Neon Wasteland: On Love, Motherhood, and Sex Work in a Rust Belt Town
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Neon Wasteland: On Love, Motherhood, and Sex Work in a Rust Belt Town
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520948310 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 02/07/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 719 KB |
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Neon Wasteland
On Love, Motherhood, and Sex Work in a Rust Belt Town
By Susan Dewey
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-94831-0
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
CHANTELLE'S NEW JOB
This is a real blue-collar place. At first I thought it was pretty weird that you came here to write a book about us, because I always thought that women with PhDs and all, well, they don't usually come into a place like this. I guess it's different for you, because you grew up like all of us did and so you understand why our lives are the way they are. So this isn't a place where dancers can make a lot of money, because the guys we get in here, they work at one of the plants, some of them don't work at all. This isn't one of the more upscale places like you get in New York City, where the girls are all perfect with implants and stuff, here we're just regular girls trying to support ourselves and our kids. A lot of us didn't finish high school because we came from messed-up families or had kids real young and so we're just doing the best we can.
People don't generally think of dancers as family types, I guess, but we have kids, too. I'm trying not to tell people that I'm pregnant although obviously it won't stay a secret for long. I don't tell any of the guys who come in because that's a pretty big turnoff—to think there's a pregnant woman shaking it for money in front of you. I figure I can work for three or four months and make some money before I start to show, because I really need the money right now and I don't have anybody around who's going to give it to me. I never really thought I'd be a single mom since I grew up without a father around and that was tough for me, but here I am. It's my own stupidity for putting my trust in guys who didn't deserve it.
I've been working here for three weeks now, and it's OK so far. I get really tired because of the baby and because I've never worked nights before, so that's a bad combination. The other girls are pretty nice but a couple of them are real messed up, because this kind of work can do that to you, but probably some of them were that way before they got here. One of them, you know Diamond? She's the prettiest one here. She told me on my first night that I should get wasted before I go onstage because it makes things easier, but of course I didn't because of the baby. I was so scared that night with all those men looking at me, but I just tried to pretend they weren't there when I was onstage and I didn't get much in tips afterwards because I was afraid to talk to them with practically no clothes on.
I'm not going to be doing this forever, so I guess it doesn't bother me as much as it would if I was like some of the other girls here who don't have any plans for the future. Some of them just spend everything they earn because that's easy to do when you get paid under the table, but I'm doing this for my daughter. I mean, it's too early to know what I'm going to have, but I really want a little girl. I'm going to name her Nevaeh, that's "heaven" spelled backwards. I want to raise her right, so she won't end up like her mama, doing this kind of work. But, like I said, I'm not going to be doing this forever. Once the baby comes, then everything changes for me.
PAUL: "MAN, WOMEN HAVE IT EASY"
You learn a lot of things working around dancers. Look, I've been married to two of them and been the manager here for three years, and so I can tell you one thing: man, women have it easy. You probably think that they're all abused and shit, they try to play it out like that sometimes so people will feel sorry for them. They make more money that way. Dancers, they're professionals at taking other people's money. They're hustlers. These are girls who don't want to work; they want to party and have men fall all over them like they're the best thing in the world. I don't have a lot of sympathy for them. If I feel sorry for anybody here, it's these poor suckers who come and blow all their money on some of these bitches. We've got some nice girls here, but most of them are just people who can't hold down a normal job for whatever reason. And the guys we get in here, they need to get away for a while, maybe from their wife's or girlfriend's nagging, maybe just from life here with the economy all shot to hell and all. Let me tell you, though, in a place like Sparksburgh where there are no jobs for anybody, these girls are doing pretty well. Don't let yourself feel too sorry for them.
VIXENS: AN INTRODUCTION
Read together, these two narratives raise a host of questions regarding the paradoxical coexistence of such wildly divergent understandings of the same work environment. For instance, why did Chantelle believe that sex work offered the best opportunity for life improvement when there were social-service agencies that could have assisted her? How did the manager of Vixens, Paul, reconcile his belief in the "ease" with which women could support themselves with the harsh economic and life realities faced by the dancers who worked for him? Such perplexing contradictions raise this book's central questions of why some poor U.S. women choose sex work over other low-wage jobs and why they believe that sex work is a first step toward long-term social mobility.
Chantelle was nineteen when I met her, just one year over the legal age requirement to dance topless in New York State, and in the space of just a few short months she had found herself abandoned, pregnant, and with no means of financial support. Like many poor young women without a socioeconomic network to assist her, she was not at all surprised to find herself in this situation, although she was nonetheless disappointed. One of the most striking aspects of Chantelle's life philosophy was that she did not view herself as a victim but rather as a conscious decision maker who was both responsible for her choices and capable of improving her own life. Her perceptions of her new work environment set the tone for some of the arguments presented in the rest of this book regarding news ways of thinking about sex workers as complete social beings who are also family members and friends.
A twice-divorced father of two young children, the twenty-four-year-old Vixens manager, Paul, was also a key figure in the lives of dancers like Chantelle, and accordingly, he features prominently in the ensuing chapters. In asserting that "women have it easy," Paul argues that women are at a distinct economic advantage in Sparksburgh's depressed economy because of their supposed sexual power over men. Sparksburgh is indeed still reeling from the economic collapse and skilled-labor emigration that followed deindustrialization several decades earlier, although, as we will see, most of those who have chosen to stay find themselves eking out a living in an impoverished community of men and women for whom work in any form generally takes place on what they are fully aware are poorly paid, demeaning, and even exploitative terms.
Sex work is one of the many forms of gendered labor that poor people engage in as part of broader, albeit highly stigmatized, survival strategies that continue to be objects of popular cultural fascination in less-than-subtle classist and racist manners. Witness, for example, the plethora of U.S. films, television shows, and other mass-media forms that focus on the regulation of activities such as gang membership, drug dealing, and prostitution as subversive, threatening, and yet somehow fascinating enough to form the substance of endless entertainment. The following analysis seeks to demystify the lives of people who engage in such activities through a combination of ethnographic analysis and self-representation. Accordingly, each chapter begins with an unedited narrative from a Vixens worker, most often from one of the five dancers whose lives this book chronicles. My own ethnographic and personal evaluations are absent in order to maintain the integrity of the women's words, and these narratives function to complement and underscore the key themes of each chapter as part of my strong belief in the collaborative nature of the research process. I have used pseudonyms similar to the "stage names" that dancers, following the standard practice at North American topless dancing bars, choose for themselves in order to keep their identities secret. I have also fictionalized certain elements of their lives and place of work in cooperation with each of them to render them unrecognizable and thus anonymous.
Feminist anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod advocates writing "ethnographies of the particular" (1991, 138) that run contrary to what she believes is the anthropological tendency to generalize. This book is one such "ethnography of the particular" in that it draws upon an increasingly vast cross-cultural literature on sex work to show how the "particulars" of topless dancers in Sparksburgh are by no means isolated from the experiences of other sex workers throughout the world. The following chapters thus frame their lives within the broader ethnographic context of sex work while simultaneously doing descriptive justice to the complexities of their individual everyday experiences.
Vixens is housed in a small rectangular building near the New York State Thruway, and in the long winters characteristic of that part of the world, its squat gray walls are the same bleak color as the brittle, snowy skies. It has an air of abandonment and deterioration that it shares with the many small businesses in the region that are perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy or closure: a gravel parking lot, exterior walls in need of repair, muddy snow congealing in forlorn piles outside the door. Traffic sounds form a perpetual humming whirr from the nearby intersections of three major highways, and there are no sidewalks, residences, or shops nearby. Vixens' isolation on Sparksburgh's physical margins virtually guarantees that no one ends up there by accident.
Despite the urban decay surrounding it and the remoteness of the location, dancers consider Vixens the safest and most lucrative of all the erotic dancing establishments within driving distance of Sparksburgh. Women who work there often follow their complaints about low pay, disrespect from clients, and management's general abuse of their labor with descriptions of what they consider inferior working conditions in the region's other topless and nude dancing bars. "If you have to do this," pragmatic Cinnamon explained to me soon after we met, "this is the best place to do it in, because there's no push from management to do more than you want to." Cinnamon was the mother of an adolescent daughter and had worked in a wide range of area erotic businesses for ten years—much longer than any of the other women at Vixens had been in the industry.
Cinnamon's wealth of experience with such establishments was quite paradoxical given that she was only twenty-five years old, and her knowledge of both illegal and illicit adult-oriented businesses stemmed from a life molded by abandonment and the abuse of her trust. "I started doing this because my daughter was starving to death," she said abruptly one night when we found ourselves alone in the dressing room backstage. She was staring at herself in the mirror and smoking a cigarette as she described the path that had placed her in the backroom of a topless dancing bar.
I had my first baby when I was thirteen, and my parents threw me out of the house two months after she was born. The funny thing is I was too young for welfare unless I wanted to go into foster care and get my baby taken away, and so I ended up in one of the sleaziest nude places pretty quick. You wouldn't even go in there if you saw it, it was that bad, but you have to be eighteen to dance topless and in the nude places they don't care how old you are because half the girls there are hookers anyway.
Cinnamon is one of the women whose lives make up the substance of this book, and her story is particularly representative of how people can find themselves left out of systems designed to help them even in relatively resource-rich states like New York. Too young for welfare benefits as a self-supporting mother and not old enough or educated enough to find formal-sector employment, she quickly began work in an industry that more than a decade later seemed impossible for her to leave. Cinnamon did not feel she was particularly lucky to be working at Vixens, but she understood from experience that her situation could be much worse. She was often quick to tell horror stories of mistreatment at other establishments when Vixens dancers complained about not earning enough money or having to deal with a difficult client.
Such tales frequently centered on the abuse of authority at other establishments by older male managers, who sometimes expected sexual favors from dancers as a condition of employment. Typologies abounded backstage at Vixens that categorized other topless dancing bars as little more than brothels where young women were powerless to control the circumstances under which their bodies were sexually available to random men. Reasons for this, in the words of Vixens dancers, ranged among individual women from extreme poverty, youth, and entrapment in an exploitative relationship with an employer-cum-boyfriend to drug addiction. This kind of violent folklore partly functioned to mitigate the everyday difficulties Vixens dancers encountered at work, through a process of comparison that sought to remind them just how lucky they were.
"I like it here because there are rules," Cinnamon told me. "In other places, guys who walk in with money get whatever they want." She was voicing a common sentiment among many Vixens dancers about the clear distinction between their work and prostitution. Yet despite their insistence on such boundaries, dancers often complain that clients expect a great deal of physical contact in exchange for tips, their primary source of income, and sometimes this behavior borders on more than just the simulation of sex. Men go to Vixens knowing that they can expect a minimum of three things: first, to watch a bare-breasted woman in a thong wind her body around a metal pole to the steady thumping beat of rhythm-and-blues music; second, to have a drink and perhaps to talk to other men. And third, they can expect dancers to approach them numerous times to offer a ten-dollar private dance, sometimes called a "lap dance" because it involves such close contact between dancer and client, in a curtained area located in a corner of the building near the stage.
Most of these expectations are fairly straightforward, but the third raises important questions, both for dancers and for those interested in their lives, about the blurry lines that divide private from public, genuine intimacy from performance, and, indeed, houses of prostitution from topless dancing bars. It is perhaps not surprising that all three of these issues routinely present dilemmas for dancers, management, and clients alike in the course of an ordinary night of work. A number of precautionary measures discussed later—including the use of security cameras, curtained areas, and clothing to regulate interaction between dancers and clients—function to both empower and marginalize different individuals in the shifting terrain of desire.
Throughout this book, we will encounter women who often appear to make contradictory decisions and engage in behaviors that harm them despite the fact that they obviously have the ability to make other, less risky choices. Sociologist Avery Gordon terms this phenomenon "complex personhood"—a phrase that underscores how "even those who live in the most dire circumstances possess a complex and often contradictory humanity and subjectivity that is never adequately glimpsed by viewing them as victims or, on the other hand, as superhuman agents" (1997, 4). Put in extremely simple terms, this means that people are rarely truly good or extremely bad, but rather fall somewhere in between at different times and in varying circumstances. Complex personhood also
means that the stories people tell about themselves and their troubles, about their social worlds, and about their society's problems are entangled and weave between what is immediately available as a story and what their imaginations are reaching toward ... [because] even those who haunt our dominant institutions and their systems of values are haunted too by things they sometimes have names for and sometimes do not. (Gordon 1997, 4)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Neon Wasteland by Susan Dewey. Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Feminized Labor and the Classed Body
3. Everyday Survival Strategies
4. Being a Good Mother in a "Bad" Profession
5. Pseudointimacy and Romantic Love
6. Calculating Risks, Surviving Danger
7. Body Work and the Feminization of Poverty
8. Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Dewey contributes to a growing wave of qualitative research on the sex industry."—Choice