CNBC Does Hookers

CNBC! High-end call girls! When will the fun end? Vicky Ward says some not totally retarded stuff, but she's so botoxed up, it's distracting. Oh! I just realized I know someone who's on the show. Fascinating. Anyway, debuts November 11.

The Devadasi's Tale

William Dalrymple has written a really terrific story about devadasis for The New Yorker: "Serving the Goddess." In India, some devadasis are something akin to sacred whores. And what makes the piece great is that Dalrymple gets out of the way and lets the story tell itself.

"'You see, we are not like the ordinary whores,' Rani said, as we finally got to her house. 'We have some dignity. We don't pick people up from the side of a road. We don’t go behind bushes or anything like that. We spend time with our clients and talk to them. We are always decently dressed—always wear good silk saris. Never T-shirts or those miniskirts the other women wear in Bombay.'

We had arrived at Rani's door. Outside, suspended on the wall, was a cubbyhole stall selling cigarettes and paan. Her younger sister was sitting here, handing out individual bidis and other cigarettes to passersby. As Rani led the way in, she continued, 'You see, we live together as a community, and all this gives us some protection. If any client tries to burn us with a cigarette or to force himself on us without wearing a condom, we can shout and everyone comes running.'

Inside, everything was immaculate. The space was divided in two by a large cupboard that almost touched the shack's roof. The front half of the room was dominated by the large bed where Rani plied her trade. To one side, on a shelf, were several calendar pictures of the goddess. In the back of the room was a second bed--the one Rani slept in. Here were pots and pans, stacked neatly in racks, and below was a kerosene burner for cooking. On a cupboard was a large mirror and Rani's family photographs: pictures of her son and her old boyfriend--a handsome man with a Bollywood-film-star mustache and dark glasses--and beside that were passport-size shots of her dead daughters. Both were pretty girls, captured smiling when they were around twelve or thirteen.

Rani took the photographs from my hand, and replaced them on the cupboard. Then she led me back to the front half of the room and indicated that I should sit on the bed. I asked her whether her auspicious status made any difference to her clients when they came to be entertained.

'No,' she said. 'There is no devotional feeling in bed. Fucking is fucking. There I am just another woman. Just another whore.'"

The Rise and Falll of the "Digital Pimp"

New York Times reporter Matt Richtel has written a great expose of the man behind The Erotic Review, David Elms, who is currently in jail and has been accused of extorting sex from sex workers who are listed on the site.

"Ms. Link, the deputy district attorney, said the criminal charges against Mr. Elms stemmed from a night in 2006 when the police were called to a hotel where they found him with 3.8 grams of cocaine and a loaded semi-automatic weapon. A prostitute was there and said Mr. Elms had forced her to perform oral sex at gunpoint, but there was not enough evidence to press charges on that accusation, Ms. Link said."

You can read more sex worker testimonials here.

Peter Bart Hearts Heidi Fleiss

Defamer points to Peter Bart's sorta-rave review of the upcoming Heidi Fleiss doc: "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal."

"When Heidi refused to talk to Bailey and Barbato any more, Sheila Nevins stepped in to shoot the interview and did an impressive job. There Heidi is, on camera, speaking insightfully one moment and incoherently the next, explaining her weird view of life. In one moment she is comparing herself to Alexander the Great ('I, too, conquered the world in my twenties – the sex world'), then she’s talking about her 'three years in lesbian hell' (jail)."

[Ed. note: What the fuck? Is every post today going to be about prostitution? At this rate, maybe.]

If The New York Times Was A Man, It Would Never Get Laid

Oh, New York Times. You're so dull, you can make sex work boring. Sometimes, I think the Times is like a fifty-something guy with a bad case of erectile dysfunction, and I'm the girl who has been sent to fellate him. You know what? He's never going to come. Why the rag keeps venturing into sex waters with all their clothes on, angsting about feminism, waxing on dully about the culture and "what it all means," continuing to do the literary version of pushing PAUSE on a porn movie, I'll never really understand. Every time they "go there," they can't help but damn themselves--and us--for doing so.

The latest missive comes from Edmund White--oh, I'm sorry. I mean Edward Wyatt--rambling on about Showtime's up and coming hooker show, "Secret Diary of a Call Girl," which premieres on Monday. For those not in the know, the series is based on the book by Belle de Jour, a London call girl, and the series already aired in England. Wyatt describes it as "lighthearted"--and it pretty much is; you can watch the first episode here--and then starts wringing his hands over whether or not feminists and their icky ilk are going to get all up in arms over it in America.

First, Chris Albrecht--the ex-HBO exec who has stated publicly that his tenure at HBO was filled with personal longing to do a hooker show, a mission that was derailed when he got busted for assaulting his girlfriend at the time (now his soon to be his wife), and who brought the show to Showtime--backs away from defending the show's sexual politics: "I’m pretty sure there isn’t anyone associated with this show who thinks this profession is empowering to women." Then, British actress Billie Piper, who plays Belle, compares the call girl character to Tony Soprano, "a man who goes around killing people." Finally, just in case there's any desire, titillation, or curiosity left in the room, Wyatt dials up a feminist who declares the project does for "prostitution what HBO’s 'Big Love' does for polygamy." Shudder.

Of course, the Times story is pretty much bereft of sex. And that's part of what the show is about, isn't it? Why we do it. Why men pay for it. What it's really like to be a woman who sells it for a living. Not long ago, a friend of mine asserted that every woman secretly wants to be a "Pretty Woman." I agreed. Women want to be them. Men want to be with them. Too bad nobody's willing to admit it.

404

Sorry, but this is lame. Surely, someone else can do better. No?

New Reverse Cowgirl Poll: Should Spitzer Be Indicted?

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Reporting on Sex Work When the Reporter Is a Man

I've been meaning to link to this New Yorker story, "The Countertraffickers," by William Finnegan for a while. But I didn't. I guess I didn't know what I wanted to say about it. The only mention I'd seen of it on some blogs was as an example of biased reporting. Some sex worker activists feel reporting like this, which focuses on sex trafficking, as opposed to, say, the sex workers rights movement, is sensationalist. I feel like too many sex worker activists have this response, that they get all up in arms when reporters profile the negative aspects of sex work, when the bad is part of sex work. It sure isn't all good. Nothing is.

Finnegan is a great writer and terrific reporter, but reading the story, I couldn't help but notice that he didn't really get his story in this case. The story, of course, focuses on human trafficking, sex trafficking in particular, and a woman who works to stop it especially.

"[Stella] Rotaru, who is twenty-six, works for the International Organization for Migration, a group connected to the United Nations, in Chisinau, Moldova. She is a repatriation specialist. Her main task is bringing lost Moldovans home. Nearly all her clients are victims of human trafficking, most of them women sold into prostitution abroad, and their stories pour across her desk in stark vignettes and muddled sagas of desperation, violence, betrayal, and sorrow."

The story is full of facts and stats about global trafficking. Along the way, Finnegan speaks with several women who were trafficked, but he never really gets... and this is where language fails me... any of them to pop, or flip, or however you want to put it. Maybe you have to be a journalist to know what I'm talking about. Or maybe you don't.

Janet Malcolm famously wrote: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." Her idea is that journalists lull their subjects into a false sense of security, and then we betray them in our texts. And it's true. To a degree. I've thought quite a bit about this in recent years, and these days I feel like every interview is a search for a confession. As journalists, we trick, manipulate, flatter our subjects into confessing. What we do with those confessions is another thing. Why people confess is another.

No woman in Finnegan's story confesses. Not really. "I talked to Maria for hours, although she let her psychotherapist, Alina Budeci, who works for La Strada, tell me about what happened in Turkey. Talking about it was too much like reliving it, she said." As a journalist, you're always looking for that moment in which the subject reveals itself to you. Completely. Totally. Utterly. The story lives and breathes in those moments, and without them, the story is dead. That moment never comes in Finnegan's story. Why? I wonder how much it has to do with the fact that Finnegan is a man, his interviewees are women, and the subject is sex.

It's hard to get someone to confess. It's not just you, and it's not just them. There's also the kind of serendipity that you see in poker. Somebody has to want to confess, and you have to want to hear it, or know how to get it, or the moment is lost. It requires a strange confluence of events outside the control of anyone involved.

A few weeks ago, a source told me about a story. It's a good story. A great story. A story that needs to be told. But I couldn't tell it. The nature of it would put me at risk legally, a risk I couldn't take on as a freelancer. And that made me sort of sad. Because I would have liked to tell the story.

But the story was important and bigger than me, so I gave it to another reporter, who I think will tell it well. But he's a man. And the subject is sex. And many of the sources are women. I talked to him on the phone the other day, and he hadn't met any of the players--the women--yet, and I told him that he had to go and meet them. Because stories like these, well, it's hard to know how to put it, but I said it's like you have to tell them with your body. You have to submerge yourself into the story, and all those writhing fucking bodies, and then write it. Because sex stories are about the body, and sometimes the only way to tell them is by getting up to the elbows in the muck. And if you're a man, and the subject is women, and everything in the story is about fucking, sometimes it gets confusing.

"[S]he lets the other language speak—the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death..." -- Hélène Cixous

Letters from Working Girls: I Decided That This Was a Weird Moral Decision to Make Anyway

I've posted a new working girl letter: "I Decided That This Was a Weird Moral Decision to Make Anyway."

"The only difficult thing for me is to be nice to people who are genuinely stupid, through no fault of their own, just a lack of brain cells, and to be forthcoming to guys in general."

This one came from England.

DC Madam Charges Dismissed

In an interesting twist, the NY Daily News reports the charges against Deborah Palfrey, aka the DC Madam, have been dismissed.

As the WaPo explained in the wake of Palfrey's death: "It is standard practice for authorities to file an 'abatement of prosecution' motion with a court if a defendant dies before the end of a criminal proceeding. Palfrey's case had not ended because her sentencing was pending and she had filed a notice that she planned to appeal her conviction."

My Salon story on Palfrey: "Death and the D.C. Madam."

Death and the D.C. Madam [Updated]

Late last week, after Deborah Jeane Palfrey, aka "the D.C. Madam," killed herself, an editor at Salon contacted me and asked if I would write a story on the subject. That story, "Death and the D.C. Madam," is now online. Special thanks to Melissa Gira, Bree Daniels, and the Anonymous Call Girl for letting me interview you. If you'd like to hear more from working girls and johns in their own words, you can visit my related project: Letters from Working Girls & Letters from Johns.

Update: Details of Palfrey's suicide notes released. [via Radar]

On May 1, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, better known as "the D.C. Madam," was found dead in a shed located behind her mother's Tarpon Springs, Fla., mobile home. Apparently, Palfrey, 52, hanged herself from a metal beam with a length of nylon rope. When her 76-year-old mother, Blanche Palfrey, called 911 just before 11 a.m., the emergency operator asked if her daughter was still hanging from the rafter. "Yes," said the madam's weeping mother, who had regularly accompanied her daughter to court the month previous, "I can't move her. I'm 76 years old."

Whores Really Are The New Black

While I was sleeping, Reverse Cowgirl reader A, a Hollywood film exec, sent me a link to this story in Variety: "Soderbergh to direct 'Girlfriend.'" A added: "you should go into consulting....strike that, you should call yourself criswell and predict the future on tv. it's more lucrative." Whether that was a reference to my proclaiming last year that whores are the new black or launching Letters from Working Girls and Letters from Johns, I do not know. Either way, I'm a big fan of Mr. Soderbergh, so this is good news, in my opinion. If it has the beauty of the "Ocean's" series, the brilliance of "Traffic," and the insanity of "Schizopolis," it should be pretty fucking awesome. The movie will be shot lo-fi like "Bubble" and released simultaneously in theaters, on cable and DVD. Perhaps equally interesting is this tidbit: "Rather than go for star power, Soderbergh may set an adult film actress to play the lead role." My first reaction to that was, "Ha! Good luck, dumbass!" Most porn stars I have known are better at giving blow jobs than emotionally emoting. But perhaps there is someone out there for Soderbergh and his GFE. Take, for example, Justine Joli. Why, Mr. Siege has already created a video test for her big audition.

The title refers to a phenomenon in which wealthy men pay not just for the quality of a sexual encounter but also for a woman who will play the role of a perfect girlfriend. The arrangement apparently involves more intimacy than the usual prostitution relationship. Soderbergh, Koppelman and Levien interviewed numerous women and fixed on an interior look at a woman who makes $1 million a year in the business.

Swing

I spent the whole last week or so working on something, and now I'm about done with it, and now I'm beat. I am not sleeping well, working myself up into some kind of state, ready to c-r-a-s-h. This morning, I had a dream that included a motorized fuck-dog and a field of trees that ate people. I woke up in a kind of fever state. Over the last six weeks, this blog and the letters blogs have gotten more attention than anything else I've done in the last three years combined, with the mentions in Time, Newsweek, the LA Times, interest from the New York Post, and mentions on various high-profile blogs. Yesterday, someone sent me some interview questions about prostitution, which I suppose I will answer. Sometimes, I wonder about the difference between porn stars and prostitutes. Because of some random law, porn is legal, but prostitution is not. They share common themes: fucking, performing, sex for money, fame, stilettos, hot chicks, dudes with issues, people trying to get it on while everybody watches. The context is what's different. That prostitution breaks the law while porn does not means the former gets beat up while the latter gets glorified--or is it the other way around? The end result is porn is America's punchline, and prostitutes are the new black. It's hard to know what to make of it. Either way, people who fuck for a living bear the consequences of a cosmic misunderstanding. I need to get back to working on my novel, which I relegated to the sidelines while I focused on this other project. Remember, we're trading in peonies here, not daisies. Sometimes I think I'm crazy. Sometimes I don't. These days, I've begun to suspect it really doesn't matter either way.

I wasn't sure whether this, too, was for effect, another mock punch, another flourish for the ever-present camera in T. T. Boy's head, or whether his father's violence was the inheritance that he did receive. Then again, maybe it was just the loud clamorings of a young man alone, trying to beat back the tundra silence of an apartment where the table was always set for a family of four, and no one was coming home. -- "Waiting for Wood," Stiffed, Susan Faludi