Thursday, March 27, 2014

How and why are the prostitutes "students of men"?

Malcolm X was an outstanding student during his junior high years. His exemplary grades were suitable enough to help him perpetuate his dreams to become a lawyer, however, his favorite teacher crushed him unmercifully by telling him there was no place for a ______ in that profession. Dejected and denied, he promptly left his schooling, moved to Harlem, and entered his first career path as a pimp and drug dealer.

Malcolm X relied on the women he employed to provide intimate details of their experiences with the clients they serviced. The women gave him information that no other employee can offer in such great detail. He, in his own way, was a pioneer of Information Age-esque data mining. The prostitutes would tell him how the men were invariably broken by "domineering, complaining, demanding wives who had just about psychologically castrated their husbands" and associated them with the good fortune he had made off of their husbands' misery.


Malcolm's referring to his days working as a pimp and a street hustler. He notices that the prostitutes who work for him are keenly observant of men's behavior due to their regular contact with them. They effectively study the men that they sleep with, learning quickly that they are too easy to push around. In the women's experience, the men who come to them do so because they feel as if they've been ridiculed and humiliated by their wives, despite giving them everything they could ask for. The prostitutes have internalized the retrograde, sexist attitudes toward women that Malcolm expresses candidly throughout the Autobiography. They think, as he does, that men need to be more forceful and controlling towards their wives; that men are supposed to be strong while women remain weak and subservient.

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