Sunday, March 16, 2008
Opinion

Hookers, politicians and me

The first time I saw Michelle...

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer with his wife Silda Wall on March 12 after being identified as a client of a prostitution ring.
CREDIT: TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images
By Stephanie Ramage

The first time I saw Michelle, she was sitting on the hood of my car waiting for a john—not a toilet, a customer. She was a prostitute, and I had grown used to seeing them hanging around the dead-end street where the newspaper I worked for was located, next to a vacant lot.

“Please get off my car,” I said, tired, irritated and ready to go home at the end of a long day. She was staring at my stomach, which protruded like the cowcatcher on the front of a train engine. I was eight months pregnant, and I realized in that split second that she was, too. Her belly wasn’t as big as mine, but it did poke out beyond the little denim jacket she wore in the blazing midsummer heat.

“Sorry, honey,” she said, taking a drag on her cigarette before shuffling off to another car where she lounged and looked furtively up the street.

I wouldn’t see her again for years, though I probably passed her thousands of times on my way home as she solicited in the area around Boulevard and Monroe Drive. Then one day, the paper’s receptionist buzzed me and said, “There’s someone here who says she wants to see you. Can you come out?” I went out to the lobby and saw a pregnant woman with ragged blonde hair, smiling a broad and mostly toothless smile. She said, “Hey, ’member me?” with a smoky, whiskey-stained southern accent like Loretta Lynn’s.

“You shooed me off your car,” she said. “Back when you was pregnant.”

“How’d you know my name?” I asked.

“I ast the guy out on the loadin’ dock. I described you,” she said. “I came here ’cause I need some help.”

She wanted me to write a story that might help her get her little boy back, the one she’d given birth to shortly after the first time I saw her. He’d been taken into foster care because she’d gone on a heroin bender and ended up in rehab. She’d given up other babies before that, or had them taken away. (One had died. Her boyfriend/pimp was involved in the death, she claimed, and had gone to jail.) She’d never seen them again, but she had been allowed to see this little boy, and she wanted him back. She felt like, if she just got some help, she’d be able to take care of him and this one that she was carrying. She was working on kicking the smack, she said, and rolled up her flannel shirt sleeves to show me the chains of tiny black and green bruises that shackled her veins. She said they were old marks.

She explained that she used to be pretty. Her mother was an alcoholic and her stepfather had raped her and then pimped her out to his friends. She’d run away and eventually got a job as a call girl for what was supposed to be an escort service, turning tricks for businessmen visiting Atlanta. She’d spent some hours at the nicest hotels in town. Then she’d gotten hooked on cocaine, then crack and then smack. And with each new addiction she became a little more worn, lost a few more teeth, and slid a little further down the hooker hierarchy until she was charging $35 for a trick in a vacant lot. And here she was. So could I please help her by writing a story? She’d seen it work on television.

The trouble was, she might be wanted by the police for prostitution or drugs, so she couldn’t have her name or her face in the paper, and really, she’d just prefer that I didn’t even mention the prostitution.

Of course, there was no way to do a story about her without mentioning the prostitution—everything that had happened to her was because of the shadow world that prostitution, as an illegal activity, necessarily inhabits. And almost 10 years later, that hasn’t changed.

I’m not saying that if we legalized prostitution there would be no more Michelles, but there would certainly be fewer of them. Michelle had a vested interest in keeping her circumstances secret because her activities were illegal, but her need for secrecy also greatly benefited the men who bought her services. As a criminal, she couldn’t speak up about the things that happened to her, perhaps things like those about which the booking agent at the Emperor’s Club warned Ashley Youmans, now Ashley Dupre, aka “Kristen” regarding “Client No. 9,” aka New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer: things, the booker told Dupre, “you might not think were safe ... very basic things.” (Dupre, who must be commended for her strong stomach, later said that Spitzer was not “difficult.”)

As long as prostitution is illegal, the men who finance the lowest, as well as the highest, circles of prostitution will remain largely anonymous—unless, of course, there’s a federal investigation, because prostitutes are criminals and not likely to talk except when they’re cutting a deal.

Who has kept prostitution illegal? Men. Who benefits from it being illegal? Men. Who will fight tooth and nail to keep it illegal so that wifey doesn’t know the truth about the scum she married? Men. With as much money as prostitution makes in this country, there is no question that it has the financial leverage to become legalized, but the people who make our laws happen to be the same people who benefit most from keeping prostitution illegal. They are the customers, and they want the hookers to have a reason to keep their secrets.

But there’s much more to this than just the potential of public humiliation—there is also the irrational guarding of a fetish on which a lot of these sickos rely for their turn-on.

Prostitution is illegal, and people who look like grown men but have the mentality of 13-year-olds get a sexual charge out of doing what’s illegal and getting away with it. If you legalize it, you’ll take away the taboo, and they may never be able to perform again.

In Amsterdam and other centers of legalized prostitution, there is no mystique—at least not for the locals. They walk past the working girls in the windows of the brothels without a second glance—it’s just business, and a sad one at that. Only the visitors—for the most part, the American and Arab tourists—get a charge out of women with bodies for rent, because back home it’s illegal. The locals see it for what it is. That’s what legalization does: It de-glamorizes the industry.

I don’t expect anyone to confront Georgia’s legislature about our state’s dirty little not-so-secret. If the present election cycle has shown us anything, it’s that we are far more sexist than we are racist in this country, and we all know how racist that is. Who cares about women? Not even the female presidential candidate. Who cares about women who live in a shadow world because they’re criminalized for renting their bodies out to powerful men? Certainly not the lawmakers, because they’re the renters. SP

Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper. This article went to press on Thursday, March 13, 2008.