The Problem with Whores

Several months ago, one of my 11 year old daughter’s equine-obsessed friends introduced her to a website called Howrse.com.

On this site, users breed horses and ponies and manage their own personal equestrian centers. It didn’t sound very interesting to me, but after checking out the site for myself and making it clear to my daughter that she could only friend users she knows in real life, I left her to it. Howrse.com quickly became one of her favorite websites and now, several of her friends have joined as well. They trade horses back and forth for breeding and send messages to each other. My daughter generally only gets interested in the site for a few days at a time, but when she’s on it, she can’t stop talking about it.

And that, as it turns out, is a problem.

“I just love whores,” she told me in the car a few days after she’d first discovered the website.

“EXCUSE ME?” I said.

“The website. Whores,” she said.

“What website is this?!” I sputtered.

“The horse website,” she said. “WHORES.”

“Oh!” I said, trying hard not to laugh. “You mean ‘horse.’ Horsssssse.“

“But that’s not how you pronounce it, mom,” my daughter said impatiently. “It’s not spelled ‘H-O-R-S-E.’ It’s H-O-W-R-S-E. Whores.”

“Or maybe it’s pronounced ‘How-rse,” I suggested helpfully.

“Nope,” my daughter said with the air of One Who Knows. “It’s definitely ‘whores,’ Mom. Sorry.”

Did I mention my daughter inherited the Ferrier stubborn gene? I had about as much chance of winning this argument as Donald Trump has of taking a vow of silence.

Looking back, I probably should have told my daughter that day that her pronunciation sounded like a word that was sort of… inappropriate. But it was one of those moments when I simply wasn’t in the mood to have a conversation with my eleven-year-old about the world’s oldest profession. And so, ‘Whores’ it was… and at first, I have to admit, it was kind of funny. “I can’t believe we spent $20 on whores,” I told my husband after Punky gave him the money for a membership on the site. Oh, the whores gags were endless– but they were also confined to the walls of our house.

At least until recently.

“Wanna play whores?” my daughter asked when she and a neighbor friend came in the other day. From the kitchen, I cringed. Fortunately, the other girl wasn’t familiar with… whores…, but I realized that it was probably time for my daughter and I to talk. Unfortunately, I got busy and forgot all about it– until a few days later, when I overheard my daughter leaving a message on her friend’s family voicemail.

“Hello, this is Punky Ferrier,” she announced politely. “I’m calling because I need to talk to Stephanie about whores. Please ask her to call me back as soon as she can. Thank you!”

Surprisingly, we never got that call back.

That night, I explained this latest predicament to my husband, but despite the evidence I presented, he still wasn’t convinced that it was time for that age-old tradition that every family faces: The Whore Talk. “Do you really have to go there?” he asked. “I mean, she never plays that game for very long. She’ll probably be tired of it again in a couple of days and we’ll stop hearing about it.”

Fast forward to the next morning, when it was my turn to drive carpool. In the backseat, Punky’s school friends merrily chattered about how much they OMG loved Ellie Goulding and Netflix and Pokemon knee socks and grape-flavored slushies.

“I’m completely obsessed with whores right now!” my daughter contributed from the front seat.

Behind us, silence.

People, I never thought I’d say this as a parent, but here it is:  We have a whore problem.

It really never ends around here, does it?