Hooker's Ball page 2
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"The Life" focuses on a "virtuous" prostitute struggling with a doomed relationship. Queenie, who used to sing in a church choir, has her heart broken by an incompetent pimp. This archetype also appears in "Miss Saigon," the last major Broadway show to capitalize in a big way on prostitution. "Miss Saigon" is still going strong, but when it opened in 1991, Asian-American activists mounted a well-publicized attack because of the show's alleged sexism and racism. A male prostitute I know was walking past the Broadway Theatre and was leafleted by protesters who argued that images of Asian prostitutes were insulting to Asian-Americans generally. They were surprisingly unaware of how this might sound to prostitutes, Asian or otherwise. "It never occurred to them that a prostitute would read their propaganda," my friend said, astonished.
One evening, on public television, I saw Mil Young Cho of Asian Lesbians of the East Coast leading the charge not only against "Miss Saigon" but against the 1960 movie "The World Of Suzy Wong." There was, I felt, something of the "nouveau puritan" about this spokeswoman and I wondered if she was a first-generation Westerner. Just as those with new money flash their cash (when it's cooler to hide it), these activists were crudely displaying a Judeo-Christian hostility toward prostitutes, and proclaiming their phobia a little too loudly, at a time when it was actually becoming fashionable and forward-looking to tame such irrational phobias.
"The Life" hasn't inspired angry pickets, but its characters have been described as "sorry stereotypes" in the Wall Street Journal. A blonde teenager fresh off the bus from Duluth is conned by a black pimp at the Port Authority. A tired, overweight whore uses a calculator to figure out how many guys she's had. A street prostitute gleefully empties a john's wallet in front of her bemused workmates. But turning such blatant stereotypes into sympathetic characters is sometimes more effective than consciously trying to destroy them. Despite the stolen wallet, the audience roots for these streetwalkers. When Queenie and her lover Fleetwood sing about their domestic trials, you can't simply demonize him as a pimp or dismiss her as a victim.
For the past two or three years, New York's off-Broadway theater scene has been increasingly preoccupied with commercial sex. Popular plays like "Making Porn" (at the Actors Playhouse) come to mind, as do the off-off-Broadway works of performers Annie Sprinkle, Penny Arcade and Shelly Mars. The love that sells itself to the highest bidder goes by various names -- although the most PC is "sex work" -- and nobody is asking it to shut up. Sometimes, there is a studied effort to confront stereotypes. And too often, when a playwright or filmmaker sets out to do this, the audience feels like it's being lectured -- or sold a bill of goods.
The popular one-woman show "The Vagina Monologues" (which will make its way to the Edinburgh Festival this summer) bows to the prostitute's trendy status by tokenizing her. When I saw it, author/performer Eve Ensler, who interviewed "many sex workers" for her piece, informed the room that "sex workers have a very deep and complex relationship with their vaginas." Nowhere did she let on that prostitutes enjoy a similar relationship with the collective penis. There isn't one positive representation of a penis in "The Vagina Monologues" -- but Ensler strives to represent sex workers in a "positive" light. She gets around this contradiction by creating a lesbian who services women for a living -- the most atypical prostitute being, of course, the most palatable. For Ensler, the prostitute becomes a symbol through which she can work out some of her frustrations with society or with men as a group.
Ensler isn't alone. For some feminists, championing prostitutes is a handy way to prove their opposition to a particular branch of feminism. Last year, when Stephanie Gilman and Kristin Tanzer were researching their play "SexWork," they contacted PONY (Prostitutes of New York) along with other sex workers' rights groups. Gilman, a former women's studies major, was unhappy with the feminist view of sex work as degradation. Both Gilman and Tanzer wanted to give sex workers a chance to be heard.
Disenchantment with Catharine MacKinnon's puritanical feminism comes through loud and clear in "SexWork" -- but feminist theory's gain is humanity's loss: The show depicts prostitutes and johns as two-dimensional figures at best. Feminism -- even when it seeks to empathize -- can have the eerie effect of dehumanizing by turning live flesh into mere words and ideas so that someone can prove a point. My colleague Amanda, who worked for Sydney Biddle Barrows -- the "Mayflower Madam" -- during the '80s and was one of the women interviewed by the playwrights, was surprised when she finally saw the play during its short run at Synchronicity Space. "All the customers were portrayed as jerks," she told me. "And the emphasis on sacred prostitution, on goddess worship, was just wacky, I thought."
"SexWork" actually says less about prostitutes than it does about the prostitutes' rights movement, which has been growing steadily (and quietly) over the past 25 years. In the U.S., New Age "goddess-worship" is the spiritual hobby of some hookers who describe their profession as "sacred" -- a trend that many hookers find bizarre. Some dedicated activists are goddess-worshippers who mix their politics with their religion in a manner that might be regarded as typically American. "SexWork" managed to convey the current mood of a political movement -- but prostitutes in the show were sketchy beings without personal lives.
To some extent, this is true of Lizzie Borden's 1986 film "Working Girls." Borden worked overtime to depict indoor prostitution as rational labor, rather than escapist nymphomania -- a message that appeals to the mind, perhaps, but not necessarily the heart or any other human part. When "Working Girls" was released, I was a hard-working Manhattan call girl in my 20s. One of my colleagues, a working girl in her 30s leading not two but three lives, complained that the movie was "drab." In response to Borden's goal of realism, she protested that "not one of those girls had a sexual fantasy about her work, and that's not realistic. Getting paid for sex makes it kinky." Support for the film was strong among prostitutes' rights activists, but I agreed with my kinky friend -- the complex pleasures we knew about weren't even hinted at. When a film or play promises to "represent" people, rather than entertain, there will always be those who feel cheated or left out.
During a radio interview, Borden explained that "what working girls want is decriminalization." There is some truth to this, of course. But what working girls seem to want from filmmakers is a love story with glossy production values, in which the prostitute is a heroine, overcoming obstacles here, battling a little prejudice there, then enjoying a vengeful shopping spree on Rodeo Drive. In two words, "Pretty Woman" -- which was a hit with prostitutes. Where "Working Girls" tried to debunk some popular fantasies about prostitutes, "Pretty Woman" popularized the fantasy of many a real-life working girl. One fan explained: "In real life, the john who falls for you is a rich balding guy with bad breath -- and the cute millionaire you'd consider doing for free? He always loses your number, or he's married."
Hookers are adept at catering to other people's wishful fantasies -- which we aren't as keen to debunk as others might hope. Instead, many of us enjoy seeing our own fantasies and feelings explored, perhaps even exploited, in romantic comedies like "Pretty Woman," in a musical like "The Life" or -- as "The Life" itself tells it -- in our personal relationships with men. After seeing "The Life," I felt both exhilarated and drained -- I laughed at all the hooker jokes, needed a hanky on four separate occasions, and had the urge to sing at least three songs the next day. My emotional range was thoroughly exhausted.
Popular entertainments like "The Life" take prostitution for granted, just as prostitutes do, while getting on with the story. "The Life" does not "experiment on" prostitutes, as a feminist vehicle would. Nor does it try to make broad feminist statements. Instead, prostitutes and pimps are treated the way other characters are treated in musicals. This, too, was the crime of "Pretty Woman" -- treating a streetwalker like any other romantic heroine. Ironically, feminists are often the first to object when hookers get this kind of equal treatment. But formulaic plots and characters can be surprisingly effective. Put another way, the life goes on, and so should the show -- especially if the songs are good and the story is worth following.
Tracy Quan is a contributor to the anthology "Whores & Other Feminists" (Routledge) and a member of PONY (Prostitutes of New York).
Are the entertainment industry's depictions of prostitution realistic? Should they be? Fork over your 2 cents' worth in Table Talk.
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