PRETTY IN MINK | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Girls who have earned their coats the old-fashioned way love to joke about "trapping" a mink. "I caught and skinned each pelt myself," is how Lisa describes the ranch mink she received from her married sugar daddy. "Benny started out as a $200 john, someone I saw once every two weeks for an hour. One day, while fixing him a drink, I turned and saw that he had that unmistakable look on his face." Benny was smitten. "That's when I knew I had him," she frankly admits. Lisa never pretended to love Benny, but was seduced by (and rather fascinated with) her own power. Soon, Benny was paying Lisa's bills, pressing her to give up her other clients and offering to buy her a coat. Lisa was surprised when Benny insisted on accompanying her to Bergdorf Goodman -- he had always before stressed a need for discretion. With a quiet expression of awe on his face, Benny watched his new mistress trying on five different mink coats. "By letting them know he was buying my coat, he was declaring his love right in front of the sales staff," Lisa recalls. "I never expected that." Where else could Benny declare his feelings? "There could be no doubt about the nature of our relationship. I was in my early 30s, and looked about 25. Here was this flushed, adoring man in his 50s, going gaga over me right in front of these very polite salesgirls. I'm supposed to be the jaded hooker, but I have to admit -- I was as excited as he was. I'm sure the salesgirls see this kind of thing every day." The transaction altered their relationship. "Right there in the store, something happened. This was no longer a surreptitious meeting to be hidden from the entire world. I was still being bought and we all knew it. But he was spending $10,000 instead of $200, so he didn't have to be completely clandestine. And I didn't mind if people saw, because they knew I had the upper hand." Benny had an emotional agenda that seemed to have a life of its own. "After he bought the coat, the sex changed. We stopped watching porn videos. Anything that was in the least bit lewd was off-limits. Three-way sex was out and dildos were now verboten. I stopped telling him dirty jokes. Soon we were having no sex at all. As a john, he had been such a predictable pervert -- that's why I wanted to be his mistress! As a sugar daddy, he was totally different. We were going to the Four Seasons for lunch one day, and I planned on giving him a quickie beforehand. But when he showed up at my apartment, he told me we shouldn't have sex because it would just mess up my hair. Since when does a john care about mussing your hair! At the restaurant, I discovered that he just wanted to show me off in my fur. I thought, I can live with this, it's fun." But soon, Benny was testing Lisa's patience. "He pestered me about whether I was still seeing other guys for money, and I politely told him I wasn't, but he didn't believe me. One day he called, accusing me of cheating, and I slammed the phone down in a rage." Lisa cut Benny off and stopped returning his calls. To appease his befurred love object, he began sending theater tickets, tulips, Battersea boxes and large checks. "The angrier and colder I got, the more he loved it." A reluctant bitch-goddess, Lisa got more than she bargained for when she accepted her mink. "Benny was always trying to queer the deal by acting like a slavish child." You don't have to be a masochist to love the way a woman looks in a fur. Long before Versace was seducing his customers with kink couture, fur was mainstream fetish gear. That, apparently, made mink a must for everyone from the doctor's wife to the gold digger next door. Men, of course, have been known to wear fur, but fur on a man can seem effeminate. Perhaps there is something to this. If an expensive alligator bag represents a woman's highly treasured hidden orifice, fur is a less secretive, more tactile symbol. A mink or sable worn half-open is reminiscent of "a woman's lush, unwaxed outer labia," one successful madam points out. Is that why so many women I know feel compelled to go out wearing nothing but their winter boots underneath a fur coat -- just once, so they can say they've done it? Fur is associated with so many stock clichés -- because fur makes individual men and women behave like stereotypes. "Venus in Furs" has become a legend that all kinds of women act out in subtle ways, thanks to Fred the Furrier's accessibility and a leap in working women's salaries during the past two decades. The glamour of fur derives from what Camille Paglia has called "the amorality of aestheticism" and is available to anyone with a few thousand dollars to spend -- especially in New York, where wholesalers cluster around Seventh Avenue and summer shoppers get deep discounts during the slow season. A good mink coat creates a primal glow that lights up almost any woman's face. Masoch could think of "nothing more extravagantly flattering" to his goddess, and neither can I. A woman in a fabulous fur looks arrogant and carnal because she obviously does not mind if a few animals have died to keep her warm. A pretty girl in a well-made sable or mink begins to look like a sleek predator. In a tacky fox jacket, she evokes a scrappy stray cat accustomed to finding its own dinner. A sable-owner in her 40s tells me: "There is a feeling that because you can be had for a fee, you are stripped of your mystery. When a client is so crazy about you that he buys you a serious fur, you have proven something -- you haven't lost your mystery after all." Getting a fur is "a diplomatic feat" in Caroline's view, and each winter she highlights her hair "to match the coat." It makes her feel "just a bit like one of those royal favorites who demanded a carriage that matched her hat." No woman I have ever seen decked in fur looks innocent. There is no getting around it. When you wear a fur coat, you announce your carnality, even if you do so quietly. Fur makes women of all ages look selfish and culpable. It may be a cliché, but we have all killed in order to live. Life devours life, and fur -- more than any other clothing a woman can own -- reminds us of it. Nuns do not wear fur coats, as far as I know, and that's as it should be. Fur implies coldness when worn by the socially aloof but signifies sexual availability -- for a possible price -- on others. As Mae West is famous for having said, "Goodness had nothing to do with it." A male friend of a certain age recently told me: "I miss those old New Yorker cartoons -- they were so politically incorrect -- of the respectable fellow in top hat and tails, escorting the blowsy chorus girl in her fur coat." Wearing a fur doesn't have to signify that you're a floozy, but the prostitute intent on hiding her profession does not run around town in a mink. I once knew a call girl from Illinois who hid her fur whenever Mom came to New York because she thought her mother would suspect her of being exactly what she was. Jane was also using the money she earned to pay for grad school, yet never hid her multiple degrees -- which were at least as costly as any of her coats. PETA keeps trying to make the rejection of fur look as racy as fur itself. But this attempt to turn sexual politics upside down has only been partially successful. By posing naked to display a commitment to animal rights, sexy supermodels like Turlington, Nadja Auermann and Tyra Banks end up flirting with the politics of virtue. Beautiful and sought after, these girls are probably capable of making men crawl across the floor to do their bidding. Auermann's exactly the kind of woman who might be expected to earn a fur simply by looking so fabulous that some indulgent man offers her a lynx coat, for the sheer pleasure of having given her something. But instead of a Venus in Fur bringing mortal males to their knees, PETA presents Auermann as some sort of prelapsarian Eve cavorting in her innocent nudity for a humane cause. These are actually the politics of sexual -- not social -- virtue. By rejecting fur and everything it stands for, these models imply that they'll disown their own sexual power: beautiful and yet not culpable -- until they are corrupted again by fur, that is. The politics of virtue makes for a procession of strange bedfellows. After a furless phase, supermodel Naomi Campbell defected -- and attracted the ire of PETA spokesman Dan Matthews by wearing a Fendi sable at a Milan fashion show last year. In a public letter to Campbell, Matthews made shrewish allusions to the model's age and possible substance abuse. With high fashion icons deserting the cause -- and it's not surprising, if Matthews is really that bitchy -- the antifur arena may find itself compelled to open its doors to a population it once snubbed. Remember when PETA protesters carried placards saying that fur was for "bimbos"? Signs have changed. Pamela Anderson Lee recently launched her own antifur campaign by appearing nude on a Times Square billboard. PETA proudly reports that Penthouse magazine's Pet of the Year, Paige Summers, opted for an Isaac Mizrahi fake instead of the real fur traditionally awarded to the winner of the title. How long will this downscaling trend last? (And what sort of puritanical tongue-lashing is in store for a men's magazine or a "Baywatch" babe in the event that Matthews' cause is, again, betrayed?) Fur is often derided as a vice of the privileged, but one fur owner in my circle argues that antifur celebs such as Cindy Crawford and Elle MacPherson are themselves privileged: "You need a fur in New York," a call girl from Los Angeles (who bought her own coat) told me when she moved here. "These models who represent PETA -- every place they go, there's a limo waiting for them! What happens when you're on Lexington Avenue in rush hour on a really cold day, and you have a guy waiting for you at the Plaza Hotel, and you can't find a frigging cab? These chicks don't live in the real world! They have no idea what it's like." SALON | May 26, 1998 Tracy Quan is a regular contributor to Salon. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - R E L A T E D_.S A L O N_.S T O R I E S Hooker's Ball A working girl falls for the hit Broadway musical "The Life." By Tracy Quan May 30, 1997