How to be sad and pathetic without even trying

Jessica Culter, pathetic Washington strumpet

Funny thing about consequences

Brag about being a whore and the people at your straight job hate you. Remeber Jessica Cutler, who got fucked up the ass for money, what we call prostitution, or less kindly, being a whore? Well, it seems she's making the most of her 15 minutes of fame, while remaining as clueless as possible about her amorality.

Blog Interrupted
When Jessica Cutler put her dirty secrets on the Web, she lost her job, signed a book deal, posed for Playboy -- and raised a ton of questions about where America is headed

By April Witt

Sunday, August 15, 2004; Page W12

The instant message blinked on the computer at Jessica Cutler's desk in the Russell Senate Office Building. "Oh my God, you're famous."

Before she could form the thought -- "famous, cool" -- or puzzle how she, a lowly mail clerk, had escaped obscurity, a second instant message popped up on her screen. Startled, Jessica recalls, she began to curse.

"Your blog is on Wonkette," the message said.

.................

Too jittery to work, Jessica dumped her stack of unopened mail on the two new interns in her office. She figured they'd still be filled with youthful enthusiasm for serving their government, seeing as how it was only their second day on the job.

Just then, Jessica says, the office door swung open. Framed in the doorway was the man she'd chronicled on the blog as her latest and favorite paramour -- a serious committee staffer more likely to be featured in some wonk newsletter than an online sex diary. He didn't look happy.

He asked her to step into the hallway, Jessica says. He was clutching a printout of her blog. "I have nothing to say to you about this," Jessica recalls him saying before he walked away.

"Okay, bye," Jessica said. She slunk back to her desk thinking, "Boy, am I getting off easy."

A few minutes later, she noticed one of the senator's senior aides standing a few feet away, glaring. This was the woman Jessica says set her up on her first date with the committee staffer. In her blog, Jessica breezily referred to her as a pimp. Now, the senior aide Jessica had called a pimp looked as if she wanted to rip Jessica's head off.

"You are the sorriest excuse for a human being," Jessica remembers the woman shouting. "You are worthless."

The woman and the committee staffer both declined to be interviewed for this article through Mike Dawson, DeWine's director of communications. Dawson declined to publicly discuss the accuracy of Jessica's blog or her account of what happened after it became public.

But, according to Jessica, the woman continued berating her until Jessica asked meekly, "What should I do?"

The woman told Jessica she should pack up and leave before she had her thrown out. "You better hope I never see you outside this building," Jessica recalls her saying.

This was turning out to be a really lousy 26th birthday.

........

Jessica grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., the oldest of three daughters raised by a former U.S. soldier and his Korean-born wife. Her parents fought a lot, remembers Jessica, who was in junior high when they divorced. Her mother moved out, leaving the girls to live with their father. They started leading largely separate lives.

"We all got cable in our rooms," Jessica says. "We all would just go to our rooms at the end of the day and watch the shows we wanted to watch."

From first grade through junior high, Jessica spent one day each week in a special program for gifted and talented children. Jessica and some of her schoolmates describe the program as pure free-to-be-you-and-me fun: Nobody graded them; nobody gave them homework; nobody cared if they finished anything.

Those classes left a mark on Jessica. "They tell you, 'You guys, you are smarter than most people,' " recalls Jessica, whose closest friends remain the girls she met in that program at age 7.

Jessica finds it curious that she and several of her gifted classmates became underemployed slackers with attitudes. She wonders if that traces back to the lessons they learned in the gifted program. "You kind of create your own moral universe," Jessica says. "It's like, well, I like myself. If other people don't like me, then whatever. I'm out of here."

During Jessica's teen years, her mother wasn't at home to offer admonitions about sex or romance, but lessons were easy to come by. Jessica, a comparative late-bloomer, remembers some high school classmates casually listing the guys they'd slept with and coming up with 20 or 30 partners
......................
Yet as a teenage student at Syracuse University, she dated a 38-year-old doctor who liked to take her shopping for clothes . The gifts he bought her, she says, made an impression. "That's the standard you hold every guy to for the rest of your life."

.

This is sad. She raised herself and didn't get the ethical grounding she needed. And she still seems confused by the reaction to her deeds. She doesn't get that it isn't just practical to take money for sex acts you don't like, it's demeaning, it's diminishing and it is soul killing. What kind of 38 year old man dates a teenager? No wonder she would whore herself out. She had no moral governors. No one to explain her actions to, no one who really cared. Just her idiot friends who lacked the common sense of 10 year olds.

After college, Jessica says, she squatted with friends in an apartment under construction in New York. She didn't have a career plan, always figuring she'd worry about the future later. As she worked a series of low-level jobs, she came to believe that no matter how smart a woman was, it was her looks that mattered.

"I used to read, like, Ms. Magazine and all that stuff when I was in high school," she says. "I was really, like, earnest back then. When I grew up and saw the way people are, I had to adapt. It's more about your looks than anything you can do. If you are not attractive, if you are fat, you don't get seated [at a restaurant], like, in the window or outside. If you want to do what you want to do, you have to look a certain way."

Jessica did. She burned through men and jobs in rapid succession and for much the same reason: She could not stand to be bored. And she bored easily. The way Jessica saw it, suckers were stuck doing things they didn't want to do. Jessica refused.

Yeah, exactly what I said as I updated the blog. What a sad moral vacuum this girl has. Could she be more immature?

And that is why DeLuca figures that all the people who employed Jessica on the Hill deserved exactly what happened next. "If Capitol Hill is this shining example of anything, how did she get hired?" DeLuca asks. "That's why it's so silly, people getting mad at her for bringing shame on the senator's office or the Hill or the system. Look at the guy who hired her for an internship, then asked her out. Look at the woman who supervised her, then pimped her out. Something is wrong with the system. It's not her."

Jessica left her unpaid internship in Lieberman's office in late February for a paid, entry-level post in DeWine's office. The résumé she used to land the job stated incorrectly that she had earned a BA from Syracuse and listed the wrong birth date, shaving two years off her age.

Let's see, they hired her because she was pretty and she lied on her resume. All evens out, right?

What is so sad is that this girl is directionless and is now scorned because she's venal and stupid. No one wants a whore as a girlfriend unless they're a pimp, and you can blame the men for chasing her, but why didn't she say no? She had that power if she wanted to use it. No one made her sleep with six guys, two of whom were married, at the same time.

At every turn, she made some bad ethical choices. Not just in screwing married guys, but taking money for sex she didn't like.

There a line in the Wild Bunch, where the two old outlaws weee discussing their former collegue, who was leading the posse chasing them. One says "he gave his word, he didn't have a choice." The other replied "it doesn't matter that he gave his word, it matters who he gave it to". It matters what you do and how you do it. It matters if you show up to work high and take money for sex. It matters if you mock your lovers in print. All people have is their word and their actions. If they don't match up, then bad things happen.

Cutler is more sad than either foolish or evil. And lots of women get hit on by men, but most say no, and walk away. They don't let themselves become whores, they don't act like nothing matters.

Cutler has proven herself to be deeply untrustworthy. The multiple boyfriends is one thing, we have all been guilkty of something like that. Even the money is a bad choice, but it happens, although less obviously. But when you combine the two, and add in the blog which used the real initials, which leads to their exposure online, something was wrong, deeply, deeply wrong.

When you go into a bedroom with someone, it's private, it's personal. Now it's one thing to be catty, another to shoot the shit with your girlfriends, but it you're going to write about intimacy in detail, you have to cover your tracks and theirs. People do stupid shit, and cheating often results in bad things, but anyone who lives like this is either in a great deal of anguish and pain or a sociopath. I'd bet on the first with her. She's not evil, just careless about things she shouldn't be. And she's paying for it.

posted by Steve @ 12:00:00 AM