The Tale Of A Harvard Call Girl–The Sexual Harvesting Of The Washington Elite

Alison Whitfield had been an exceptional student at Harvard – summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and mention in the Crimson as one of the university’s up and coming stars.  Alison had not declared her plans by graduation and intimated that a year off would be a needed respite from her studies and would give her time to assess her life, but assured everyone that she would not disappear.  ‘Watch this space’, she said.

Alison had grown up in a patrician family of proper Bostonian lineage, part of the Davenport expedition to Connecticut that left the oppressive, puritanical Massachusetts Bay Colony for the more tolerant communities and promising territory along the Connecticut shore.  

There were few English settlers there when the Davenport party arrived, trappers and traders who did business with the Pequots and Mohegans, but in a short time the New Haven Plantation prospered.  It had a wide and protected harbor, fertile lands, and friendly Indians.  

The Whitfield family remained in New Haven for generations, although one branch left for what were considered even more ideal reaches in New Jersey. The Whitfields who remained married well,  became deans and deacons of Yale University, and were active in the southern branch of the Newport Three-Cornered Trade. 

Alison’s mother’s side of the family was equally reputable, having come with the first English settlers of Jamestown, settled along Albemarle Sound until they moved to Norfolk and much later to Richmond.  Rebecca Palmer’s ancestors had settled the Northern Neck and were among the associates of King Carter whose vast holdings produced tobacco and wealth for the King.

The Palmers were given especially good land by Carter, and they invested their wealth in the new cities of the Tidewater.  Her great-great uncles fought against the British in the Revolutionary War and later generations for the Confederacy.

In short, Alison’s pedigree was impeccable.  While she was called out for her family’s participation in the slave trade (Whitfield-owned sailing ships had brought slaves to the Caribbean as part of the slave-molasses-rum trade) and for fighting for the Confederacy (Palmer ancestors had served with valor at Chancellorsville), she was nonplussed.  It was the valor of the officers who fought for the South and the enterprise of the merchants who built New England into an economic power which counted, not the socio-political context of the day.

 ‘Racist!’ was shouted so often with such increasingly marginal logic, it became to Alison as inoffensive as Christmas sugar plums.

Much to the consternation of the women in the ranks of Harvard’s progressive caucus – dour, unattractive, short, and remarkably plain – Alison was beautiful.  She had inherited all the best physical genes of both mother and father, and was to every man on campus, stunning.  She was as classically beautiful as Catherine Deneuve, an ironic similarity because of the profession Alison chose – not acting, but the life of a courtesan as played by Deneuve in Belle de Jour.

Alison reveled in the contradictions of Harvard life.  She was hated by the progressive radicals who had become the campus arbiters of status, social posture, and right speech and who was jealously loathed by the feminists who, despite their outrage and righteous gender activism, wanted to be her; and she was loved by all men.

Political radicals swallowed their pride and images of slave ships and Confederate officers, and did whatever it took to ingratiate themselves with her; the few conservatives on campus were far more forthright and forward; and every other creed, race, ethnicity, or political persuasion made some kind of a play.  

She was a golden goddess for affirmative action black men who had always dreamed – again, against type and political advocacy – of making love to a beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed white girl.  She was the final rung of the ladder of assimilation for Jews, Hispanics, and Asians.  Hardcore gay men found themselves looking her way.

Alison’s looks alone could not account for such attractiveness any more than Marilyn Monroe’s universal, lasting, permanent appeal.  Both women had an indefinable allure, a sexuality that defied category or description.  Something they were born with and developed as they came to understand their particular, irresistible sexual magnetism.

In the Louis Bunuel film, Belle de Jour, Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), a young and beautiful housewife, is unable to share physical intimacy with her husband despite their love for each other. Her sexual life is restricted to elaborate fantasies involving domination, sadomasochism, and bondage. 

Although frustrated by his wife's frigidity toward him, he respects her wishes. Severine learns that a common friend is a prostitute at a high-class brothel and she decides to work there.  It will be the perfect place for her to render physical her sexual fantasies and to engage in the even more unconventional desires of the men she services.

Severine is not, according to Bunuel, a disturbed woman, a frustrated nymphomaniac, a Freudian case study; but a highly mature woman who has never been trapped within the confines of the bourgeoisie. She knowingly and purposefully enters the anti-social world of prostitution and is excited by the notion that she – beautiful, aristocratic, educated – can become a call girl.   

It is both a statement of exaggerated possibility – no one needs ever to be trapped – and one of social opprobrium.  The middle class is by nature neutering, inhibiting, and pedestrian.

It was for similar reasons that Alison Whitfield became a high-class call girl in Washington, DC.  She, like the Deneuve character, felt that her sexual adventure – the prostitution of an aristocratic beauty to the crude desires of anonymous men – would be an expression of will and domination.  In its perversity – hundreds of men lining up to be with her, bribing the madam, pleading their privilege and position; and she doing what she wanted, pushing the johns’ particularly unusual sexuality to its limits – it was supremely validating.

Alison was not a vengeful or vindictive woman, and her decision to keep a call book had nothing to do with the ignorance of her accusers at Harvard.  It was only the most interesting twist of her transformation, of her new profession.

She knew the politicians who came to her, especially those who had publicly condemned the abusive treatment of women, had trashed male libido and sexual pursuit, and verbally castrated every man who refused to endorse No Means No.  They came into her bedroom sheepishly, trying to gin up some self respect and personal cover, but buried themselves in her like rutting hogs and then thanked her and thanked her again.

She liked the Donald Trump advisors whose hour with her was simply a for-pay interlude in a diverse and active social life.  No questions asked, no apologies given.  Commercial sex was simply a variation, not an anomaly or perversion.  It fit right in with the sexual agenda of their days. A generous tip, a kiss on the cheek, respect, good will, and no refunds ever asked for.

She never considered holding back the evidence, the names, dates, times and even requests of the liberal johns.  The book was compiled and maintained only for publication.  When the time was right – when progressive sanctimony was at its most intolerable worst – she would make known who had been in her bed.

She was not run out of town when she went public.  She was too smart to get herself tarred and feathered; and she knew that as much as Congressman X or Lobbyist Y might say that they hated her for her treachery, all they wanted was one more roll in the hay before she left town.  Besides, she had plenty of well-paid cover.

With her considerable earnings and the private income left by both her mother and father who had never suspected the truth about her ‘K Street job’ she moved to Montana, bought a ranch in Paradise Valley, raised cattle and sheep, joined the Livingston Players, and lived to a ripe old age.