Prostitution isn’t just the world’s oldest profession. It’s also a longtime focus of cultural obsession, across many historical periods and on every continent, from the poetry of Catullus to the woodblock prints of 19th-century Japan. There’s such a long history of male artists, writers and filmmakers who depict prostitution in erotic, romantic and sentimental terms that it’s only natural to approach Austrian documentarian Michael Glawogger’s “Whores’ Glory” with suspicion. Indeed, in the film’s opening scene, Glawogger’s camera directly engages the lurid allure of sex work, showing a group of scantily clad young women in a Bangkok brothel called the Fish Tank as they try to attract clients: Pretending to make out with each other, pressing their breasts and buttocks against the window, using a laser pointer to pick out likely-looking men on the street. But those are just the opening moments of a long journey, a daring, novelistic and unforgettable account of the real lives of female prostitutes in three very different countries and social contexts.
If “Whores’ Glory” successfully resists romanticizing the lives of women who sell their bodies to make a living, Glawogger also does not surrender to what you might call the vulgar Marxist alternative, in which such women are interchangeable victims in a vast, mechanistic sexual economy, stripped of any agency or personality. Indeed, if there’s an ideological point (and a smidgen of hopefulness) to be found in “Whores’ Glory,” it lies in the film’s insistence that the women Glawogger meets in Thailand, Bangladesh and Mexico remain defiantly individual, even in the face of a system of sexual and economic exploitation they cannot (or at least do not) resist. Indeed, “Whores’ Glory” has a surprising double focus on the women’s economic lives and on their spiritual and religious pursuits. If one is inevitably reminded of Marx’s famous remark that religion is the opiate of the masses, one might also remember that his preceding comments were not nearly so harsh: “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation.”
Right after that scene with the girls from the Fish Tank strutting over the Bangkok street, Glawogger introduces an extraordinary epigraph from Emily Dickinson, one that convinced me right away that this movie was something unusual. “God is indeed a jealous God,” Dickinson wrote. “He cannot bear to see/ That we had rather not with Him/ But with each other play.” Indeed, we have already seen brief vignettes of women in the three countries talking startlingly about their relationship to the divine. In Reynosa, a battered Mexican border city across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas, the street hookers all seem to pray to La Santissima Muerte (the Most Holy Death), a demonic female entity who seems to coexist with God and Jesus in their version of Roman Catholicism. In the City of Joy, a filthy warren of stone buildings in Faridpur, Bangladesh, a young woman tells the camera that she resists clients who demand oral sex by telling them that Allah did not make her mouth for that purpose; it is the mouth she uses to recite the suras of the Quran.
It’s details like those that make “Whores’ Glory” both a wrenching journalistic exploration of real life and something close to great cinema. This film, which took four years to complete, is the third installment in Glawogger’s series of documentaries about work in the era of globalization, which began in 1998 with “Megacities” and continued with “Workingman’s Death” in 2005. (I’m coming late to his work but what I’ve seen so far is absolutely remarkable — and you can see it for yourself in a retrospective that just concluded in New York and will soon reach other cities.) While the fluid camerawork of Wolfgang Thaler is never ostentatious, this film has considerable artistic ambition, with a score by Pappik & Regener (members of the German band Element of Crime) and soundtrack songs by PJ Harvey, CocoRosie and other indie-type artists. I suppose some viewers will find those ingredients intrusive or distracting, but sometimes the music (and Monika Willi’s remarkable editing) serve to create a little dreamlike distance from what we’re seeing on-screen. Without that distance, “Whores’ Glory” might be too difficult to sit through, quite frankly.
Compared with the dire conditions found in Faridpur and Reynosa, the women who work at the Fish Tank have almost middle-class lives. They live in modest but clean apartments, often have outside boyfriends, come to work by taxi, and punch in on a digital clock like industrial workers all over the world. On the other hand, the universal commodification of sexuality in Bangkok and the relentless capitalism of contemporary Asia seem to permeate almost every aspect of their lives. Perhaps it’s surprising that many of them spend their leisure hours hanging out with “bar boys” — coiffed and styled young men who work as prostitutes for an older female clientele — but on the other hand, this is a world where no one believes in romantic love, and everything is for sale.
In Bangladesh, social and religious taboos mean that the prostitutes generally won’t perform oral or anal sex (both of which are routinely available in Thailand). But the women of the City of Joy are virtual prisoners, often sold to madams after their first menstrual period and expected to live out their lives there, first as sex workers, then as madams and finally as servants. On the dusty back streets of Reynosa, where groups of profane, hard-bitten women turn tricks out of tiny sidewalk-level apartments, it’s a drive-by Darwinian free market for every possible sexual act or display, along with drugs, liquor and almost anything else that can be bought or sold. Both these sections of the film are tough to watch, at times, but Glawogger’s interviews with the prostitutes (and sometimes with their clients) always reveal things you aren’t expecting.
In Thailand and Bangladesh, what happens between the women and their johns remains behind closed doors, but in Reynosa, Glawogger persuades a prostitute and her client to let him film their interaction from beginning to end, an utterly businesslike encounter that’s about as sexy as buying half a pound of roast beef at the deli counter. It’s a moment of physical nakedness, but not nearly as revealing as when we see the same woman a bit later, smoking crack with a friend who is avidly trying to seduce her and talking about how visions of the Holy Death have eased her fear of mortality. There’s no judgment in “Whores’ Glory” — certainly not of the working women it depicts, and not even especially of their bewildered clients, who seem to vacillate from misogynist hostility to wistful romanticism and back again. There is, however, tremendous compassion, and more than a few moments of piercing clarity, as when a Bangladeshi hooker who looks no older than 15 tells Glawogger that women are fundamentally sad creatures. “Who can explain why this is true?” she wonders. “Is there no other path?”
“Whores’ Glory” is now playing at the Cinema Village and Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York, and the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle. It opens May 25 in San Francisco, June 15 in Boston, June 22 in Philadelphia and July 6 in Atlanta and Washington, with other cities and home-video release to follow.
Ontario’s top court has legalized brothels in the Canadian province, a ruling that is meant to protect the safety of sex workers.
The landmark decision taken Monday, decided that the dangerous work of prostitution could be made more safe if it occurred under one roof with security staff, reported the Globe and Mail.
The Appeals Court of Ontario said that some of the country’s anti-prostitution laws were unconstitutional as they restricted the prostitute’s ability to protect themselves — a ruling already made by a lower court in 2010 but appealed by the provincial and federal governments.
The court also said that it would re-model the law against pimps, which prohibits living off the work of others by adding “in circumstances of exploitation,” reported PostMedia News.
This is thought to allow violent or manipulative pimps to be arrested, while permitting prostitutes to be able to hire drivers and security staff for their safety.
Prostitution is legal in Canada with many caveats.
According to the Associated Press, while sex work might be legal, soliciting sex and operating a brothel are both criminal acts.
While the latter provision was struck down, the court upheld the ban on soliciting sex in public.
According to the National Post, the new laws will likely prompt similar challenges in other provinces around the country.
The case was brought forward by an appeal by the provincial and federal governments, which opposed the earlier lower court ruling.
The case took nine months of deliberation and a week of oral arguments with more than 25,000 pages of evidence, according to the National Post.
Witnesses at the hearings included current and former prostitutes, police, activists, politicians and journalists.
Both sides said they will take their case to the Supreme Court of Canada if they lost.
The new laws, which will be binding in Ontario, will come into effect next year.
This week saw a renewed effort, led by the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, to pressure Village Voice Media’s online classified site Backpage.com to shutter its adult section. On Sunday, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist offered up a harrowing story about “Alissa,” whose pimp used the site to sell her for sex at the age of 16 and 17. A couple of days later, Kristof responded to a Village Voice article claiming that his original column contained factual errors with a rebuttal and a call for Backpage to “get out of carrying prostitution advertising” altogether.
For many progressives, there is a dramatic tension here: Horror at the existence of child trafficking, and a desire to see it disappear, and yet a belief that consenting adults should be able to do what they want sexually — maybe even if it involves the exchange of money. It’s not even a question of one concern trumping the other, because, while theories abound, it’s unclear what impact the shuttering of Backpage’s adult section would have on trafficking as a whole, let alone whether similar ads wouldn’t just pop up in the personals section; nor is it clear what impact the site’s screening measures have had on reducing trafficking ads.
It’s hard enough nailing down accurate figures on the number of children trafficked in the U.S. each year — the most commonly cited estimate is 100,000 to 300,000, but the Village Voice claims those figures are wildly inflated and “hatched without regard to science.” We do know that more than 50 cases of child trafficking (attempted or otherwise) on Backpage have been reported over a three-year period, which brings up another quandary: Do we castigate the site for failing to detect those ads or celebrate these as cases where traffickers were actually caught? Furthering the contradiction: Backpage is both friend and foe to traffickers. It’s an ideal advertising outlet, but it’s also one of the most, if not the most, relied upon tools for law enforcement to identify child trafficking victims.
Given the complexities here, details are especially important — and they’ve gotten lost in this emotionally charged debate. For example, it’s worth taking a closer look at what Backpage does do to vet ads. Liz McDougall, general counsel for Village Voice Media, tells me the site “operates an automated filter system to preclude ads with suspect words and phrases.” The specifics of the system are guarded by lock and key to make it harder for traffickers to circumvent it. On top of this, Backpage has real-life human beings manually review all submitted content for the adult and personal sections before it’s posted on the site. Just to be double sure, Backpage does another manual review of all material once it’s actually published in either section.
When Backpage identifies an ad potentially advertising a minor, it “immediately reports it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,” and an “‘expedited’ reporting system” is in place for cases “where there appears to be an imminent possibility of rescue.” All postings require a credit card number, which can be subpoenaed by law enforcement, and Backpage has a policy of responding within 24 hours, says McDougall. She adds that the site “stands ready and willing to do more,” especially “in cooperation with government, nongovernmental, public, private and all other interest groups sincerely dedicated to pragmatic approaches to addressing this scourge.”
Backpage is attempting to both prevent traffickers from advertising on the site and to assist law enforcement in cases where they do slip through — but is it enough? The site’s outspoken critics certainly don’t think so. Short of no longer carrying sex ads, Kristoff suggests that Backpage require an ID check for those placing ads to ensure that they are adults — but that only addresses trafficking cases where the minor is advertising herself. “I assume that critics sometimes urge age verification anyway because child sex trafficking is a horrific crime and we want to feel active in fighting it,” McDougall says. “But it does not help the problem to advocate measures that have superficial appeal but no real effect.”
Ultimately, most critics will accept nothing less than the site shutting down its adult section — but this will likely direct business elsewhere (just as Craigslist’s shuttering of its adult section drove traffic to Backpage), and potentially to less cooperative businesses.
That’s not to mention that many sex worker activists argue that closing Backpage’s adult section will make it harder, and more dangerous, for those who are willingly in the industry to ply their trade. “What it comes down to is what keeps the most people the most safe, and what actually makes sense for sex workers,” says Sarah Patterson, a community organizer for the Sex Worker’s Outreach Project’s New Work City chapter. She argues that the ultimate answer is decriminalizing sex work while also protecting those who are being coerced into the business; and in this particular case, she says it’s allowing adults to sell sexual services on Backpage while also going after those selling non-consensual services. “For a lot of people that’s really hard to imagine,” she says, explaining that sex work is generally seen only in black and white terms. “Unfortunately for me, that is the solution.”
This article is the first in a series of oral histories by current and former sex workers, in which they describe the moment they came out to their families about their work. As told to Thomas Rogers.
Two years ago, I published a book about my life working in a harem in Brunei. Afterward, everything happened that I was afraid was going to happen. The very first piece of press came out and my mother couldn’t handle it. She called me and said she needed some space. I guess she needed a lot of space because she and my father stopped talking to me entirely.
My parents are a pretty conservative middle-class Jewish family. I was always open-minded about sex, but that’s not where my decision to work in the sex industry came from. I think that had more to do with a lack of boundaries, and from having inappropriate relationships. (I had a relationship with a much older man when I was 12 years old — the kind of thing that imprints young women who often wind up being strippers.)
When I was 16, I went to college a year early in New York and promptly dropped out. My friend said to me, “Why don’t you come and work at the club where I work? They won’t care that you’re a terrible waitress.” So I started off as a stripper, and then I moved into doing escort work, and it was through a friend that I knew from doing the latter that I got the job working supposedly to entertain rich businessmen in Singapore. Then I wound up being a guest of the Prince of Brunei and essentially becoming a member of his harem. This was about 18 years ago. (I haven’t done sex work for the past 15 years.) I was in Brunei for about a year and a half on and off. We parted ways amicably and I went home and never went back.
I was open about it to my friends but not to my parents. I told my parents I was in Brunei, then that I was shooting a movie in Singapore, then that I had gotten a job, and then, as my trip kept getting longer and longer, I told them I had met the royal family of Brunei and that I was working for them as a personal assistant and that I was having a relationship with my employer. My father later told me he knew this was bogus; he said to me, “Look, we didn’t think you were a diplomat.”
Six months before the book came out, I sat down with my parents. I hired a mediator who read the book — because I really wanted an objective point of view — and then I told my parents point by point everything that was going to be in it. I was trying to be very specific and prepare them for what it was going to be like for this to come out, but I don’t think they got it.
It wasn’t the revelation that I was in the sex industry that alienated my parents from me; it was the fact that I was public about it, that I told that story to a larger public that also included their friends. It was not about what I did, it was about what the neighbors thought of them. My parents come from this culture where your merits are judged by your children’s accomplishments in the world: “My daughter’s a lawyer, how’s your daughter?” “My daughter’s a best-selling author, she has a book about being a prostitute.”
I think the heart of the problem is that I didn’t fulfill my parents’ dreams for me. I didn’t even come close. Even though I am very happy with who I am today and very grateful for my life, it still bothers me to this day that I’ve been such a disappointment. I would have liked to have been the person who fulfilled those dreams, that just wasn’t who I was.
We go into the parenting process many times expecting our children to validate our dreams and existence on this planet. Maybe my experience is going to make this a lot easier for me to realize that my son’s journey is his. There are all kinds of things he could do that would shame me. He could be a criminal. He could be mean, a bully. He could go door to door to raise funds for Newt Gingrich. But him being a porn star wouldn’t shame me. It might sadden me if I didn’t feel like it was coming from a place of great self-love, but it wouldn’t shame me.
I do hold out hope that the gap between my parents and me will be bridged sometime — and I hope it’s not when a giant tragedy happens. They were great grandparents during my son’s first year being here (my son’s adopted) and having to explain where they’ve gone has been challenging. So, for my son’s sake I hope we’re able to forge a relationship. I think we will. It’s just a matter of when.
I always tell people who are writing memoirs like this that if you’re not going to run the manuscript by people, you have to be prepared to lose them. I ultimately decided that this story was bigger than just me and that it was important for me to tell it.
Jillian Lauren is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir “Some Girls: My Life in a Harem,” which has since been translated into 14 languages. She is, most recently, the author of “Pretty,” a novel.
Yesterday, 29-year-old Anthony McCord tried to get himself admitted as an expert witness at his own trial — an expert on pimping, that is.
“I’ve pretty much read every book, saw every movie and heard every song relating to the subject matter,” he told a Brooklyn judge, according to the New York Daily News. (Efforts on Tuesday afternoon to ascertain just which cultural products are definitive in this regard were unsuccessful.) Answering the standard questions about his qualifications as an expert witness, McCord also said he had attended two national conferences on pimping — perhaps one of these — and was “a member of a quiet society of pimps.”
Quiet? For decades, feminists and advocates for sex trafficking victims have been trying to stem the tide of pimp glorification in pop culture. And for decades, almost no one has given a shit. McCord may be an innovator in his particular audacity, but he’s by no means alone.
For a clue at why one might want to poop the pimping party, just look at why McCord’s on trial. He’s been charged with rape and robbery. According to the New York Post, he is ”accused of beating up two girls in his stable and raping one of them as payback for stealing his computer.” One woman was beaten and raped for “freelancing” without tithing to McCord. His expert testimony was supposed to show that this was standard operating practice in the pimp-prostitute relationship.
He may be right about that much. When mocking James O’Keefe’s ridiculous get-ups or ’70s camp nostalgia, it’s easy to forget what is really being talked about here, as blogger Michele Clarke realized when she asked a few strangers to define a pimp after Three 6 Mafia won the Best Song Oscar for “It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp.”
One young man answered, “They wear these fancy hats and drive big cars,” and began to giggle. “They manage stables of prostitutes,” crisply answered a second, obviously a B-school graduate.
Yes, sex work is a business too, but pimps are easily the most exploitative part of it — they’re the kidnappers and the coercers, the ones handing out substances and beatings and rapes to make sure the enslavement is complete. On the other hand, that B-school graduate and Anthony McCord might have a lot to talk about when it comes to efficient but amoral management.
Newsweek is trumpeting its exclusive coverage of a new study on men who pay for sex with the grabby headline “The John Next Door.” Too bad the research — which set out to compare “sex buyers” with men who don’t buy sex — absurdly lumps together johns with porn watchers and strip-club visitors. Also? It was conducted by self-declared prostitution “abolitionist” Melissa Farley — whose methodology when studying johns in the past has been rightly criticized — but the magazine’s coverage doesn’t bother to mention that until more than halfway through the article. The piece egregiously fails to mention that the stridently anti-porn activist was arrested on multiple occasions in the mid-’80s for entering stores that sell Penthouse and destroying copies of the magazine in protest.
Despite Newsweek’s obfuscation, there are plenty of red flags early on. Author Leslie Bennetts writes, “buying sex is so pervasive that Farley’s team had a shockingly difficult time locating men who really don’t do it.” Actually, there’s nothing shocking about that because in addition to men who have never visited a prostitute, the researchers were originally looking for those who don’t indulge in “pornography, phone sex, lap dances, and other services.” In other words, they wanted to group together all forms of sexual entertainment, including the purchase of sex from a prostitute. Of course they had trouble finding men for their control group.
Bennetts reports that “the researchers were forced to loosen their definition in order to assemble a 100-person control group.” Funny, an objective researcher might have narrowed the definition of “buying sex” to, you know, buying sex. Instead, says Farley, “We finally had to settle on a definition of non-sex-buyers as men who have not been to a strip club more than two times in the past year, have not purchased a lap dance, have not used pornography more than one time in the last month, and have not purchased phone sex or the services of a sex worker, escort, erotic masseuse, or prostitute.”
There’s no question that there can be overlap between various facets of the sex industry, but a reasonable distinction should be made between a man who watches pornography every once in a while and a man who frequents prostitutes. Farley’s lack of nuance is not going over well in the Twitterverse. Sex columnist Rachel Kramer Bussel tweeted: “Dear @Newsweek — I wonder what would happen if everyone who’s watched porn, given/gotten a lap dance or erotic massage stopped reading you.” In response to a question I posed, porn star Kimberly Kane tweeted that “all the millions of porn watchers should be very offended” — and not just because of Farley’s loose definition of “buying sex.” Bennetts summarizes the findings like so: [T]he attitudes and habits of sex buyers reveal them as men who dehumanize and commodify women, view them with anger and contempt, lack empathy for their suffering, and relish their own ability to inflict pain and degradation.” It’s important to note here that, unlike with her definition of sex buyers, Farley has a very narrow view of what type of sex is healthy and OK: Just check out her list of “Ten Lies About Sadomasochism,” which claims that the practice is not truly consensual and compares it to “annihilation.”
Journalist Susannah Breslin specifically questions the merit of Farley’s findings about johns. In 2008, she created the blog Letters From Johns, which is exactly what it sounds like: a collection of accounts from men who pay to have sex with prostitutes. In response to the Newsweek article, Breslin told me by email: “Her research and conclusions are so skewed and histrionic that they would be laughable if they weren’t so grossly wrong, and, even more offensively, being treated as fact by Newsweek.” She added, “Farley has given greatest weight to those johns who fit her preexisting views.” Breslin published 50 letters before she stopped updating the blog, and received many more, and says, “Unlike Farley, I found that most men seek out sex workers for one simple fact: they are lonely. They are looking for companionship, they crave intimacy, they are looking for some kind of a connection, and because they cannot find it any other way, they buy it.”
Tracy Quan, a former sex worker (and Salon columnist) who was quoted briefly in the Newsweek piece, makes a similar argument. She’s dubious of one particular quote from a john — “You can have a good time with the servitude” — that the study holds up as representative. Quan told me by phone, “The only time I’ve ever heard a customer use the word ‘servitude’ was when speaking to a masochistic guy speaking to a slave fantasy about himself.” The Newsweek piece describes Quan, author of the novel “Diary of a Jetsetting Call Girl,” becoming emotional while talking about an experience with a john that she was afraid might seriously hurt her, but she tells me, “That person was unusual and an aberration.” She adds, “Some are not very nice, but many are gentler, nicer and much more timid than men who are not buying sex.”
I suspect there is something very simple behind Newsweek’s uncritical endorsement of this study: Sexual fear-mongering sells. That’s true whether it’s about philandering husbands, sexting youth or “the john next door.” Many of us get a charge (dare I say an erotic one) from taking a glimpse of America’s sexual underbelly; it confirms our worst fears — about others and ourselves. But it’s true what they say about fear: It distorts reality.
A still from "Whores' Glory" 
Sex workers listen to a presentation at the 16th International AIDS conference in Toronto (Credit: Reuters/JP Moczulski) 
(Credit: luxorphoto via Shutterstock/Salon) 
Jillian Lauren 
Members of the rap group Three 6 Mafia perform at the 78th annual Academy Awards in Hollywood, California March 5, 2006. (Credit: Reuters/Gary Hershorn) 
A TV addict staring into static. 
