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Leadem, Christopher

"The Mantooth"


'You see before you a busy street---strip joints, adult book stores,
pornographic theaters. But you don't seem to notice the background
much. No. It's the ragged flowers springing from the sidewalk that
catch and hold your eye: prostitutes, the whipping girls of the city.
'On a good day all they're required to do is give their bodies to
pawing, drooling idiots, who in their half-assed passion call them
‘mother', ‘cheap whore', or the name of some long-lost
lover. Oh, but of course they don't really FEEL anything.
They're not real people, like you and I.' At this he curled his
lip, barely able to contain his rage. 'On bad days..... They're
harassed and preyed upon by police, jaded social workers and psychotic
killers, or just beaten and abused by the ‘fatherly' pimps.
'And what is their crime, that makes them the object of universal
scorn and reprisal? They're VICTIMS, vulnerable, bringing out the
predatory instinct in all of us. And more than that, they commit the
most unforgivable sin of all: they make us look at ourselves, and see
something about our pretty little world that we don't like. Because
they do, in fact, what the rest of us do in spirit: sell themselves,
body and soul, for MONEY. Only they lack the skills and social graces,
like the ones you learned in college, to be subtle and self-justifying
about it.


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