The Mistress of Sorceries & the Temple of Ashtaroth

Ishtar's Angel: Chapter 4

[This is Chapter 4 of Ishtar’s Angel. For more chapters, click here.]

With the noise cancellation tech in the chamber shut off, I heard the loudspeakers of the ESWERFAs penetrating our space from a mile away. [ESWERFA stands for “Evangelical - Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist Alliance. This term is explained in Chapter 3.]

Some evangelical preacher seemed to be reading from the Bible through the loudspeaker.

“Exodus 34,” the preacher shouted. “The Lord said to Moses:

Observe what I command you this day. Behold, I will drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Take care, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to which you go, lest it become a snare in your midst. You shall tear down their altars and break their pillars and cut down their Asherim (for you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God), lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and when they whore after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and you are invited, you eat of his sacrifice, and you take of their daughters for your sons, and their daughters whore after their gods and make your sons whore after their gods.¹

I said to Serah, “Christians always accused horny, debauched fuckers like me of being in league with the Devil. I’m an atheist, so I don’t believe in God or the Devil. But if I had to pick, I’d pick the Devil, ten times out of ten. And it should be obvious why, given the genocidal passage above.”²

“Cut down their Asherim!” evangelicals chanted through the loudspaker. “Cut down their Asherim!”

“Daemon, we can role play my Sensual Ceremony in a moment. But first, my little researcher, what are these losers prattling on about? What the fuck are Asherim? They’re always yelling about cutting down Asherim.”

“My Queen, Asherim, were wooden pole statuettes in the shape of Asherah, a fertility goddess that the pre-Israelites worshipped in their polytheistic, pagan Canaanite religions. These religions included Yahweh, a war god that the Israelites (earlier known as Yahwists) eventually claimed was the sole God in the universe, thereby inventing monotheism. But before monotheistic Judaism, Yahweh was seen as just one god among many. And, within pre-Israelite and Yahwist folk tradition, a horny one at that: he had a hot, very fertile wife name Asherah.”³

Serah grabbed her womb area and thrust it up, along with her pelvis. “Was Asherah related to Ishtar?” she asked.

“No, they sound alike, but they are distinct. The ancient Canaanites worshipped many female and male deities, including a goddess of war and sex—the two elemental forms of human power—called ‘Astarte,’ known in the Bible as ‘Ashtaroth.’ Ashtaroth was the Canaanite equivalent of your citadel’s namesake, Ishtar. While Asherah was a mother goddess, Ashtaroth/Astarte/Ishtar didn’t have time for kids. Just war and fucking. They were the original badass babes. They later morphed into the ancient Greek goddess Aphrodite, and her Roman counterpart Venus, the goddess of love and sex.”⁴

“No wonder these fuckers want to burn us down,” Serah said. “We’re having way more fun than they are. It’s like you were telling me about the sexual cartel of patriarchy. In a free and open market competition, who’s going to win: the religion that offers hot goddesses and plenty of fucking, or the religion that offers some prudish, angry, crusty, celibate, life-long bachelor in the sky yelling at you for whacking off? As you say, aspiring monopolists must suppress the competition.”⁵ ^{(also note}⁶⁾

“Yes, my Queen,” I said. “The Bible rails against Asherah no less than forty times, and against Ashtaroth eleven times. Throughout the Bible, God is obsessed with ordering his followers to desecrate any shrines to Asherah, which compete with worshipping him. It seems to me, though, if you’re going to have a religion, then worshipping both a feminine principle of fertility and sex, and a masculine principle of violence and self-defense, makes sense. This balance honors the two most elemental forces in life, sex and violence. If you’re going to give primacy to violence over sex, thereby giving primacy to the masculine principle over the feminine principle—a silly thing to do, in my opinion—then you need to discredit, dishonor, devalue, and desecrate the goddesses that pose competition to your monopoly of masculine monotheism. And if you’re going to believe in a creator deity, how could anyone believe that the creator of life was an old, angry, celibate, life-long bachelor, rather than a curvy, busty, fertile female?”

Serah held her breasts up to me. “These breasts give you life, Daemon! Not some crusty geezer in the sky! These embodied, earthly, fleshly, ‘sinful’ breasts! Worship these, ye man! Bask in these luscious life-giving turned-on lamps of lust!”

I reached out and held her magnificent breasts. I wondered how anyone could worship one book rather than two boobs. Her huge brown areolas were impossible-to-miss targets for my hungry lips and tongue. “May I?” I asked. She smiled and nodded yes. I took one of her boobs in my mouth, and sucked on it gently like my mouth and tongue were voicing prayers. It’s amazing: men can walk on the moon, but we always come back to boobs. It took a lot of work for these prudish religions to turn men away from the primal power of boobs.

The evangelicals shouted: “Drive them out of the land! Tear down their altars, break their pillars, cut down their Asherim! No whoring after other gods!”

Fuck, their chanting was batshit! I took my mouth off Serah’s breasts. It took a lot to get me to take my mouth off breasts, but this anti-boob blasphemy they were spewing, this anti-pussy propaganda, this gynocidal garbage, was just too much.

 “My Queen, their God is calling for genocide and ethnic cleansing against goddess worshippers, and taking goddess worshippers’ daughters as sex slaves. ‘Take of their daughters for your sons.’ And these religious fucks have the gall to call what we’re doing ‘sex trafficking’?⁷ These assholes have the gall to call me evil just for being a horny fucker, and wanting to worship at the altar of your breasts, hips, ass, and pussy, while offering you a financial tribute for the honor? Fuck these fuckers. I chose my porn-performer nom de guerre, ‘Daemon Derriere,’ just to spite them, even though I don’t believe in the devil. This fuckers can kiss my demonic booty.”

Serah bent down behind my ass. “I’m a Queen, so I don’t normally kiss ass… but this ass”—she held her thumb to her fingers in one hand and made an air-kissing gesture—“Magnifique! For this ass I will make an exception! For my own pleasure, I will kiss this tight, toned, demonic booty!” She caressed my ass through my pants. In most respects, I think I’m pretty average looking, except for two features: my deep blue eyes, and my ass. For reasons I don’t understand, I was blessed with a world-class ass that consistently made women (and gay men) go crazy. Serah hungrily kissed my tight ass all over through my pants. “Mmmmmm!” she moaned.   

I saw, through the video feed, the pasty, doughy, sweaty preacher yelling into the microphone, spittle spewing from his enraged mouth. “Leviticus 21:9. ‘And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.’”

“Burn the whores in fire! Whores expire in the flames’ spire!” the followers chanted.

“Exodus 22:18. ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!’” the preacher shouted.

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!” his followers chanted.

 “Deuteronomy 18:10-12,” the preacher yelled:

There shall not be found among you. . . an enchanter, or a witch. Or a charmer. . . or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee!

“Pile the pyre! Light the fire! Jesus makes witchcraft expire!” the followers chanted.

Serah looked at me. “Well, you, dear demonic Daemon, are a very enchanting and charming wizard.” She slid her hand down my pants, and touched my cock. This was the first time she had touched my cock; the first time my cock had been touched since the Crash two years earlier. (Being broke and unemployed isn’t exactly a turn-on to most women, even during the apocalypse. Which is why I was spending my final savings on this last hoorah.) “Your magic wand is stiff, I can see… your wizard powers are growing. Soon you’re going to be able to shoot thunderbolts out of that thing! But let me tell you… this Witch Queen can catch thunderbolts with her lips. Both sets of lips.”

Serah unbuttoned my pants and pulled them down. I pulled off my shirt. She motioned me to climb onto a massage table in the center of the Sensual Ceremony chamber.

This definitely was not me Domming the Queen anymore. She was re-asserting control of the scene, and I couldn’t tell if she was doing it in order to avoid subbing to me, or if she was testing my frame control as a Dom, or if was just trying to make sure I got some physical pleasure before she killed me.

She drizzled some massage oil on me—on my stomach, my thighs, my stiff prick.

Whatever she was doing, I had virtually no willpower to stop it. The Domming could wait.

Serah started tracing her index finger up and down the bottom of my shaft. “The wizard’s wand is getting longer!” she said. Cheesy, but hey, I didn’t choose the wizard or witch references. Neither did she. They were being thrown at us by people only a mile away who wanted to kill us.

Serah slid a few of her fingers under my foreskin, and started playing with the ridge of my cock head underneath.⁸

There’s a tremendous amount of sensitivity in an uncircumcised frenulum—the little band of tissue on the underside of the penis head that tethers the foreskin to the glans. I don’t have a clit, so I don’t know what it feels like to have your clit gently stroked and caressed, but as Serah tickled the tiny flap of tissue of my frenulum with her well-oiled index finger, and pleasurable sensation washed over me, I imagined this was along the lines of what it must feel like to have a clit. One tiny flap of tissue—and starbursts of pleasure.

“I can’t believe that governments made paying someone to touch my frenulum for pleasure illegal!” I said. “Back when there were laws, it was perfectly legal to pay someone to painfully cut off your infant’s foreskin for religious reasons—but no, no, no, if you want to pay someone to caress your own foreskin for pleasure, instead of cut an infant’s off for piety, that makes you a dirty pervert! And there’s no way an adult woman could consent to touch a man’s frenulum for money! She can consent to touch his thigh, in a therapeutic massage, but as soon as she moves her hand two inches to touch his wiener, now she’s incapable of consenting to that, at any price, and she’s being ‘coerced’ by the money and is a victim of ‘paid rape.’”

“Sshhhh,” Serah said, as she stroked my penis up and down—she was working the shaft now as well as the frenulum—and slid her hand up my toned abs and chest up to my neck. (I had been training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, kickboxing, and MMA to defend myself in this dangerous, tattered hellscape, so my muscles were decent now.) From my neck, she slid her hand up to my jaw, squeezed it, and shook my jaw bones to and fro. “You talk a lot, Mr. Daemon. Talk, talk, talk. I know you have all those big ideas in that big head of yours. But for someone who talks so much about integrating the mind and the body, maybe you’d enjoy these last few hours of your life if you stopped talking so much, and surrendered to this bodily pleasure I’m sharing with you. I didn’t train how to please a cock like this for nothing!” 

The preacher’s ranting was still piercing through the Ceremony chamber. Serah hadn’t told her assistant to turn the noise-canceling tech back on. I didn’t ask Serah to do so. I thought it was kind of funny, and interesting, this weird juxtaposition.

The preacher yelled: “Galatians 5:16-25. Paul the Apostle says:

[W]alk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft. . . . drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. . . . Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” the ringleader preached.

His followers chanted back: “Flesh is contrary to spirit! Spirit is contrary to flesh! No witchcraft! No orgies! Light the pyre! Burn them in fire!”

 “Here,” Serah said, holding out a gourd with the warm oil in it, “spread some oil on this flesh! Idolize it! Infuse it with the spirit of your witchcraft!” She got up on the massage table, straddled my abs, and leaned back. Her abs were flat and lightly toned. Her hips were wide and tight. She was exquisite, a perfect specimen of human beauty.

I dipped my fingers in the gourd, scooped a good dollop of the honey-colored oil, and drizzled it over her abs, her bust, her thighs, her hips. I held my fingers over her pubic mound. “May I?” I asked.

Serah nodded yes. I cupped her pubic mound. Her mound was covered in bush, thick black-colored bush. I had requested Serah in part because I saw in her photos on the site that she had a huge bush. I had masturbated so many times to her photos of that furry bush. There was something so animalistic about thick muff.

As I held and beheld her mound, I said, “I just realized: I think part of the reason prudish, religious men throughout the ages have hated women is that these men aspire to be close to God, and the fact that they get turned on, again, and again, by a little patch of hair that looks like a furry kitten bothers the fuck out of them. It reminds them that on some level, they’re just animals—horny animals that get automatic boners because they spot a patch of furry flesh.”⁹

“I’m glad my kitty has that effect on you. She wants to make you purrrr,” Serah said. She leaned down and whispered that purrr into my ear.

“To God’s love we aspire! Witches we burn in spires of fire!” the evangelicals shouted. “We will quell your spell! You will burn in hell!”

“I don’t believe in hell,” Serah said, “but given that’s where they want to send us witches and all the other sexy peeps like us, that’s where I want to hang out! Not with these prude doofuses in their boring heaven!”

The preacher yelled: “Nahum 3: ‘Many casualties, piles of dead, bodies without number, people stumbling over the corpses—all because of the wanton lust of a prostitute, alluring, the mistress of sorceries, who enslaved nations by her prostitution and peoples by her witchcraft.’”

The followers chanted: “Mistress of sorceries! We bring an end to your forgeries! Mistress of sorceries, we bring an end to your forgeries!”

I said: “My Queen, my Mistress of Sorceries, may I oil up the gates to the temple of your wanton lust?”

“Yes, dear Daemon, I want nothing less. You may only enter the temple of the Queen, the Mistress of Sorceries if you pay proper tribute. In cash, and in pleasure. You already handled the cash part. Now handle the pleasure.”

With the oil in my fingers, I delicately lathered the crease between her inner thigs and her outer labia. The foothills of the mount of pleasure.

“Mmmm,” Serah intoned. “You are honoring the gates. The Mistress of Sorceries just might let you inside her inner sanctum.”

“The shadow of the dome of pleasure,” I said, reciting Coleridge as I gently touched her pussy lips, “Floated midway on the waves; / Where was heard the mingled measure / From the fountain and the caves.”

“Kubla Khan!” she exclaimed. “My favorite! ‘But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted / Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! / A savage place! as holy and enchanted…”

“As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted,” I picked up, “By woman wailing for her demon-lover!”

“Demon lover,” she said, “make me wail!”

“My Queen, may I enter your hole of holy harlotries?”¹⁰

“Yes, you may,” Serah said. See, it was that simple. Ask, get permission, and express appreciation through money. Appreciate. From Latin pretium, “price.” The SWERFs never got this.

“Fuck my hole of holy harlotries my demon lover!” Serah yelled. Make me wail in my temple mount!”

Fuck those stodgy religious temples. This was the only temple I cared about.

My middle finger entered her pussy gently, wet from her own glistening juices mixed with the oil. I curled up my middle finger inside with that “come hither” motion, while my ring and index finger lay on her vulva from the outside. Serah let out an “Ahhhhh.” I fucked her with my index. After a minute or two, I felt her pussy opening to me more. I slid my index finger in as well. Her eyes widened, and she smiled yes and moaned louder. I started pumping with my middle and index. I felt her pussy opening up even more. I made eye contact with her to make sure she was OK with this, then slowly added my ring finger into the mix. Now I was fucking her with three fingers, and she was gyrating her pelvis, slamming it into my pumping fingers.

“Three is perfect, no more!” she said, as she moaned.

“Yes, my Queen,” I said.

“Fuck me with those fucking fingers, don’t stop!”

I felt her pelvis and pussy gyrating. I could tell she was about to come.

 “Fuck me!” she said, squeezing down on her breath. “Fuck me!” She let her tightly-held breath go in a scream, and her pussy exploded. Squirt went everywhere, over my stomach, my face, the floor behind my head.

“Whew,” Serah said, collapsing onto me. “Nice fingers!” I smiled. “You worked for that one! Good boy, Daemon.”

Revelation & Counter-Revelation

Serah called in Stephanie, her assistant, who provided towels for us, and wiped down the floor, cleaning Serah’s squirt.

“I have a weird request, “ I asked Serah.

“Yes?”

“Well, since you can project any video you want onto the ESWERFAs from your drones above them, could we project the livestream of this Sensual Ceremony onto them? With audio? I want to annoy the fuck out of these fuckers.”

Serah burst out laughing. “Well, I’ve never heard that request. But I don’t see why not. Let’s put on a show for them! Show them what their hell looks like, our heaven.”

Serah asked Stephanie, “Can you make that happen?”

Stephanie nodded yes, laughing. “I like how you think, Daemon. You’re a good one. Devilishly creative.” She grabbed the controller, pressed some buttons, and fiddled with the joysticks for a moment. “Look,” she said, pointing to the screen. “Your livestream is now projected all over the ESWERFA’s encampment.”

Serah and I looked up at the at the screen. The ESWERFAs were running around, freaking out like scared mice. My cock was projected about twenty feet long onto the ground of their encampment. As I walked around the room, it moved around their camp, like a marauding shark. So this is what it would be like to have a twenty-foot cock! I walked around the chamber, and the projection of my cock moved along the grounds of their camp. Wherever my cock went, ESWERFAs squealed and ran to try to get the projection of my penis off their face.

Serah and I hit the floor, while Stephanie tried to hold herself up in the doorway. We were laughing the hardest belly laughs I had felt or seen since the crash. Nothing like a little homemade porn projected onto religious and prudishly-feminist people who want to kill you, to lighten the mood.

Stephanie tried, moderately successfully, to tell me something through her laughter. “The left joystick and buttons… control the angles… of what’s being filmed in the Chamber. And the right stick… controls… where the drone is projecting the livestream… onto the camp.” Through her laughter, she adjusted the joystick, and pointed to the screen. My butthole, about thirty feet across, was now being projected onto the encampment. Stephanie handed the controller to me. “Have fun!” she said as she left the doorway and shut the door.

The preacher started yelling verses related to “whores” and “harlots” in the Bible. There were a lot of them!¹¹ I adjusted the right joystick, and now the thirty-foot version of my ass was being projected like a target onto the preacher. My butt-bullseye on the biblical bullshitter.

The preacher called out, beads of enraged sweat flying from his furrowed brows: “Revelation 17!”

Ah, I knew this one from my research. This was the famous Whore of Babylon scene from the Bible’s dramatic finale, the Book of Revelation. The climax sequence of the entire Bible involves a prostitute as one of the main adversaries. It’s arguably the most whorephobic passage in history.

As he dove into Revelation 17, I wasn’t sure if the preacher knew that my butt was being projected onto him, and that my asshole now covered his mouth. My asshole was the perfectly appropriate counterpart to the whorephobic shit that was emanating from his piehole:

And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters:

“Sitteth upon my waters!” Serah exclaimed, grabbing a dollop of hot oil from my abdomen, rubbing it into her pussy, and gliding her pussy up and down the front of my body, my thighs and abs, stopping to massage my cock with her pussy lips, without letting it enter. The teasing was killing me! I wanted to explode!

With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.

“Drink the wine of my fornication!” Serah said. She slid up my midriff, over my chest, and held her pelvis over my face. Her furry bush was glistening with oil and pussy juice. Her meaty pussy lips hung down an inch above my mouth’s lips. “Drink!” she ordered. “Drink of the wine of my fornication!” I suckled on her pussy lips hanging above my lips, and felt her nectar replenish me. Serah moaned, and rubbed her pussy on my face.

So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.

And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:

And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon The Great, The Mother Of Harlots And Abominations Of The Earth.

Serah dismounted my face, sauntered to a cabinet, pulled out a red marker, and handed it to me. “Write that on my womb,” she said.

“Write what?”

“What that dude just said. ‘Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.’”

I did as she told me. Serah rubbed her belly. “Kiss it,” she said. “Worship it.”

I kissed her belly, rubbing my face in its feminine flesh. “I worship you, Babylon the Great, Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.”

And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.

Serah walked to the cabinet again, and pulled out a clear wine bottle with a small amount of wine in it. She pulled out a silver chalice, and poured a dash of the wine into it. She handed me the chalice. “Drink,” she said.

“I don’t drink alcohol.”

“It’s not alcohol.”

“What is it?”

“Guess.”

“Mm… mm… moon blood?”

Serah smiled. “Fresh,” she said, holding it under my nose. It had an earthy scent. “Drink. Drink from the chalice of my abominations.”

I clasped the chalice, lifted it to my mouth, and took a sip of Serah’s fresh menstrual blood. Metallic, from the iron. Full-bodied. Earthy.

The preacher continued:

Revelation 18. Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. . . .

How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.

Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.

And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with [Babylon the Great], shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning, Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.¹²

Serah straddled me again, her pussy massaging my cock, was engorged with more blood than the menstrual blood in her chalice. Teasing, taunting, tormenting: not letting me enter her yet, just glistening up and down.

“I sit a Queen,” she said. “I sit a Queen, atop her knight, and shall see no sorrow. Daemon, my Queen’s knight, my Queen’s Dom, commence my Sensual Ceremony. Before they burn down this temple of Ashtaroth, this temple of Ishtar.”

1. In the Bible, God does not just feel jealous towards his followers who flirt with his competitors in the spiritual marketplace. He literally says that his name is “Jealous” (in Christian translations) or “Jealous One” (in Jewish translations).

From the Stone translation of the Torah, Exodus 34:14: “for the very name HASHEM is ‘Jealous One.’” (HASHEM means “The Name” and is used by observant Jews to avoid speaking aloud the name God revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14, which is the “Tetragrammaton” YHWY—typically written and spoken by others as “Yahweh.”)

2. From a Reddit post entitled “God is way more evil than Satan in the Bible”:

Our culture depicts Satan as this evil mastermind while ignoring the fact that God is WAY worse. Satan unfairly gets treated like the villain of the Bible but he acts more moral than the God of the Bible.

For starters Satan is directly responsible for 12 deaths in the Bible. God on the other had is directly responsible for over 2 million recorded deaths in the Bible. That number is actually low when you take into account God’s rage fueled flood that drowns the entire earth. Satan never commanded child sacrifice (Abraham and Isaac) like the God is the Bible did. Satan also never encouraged slavery and treating people like property. Just on face value alone Satan isn’t that bad of a guy.

I’m sure people will say well “what about hell”. According to the Bible God directly sends people to hell not Satan. God also created hell and is the one who also created Satan thus making him more immoral than Satan yet again.

The Bible (especially the Old Testament) depicts God as a genocidal ruler while Satan is just guilty of “tempting” people. It’s clear to see who the villain is here.

3. See The Hebrew Goddess by Raphael Patai and Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel by William Dever.

4. See Transformation of a Goddess: Ishtar – Astarte – Aphrodite, ed. David Sugimoto.

5. The bible of the War on Whores is… the Bible. No text before or since the Bible has been so virulent and violent against the women labeled (in various translations) as “whores,” “harlots,” and “prostitutes.”

Like a drunk, insecure, possessive, jealous frat boy calling every woman in the bar who rejects him or desires someone else a “whore,” God repeatedly castigates his followers who worship other gods, or who mate with worshippers other gods, for “whoring after false gods” or “playing the whore.”

This exemplifies a long tradition in patriarchy of characterizing prostitutes as “betrayers” or “traitors” in one way or another.

For example, in the Bible, Nahum 3:4, God says: “And all for the countless whorings of the prostitute, graceful and of deadly charms, who betrays nations with her whorings, and peoples with her charms.”

In Proverbs 23:27-28, prostitutes are portrayed as enticing treason among men: “For a prostitute is a deep pit; an adulteress is a narrow well. She lies in wait like a robber and increases the traitors among mankind.”

SWERFs continue this tradition of linking sex workers to treason, by viewing sex workers as “collaborators” with male oppressors (see “The Horny Ecofeminist” for corroborating quotations of SWERFs) and thus traitors to womankind.

Sex worker activists have referred to this type of attitude as “whorephobia” or “whoremisia”—a pervasive hatred of and stigma against sex workers, such that calling someone who isn’t a prostitute a “prostitute” (or a “hooker” or “whore”) is an insult, in a way that calling someone who isn’t a lawyer as a “lawyer” (or “attorney”) is not an insult (even though lawyers often sell their souls and their values to the highest bidder). “Whore” is one of the most insulting words in the English language.

6. For just a few of God’s many extended, unhinged, misgynistic rants accusing Israelites who stray from monotheism of “playing the whore,” see “The LORD Accuses Israel” (Hosea 4), “The LORD’s Faithless Bride” (Ezekiel 16), Jeremiah 13 (“Faithless Israel Called to Repentance”), Ezekiel 23.

In the New Testament, neither God the Father nor his son Jesus ever explicitly foreswear or apologize for God’s extreme, violent misogyny (such as above) from the Old Testament / Hebrew Bible. People who believe that worshipping this God is compatible with basic respect for women can only believe this by squinting at violently misogynistic passages like these in the Bible, for which God never atoned.

On God’s whorephobia, see also, “Just a Whore: The Annihilation of Babylon According to Revelation 17:6,” by Caroline Vander Stichele, and “Rape in the Hebrew Bible § Personified capital cities threatened with rape” on Wikipedia.

7. It’s hard to believe, but in Exodus 21, the Bible chapter directly after the chapter in which God tells Moses the Ten Commandments—the supposed moral pillar of Western Civilization—God tells Moses the rules for selling daughters into sex slavery. From Exodus 21:7-10:

When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do.  If she does not please her master, who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has broken faith with her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights.

God is still on Mt. Sinai when he says this, with the Ten Commandments barely having left his breath. “Here are the Ten Commandments, the bedrock moral foundations of your society…and here are the rules for properly selling your daughters into sexual slavery.”

And Bible-thumpers have the gall to judge adults who sell and buy sex consensually amongst themselves as “obscene.”

8. I’m Jewish, ethnically (99.7% Ashkenazi Jew, according to 23andMe) but my parents were not religious and were peace activists, so fortunately, they spared me the knife. That “sparing the knife” is relatively uncommon in relation to infant boys’ penises in America is a moral travesty. Medically-unnecessary genital cutting of infants without consent (and infants cannot consent) is, in my opinion, sexual assault. I can’t imagine a definition of “sexual assault” that would not include unnecessary non-consensual genital cutting. It’s widespread and socially sanctioned sexual assault, but sexual assault nonetheless.

9. In The Hammer of Witches, the infamous fifteenth-century manual to witch-hunting, endorsed by Pope Innocent VIII (and arguably the most misogynistic book ever written) the authors quote Early Church Father John Crystosmom: “What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours!” (Part I, Question VI, “Concerning Witches Who Copulate With Devils”)

I’ve never seen a clearer expression of pious men’s love-hate relationship with the allure of women’s sexuality.

10. SWERFs were always going on about how sex workers had no boundaries. That was complete bullshit. There is no set of people I’ve ever met who are more clear and assertive about their boundaries than sex workers. I’ve learned more about boundaries from pro-Dommes I’ve worked with, than anyone else. I’ve learned that you must ask, and that you follow the rules, and if you do, you’ll get rewarded, and if you don’t, you’re out. Society should have dominatrixes and other sex workers teach boundaries and consent to every young man the day he turns eighteen. They know more about how to assert boundaries with men, and how to get men to respect and follow those boundaries, than every SWERF combined. SWERFs are generally scared of men—sheer paranoid terror of men runs throughout Dworkin’s writing—and they project that fear onto what they think sex workers should feel. The idea that sex workers don’t know their own sexual boundaries or know how to enforce them is the SWERFs greatest slander against sex workers. In reality, it’s the opposite—sex workers on the whole know more than any other women do about how to set boundaries with men; it’s part of their profession. Through their work, sex workers view us as we are: not as terrifying bogeymen, but as (frequently) whimpering, pathetic hornballs willing to follow orders and do whatever we are told if it means getting access to the feminine physical affection we crave. We just need to be taught and trained. Sex workers should be paid to educate (respectful) men about sex. Educating men about sex should not be left to SWERFs, who couldn’t teach a man how to interact with a woman properly any more than they could teach most men their Ph.D.-level feminist theory.

11. The words “whore” (as both noun and verb), “whoring,” and “whoredom” occur a combined 82 times in the King James Version. The word “harlot” occurs 48 times.

Of top-selling Bible translations in the US: the King James Version uses “harlot” and “whore;” the New International Version uses “prostitute;” and the English Standard Version uses “whore” and “prostitute.”

The relevant word being translated in these instances, from the biblical Greek, is porné, which is generally translated in modern English as “prostitute” (female). There were two main classes of prostitutes in ancient Greece: the hetairai (singular, hetaira) were upper-class, educated courtesans with considerable social status and political influence behind the male-dominated political scene. The pornai were prostitutes who worked in brothels and on the street; sometimes they were enslaved (and thus, in modern parlance, “sex trafficking victims”), and sometimes they were free (and thus, in modern parlance, “sex workers”); their trade was legalized, but they had low social status. Also, there were pallakai, concubines in single households, often captured and sold into sex slavery.

Ancient Greek politician Apollodoros of Archarnae is reported to have said in a speech, “we have courtesans (hetairai) for pleasure, and concubines (pallakai) for the daily service of our bodies, [and] wives (gunaikes) for the production of legitimate offspring and to have a reliable guardian of our household property.” (Quoted in “Courtesan, Concubine, Whore: Apollodorus' Deliberate Use of Terms for Prostitutes” by Jess Miner.) There is no clearer example Madonna/whore thinking and how it is used in service of the patriarchal sexual cartel.

12. There is endless debate about who and what the Whore of Babylon—described as both a person and a city—symbolizes. The most common interpretation is that she is a coded reference to Rome. Other interpretations suggest she symbolizes Jerusalem. Martin Luther and John Calvin believed she symbolized the Catholic Church. Many Protestant denominations view her as symbolizing any/all of the other, “false” Protestant denominations. (See the various interpretations discussed here.)