Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (20 page)

That street streams with ghosts, day and night.

6

I didn’t come here in the 1970s, because I was afraid. I was a small-town girl, and I remember when I believed San Francisco was such a big city. You have to be
ready
to do any new thing, unless the world forces you into it; otherwise, you grow into the time when what you could not do, you can. It’s what maturation really means—this growing.

I did not think I could make a life for myself here. I swam in a small pond, the years ticked by, I waited to be ready to step into the world that I knew waited for me, and perhaps by doing so—though truly I cannot see it as anything but a failure of my character—I saved my own life.

We were not ready to lose our men. We were not ready to lose our friends and our lovers, and if the savage losses of the epidemic had happened to any single individual one of us, nearly all their friends gone, dying and then dying and still more dying, that one might have lost their mind with grief. Instead, it happened to all of us. The world forced us into it, and, drafted, watching each other die, some of us stayed alive and helped each other and waited for the future.

In the face of such a thing, fear means everything and it means nothing at all. Do you hide, move away, go straight? There must still be shell-shocked people everywhere who fled it. Do you sign up with Shanti or STOP AIDS or go walk somebody’s dog? Or, like Robert and I did, throw a sex party, trying to deploy the only tool we trusted—and the one we ourselves needed—to help preserve sex in the face of all this fear?

All my dead men: I could not save them, can barely grieve them. Now that I finally found the courage to come here to find them, I am left with San Francisco: we are each widowed so many times.

Happy Hookers

Melissa Gir a Gr ant

The following books were not published in 1972:
The Happy Secre- tary
,
The Happy Nurse
,
The Happy Napalm Manufacturer
,
The Happy President
,
The Happy Yippie
,
The Happy Feminist
. The memoir of a Manhattan madam was.
The Happy Hooker
climbed best-seller lists that year, selling over sixteen million copies.

When it reached their top five, the
New York Times
described the book as “liberally dosed with sex fantasies for the retarded.” The woman who wrote them and lived them, Xaviera Hollander, became a folk hero. She remains the accidental figurehead of a class of women who may or may not have existed before she lived and wrote. Of course, they must have existed, but if they hadn’t, say the critics of hooker happiness, we would have had to invent them.

Is prostitution so wicked a profession that it requires such myths?

We may remember the legend, but the particulars of the happy hooker story have faded. Hollander and the characters that grew up around her are correctly recalled as sexually omnivorous, but desire alone didn’t make her successful as a prostitute. She realized that the sex trade is no underworld, that it is intimately entangled in city life, in all the ways in which we are economically interde- pendent. Hollander was famous for being able to sweep through the lobby of the Palace Hotel, unnoticed and undisturbed, on her way to an assignation, not because she didn’t “look like” a working girl, but because she knew that too few people under- stood what a working girl really looked like.

In
The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington
, a 1977 film adapted from Hollander’s memoir, a scene opens with Teletype bashing the screen with Woodward-and-Bernstein urgency. Flashlights sweep a darkened hall. Inside an unlocked office, a criminal scene is revealed: a senator embracing a prostitute. Hollander is called before Congress to testify. When the assembled panel interrogates her career, attacking her morals, she is first shameless, then spare but sharp in pointing out the unsurprising fact that these men are patrons of the very business they wish to blame for America’s downfall. What’s on trial in the film is ridiculous, but the ques- tions are real. What value does a prostitute bring to society? Or is hooking really not so grandiose as all that? Could it be just another mostly tedious way to take ownership over something all too few of us are called before Congress to testify on—the condi- tions of our work?

“Did you know that 89 percent of the women in prostitution want to escape?” a young man told me on the first day of summer this year, as he protested in front of the offices of the
Village Voice
. He wanted me to understand that they are complicit in what he

calls “modern-day slavery.” The
Village Voice
has moved the bulk of the sex-related ads it publishes onto the website Backpage.com. This young man, the leader of an Evangelical Christian youth group, wanted to hasten the end of “sex slavery” by shutting Backpage.com down. What happens to the majority of people who advertise willingly on the site, who rely on it to draw an income? “The reality is,” the man said to me, not knowing I had ever been a prostitute, “almost all of these women don’t really want to be doing it.”

Let’s ask the people around here, I wanted to say to him: the construction workers who dug up the road behind us, the cabbies weaving around the construction site, the cops over there who have to babysit us, the Mister Softee guy pulling a double shift in the heat, the security guard outside a nearby bar, the woman working inside, the receptionist upstairs. The freelancers at the
Village Voice
. The guys at the copy shop who printed your flyers. The workers at the factory that made the water bottles you’re handing out. Is it unfair to estimate that 89 percent of New Yorkers would rather not be doing what they have to do to make a living?

“True, many of the prostitution ads on Backpage are placed by adult women acting on their own without coercion,” writes
New York Times
columnist and professional prostitute savior Nicholas Kristof. But, he continues, invoking the happy hooker trope, “they’re not my concern.” He would like us to join him in sepa- rating women into those who chose prostitution and those who were forced into it; those who view it as business and those who view it as exploitation; those who are workers and those who are victims; those who are irremediable and those who can be saved. These categories are too narrow. They fail to explain the reality of one woman’s work, let alone a class of women’s labor. In this

scheme, a happy hooker is apparently unwavering in her love of fucking and will fuck anyone for the right price. She has no griev- ances, no politics.

But happy hookers, says Kristof, don’t despair, this isn’t about women like you—we don’t really mean to put you out of work. Never mind that shutting down the businesses people in the sex trade depend on for safety and survival only exposes all of them to danger and poverty, no matter how much choice they have. Kristof and the Evangelicals outside the Village Voice succeed only in taking choices away from people who are unlikely to turn up outside the
New York Times,
demanding that Kristof’s column be taken away from him.

Even if they did, with the platform he’s built for himself as the true expert on sex workers’ lives, men like Kristof can’t be run out of town so easily. There’s always another TED conference, another women’s rights organization eager to hire his expertise. Kristof and those like him, who have made saving women from themselves their pet issue and vocation, are so fixated on the no- tion that almost no one would ever choose to sell sex that they miss the dull and daily choices that all working people face in the course of making a living. Kristof himself makes good money at this, but to consider sex workers’ equally important economic survival is inconvenient for him.

This business of debating sex workers’ choices and whether or not they have them has only become more profitable under what so- ciologist Elizabeth Bernstein terms “post-industrial prostitution.” After the vigilant antiprostitution campaigns of the last century, which targeted red-light districts and street-based prostitution, sex work has moved mostly indoors, into private apartments and gentlemen’s clubs, facilitated by the Internet and mobile phones.

The sex economy exists in symbiosis with the leisure economy: personal services, luxury hotels, all increasingly anonymous and invisible. At the same time, more young people find themselves without a safety net, dependent on informal economies. Sex work now isn’t a lifestyle; it’s a gig, one of many you can select from a venue like Backpage or Craigslist.

Recall the favored slogan of prostitution prohibitionists that on the Internet, they could buy a sofa and “a girl.” It’s not the potential purchase of a person that’s so outrageous; it’s the prox- imity of that person to the legitimate market. Bernstein calls these “slippery borders,” and asks us to observe the feelings provoked by them, and how they are transferred. Anxieties about slippery market borders become “anxieties about slippery moral borders,” which are played out on the bodies of sex workers.

The anxiety is that sex work may be legitimate after all. In a sense, the prohibitionists are correct: people who might have never gotten into the sex trade before can and are. Fighting what they call “the normalizing of prostitution” is the focus of anti–sex work feminists. In this view, one happy hooker is a threat to all women everywhere.

“It’s sad,” said the speaker from the women’s-rights NGO Equality Now in protest outside the
Village Voice.
She directed her remarks at the cluster of sex workers who had turned out in coun- terprotest. “Backpage is able to be a pimp. They’re so normalizing this behavior that a group of Backpage advertisers have come out today to oppose us.” So a prostitute’s dissent is only possible if, as they understand prostitution itself, she was forced into it.

“Why did it take so long for the women’s movement to genu- inely consider the needs of whores, of women in the sex trades?” asks working-class queer organizer and ex-hooker Amber L. Hollibaugh, in her book
My Dangerous Desires
. “Maybe because

it’s hard to listen to—I mean really pay attention to—a woman who, without other options, could easily be cleaning your toilet? Maybe because it’s intolerable to listen to the point of view of a woman who makes her living sucking off your husband?”

Hollibaugh points to this most difficult place, this politics of feelings performed by some feminists, in absence of solidarity. They imagine how prostitution must feel, and how that in turn makes them feel, despite all the real-life prostitutes standing in front of them to dispute them.

It didn’t used to be that people opposed to prostitution could only get away with it by insisting that “happy” prostitutes didn’t really exist. From
Gilgamesh
to the Gold Rush days, right up until Ms. Hollander’s time, being a whore was reason enough for someone to demand you be driven out of town. Contemporary prostitu- tion prohibitionists consider the new reality, in which they deny the existence of anyone with agency in prostitution, a form of victory for women. We aren’t ruined now. We’re victims.

Perhaps what they fear most of all is that prostitutes could be happy: that what we’ve been told is the worst thing we can do to ourselves is not the worst, or even among the worst. What marks us as fallen—whether from feminism or Christ or capital—is any suggestion that prostitution did not ruin us and that we can de- liver that news ourselves.

Christian Conservatives vs. Sex:

The Long War over Reproductive Freedom

Rob Boston

On November 1, 1961, Estelle Griswold and Dr. Charles Lee Buxton did something radical: they opened a clinic in New Haven, Connecticut, to dispense birth control information.

Nine days later, police raided the clinic and arrested Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Con- necticut, and Buxton, chairman of the obstetrics department at Yale Medical School.

Buxton and Griswold weren’t surprised. In fact, they had been expecting to be arrested all along. Their decision to open a birth control clinic in New Haven was a deliberately provocative act, designed to test a law originally passed in Connecticut in 1879 that banned artificial forms of contraceptives in the state for ev- eryone—even married couples.

Connecticut’s anti–birth control statute was only being spo- radically enforced at the time, and some types of birth control

were available in drugstores. But Buxton and Griswold believed that as long as the law was in place, access to contraceptives wasn’t secure.

Sure enough, when they opened their facility, conservative religious leaders went on the warpath. The state’s politically pow- erful Roman Catholic hierarchy demanded action, leading to the raid on the clinic.

Buxton and Griswold went to court. They lost at every level in Connecticut state courts, including before the state supreme court. But in 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the pair’s convictions and ruled 7-2 in Griswold v. Connecticut that the law was unconstitutional.

Citing “the zone of privacy created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees,” Justice William O. Douglas observed, “Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of mar- ital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship. We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights….”

Five years earlier, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted approval for sale to the public of the first oral contracep- tive. Within two years, more than a million American women were on “the Pill.” The number escalated as refinements con- tinued in years to come.

Today, most Americans believe access to contraceptives is se- cure; younger Americans may not even know about the case in- volving Buxton and Griswold.

But as recent events have shown, birth control—although regarded as noncontroversial and indeed necessary by most Americans—remains a political flashpoint. When President Barack Obama announced earlier this year that most employers,

including religiously affiliated institutions such as hospitals, uni- versities and social service agencies, would have to contract with insurance companies that would make contraceptives available to employees who want them, conservative religious groups were quick to stir up opposition.