Used and Forgotten: Maupassant, Ward 9, and the Dirty Truth About Sex Work

The Oldest Profession, The Oldest Hypocrisy

You ever notice how society loves to use something until it's inconvenient, then toss it like a cigarette butt in the gutter? Prostitution is the perfect example. It’s been around since the first caveman realized he had something to trade and the first cavewoman realized she could name her price. It’s older than kings, older than money, older than religion. And yet, people talk about it like it’s some kind of disease, like it’s something to be ashamed of—unless, of course, they’re the ones sneaking into a back alley or a five-star hotel to buy it.

They call it the oldest profession, but what they really mean is it’s the oldest contradiction. Society has always needed sex workers but never wanted to admit it. They want the service, but not the conversation. They want the pleasure, but not the reality. And worst of all, they want the women when they’re young, healthy, and available—but the second they get sick, get old, or get inconvenient, they’re discarded like last night’s whiskey bottle. Forgotten.

History doesn’t do much better. It remembers the kings, the generals, the war heroes. But the women in the background? The ones who took the hits, who held the secrets, who comforted the broken men who went off to kill for their country? They’re footnotes at best, ghosts at worst. And that’s where Guy De Maupassant steps in, waving his literary flashlight over the kind of truth most people would rather not see.

Ward 9: A Story of Guilt, Disease, and Good Old-Fashioned Hypocrisy

Maupassant didn’t have much time for bullshit. He saw the world for what it was—dirty, cruel, and full of people trying to pretend otherwise. And in his short story Ward 9, published in 1888 as part of Le Horla, he did what good writers do: he held up a mirror, and what stared back wasn’t pretty.

Set against the grim, bloody backdrop of the Franco-Prussian War, Ward 9 tells the story of Rose, a prostitute rotting away in a hospital bed, dying of a venereal disease she caught in the line of duty. Because that’s what it was—duty. She didn’t wear a uniform, didn’t carry a rifle, didn’t march under a flag, but make no mistake: she was part of the war effort. She, and women like her, were sent to the front lines of another kind of battle—the one fought not with bullets, but with bodies.

Rose and the women like her weren’t just there to provide comfort; they were weapons. Nobody wrote about them in the history books, but they were deployed just the same. When officers needed to keep their men from breaking, they sent in the prostitutes. When soldiers needed an escape from the trenches, from the filth, from the sight of their friends being torn apart, they sought out women like Rose. And sometimes—whether they wanted to or not—those women were used as tools of war in the most literal sense.

Infected with disease, whether by accident or by design, prostitutes were sent into enemy territories, their bodies turned into biological warfare. A kiss on the lips, a night of passion, and the damage was done. The enemy woke up infected, rotting from the inside, his body falling apart while he marched toward the battlefield, unknowingly carrying death inside him. It was a quiet, slow way to kill, a strategy nobody wanted to admit to but one that had been used time and time again. Soldiers could be shot, stabbed, bombed—but this? This was something else. Something insidious. A man could die in battle and be called a hero, but die from what Rose carried in her blood? That was disgrace. That was shame. And shame was sometimes a more powerful weapon than any bullet.

But when the war ended, when the men went home, when the generals shook hands and the politicians took credit for the victories, where did that leave women like Rose? Nowhere. They were forgotten. The same armies that had used them left them behind. The same men who had once needed them now walked past them in the streets without a glance. The diseases they caught in the line of duty—the same duty that kept soldiers sane, that kept morale up, that had even been used to weaken the enemy—those diseases were now their own problem to deal with.

Once upon a time, Rose had a lover. A captain. A man who swore he loved her, who took her into his arms and into his bed without hesitation. A man who, at some point, whispered words that made her believe she was more than just a convenience, more than just a body passing through his life. But now? Now, he’s a war hero. Now, he’s respectable. Now, his uniform is clean, his name is shining in the newspapers, his future is bright. And a dying prostitute—well, that doesn’t fit into his story.

So he stays away. He lets her rot alone. Maybe he feels guilty. Maybe he thinks about her in the quiet moments, when the crowds have gone and he’s left alone with his thoughts. Maybe he remembers the warmth of her, the softness, the way she was there for him when no one else was. But he never goes to see her. Because visiting her would mean acknowledging what he left behind. It would mean facing the ugly truth: that she had given everything, and he had given nothing.

The beauty of Ward 9 is in its raw, unapologetic truth. Maupassant doesn’t dress it up. He doesn’t romanticize Rose’s suffering. He doesn’t offer a redemption arc for the captain. Because real life isn’t like that. In real life, people abandon the things that remind them of their own dirt. In real life, people take what they need and pretend they never needed it.

And sex workers? They’ve always been used, then discarded. They’re there when men want them, and invisible when men don’t. They exist in the shadows of history, in the margins of stories, in the gaps between the official narratives. They fight wars, too, but nobody writes their names in the books. They bleed, but their wounds aren’t counted. They die, but their deaths don’t make it onto memorial plaques.

Rose wasn’t just a prostitute dying of disease. She was a soldier in a war that never recognized her. And like so many before her, and so many after, she was left to fade away, alone, while the world pretended she had never mattered.

Prostitutes and War: The Soldiers Nobody Talks About

You think soldiers were the only ones fighting wars? Think again. History has its official warriors—the men in uniform, the ones with medals pinned to their chests. But behind them, there were always the unofficial warriors. The women who fought different battles in different ways. The ones who held them, listened to them, let them cry when they were too ashamed to cry in front of their fellow soldiers.

World War I and World War II: The Unspoken Role of Sex Workers

During both World Wars, sex workers were unofficially part of military strategy. Nobody put them on recruitment posters, but make no mistake—governments knew damn well that soldiers needed an outlet. Morale was just as important as bullets, and prostitutes were a key part of keeping men from breaking.

Some were spies, too. You want information from an enemy soldier? Send a beautiful woman, pour him a drink, let him think he’s safe. In the heat of passion, men tell secrets. And those secrets got passed along to the right ears, sometimes changing the course of battle without a single shot fired.

And then there were the darker stories. The stories nobody likes to tell. Like when prostitutes were deliberately infected with venereal diseases and sent to enemy camps to weaken the troops from the inside. Warfare wasn’t just fought with guns and bombs—it was fought with bodies. And sex workers, once again, were weapons nobody wanted to acknowledge.

The Courtesans: Playing Chess While the Men Played War

Not all sex workers worked the streets. Some worked the parlors, the palaces, the places where power whispered instead of shouted. Courtesans weren’t just prostitutes with fancier clothes—they were strategists, diplomats, sometimes even kingmakers.

They didn’t just sell sex; they sold influence. They knew secrets about men that even their own wives didn’t know. And in the right moment, with the right words, they could change the course of history.

But did history give them credit? Of course not. Because history is written by men who want to be remembered as great, not as fools who spilled their plans in the arms of a woman they paid for.

Prostitutes and War: The Soldiers Nobody Talks About

You think war is just men in uniforms, charging onto battlefields, waving flags and shouting their country’s name? You think history is just the generals, the presidents, the war heroes? No. War has always had its ghosts, its hidden hands, its invisible workers—the ones who don’t get statues or medals or patriotic speeches. And among them, sex workers have always been there, on the front lines, behind enemy lines, in the trenches, in the barracks, in the shadows of history where no one wants to look too closely.

They weren’t carrying rifles, but they were carrying the weight of broken men. They weren’t marching into battle, but they were patching up wounds no nurse could reach. They saw the soldiers the way their mothers never would, the way their wives never could—the fear, the exhaustion, the trembling hands lighting cigarettes before sunrise because there was no guarantee they'd see another. They held them when no one else would, they listened when no one else cared, and when the war machine chewed those men up and spat them out, they were the ones left standing, watching, waiting for the next wave.

But society doesn’t write about that. It doesn’t want to. Because if you admit that sex workers have always been part of war, you admit that war is not just about glory and honor. You admit that soldiers needed something more than guns and speeches to keep them going. You admit that, in the grand machinery of conflict, these women were just as necessary as bullets, as food rations, as war propaganda. And that’s a truth people don’t like looking at.

World War I and World War II: The Unspoken Role of Sex Workers

During the world wars, brothels were not just businesses. They were part of the war effort. The British had them. The French had them. The Germans had them. The Americans had them, whether they admitted it or not. Even in places where prostitution was supposedly illegal, the military authorities turned a blind eye, because they knew that soldiers don’t fight well when they’re starving, when they’re exhausted, or when their balls are about to explode.

In France during World War I, licensed brothels known as maisons tolérées were practically as common as mess halls. The French military had an entire system in place to regulate them, issuing health checks, rationing visits, making sure their soldiers could get what they needed without the whole thing spiraling into disease and chaos. The British had "blue lamp houses," unofficial but tolerated brothels that catered to their men. The American forces tried to pretend they were above all that, but thousands of U.S. soldiers found their way to Parisian brothels anyway, because war doesn’t make saints of men—it just strips them down to their most basic needs.

And then there were the darker sides of it, the parts that don’t make it into history books. In occupied France, in Nazi-controlled territories, sex workers didn’t just service men; they were weapons, informants, spies. The French Resistance used them to extract intelligence from high-ranking German officers, slipping secrets from loose lips between whiskey and bedsheets. Sometimes they worked willingly, believing in the cause, and sometimes they were coerced, knowing that if they refused, their families might pay the price.

Then there was the war’s most sinister manipulation of sex work—the Japanese Imperial Army’s creation of "comfort women," a sanitized term for the systematic enslavement of hundreds of thousands of women, forced to service soldiers in military brothels. Women from Korea, China, the Philippines, and beyond were kidnapped or tricked into sexual slavery, trapped in hellish conditions, abused until their bodies gave out, and discarded when they were no longer useful. And for decades, Japan refused to acknowledge it, as if history itself could be erased with enough silence.

And let’s not forget the biological warfare disguised as prostitution. The Nazis, the Soviets, even the Japanese military experimented with the idea of deliberately infecting sex workers with syphilis, gonorrhea, or other venereal diseases and then sending them to enemy troops, letting the infections do the killing slow and quiet, an invisible battlefield spreading through brothels and barracks. It wasn’t just bullets and bombs—it was biological sabotage, weaponized through the very women who had no say in the war at all.

But do we teach this in history classes? No. Because it’s inconvenient. Because it ruins the story of war as a noble, honorable thing. Because it forces us to admit that behind every great battle, behind every victory, there were women suffering in ways no soldier ever did.

The Courtesans: Playing Chess While the Men Played War

Not all sex workers were in back-alley brothels or military barracks. Some of them sat in the grandest salons, the most lavish palaces, rubbing shoulders with kings and emperors, their power slipping into the cracks where men were weakest. Courtesans weren’t just prostitutes with better outfits—they were masters of influence, the puppeteers behind the men who thought they were running the world.

In ancient Rome, emperors had their mistresses, but the real power lay with the women who weren’t bound by marriage, the ones who could move freely through the courts, gathering secrets, trading whispers, pulling strings. The infamous courtesan Aspasia was more than just the lover of Pericles—she was a political advisor, a woman whose influence stretched across Athens like an invisible empire.

In Renaissance Italy, the great city-states were ruled not just by men with crowns, but by the women they shared their beds with. Veronica Franco, a Venetian courtesan, was more than just a woman for hire—she was a poet, an intellectual, a diplomat who stood before the Inquisition and defended not just herself, but her entire profession. In France, Madame de Pompadour wasn’t just Louis XV’s mistress—she was his closest political advisor, influencing foreign policy, shaping the country in ways most men in his court never could.

But do history books give them their due? Do they name them as architects of power? No. They call them mistresses. They call them lovers. They call them anything but what they really were—strategists, negotiators, manipulators who played the game of war and politics with the same precision as any general on the battlefield.

And it didn’t end there. During World War II, high-class escorts in Berlin, in Paris, in London, found themselves caught between the machinations of nations. Some played both sides, slipping secrets between the sheets, feeding information to the highest bidder. Others were taken and used as bait, as tools of war, handed off like poker chips in a game they never agreed to play.

But history is written by men, and men don’t like to admit that they were ever outplayed. So the courtesans, the spies, the sex workers who shaped wars from behind the curtains, they get left out, erased, replaced with stories of kings and presidents who never had to dirty their hands with anything but signatures on treaties.

The Stigma That Never Dies

You’d think by now we’d have grown out of this hypocrisy, that we’d have evolved past the days of burning witches and branding women with invisible scars. But no. The world still sharpens its knives, still spits out its venom, still grinds its judgment into the bones of sex workers like a bad habit it can’t quit.

Even today, after centuries of proof that civilization runs on the labor of women, after wars and revolutions and the so-called enlightenment of modern times, sex workers are treated like disposable napkins—used when needed, tossed when inconvenient. They carry the weight of the world’s desires, but they aren’t allowed to exist in it without shame strapped to their backs like an iron yoke. Society takes from them—takes their bodies, their time, their silence—but gives them nothing in return except handcuffs, slurs, and the cold shoulder of moral self-righteousness.

Governments might legalize it in some places, but legalization is just a fancy way of saying, We’ll take our cut, but we still won’t respect you. The world doesn’t care about sex workers until they’re gone—until they turn up dead in dumpsters, until they overdose in some rundown motel, until they make headlines for the wrong reasons. Then suddenly, everyone has an opinion. But when they’re alive? When they’re just trying to survive? The world would rather pretend they don’t exist.

Social Exclusion: The Price of Stigma

Sex workers are still ghosts in society—there, but not really there. You see them on the street corners, in the clubs, in the hotel lobbies, but you don’t see them. They move through the world like shadows, their presence acknowledged only when someone needs something from them. They’re denied basic rights, basic respect, basic humanity.

They’re treated like criminals even in places where their work isn’t illegal. A sex worker could pay her taxes, obey the law, do everything by the book, and still be treated like she’s smuggling heroin across the border. In the eyes of the world, she’s always one step away from being a criminal, always walking on a tightrope with no safety net. And God help her if she tries to leave the profession, tries to "go straight," as they say.

Because once you’ve been a sex worker, society never lets you forget it. Employers won’t hire you. Landlords won’t rent to you. Banks won’t give you loans. You’re marked, stamped, filed away as damaged goods. You can be a war criminal and still get a job at a bank, but if you spent a few years selling sex, you’re untouchable. A man can go to prison for fraud and still be allowed to rebuild his life, but a woman who sold her body for money? No second chances. No redemption arc. She becomes invisible until someone wants her again—for the same thing that got her cast out in the first place.

It’s a trap, and it’s designed that way. The same society that demands sex workers exist to satisfy its hidden desires is the same one that refuses to let them live with dignity. They are wanted and unwanted at the same time. Needed, but never acknowledged. Desired, but never respected.

Legal and Economic Shackles

The law, when it comes to sex work, is a joke—one of those cruel jokes that isn’t funny but still gets told over and over again. In most places, sex work is illegal, which means the women doing it are criminals by default, no matter how safely, how willingly, how professionally they operate. A woman could be standing on a street corner selling a service no different than a masseuse or a therapist, and yet she’s the one getting arrested, fined, thrown in jail.

And what happens when you criminalize something people will always want? You push it underground. You shove it into the dark alleys, into the hands of pimps, into the control of traffickers who see women as nothing more than walking ATMs. No legal protection means no justice when they get beaten, raped, or robbed. No legal work means no financial stability, no savings, no retirement, no safety net when the years start wearing down their bodies. They live on the edge of a razor blade, and the world just shrugs.

And even where it’s legal, the stigma sticks like glue. It doesn’t matter if a sex worker follows every rule, registers her business, pays her taxes—she’ll still be treated like she’s part of some underground crime ring. They get exploited, controlled, underpaid, overlooked. If they work for themselves, they’re criminals. If they work for someone else, they’re victims. Either way, they’re never just workers. They’re never just people.

Money is the great divider. A billionaire can fly in escorts on a private jet, pay for their silence, and still be invited to galas and political fundraisers. But a woman trying to feed her kids by working the same trade? She’s scum. It’s not about morality. It never was. It’s about power. It’s about who gets to play the game without consequences and who gets punished just for surviving.

Health and Safety: A System Designed to Ignore Them

Society talks a lot about public health, about keeping people safe, about disease prevention. But somehow, sex workers never make the cut. They’re left to fend for themselves in a system that would rather see them disappear than acknowledge that they, too, deserve basic human rights.

Venereal diseases, violence, drug addiction—these aren’t the result of sex work itself. They’re the result of the way society handles it. Criminalization means no access to proper healthcare. Stigma means doctors turn them away, treat them like vectors of disease instead of patients. A woman working in a high-end legal brothel in Nevada can get tested weekly, have medical staff on-site, and work in controlled conditions. Meanwhile, a woman working illegally in a country where she has no rights is forced to take risks, to rely on whatever protection she can find, to hope she doesn’t get sick because she knows that if she does, there’s nowhere to go.

And it’s not just physical health. The psychological toll of sex work—especially when it’s done in a hostile, criminalized environment—is something few people talk about. Depression, PTSD, substance abuse—these aren’t inherent to the job, they’re the side effects of being treated like less than human for too long. The world wants to believe sex workers are broken people, when in reality, it’s the system that breaks them.

According to the World Health Organization, more than half of sex workers enter the profession after facing abuse at home. That means most didn’t even choose this life—it was their best option in a world that gave them nothing else. A world that turned its back on them long before they ever turned to the streets.

And yet, society has the audacity to judge them. To look down on them. To pretend they are the problem, when the real problem is a world that creates them, uses them, and then refuses to acknowledge their existence.

Sex work isn’t the disease. It’s the symptom. The symptom of a world that still doesn’t know how to take care of its own.

So What’s the Solution?

We don’t need another self-righteous politician standing at a podium, wagging his finger, declaring that sex work is immoral while his name is on the client list of half the high-end escorts in town. We don’t need another lawmaker spewing nonsense about "family values" while flying out to some overseas island where nobody will recognize him, where the girls are young and desperate, where the same thing he condemns is exactly what he pays for. We don’t need another round of moral outrage from people who are only outraged when it’s convenient, only horrified when it threatens their own carefully curated public image.

What we need is change. Real, actual, tangible change. Change that doesn’t just shift things around on paper, doesn’t just slap a new label on an old problem, but rips the whole rotten foundation out from under the hypocrisy and starts building something new.

The solution isn’t pretending sex work doesn’t exist. It’s been here since the dawn of time, and it’s not going anywhere. The solution isn’t criminalizing it, because we’ve seen how that plays out—women beaten in back alleys, left with no legal recourse; traffickers tightening their grip on the most vulnerable; law enforcement treating sex workers like criminals while their clients walk away with a slap on the wrist.

No, the solution is simple. It’s just inconvenient for the people who like keeping things the way they are.

Decriminalization and Legal Protection: The First Step Towards Dignity

When sex work is decriminalized, something radical happens: sex workers become people under the law. They become workers, not criminals. They can report abuse. They can refuse clients. They can operate in safer conditions without the constant threat of arrest hanging over their heads.

Look at New Zealand. In 2003, they decriminalized sex work, and guess what? The sky didn’t fall. Society didn’t collapse into a moral freefall. Instead, violence against sex workers went down. They were able to go to the police when they were assaulted, because suddenly, the law was on their side instead of against them. They gained access to healthcare, legal protections, labor rights—things that every other worker in a civilized society takes for granted.

Compare that to the U.S., where sex work is criminalized almost everywhere, and what do you see? Women thrown in jail for trying to make a living, while the men who buy their services walk free. Police officers abusing their power, demanding free sex in exchange for letting women go. Trafficking victims too terrified to come forward, because they know they’ll be treated as criminals instead of victims. And in the worst cases, women are murdered—and law enforcement barely bats an eye, because a dead prostitute isn’t seen as a tragedy. It’s just another statistic.

Legalization isn’t enough either—not if it comes with so many regulations that it forces sex workers into a bureaucratic nightmare, into government-controlled brothels where they lose their autonomy, where they still end up under someone else’s thumb. True decriminalization means letting them operate freely, with the same labor protections that everyone else has. It means recognizing that sex work is work, and workers deserve rights.

Health and Safety: The Basics, for God’s Sake

You don’t have to be a genius to understand this: when people have access to healthcare, they live healthier lives. It’s true for every profession, every industry, every human being. So why is it that sex workers—the very people who have the most need for regular medical care—are often the ones who are locked out of it?

When sex work is criminalized, healthcare isn’t an option. You get sick? You deal with it yourself. You get assaulted? You patch yourself up in a motel bathroom. You contract an infection? You either suffer in silence or risk going to a doctor who might report you, judge you, or refuse to treat you.

In places where sex work is decriminalized, that changes. Sex workers can get regular medical check-ups without fear. They can access STI screenings, contraception, counseling. They can learn how to protect themselves, not just from disease, but from violence, from abuse, from the dangers that come with working in the shadows.

And it’s not just about health—it’s about safety. In countries where sex work is criminalized, women are forced into isolated, dangerous situations. They have to meet clients in secret, in unfamiliar locations, with no security, no backup. But when sex work is decriminalized, they can work in safe environments, in cooperatives, in places where they have control over who they see and under what conditions. They don’t have to rely on pimps, on brothel owners, on exploitative systems. They can protect themselves, because the law protects them.

This isn’t some radical idea. It’s basic human rights. It’s the bare minimum that should be afforded to every worker in every industry.

Burning Down the Stigma: Because It’s the Root of Everything

But here’s the thing—none of this works if the stigma remains. You can pass all the laws you want, open all the clinics, hand out all the protections, but if society still sees sex workers as less than, as dirty, as disposable, then they’ll always be fighting an uphill battle.

Because stigma is what keeps them hidden. Stigma is what keeps them vulnerable. It’s what makes it so easy for police to abuse them, for men to hurt them, for society to turn its back on them when they need help.

And that means we have to change the way we talk about sex work. We have to stop treating it like a moral failing, like something shameful, like something that "good women" don’t do. We have to stop sensationalizing it in the media, stop painting sex workers as either tragic victims or cunning manipulators.

We need public education—real education, not just scare tactics. Schools teach kids about every other profession, but sex work? It’s treated like some dark, untouchable topic. But if kids grow up only hearing the same tired myths, the same outdated moral judgments, then the cycle continues. They become the next generation of lawmakers, of police officers, of doctors, of landlords—people who have the power to either help or harm sex workers. And if they’ve only ever learned to look down on them, they’ll do what society has always done: turn away, ignore, pretend they don’t exist.

We need better representation in media. Not the Hollywood version of sex work, where every prostitute is either a heart-of-gold hooker with a redemption arc or a broken woman drowning in drugs and despair. We need real stories, real voices, real depictions of what sex work actually is—because when people see the truth, when they see sex workers as humans instead of stereotypes, the stigma starts to crack.

And we need to listen to sex workers themselves. They don’t need politicians speaking for them. They don’t need saviors. They need a platform. They need to be heard. They need to be the ones leading the conversation, shaping the laws, demanding the rights they’ve been denied for centuries.

Conclusion: The Same Old Story, The Same Old Hypocrisy

Guy De Maupassant’s Ward 9 isn’t just a story—it’s a slap in the face, a reminder that the world loves to use women until they break and then pretend they never existed. It’s a snapshot of something that’s been happening for centuries: a woman gives her body, her time, her care, and when she’s no longer useful—when she’s sick, when she’s dying, when she needs something in return—she’s discarded. Forgotten. Maupassant saw it for what it was, and he didn’t pretty it up with some moral redemption, didn’t write in a happy ending. Because there wasn’t one. Because there never is.

It would be nice to say we’ve changed since then. That we’ve grown. That we’ve learned. But look around. The story is still the same. The names are different, the wars have changed, the brothels have been replaced with internet ads and OnlyFans accounts, but the fundamental truth remains: sex workers are needed, sex workers are used, and then sex workers are left behind. Society still pretends they don’t exist except when it’s convenient. It still punishes them for doing the job that it demands they do. It still refuses to grant them the dignity, the rights, the recognition that every other working human being takes for granted.

Prostitution isn’t the problem. The world’s treatment of prostitutes is. It’s the laws that criminalize them while letting their clients walk free. It’s the healthcare system that denies them basic medical care. It’s the police who see them as easy targets instead of people to protect. It’s the landlords who refuse to rent to them, the employers who won’t hire them, the families that disown them, the doctors who turn them away. It’s the entire system that thrives on hypocrisy and then acts shocked when women end up dead in alleys, overdosed in cheap motels, trafficked across borders.

There’s no single fix, no one-size-fits-all solution, but it starts with acknowledging reality. It starts with legal reform—actual reform, not half-measures that still treat sex workers as criminals while pretending to help them. It starts with better health and safety regulations, with a system that sees them as human beings, not as nuisances or lost causes. It starts with burning down the stigma, tearing it apart until it’s nothing but ashes, so that sex workers can exist without shame, without fear, without having to constantly fight just to be treated with a shred of decency.

And maybe—just maybe—if we finally stop pretending, if we finally stop looking away, if we finally listen to the women who have been screaming this truth for centuries, we might get somewhere. We might actually build a society that doesn’t just use sex workers and then dispose of them.

But history doesn’t give much reason to be hopeful. The world doesn’t change easily. And until it does, until the hypocrisy finally collapses under the weight of its own bullshit, the Roses of the world will keep dying in their hospital beds alone, while the men who once loved them go on with their lives, unbothered, untouched, rewriting history so they can forget.

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