The Ferrett made an interesting remark about the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland and the nomenclature of sex workers.

I had a Tweet up for about twenty seconds that I then took down, which was this:

“Cleveland is hosting the National Republican Convention in 2016. I hope we have enough hookers.”

It’s funny in the sense that, while the convention is guaranteed to be a smorgasbord of squeamishness about sex, it’s about equally guaranteed that many attendees will be gettin’ it on in all manner of publicly-disapproved ways during the off hours.

It’s problematic, though, because the words like “hooker” are overloaded with cultural baggage.

So the Ferrett deleted the tweet, and decided just to tell us about it.

I took the Tweet down, not because I thought it was inaccurate, but because I thought in a shorter version it’d pass on overtones I didn’t want to create. It seemed to degrade sex workers to me (and no, for some reason “I hope we have enough sex workers” didn’t strike me as funny in the same way).

Which is a weird thing about being careful with your communications: It’s not that what you say isn’t funny, but that it also encourages people to not question things. To me, a hooker or a sex worker or a prostitute or whatever the fuck you call them are people, worthy of rights and protections. But I suspect a lot of the people who might pass that gag along would be the sort of people who’d see selling sex as the incontrovertible evidence of bad morals/life decisions/etc.

The real joke here is how the Republicans try to make kinky sex illegal, and yet crave it the same way we do. But I’m not sure that Tweet got it across without punching downwards more than I’d like.

Emphasis added, along with a hell yeah. As far as “kinky” sex goes, I figure YMMV, but I always suspect that those who bray the loudest about it just might protest too much.