist, I simply find it reprehensible that a self-stylized expert on decorum would reference "words for women who exchange sex for money," and actually advocate that these words be used as the proper basis upon which to base one's attitudes (even as the words themselves are too filthy for actual use - how clever). Calling someone a whore is bigotry, plain and simple, and your suggestion that the person who wrote you identify her friend as such (even if only in her mind), is deeply disrespectful and uncaring. At their best, thinking about manners and decorum helps people to treat one another well; telling someone that their friend is a whore does not assist in this goal, and instead only encourages a lack of understanding and even hatred. If there's an ethical problem with the situation that was described, it concerns the infidelity and not the consensual cash transaction per se, so why divert attention away from the actual problem and toward the cash? Even people who believe that paid sex is immoral should not foster bigoted opinions about those who do not share their views.

Words like "whore" and "slut" are not simply "impolite." They root bigoted attitudes and promote hatred against women generally and sex workers (of whatever gender) more specifically. Your vlog makes it seem that one can be "proper" and intolerant at the same time - indeed that one requires the other - but it's still hatred and it's still just ugly. I sincerely hope that you will not engage in this kind of behavior ever again.

All best,
Kerwin Kaye
New York City

I think the word she might have meant was prostitute. This girl is trading her body for favours, cash and otherwise. While I agree that pejorative terms are too often slung around in such situations, this should not be used as an attempt to muzzle the distaste that society in general has for such behaviour. It's not at all bigoted to come to judegements on such issues, even if those judgements are based on ones own sense of morality.

Yes, I also assumed the word Prudie was talking about was "prostitute." Nothing else occurred to me.

Except Kerwin, she didn't use those words. YOU did. Your rant is totally off. The whole situation is immoral. Both the adultery AND getting paid for sex.

What is so inherently evil about the word whore?

The word has a negative connotation precisely because it means a person who sells themselves for money. Where is the bigotry in that? Sure, calling someone a whore who isn't one, that is surely bigotted. But if someone has sex for money, then they are a whore by definition. Don't attack the word because it has a negative connotation as a result of it's denotation. If you don't want to be called a whore, don't be a whore.

This is similar to the now defunct use of the word "retarded" which its now "not polite" to use, simply because it became associated with retarded people, even though the root meaning came from being slow, which retarded people are.

Sorry, Kerwin Kaye, but that's what sex workers are.

If they were merely sex workers, they would clock out at 3:00 a.m. and go home to the hubby and the kids.

Instead, they are std-infected hopeless drunks or drug addicts who have no idea how to get themselves out of the mess they find themselves in and who hate themselves for what they have become.