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I've always known that the New York Times is an elitist paper. Most national papers are pretty directed at the upper middle and upper classes. You can tell just by looking at their advertising. Million dollar studio apartments and thousand dollar watches are not for the masses, after all. And I learned from a beloved sociology instructor in college to recognize the significance of the fact that there is never a labor section but always a business section and that the Times has two "Style" sections a week where you can learn about the newest expensive trends. So it isn't like this is a revelation. But today's Metro Section really beats all:
The story itself is worse than the headline. It contains stereotypes, overgeneralizations, faulty logic, bad assumptions and lots of other problems that I warn my students about. And aside getting the prostitution stuff wrong, it's very clear message is this: don't try to pass yourself off as belonging to the upper classes if you weren't born and bred among them.
Where to start?
Perhaps with the faulty logic. Susan Dominus asserts that Emperor's Club was selling a fantasy image of "Kristen" that didn't match Kristen's real life. Of course many sex workers do in fact shield their identities by disguising other aspects of their lives. Dominus must know that. What she is pointing out in her article is that Kristen's image was one of upper middle class or upper class upbringing, and to prove that Kristen was not in fact of such a background she poses a series of what she presumes to be inherently contradictory statements:
that she was a successful swimsuit model who’d traveled the world (as opposed to a singer getting nowhere with a boyfriend who’d paid her rent, as The Times reported yesterday); that she enjoyed civilized pursuits like dining at exclusive restaurants (actually, she’s been hoping for work at a friend’s restaurant); and that she liked sampling fine wines (no mention of the drug abuse she’d reported on her MySpace page). The site also described her as 24 (in fact, she’s 22, an age that might have sounded dangerously collegiate to an affluent clientele).
Can Dominus really believe that a working class or middle class person could never enjoy "civilized pursuits" like dining at fancy establishments, or that a person who enjoys fine wine never abuses drugs? (Wall Street, anyone?) Are these things really logically related in any way at all?
Only if one buys the assumption that pursuits like fine wine and fancy restaurants are reserved for the upper classes. And only if drug abuse is somehow different from addiction and the Betty Ford Clinic only serves the masses.
Then there are the overgeneralizations:
Once the story of Ashley Alexandra Dupré’s life actually came out, it was a fresh reminder that the words “high class” and “prostitution ring” pretty much never make sense in the same phrase (expensive prostitution ring, yes; high class, no). This was not someone who’d been turned down by the consulting firm of her choice and decided to make an alternative entrepreneurial move. Ms. Dupré’s MySpace page said she’d left home at 17 and had been abused. She’d been homeless. She said she knew, at 22, what it was like “to have everything and lose it, ” even if she’d built herself up since. Her story was not self-empowering; it was, even in its scant detail, profoundly sad, all the more so because of her extreme youth.
Somehow because this young woman herself is not of the upper classes no prostitute ever is. Somehow because her profile fits that of the stereotypical sex worker she must represent all sex workers. And somehow the fact that she reports having built herself back up (in part using sex work) after having lost everything is not evidence of any kind of self-empowerment.
Sudhir Venkatesh is quoted later as if his work supports this overgeneralization about prostitutes but if you heard him on the NPR the other day or read his piece on Slate.com you'd know that he has in fact interviewed women who left professional-class careers for upscale escorting. I have not reviewed his research so I'm not attesting to its quality, though I think highly of some of his other work. (And I should note that Melissa Gira Grant has taken Venkatesh to task for oversimplifying things, too.) But he introduces a three-tier categorization of prostitution that would certainly challenge the statements that Dominus makes in this article.
My real anger, though, actually comes from Dominus's acceptance of the term "high class." I know that is the term that much of the press has been using to describe the escort service in question. But to accept its use and to apply it to people is appalling.
"High class" is a value judgement and a way of obscuring the real stratification of wealth, power and privilege in the United States. Why not talk about the upper class, the elite, or the working class or the middle class, which are much more meaningfully descriptive?
And why not come out and make the message clear:
If you aren't born among us you can never be one of us and we'd much prefer it if you'd stop pretending.
The ad at the top of the NYT screenshot is for Loro Piana and the Americana Manhasset, shopping for the wealthy.
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...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
"High-class" or no "high-class" it's never stopped clients and never will, regardless of how society reacts. To me, that's the REAL hypocrisy that needs examined.
Great post, by the way. Hope it's required reading for your students.
XX
Thanks Amanda! I'm glad you like the post. I was so angry about the article that I was afraid it might have come off as too much of a plain old rant.
You know, you raise an interesting point of discomfort for me: I'd love for my students to read the site and to participate, too. I've been very hesitant to make it "required reading." So far I've only gone so far as to mention it as an interesting source of info about the issues.
What are people's thoughts on faculty making their own web sites or blogs required reading? Is it different from assigning one's own textbook or article? (My college has a clear policy on the assignment of faculty-authored textbooks that is designed to prevent faculty from making money by assigning their own books when those books aren't adopted by other colleges as well, but in this case making money isn't part of the equation.)
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
Mmmm...If I were a teacher, I think I'd be scared to make my blog required reading (even if my blog were a serious one & relevant to my course material).
It would make them a captive audience, and one of the reasons I started my blog was because I'd considered myself to be an overactive member of a certain local listserve & decided that I preferred writing on a blog because then people would only read it because they wanted to.
Some of those students would doubtless resent it. I'd just know that anything I wrote there was going to be scrutinized by people who'd just love to catch me in an inconsistency or an airhead moment, or even just a series of uninspired posts (or nonposts) if I had a case of writer's block, or just was too busy to write as well as I'd like to. That would really ruin some of the spontaneity of blogging for me.
I might well end up incorporating some of the material I wrote for the blog in my lesson plan, or vice versa, but as far as making it required reading - I don't think I'd want to put that pressure on myself, my site, or my students.
Elizabeth, you missed Alix Olson's performance on Monday 3/10 at the college. I met one of your students there at the bookselling table, who told me you recommended Alix to your class. Your young student was beaming when she spoke of you (explained to me you were out of town; therefore could not attend). She had never heard of A.O. before, and decided after the show to buy one of Alix' books.
There are ideal professor's out there whom we sometimes just can't get enough of. I'd bet this student of yours would be most interested in hearing more of what you have to say outside the classroom.
Great post, Elizabeth. Dominus (whose name incidentally means “lord” in Latin) makes some horridly classist assumptions. When I read Dupré’s remark that she knew, at 22, what it was like “to have everything and lose it,” I first pictured a middle (or perhaps upper middle) class kid who ran away from an abusive home, like some of the homeless kids I used to run into on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. (Of course I don’t know Dupré’s background, but I find it annoying when people assume a “broken,” abusive family is lower class, as if the elite are always responsible, loving parents.) In her book Temporarily Yours, Elizabeth Bernstein considers how sex work not only draws people from the lower classes, but increasingly attracts people from what Pierre Bourdieu dubs the “new petite bourgeoisie”—composed partly of those who haven’t earned the degrees required to pursue careers their class background promised them (doctors’ kids who don’t go to med, law or business school, for instance). Again, this might not apply to Dupré, but most mainstream media sources don’t even consider this possibility because they’re so intent on depicting her as down-and-out, or as an aspiring star who’s about to strike it rich because all publicity is good publicity.
It’s worth noting that the “new petite bourgeoisie” (also called “the creative class” by Richard Florida) includes a sizable chunk of artists and intellectuals (some of whom are also sex workers), and many of us opt out of lucrative professions and shirk exclusive restaurants because these patterns of consumption are based on exploitation. Fuck the salad fork!
Yeah, Dominus' article was pretty bad. Thankfully, I grew up on the opposite coast from Upper West Side society, and so generally don't have to deal with quite such elaborate codes to show that one is born into the right class.
I'm somebody who often falls into the "little visible means of support" category, but I can tell a bottle of good Pinot from plonk, rattle off at least a few of the better declared years of Vintage Port, and go on about the remarkableness of a good Spitzenberg apple. That comes with having traveled in some quite varied social circles in my life, not to mention raised by a restauranteur. I imagine Ms Dupré is somebody with similarly eclectic tastes who travels in a few different social circles, too. Perhaps Susan Dominus is miffed because Dupré doesn't seem to "know her place"?
To be fair to the NY Times, they did do a much better article than the above a few days later, "The Double Lives of High-Priced Call Girls ". While it does play up the headline-grabbing "high-priced call girl" shtick, it does at least provide a realistic portrait of many middle-class sex workers, and certainly is in keeping with one's I've met. The NY Times is generally on better ground when doing actual journalism than with their op-ed pieces. But op-ed idiocracy is why we have blogs as an alternative.
For a different perspective on that same New York Times article see this piece on Bound, Not Gagged. It was posted by Amanda Brooks on behalf of Faith O'Donnell, one of the women profiled in the Times piece. Briefly, she felt like the journalists (Cara Buckley and Andrew Jacobs) wrote what was essentially a fluff piece, omitting any discussion of her political analysis of sex work, while providing too many possibly identifying details (which were provided to them only so they could confirm her identity for the story, but not for inclusion in the published piece), and that details attributed to her actually came from one of the other women. It seems like the Times, whether on its opinion pages or in its news pages (the Dominus piece was on the front page of the Metro section) has a hard time reporting about prostitution, or sex in general really.
It is a disheartening observation about what is reputedly a liberal newspaper.
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
Hello Elizabeth,
People assume that when Ashley Dupre is saying "I know what it's like to have everything and lose it", they think she's talking about when she left home at 17. It would never occur to them to think that when she "had it all", she was working for NYC Confidential, and when she "lost it all", it was when NYC Confidential was shut down.
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