Free Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant

data points to support their actions. An Atlanta-based organization with the imaginatively patronizing name A Future, Not A Past (AFNAP) hired a market research firm to conduct a study of prostitution on Craigslist. “Researchers” working for the firm, The Schapiro Group, who had never before researched prostitution, trawled through the ads, scrutinized the photos and text, and based only on this content guessed at the age of each person depicted. Never mind that Craigslist ads can be posted multiple times each day, or that each doesn’t necessarily correlate to one individual—or any real individual. Dummy and repeat ads are part of the business. This either eluded or just didn’t concern AFNAP, which advertised their findings along with a lavishly produced “tool kit” adorned with a photo of a young woman, her face downcast, covered in a hoodie, captioned “stop the prostitution of our nation’s children.”
    Based on this amateurish tally of Craigslist, as well as surveillance of “street activity” and “hotels,” AFNAP claimed that “as many as 200 to 300 young girls are commercially sexually exploited every month in Georgia,” including “approximately 100 to 115 girls [who] are made availablethrough Craigslist.org ads each month, with profitable results,” as they reported to the Georgia state legislature in order to rally for tougher anti-prostitution legislation in their state. Their “methodology” was repeated in similar studies in Minnesota, Michigan, and New York, supported by the Women’s Funding Network, whose director Deborah Richardson used such numbers to claim before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary investigating Craigslist that “over the past six months, the number of underage girls trafficked online has risen exponentially in three diverse states.” She did not mention that this “exponential” increase were measured based on counts of how many men had answered fake escort ads created by Schapiro Group researchers, using photos of young-looking women, and not from actual reported cases of underage girls being trafficked. Such well-intentioned red-light wandering has the sheen of science, even as it pays for weeks of researchers’ time scrolling through ads, just like clients do.
    Red-Light Neighbors
    A better and offline equivalent to model our red-light wandering on might be the insider account of Samuel R. Delany, whose participant observation of Times Square in its last pre-Disney gasps is as much of the porn theaters as it is about them and what they meant to those who cared for them.
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
maps the various forms and sites of labor—theaters, food carts, camera shops, shoe-shine stands, hustlers—and the kinds of people who frequenteach, including himself, and his unguarded affection for the porn theaters and the anonymous sexual encounters they made possible. For Delany, the value in a red-light district like the one once bounded by the streets around West Forty-Second Street and Eighth Avenue isn’t just sexual pleasure, though it’s that, too. The red-light district signals the potential of contact—physical, mental, spiritual—that crosses class.
    I’ve worked in just one red-light district—San Francisco’s North Beach, which is dotted still with strip clubs and porn shops, all crowned by the legendary City Lights Bookstore, which published and defended Allen Ginsberg’s
Howl
, on the southwestern edge, and by Caffe Trieste, which has opera on its jukebox and old men with nothing to do but read the paper all day, up the hill to the northeast. In the streets sloping in between—Broadway, Kearny, Stockton—tourists cram together and drift between novelty Italian restaurants draped in garlic and roses and dumpling shops with whole chickens hanging in the windows. The purple neon marks the sex businesses, side by side with youth hostels, bars, corner stores, and cafes. We were all neighbors.
    Forget the particulars of the work