Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

Dawn has a dear, dear friend who spent much of his youth working as a whore. A superb whore. Among his many repeat clients, he reports, were a surprisingly high percentage of prison guards. (And to a man, they all enjoyed being physically restrained, held in "stress positions," and, to varying degrees, tortured-- anecdotal data crying out for academic verification as to its relevance to these men's career choice, but Dawn digresses....)

One guard (whose sexual predilection was being jammed into the corner where wall meets floor and having the breath squeezed out of him by his hired paramour's scissor-locking thighs), when telling of his job's day-to-day routine during an après-asphyxiation cigarette, revealed that his state's prisons have Jewish gangs! Initially, Dawn could make no sense of this-- was Dawn somehow being anti-Semitic or insensitive in being unable to imagine a Jewish prison gang?

B

View our poll archive

ut the guard's further explanation put all into focus: since the prisons have neo-Nazi-type skinhead gangs that target Jews (and, of course, many others), Jewish prisoners felt pressured to form a gang of their own. A Foucault-ian example of something being defined/created only in opposition to its antithesis. Once initiated, the gang rivalry can take on a life of its own, a history of offenses and vendettas can develop, and soon an institutionalized gang structure emerges. Central to each gang's survival is having a vital and despised opposition with which to frighten, and thus motivate, fresh recruits. Thus, reconciliation with (or even triumph over) a rival gang is to be avoided-- each needs the other to exist.

Watching as the US arms the world and then plays policeman when those arms are used, Dawn is sure there is a global lesson to this whore's tale....