<\/p>\n
RED LIGHT: INSIDE THE SEX INDUSTRY<\/em>, photographs by Sylvia Plachy, text by James Ridgeway, powerHouse Books, 1996, hardbound, 256 pages, illustrated, $39.95.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n As you may have noticed, sex work and sex workers are rarely the focus of serious journalistic reporting or investigation.\u00a0 It\u2019s not, of course, that no one is interested in the business of sex, not that the sex industry is ignored.\u00a0 On the contrary, men and women alike, from all walks of life, are endlessly fascinated by the people — the street prostitutes, call girls, erotic masseuses, striptease dancers, lap dancers, dominatrixes, porn actresses, or phone sex operators — who, one way or another, exchange sex for money.<\/p>\n But being alternately (or simultaneously) titillated and horrified by sex workers is one thing; wanting to actually learn something about the reality of sex workers\u2019 lives and the real nature of their work is something else entirely.\u00a0 Giggly infatuation with sex work is indeed the opposite of genuine interest in understanding what that work is all about.\u00a0 The glut of tv talk shows that place sex workers in public view so they can be ritually flogged with the self-righteousness of the virtuous Unfallen, and the nearly complete lack of honest information about who sex workers are, are the two sides of one very old, widely circulated, highly polished coin — the coin of sexual conventionality.<\/p>\n As Gail Pheterson so brilliantly points out in her book, A Vindication of the Rights of Whores<\/em>, the culture of sexual conventionality manipulates love-hate of the mythical whore in order to better regulate and control everyone\u2019s sexual desire, particularly the sexual desire of women.\u00a0 To accomplish that task — to maintain the power of the whore stigma — mainstream culture must deny the fact that sexual work, with its mix of mundane practical realities and complex emotional convolutions, is cut from very much the same cloth as the \u201cproper\u201d world through which all we non-sex workers make our way day after day, year after year.<\/p>\n Since I have long been interested in the whore stigma as a mechanism of social control, it was with great pleasure that I learned that veteran progressive journalist James Ridgeway and long-time Village Voice<\/em> photojournalist Sylvia Plachy had undertaken a joint three-year, text-and-photo investigation of the multifaceted New York sex-for-money scene.\u00a0 Could it be that sex work was actually to receive some proper journalistic attention?\u00a0 Indeed, Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry<\/em>, Plachy and Ridgeway\u2019s newly published report, offers just that — an honest, sympathetic, unsimplified, nonjudgmental, unglamorous perspective on sex work that begins to challenge the distorted stereotypes of the cultural mainstream.<\/p>\n Red Light<\/em> successfully grounds itself outside the usual sex work schizophrenia by addressing sex work primarily as work<\/em>, and sex workers principally as workers<\/em>.\u00a0 Of course, since the focus of sex work is the grand social bugaboo we call sex, that work has a quality all its own, and its own unique legal, societal, and moral issues to deal with.\u00a0 But as Ridgeway sees it, \u201csex workers are, first and foremost, working people.\u00a0 Like other working people, they show up for work on time, perform their jobs in accordance with their employers\u2019 and clients\u2019 wishes, and collect their pay.\u201d\u00a0 From this rather class-conscious perspective, he and Plachy accord sex workers the same basic respect that good progressives give to all workers, including respect for the difficulties of dealing with a work system that is more concerned about production than about the quality of life of its workers.\u00a0 Red Light<\/em> asks the same kinds of fundamental questions about sex workers that journalists might ask about workers in any industry:\u00a0 What do they do?\u00a0 How much money do they make?\u00a0 What are their working conditions?\u00a0 What do they think and feel about what they do?<\/p>\n From what might thus be called a politically conscious perspective, Red Light<\/em> offers an admirably down to earth, if decidedly grim, picture of the sex industry, mostly as found in the New York metropolitan area.\u00a0 The wide-ranging tour takes the reader from S\/M dungeons large and small to porn video sets, from phone sex networks to sex toy shops, from the offices of Screw<\/em> magazine to those of Masquerade Books, from Ron Athey\u2019s inventive performance art to the repetitively bland Jersey go-go clubs, from bachelor parties and upscale massage parlors to five dollar blow jobs on the Lower East Side\u2019s Allen Street.\u00a0 To their credit, Plachy and Ridgeway don\u2019t try to homogenize the multiplicity of New York\u2019s sex work scene, to reduce its complexity to something that can be neatly summarized as good or bad, uplifting or degrading, ordinary or bizarre.\u00a0 The overall picture that emerges is clearly one of work that is overwhelmingly difficult, draining and emotionally hollow for the majority of the people who choose to do it.\u00a0 But within each facet of the work, Ridgeway and Plachy also find women and men who genuinely feel positively about the work they do, people who one way or another manage to triumph over the difficulties inherent to the scene.<\/p>\n The text of Red Light<\/em>, aside from Ridgeway\u2019s astute political introduction to \u201cthe business of sex,\u201d basically consists of interwoven, feature-story style portraits of a large and diverse collection of sex workers. Not surprisingly, they offer radically differing stories about and perspectives on their work.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to pretty much stay out of the way,\u201d Ridgeway explains, \u201cto let the people speak for themselves.\u201d\u00a0 What emerges is an admirably complex take on what different aspects of sex work are all about.\u00a0 Some like the work, others hate it.\u00a0 Some feel affectionate toward their customers, others think they\u2019re mostly jerks.\u00a0 Some speak in cultured language, others speak with the grit of the streets.\u00a0 The composite is an impressionistic collage of feelings and experiences that is effective and honest, personal and vivid — especially as the verbal stories gain impact and intensity from Plachy\u2019s strong images.<\/p>\n By letting the words and images of sex workers speak for themselves, Ridgeway and Plachy are largely able to keep their own biases and interpretations from distorting the basic communication from sex workers to readers.\u00a0 Ridgeway and Plachy understand that they are essentially outsiders to the sex industry.\u00a0 \u201cAlthough we spent over three years visiting the lives and worlds of sex workers,\u201d says Ridgeway, \u201ctalking with them and photographing them on their own turf, we… can never claim to be more than visitors in their world.\u201d<\/p>\n As outsiders, they are both blessed and cursed with the inevitability of their objective distance — a distance that allows them one sort of insight while denying them another.\u00a0 The distance that is very much a part of Plachy\u2019s sex worker portraits contrasts sharply, for example, with the portraits of Market Street Cinema dancers taken by photographer Laddawan Passar (herself a dancer) and published previously in Spectator<\/em>.\u00a0 While the revelations of the insider\u2019s point of view has obvious value, there is something equally powerful and chillingly effective in Plachy\u2019s work, which embodies the truncated intimacy and the carefully maintained emotional distance that is so much a part of most sex-for-money exchange.<\/p>\n Viewed separately from the text of the book, some of Plachy\u2019s gritty street photographs come across, at first, as distant to the point of being flat.\u00a0 Photographs of street hookers, shot coyly from inside cars, accurately convey the corner-of-the-eye feeling of cruising the streets at night, but offer little more than a customer\u2019s-eye view of that scene.\u00a0 The indoor photos are much more immediately powerful.\u00a0 Some are documentary from a vantage point of great distance, as the lonely photo of a go-go dancer performing on a stage to a single customer, while a few others watch from the bar across the room.\u00a0 Other images are intimately personal.\u00a0 We see a man being enthusiastically fisted by a dancer at a Jersey birthday party, a masked slave dutifully drinking his mistress\u2019 piss while he catches the excess in a bowl, a woman and her boyfriend shooting up in their apartment, a portrait of a dominatrix sitting alongside the disturbingly twisted mask she uses in her work.<\/p>\n Seen for a second time in the context of reading the text, the photos gain another level of meaning, powerfully and precisely documenting and clarifying the mix of feelings — distance and connection, emptiness and intensity — being expressed by the interviewees.\u00a0 The text and the photos complement each other brilliantly, with one verbal description after another brought forcefully home by an accompanying image.<\/p>\n In contrast to so many others who dabble in one sexual underground or another and then tout their superficial, culture-shocked reactions as the source of great insight and wisdom, Ridgeway and Plachy have done their homework realistically and well, found their way over time to a variety of informants with real perspective and insight, and avoided the temptation to think they know more than they really do about the worlds they are visiting and describing.\u00a0 While many interviewees give somewhat nearsighted, if vivid and heartfelt, perspectives, others go beyond narrative description to address less obvious issues and perspectives.\u00a0 Go-go dancer Susan Walsh, for example, talks about how \u201cthe men want to be teased, and they think they want the women to come through… but what they really want is that futility. It keeps them coming back for more.\u201d\u00a0 Allen Street prostitute Charlotte, speaking of why she prefers prostitution to dancing, comments, \u201cI felt like a piece of meat in front of all these people when I was dancing.\u00a0 And then I started thinking of doing it in a guiltless, shameless way.\u00a0 In an honest way… [by being] up in front of one person in a private way.\u201d\u00a0 And Donna D., commenting about the women who come to lesbian strip shows, notes archly that \u201cthe lesbians are just like the men….\u00a0 They are looking at me the same way.\u00a0 There is no difference.\u00a0 They all want to take me home.\u00a0 They want to marry me.\u00a0 They want to take me away.\u00a0 It\u2019s exactly the same.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether Red Light<\/em> offers an accurate overview of the New York sex work scene is anyone\u2019s guess.\u00a0 Clearly, the sex work scene in New York is a good deal more cold and grim than what we have in the Bay Area.\u00a0 Some of this feel may be the result of what seems to be an overemphasis of the Jersey go-go clubs, the aspect of sex work to which Ridgeway and Plachy had widest access.\u00a0 (Interestingly, it is the go-go world that comes across as the most depressing of the sex work scenes — emptier and more debilitating, even, than the funky strolls of street prostitutes on Allen Street or Brooklyn\u2019s Bush Terminal district.)<\/p>\n Happily, Red Light<\/em> acknowledges male as well as female sex workers (heterosexual masseurs and callboys as well as men who dance for essentially male audiences), and takes note of other less-well-known forms of sex work, including the S\/M scene, blood sports, lesbian strip clubs, and the growing fascination with crossgender play.\u00a0 Unfortunately, it almost completely ignores lap dancing — the form of sexual entertainment that is now taking the country by storm — even though the birthplace of that form, New York\u2019s Harmony Theater, is right there in Manhattan.\u00a0 The book also gives surprisingly little attention to Times Square\u2019s oft-vilified live peep shows, sex shows, and touch palaces.<\/p>\n What is most significant about Ridgeway and Plachy\u2019s take on sex work is their tough journalistic professionalism and honesty, combined with a gritty, antiromantic respect for the people they are describing.\u00a0 As Ridgeway summed up in a recent Village Voice<\/em> interview:<\/p>\n \u201cSex workers are hard, hard people, definitely.\u00a0 But they\u2019re often courageous.\u00a0 They have a certain amount of courage to go into any situation, come what may….\u00a0 On the one hand, you think they\u2019re psychically dead and depressing.\u00a0 On the other hand, there\u2019s a life force that gets them through….\u00a0 At some level, these people aren\u2019t fucking depressing at all.\u00a0 They\u2019re really screwed up.\u00a0 You could even say they\u2019re sick, physically ill.\u00a0 But they\u2019re really quite alive.\u00a0 They\u2019re tremendously funny and their observations on human nature are right on.\u00a0 So many people go through life afraid.\u00a0 But these are not fearful people.\u00a0 If anything characterizes them, it\u2019s that they\u2019re not afraid.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Spectator<\/em>, August 2, 1996<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 1996 David Steinberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n RED LIGHT: INSIDE THE SEX INDUSTRY, photographs by Sylvia Plachy, text by James Ridgeway, powerHouse Books, 1996, hardbound, 256 pages, illustrated, $39.95.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As you may have noticed, sex work and sex workers are rarely the focus of serious journalistic reporting or investigation. It\u2019s not, of course, that no one is interested in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-essays","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}