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Tis Pity We Called Her A Whore – And Other Ineffectual Digital Apologies

Having now written two books about my failures in work, life and love, I think I’m qualified to say that the only difference between a memoirist and a prostitute is timing.

A prostitute sells sex for money – that money being payable either immediately before or immediately after the act. A memoirist also receives money for having sex – but our payment comes via a publisher, months or years later, once we’ve recounted the amusing or titillating details in print. In the final analysis, really, we’re all whores.

And yet, in terms of public perception, the distinction of payment and timing is vital. Actual prostitutes are – generally speaking – looked down on by society: labels like ‘whore’ and ‘hooker’ being, almost without exception, used pejoratively. Memoirists, on the other hand, tend to be reasonably well regarded, not least by themselves. For that reason, accidentally calling a hooker a memoirist is unlikely to cause offense, but accidentally call a memoirist a hooker and… hoo boy…

This time last week, my friend Zoe Margolis – who writes as the Girl With A One Track Mind – was asked by the UK’s Independent on Sunday (IoS) newspaper to write a column about how she went from being an anonymous sex blogger to a widely-recognised advice columnist and memoirist. Zoe, I should emphasise, does not have sex for money. I know this for a fact: we shared a house at SXSW a couple of years ago and she stubbornly refused to sleep with me, despite the fact that I paid for all of our groceries at Whole Foods.

And yet, thanks to an astonishing but – I hope – innocent piece of lazy subediting, when the IoS published her column they did so under the unambiguously libellous headline “I was a hooker who became an agony aunt“.

Hoo boy.

The IoS reaslised its mistake (for want of a better word for “misquoting one of our writers as calling herself a whore”) within an hour of the paper going to press and quickly changed the headline in print and online. But of course the damage was already done. Although, according to the paper, only a couple of thousand hard copies had been dispatched to news stands, the web version had already been syndicated to dozens of other sites – including Yahoo! – and such far-flung newspaper websites as the Times of India. Worse still, it took several more hours – and increasingly vocal complaints by Zoe – before the IoS changed the story’s URL which still contained the full wording of the original headline.

An embarrassing screw up for the Independent – but one that other papers can learn from, right?

Not so much.

A few days later, another UK paper – The Daily Mail – ran a story headlined “I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you …” The story was indeed sickening; written by a former police detective, it revealed how after signing up to Facebook as a young girl, he was immediately contacted by middle-aged men looking for sex. There was just one problem with the story: it wasn’t true.

NSFW: 'Tis Pity We Called Her A Whore – And Other Ineffectual Digital Apologies