T A B L E_T A L K What is it about Paris that makes it so je ne sais quoi? Theorize and romanticize in Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Fear, drugs, and soccer in Asia By Karl Taro Greenfeld Hedonistic expats: Fear, drugs and soccer in Asia (02/02/98) I got it online, part 2 By Jenn Shreve Comparing the pros and cons of four Internet travel services (02/02/98) I got it online, part 1 By Jenn Shreve There really are advantages to making your travel plans on the Web (01/30/98) America, grow up! By David Downie The French and Italians decry the Clinton brouhaha (01/29/98) Passages By Ralph McCarthy Four views of the expat's life in Japan (01/28/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Road warrior archives		The big steamy+| page 2 of 2 Earlier that day, I'd learned it was the 100th anniversary of Storyville, the former 25-square-block district of New Orleans renowned for its prostitution trade and erroneously regarded as the birthplace of jazz. I'd discovered some interesting facts: The going rate had been $10 a customer -- quite a sum in those days, and a steep climb from the era of the Louisiana Purchase, when girls would walk the street with a roll of carpet under their arm, ready to perform their trade right there and then for 10 to 50 cents. Before Storyville, the port city of New Orleans hosted many Tenderloin districts where for a "picayune," or 6-and-a-half cents, one could acquire whiskey, a bed and a woman. Storyville, like the sex industry today, was strictly controlled. But there was a nasty side to it, too. Pregnancy was common -- daughters were often brought into the fold and auctioned off at rates of $800 for the deflowering. There was more to this lure of the virgin than the plain novelty of it: Popular lore had it that sex with a virgin was a cure for the sexually transmitted diseases of the day, which were rampant. I wondered if there couldn't be a happy medium between the dark side of Storyville and the tepid Big Daddy's. The next day, I ventured to the Artist's Cafe -- a sad, shadowy little bar located on Iberville Street, in the outskirts of the Quarter. The bar was mostly empty (admittedly, it was 5 o'clock in the afternoon) and I somewhat guiltily lurked by the door, feeling, oddly, like a horny married man. I'd been told that the Artist's Cafe was known for its adolescent strippers, and short of carding the girls who eyed me languidly, I couldn't possibly tell if that were true or not. I was by myself and it was cold outside, with darkness falling quickly in the gray skies. I considered ordering a drink and watching the scene, but I felt too much like I was onstage myself, so I left. As in most cities, the district catering to gay sex seems to have it all figured out. I could go to the Rawhide, for example, even though I'm not gay or a man. Or, in the up-and-coming-yet-still-shabby Marigny district (whose skies are a tangle of black electrical cables and phone lines), which sidles along the French Quarter, I was told to go to The Phoenix. "Actually, I take that back," said my friend, a recent transplant to New Orleans. "Don't go to The Phoenix." It wasn't just that I wouldn't be welcome; I plain wouldn't be allowed to enter. "What happens there?" I asked, feeling like the innocent more than ever. "Everything!" he answered, with a gleam in his eye. He went on to tell me about the glory holes and lightless upstairs room and the anonymous encounters that sounded like nothing so much as the San Francisco bathhouses in the pre-AIDS days. "You can console yourself with Mother Bob's on Monday night, the Amateur Strip Night. It's like Tod Browning's 'Freaks,'" he said. New Orleans is a big city, and I'm certain there are aspects of the sex industry that I just couldn't uncover in my time there. I wondered if the prostitutes plain didn't want to compete with the $2 rum punch offered on every street corner, catering to a tourist crowd that largely seemed hell-bent on getting hammered as quickly and as cheaply as possible. There is, admittedly, something refreshing about a city that offers strip clubs smack in the middle of its most profitable district. And I'm not sure what I had been expecting -- possibly a nod-and-wink attitude toward the sex industry, or an American version of Amsterdam? But in a country where political correctness reigns supreme, that may be too much to hope for. "There is no red light district anymore," a local historian said to me. "But the sex industry is like Prohibition. You can make it illegal, but you can't make it unpopular." SALON | Feb. 4, 1998 Unzipped from last week: Inside the Oral Orifice