RED LIGHT: INSIDE THE SEX INDUSTRY, photographs by Sylvia Plachy, text by James Ridgeway, powerHouse Books, 1996, hardbound, 256 pages, illustrated, $39.95.
As you may have noticed, sex work and sex workers are rarely the focus of serious journalistic reporting or investigation. It’s not, of course, that no one is interested in the business of sex, not that the sex industry is ignored. 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.
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’ lives and the real nature of their work is something else entirely. Giggly infatuation with sex work is indeed the opposite of genuine interest in understanding what that work is all about. 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.
As Gail Pheterson so brilliantly points out in her book, A Vindication of the Rights of Whores, the culture of sexual conventionality manipulates love-hate of the mythical whore in order to better regulate and control everyone’s sexual desire, particularly the sexual desire of women. 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 “proper” world through which all we non-sex workers make our way day after day, year after year.
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 photojournalist Sylvia Plachy had undertaken a joint three-year, text-and-photo investigation of the multifaceted New York sex-for-money scene. Could it be that sex work was actually to receive some proper journalistic attention? Indeed, Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry, Plachy and Ridgeway’s 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.
Red Light successfully grounds itself outside the usual sex work schizophrenia by addressing sex work primarily as work, and sex workers principally as workers. 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. But as Ridgeway sees it, “sex workers are, first and foremost, working people. Like other working people, they show up for work on time, perform their jobs in accordance with their employers’ and clients’ wishes, and collect their pay.” 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. Red Light asks the same kinds of fundamental questions about sex workers that journalists might ask about workers in any industry: What do they do? How much money do they make? What are their working conditions? What do they think and feel about what they do?
From what might thus be called a politically conscious perspective, Red Light offers an admirably down to earth, if decidedly grim, picture of the sex industry, mostly as found in the New York metropolitan area. 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 magazine to those of Masquerade Books, from Ron Athey’s 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’s Allen Street. To their credit, Plachy and Ridgeway don’t try to homogenize the multiplicity of New York’s sex work scene, to reduce its complexity to something that can be neatly summarized as good or bad, uplifting or degrading, ordinary or bizarre. 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. 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.
The text of Red Light, aside from Ridgeway’s astute political introduction to “the business of sex,” 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.
“I wanted to pretty much stay out of the way,” Ridgeway explains, “to let the people speak for themselves.” What emerges is an admirably complex take on what different aspects of sex work are all about. Some like the work, others hate it. Some feel affectionate toward their customers, others think they’re mostly jerks. Some speak in cultured language, others speak with the grit of the streets. 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’s strong images.
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. Ridgeway and Plachy understand that they are essentially outsiders to the sex industry. “Although we spent over three years visiting the lives and worlds of sex workers,” says Ridgeway, “talking with them and photographing them on their own turf, we… can never claim to be more than visitors in their world.”
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. The distance that is very much a part of Plachy’s 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. While the revelations of the insider’s point of view has obvious value, there is something equally powerful and chillingly effective in Plachy’s work, which embodies the truncated intimacy and the carefully maintained emotional distance that is so much a part of most sex-for-money exchange.
Viewed separately from the text of the book, some of Plachy’s gritty street photographs come across, at first, as distant to the point of being flat. 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’s-eye view of that scene. The indoor photos are much more immediately powerful. 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. Other images are intimately personal. We see a man being enthusiastically fisted by a dancer at a Jersey birthday party, a masked slave dutifully drinking his mistress’ 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.
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. The text and the photos complement each other brilliantly, with one verbal description after another brought forcefully home by an accompanying image.
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. While many interviewees give somewhat nearsighted, if vivid and heartfelt, perspectives, others go beyond narrative description to address less obvious issues and perspectives. Go-go dancer Susan Walsh, for example, talks about how “the 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.” Allen Street prostitute Charlotte, speaking of why she prefers prostitution to dancing, comments, “I felt like a piece of meat in front of all these people when I was dancing. And then I started thinking of doing it in a guiltless, shameless way. In an honest way… [by being] up in front of one person in a private way.” And Donna D., commenting about the women who come to lesbian strip shows, notes archly that “the lesbians are just like the men…. They are looking at me the same way. There is no difference. They all want to take me home. They want to marry me. They want to take me away. It’s exactly the same.”
Whether Red Light offers an accurate overview of the New York sex work scene is anyone’s guess. Clearly, the sex work scene in New York is a good deal more cold and grim than what we have in the Bay Area. 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. (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’s Bush Terminal district.)
Happily, Red Light 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. 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’s Harmony Theater, is right there in Manhattan. The book also gives surprisingly little attention to Times Square’s oft-vilified live peep shows, sex shows, and touch palaces.
What is most significant about Ridgeway and Plachy’s take on sex work is their tough journalistic professionalism and honesty, combined with a gritty, antiromantic respect for the people they are describing. As Ridgeway summed up in a recent Village Voice interview:
“Sex workers are hard, hard people, definitely. But they’re often courageous. They have a certain amount of courage to go into any situation, come what may…. On the one hand, you think they’re psychically dead and depressing. On the other hand, there’s a life force that gets them through…. At some level, these people aren’t fucking depressing at all. They’re really screwed up. You could even say they’re sick, physically ill. But they’re really quite alive. They’re tremendously funny and their observations on human nature are right on. So many people go through life afraid. But these are not fearful people. If anything characterizes them, it’s that they’re not afraid.”
Spectator, August 2, 1996
Copyright © 1996 David Steinberg
Leave a Reply