by Alison Bass
Corrine picks up another ringing phone; it’s a client named John, who has arrived at the brothel on 28th Street. She quickly picks up another phone and punches in some numbers. When the woman on the other end answers, she says: “John for Roxy right now.” Another regular, named Doug, calls, and Corrine says, “Right now I don’t have anyone available. I think it will be ten to twenty minutes.” Doug hangs up, and finally there’s a moment of silence. Corinne puts her head down in her hands and groans, “Aargh.”
A few minutes later, Julie Moya rushes in and gives me a hug, apologizing again for being late. She’s wearing a low-cut pink top with ruffled sleeves and tight blue jeans. She looks hot and frazzled, her straight blond hair damp at the edges. She heads for the bathroom. “I need to dry off,” Julie says. “It’s a stinker out there.”
After lunch at a quiet Italian restaurant next door, Julie drives me to one of the brothels, located in a narrow apartment building on 28th and Madison. She says she moves their locations every year or so to keep the brothels under police radar. Just eighteen months ago, there was a crisis involving one of her girls, a pretty Korean whom she calls Minna. Minna had a millionaire lover on the side who was so entranced by her that he paid for her boob job and the rental on her Manhattan apartment, Julie says. But when Minna broke up with him, the millionaire was furious. He hired a bunch of private investigators who posed as cops and started harassing the brothel, which was then located in “a very nice building” at 24th Street, Julie says. She was forced to fire Minna and move her entire operation almost overnight.
When we arrive at the brothel’s current location on 28th Street, Erin, the woman in charge of security, buzzes us in, and Julie and I walk up to the third floor. Erin meets us at the door; she is a hard-faced woman in her forties or fifties who looks as if life has roughed her up a bit. The long hallways are painted a bordello black, and the bedrooms are New York apartment–style small. A double bed takes up much of the space in one room; it is draped with a burgundy bedspread, colorful throw pillows, and canopy netting designed to make the room look like somebody’s idea of a sultan’s harem. We find four of Julie’s working girls lounging in a common room down the hall; they are in between assignations. All in their twenties, they wear slinky off-the-shoulder tops cut low to reveal cleavage, tight miniskirts, and sexy high-heeled sandals. When one of the girls sits down, I can see she is not wearing underwear. Erin introduces me to them, using their working names, not their real ones.
Sarah, a tiny spit of a blonde wearing a short shiny-silver skirt, speaks up first. She is Israeli, she says, originally from Russia, and has been living in New York for the last three years. “I’m studying art history at Hunter College,” Sarah says. “I want to do art authorizations — you know, check for counterfeits.” When I ask if her family, still in Israel, knows she is doing sex work, Sarah says, “N.O. I say my ex-boyfriend helps me.” Sarah confides that the first couple of times she was assigned a client, she “chickened out.” Corrine had to tell Sarah’s prospective customers, who were cooling their heels outside the brothel, waiting to be buzzed in, that she had become unavoidably ill. Corrine was terribly sorry; would they be willing to party with someone else?
A tall, voluptuous blonde strolls into the lounge, and Sarah grins. “Natasha loves sex,” she says teasingly. “She’s from Russia too.” Natasha says that she came to New York two years ago on “vacation,” and has been here ever since. The other women titter and Sarah winks, implying that her Russian friend is here on an expired visa. Seated at the other end of the sofa is Rachel, a pretty, light-skinned twenty-one-year-old with soft features, dark hair, and a curvaceous figure. She has been working at Julie’s for only three weeks. “It took me a while to figure out the rules and everything,” Rachel says. “Not everybody makes you feel comfortable.” It is clear she is referring to her clients; it is equally clear that with Erin hovering in the background, she doesn’t feel comfortable saying anything more. Next to her, knees pressed primly together, sits “Paris,” a slender brunette with large breasts who lives in New Jersey and attends Rutgers University.
Paris says that when she graduates, she’d like to work with children. “This helps me pay for school,” she says. She views sex work as a “normal job,” and when she isn’t in class, she drives in from Jersey and parks in a garage nearby. When I ask how much parking costs, she says, “$40 a day” and shrugs, as if to say, that’s nothing compared with what she can make in a few hours here.
When I ask the women if they like what they do, Sarah says, “Sometimes you have good days; sometimes you have bad days.” Her coworkers giggle knowingly. While we’re talking, Julie wanders into the lounge and admonishes Erin about a stain she found on one bedspread. “You need to wash this before the next client comes,” she says. “It’s so unprofessional.”
Before coming to New York, I had heard there was going to be a protest against the Village Voice, the alternative weekly that owned backpage.com, a classified ad website that includes ads for sex workers. The Coalition against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and several religious groups had mounted a campaign to shut down backpage.com on the premise that it encourages underage prostitution by allowing traffickers to solicit clients for minors. The New York chapter of Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP), a national advocacy group for sex workers, was going to stage a counter-rally at the protest, which was slated to be held in front of the Village Voice’s offices in Cooper Square the same day as my visit to New York. When I told Julie about the event, she immediately offered to accompany me.
Earlier that day over lunch, Julie had a lot to say about the folly of trying to shut down websites that allow sex workers to advertise their services. “If they ditched backpage, I think it would put more people on the street,” she says, picking at her salad. “It doesn’t make sense.”
In 2010, after the murders of several sex workers who advertised on Craigslist, public pressure (and the threat of lawsuits by several state attorneys general) forced Craigslist to shut down its adult classified section. But Julie says sex workers still advertise on Craigslist; they simply migrated to other sections, such as the therapeutic and casual encounters sections. “They just write in code. They say, ‘I love 200 roses.’ What they mean is, I charge $200,” Julie says.
Advertising online, Julie says, allows sex workers to screen potential clients more carefully and practice safe sex. Julie herself requires all her workers to use condoms, and more than once, she or one of her security personnel has had to remove a client who was insisting on “bareback sex.”
Back at the brothel, several of the sex workers insist that they would never have sex without condoms, and Sarah tells a story about how she found a rash on one man’s “pee pee.” That threw her into a panic. “I called Erin, and she checked in and said I should ask him to put a cover on it even for a blow job,” she says. “But he was fine with it.”
As she talks, Sarah stands behind Natasha, playing with her hair and rubbing her back; they are obviously good friends. She looks at Erin, who has been standing in the back, listening to the chatter. “Erin has helped me so much,” Sarah said. “I’d never done this before.” Erin nods briskly. “This [work] will leave you with a chest full of colorful stories to tell when you’re eighty years old and sitting on a porch somewhere,” she says, and the young women laugh, as if amused by an image that, to them, must seem impossibly remote.
Too soon, it’s time to leave for the rally, and Julie and I head downtown in her huge white SUV. As we drive by Cooper Square, we can see a cluster of people with pink umbrellas milling around. Julie takes a sharp right and heads to a small corner lot that has cars stacked on top of each other; she seems to know every off-street parking space in Manhattan. Having been a working girl in New York City since the early ’80s, Julie never takes public transit if she can help it.
By the time she parks her SUV and we hike the two blocks back to Cooper Square, the backpage protest has kicked into full gear. About twenty-fiv
e people, including a priest and several nuns, are marching in a circle, pink umbrellas held high. Several women have tape over their mouths; others are holding signs that say, “Village Voice pimps children.” The marchers whose mouths aren’t taped are chanting, “Village Voice, you have a choice, prostitution has got to go,” and “Village Voice, you have a choice, sex trafficking has got to go.” They are accompanied by two dashiki-clad men in dreadlocks banging on drums.
Antitrafficking groups such as CATW and Equality Now openly acknowledge that they are opposed to all prostitution, not just sex trafficking. U.S. law defines trafficking as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for labor or services through the use of force, fraud or coercion.”1 In a recent interview, Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of CATW, argued that very few women are in the sex trade of their own choice; the vast majority of sex workers, she said, are being exploited by a third party. On its website, CATW says that “all prostitution exploits women, regardless of women’s consent,” and the organization is adamantly opposed to decriminalizing prostitution for that reason. “Do we want the type of society where we foster second-class citizens who have to cater to a man’s fantasy?” Bien-Aimé said. “This is gender-based violence.”
In Bien-Aimé’s view, the corporations that own backpage.com and Craigslist should not engage in any activity that has the potential to be used in trafficking or exploitation. “A lot of pimps advertise very young girls on backpage,” she says. “There has to be some corporate responsibility here.”
In Cooper Square, a cluster of attractive young women and men stand on the sidewalk near the CATW protesters, handing out literature to passersby. Two of the women are wearing skimpy low-cut dresses. When I identify myself as a journalist, one of the miniskirted women, who has a bleached blond bob and is wearing a nose ring, explains that she is from the local chapter of SWOP. She identifies herself as Sarah.
“We’re just here to provide a counter-argument,” Sarah says. The protesters, she notes, are conflating prostitution with trafficking. While exploitation does exist, antitrafficking groups don’t seem to recognize or care that many men and women do sex work by choice. SWOP, she says, has long considered itself an antitrafficking organization whose members report traffickers and try to help those who are truly being forced into the sex trade against their will.
A plainclothes police officer strides over to us and says, “I have to clear this area. You can’t hand out flyers on the sidewalk.” The officer identifies himself as Detective Hernandez, and he seems focused on removing the SWOP contingent; he never approaches the original protesters, even though neither group, I find out later, has a permit to gather. Julie Moya and I move away from the officer, and I start talking to a skinny young man wearing two nose rings and a T-shirt that reads, “I love sex workers.” He identifies himself as Mitchell and says he is a sex worker and also a researcher with the Urban Institute, a nonprofit public-policy think tank in Manhattan. “We’re here to say that the issues involving sex work are a lot more complex,” Mitchell says. “Shutting down backpage is not going to end trafficking. It will just put sex workers and trafficking victims into riskier situations.”
Mitchell says advertising online on low-cost sites such as backpage.com actually allows sex workers to be more independent from pimps or others who might exploit their labor. As we stand on the sidewalk in Cooper Square trying to talk over the banging drums and chants of the protesters, he wants to know why CATW and other groups that are so up in arms over online sex worker ads are not marching in the streets for better social services for underage sex workers or victims of trafficking. “I don’t see them talking about that,” Mitchell says.
Mitchell also says backpage.com works with New York police who are investigating specific sex trafficking cases. (In a later interview, Liz McDougall, general counsel for backpage.com, said the website routinely shares information with police around the country to help them identify people who are suspected of placing specific ads for underage sex workers. Backpage.com also regularly sends reports about ads involving possible underage youth to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children [NCMEC], so police can trace exploited teenagers.)
A young woman wearing a very short, off-shoulder red satin dress and matching bright red lipstick comes up to us. She identifies herself as a former sex worker. “This is an attack on all sex workers,” she says. “When you shut down one website, another one will just pop up.”
Once again, we are approached by Detective Hernandez. “You have to move off the sidewalk,” he says with a broad sweep of his hand. “You have to move over there.” He points to a blocked-in portion of Broadway separated from the protesters by a cement barrier, where the SWOP counter-protesters are being herded, like so much cattle. Julie Moya and I decide it’s time to leave, and as we walk away, she takes one last look at the protesters, whose mouths are taped shut, and asks, “Just who is being silenced here?”
The Madonna-Whore Divide
Maggie Hall, a golden-haired twenty-year-old from Ireland, stepped off a ship in New York City in 1873, eager to conquer a new world. Hall was well educated, outgoing, and beautiful, with pretty blue eyes and a contagious laugh. But like many female immigrants without family or friends in New York, she had trouble finding decent employment, so she ended up working as a barmaid in a Manhattan saloon. There, she met a good-looking bounder by the name of William Burdan, the scion of a wealthy family who had never worked a day in his life.1 Hall married Burdan, who insisted she change her first name to Molly (Maggie was apparently too common a name for him), and they took up married life in Burdan’s Manhattan apartment. Within months, however, his father found out about the secret marriage, and furious that his son had married an Irish barmaid, he discontinued Burdan’s allowance. The young man refused to find a job — he spent most of his time gambling and drinking with friends — and he wouldn’t hear of his wife’s going back to work in a saloon. As their finances worsened, they moved from apartment to apartment and finally landed in a cheap walk-up with no money to pay for food or rent. Burdan talked his wife into selling sex to other men, mostly other gentlemen of his milieu. He claimed that it was the only way that they could survive. Molly Burdan was heartbroken but did what her husband asked.2
In 1870s New York, the Victorian double standard was firmly entrenched. While there was no dearth of entertainment — striptease shows and brothels flourished alongside saloons, theaters, and expensive restaurants — these venues catered almost exclusively to men, according to Timothy Gilfoyle in City of Eros. Both single and married men participated in what Gilfoyle calls “a sporting male culture,”3 while their wives and girlfriends stayed home. In the Victorian ethos, middle- and upper-class women were not supposed to enjoy sex; they were cast as Madonnas: pure, sexless creatures whom Victorian men could worship on a pedestal. Since this meant that some men’s sexual desires could not be satisfied within the confines of marriage, these men turned to a class of women considered the polar opposite of Madonna: the Whore. Yet while it was acceptable for men of that era to frequent brothels, any woman who had sex outside marriage was deemed a whore.
At the same time, almost all the jobs available to women as the Industrial Revolution gathered steam in the nineteenth century were low-paying positions as servants, store clerks, barmaids, or garment-factory workers. Respectable (meaning middle- and upper-class) married women were not supposed to work, but according to Gilfoyle and others, many working-class women, both married and single, supplemented their income by selling sex.
“Many did not view [prostitution] as a full-time occupation,” Gilfoyle writes.4 A groundbreaking study of prostitutes by a well-known physician of the time, Dr. William Sanger, which was released in 1858, revealed that probably 5 to 10 percent of all young women between the ages of fifteen and thirty who were living in New York City prostituted themselves at some point. They cited “destitution” as the primary reason.5
Other researchers also found that the careers of many prostitutes in the nineteenth century were short-lived. Many worked largely for economic reasons from their late teens to their early to mid-twenties, and then they got married or otherwise merged back into the communities from which they had come.6 In fact, according to William Acton, another researcher of this period, the relative affluence of prostitutes “meant that they consistently enjoyed better health than other working women and were no more likely to fall victim to alcoholism, insanity, suicide,” or other problems.7
During the colonial era, prostitution largely existed on the fringe of society (in taverns by the docks) and was mostly controlled by women working independently. Indeed, Gilfoyle argues that before 1850, “Women had greater control and influence over prostitution than in any other period of American history.”8 By the 1860s, prostitution had grown into a thriving commercial enterprise in New York City, with six hundred brothels scattered around Broadway and Soho. Those who ultimately benefited from this system, Gilfoyle says, were the ward politicians from Tammany Hall and the police, who extracted bribes to look the other way. “Prostitution became a significant revenue source for the local political bosses,” he writes.9
Gilfoyle and others set this trend squarely in the context of the Victorian era’s sharpening gender divide. “Men wanted control over autonomous and sexually independent women,” he writes. “Violent gangs allied to the political machine used extortion, force and outright terror to ensure male hegemony over the profits of prostitution.”10