Wandering through the chilly streets of South Philly in search
of a good story, I approach a small group of elderly gentleman
talking on a street corner. After I finish my pitch, they look at
each other silently, communicating through raised eyebrows and
subtle shrugs. Finally, one speaks: "You should talk to his
daughter. She got laid off. Now she's--how should I put this--a
provider of erotic services."
"She's a ho," the father exclaims, taking off his cap to slap
his friend. "Might well call it what it is. Ain't no shame in bein
a ho. Can't none of you say you never hired a ho."
The three other men look at me sheepishly then exaggeratedly roll
their eyes away in all directions. One starts whistling a random
tune. I laugh.
"No, what my daughter is doing is using her natural born talents.
Her beauty. She's using the tools god gave her. Some at my church
might call it immoral. I think it good business sense. Especially
these days."
Princess, as her father calls her, seems annoyed when he arrives
back at their shared apartment tailed by a girl with a notebook.
She seems on edge, preparing herself for the kind of judgment or
condescension that would never come from me.
She'd just finished with a client, which was why her father had
been hanging out on the corner with his friends. "Don't tell daddy
this, but he's really the reason I'm doing this," she tells me
after he goes back outside. "We could almost squeek by on my
unemployment and his Social Security, but Medicare don't pay all
his medications anymore. I can't let him die because I couldn't
afford his pills."
Princess looks somewhere in her forties--youthful in spirit, but
weathered in appearance. She has two school-age sons, who both know
what kind of work their mother has been doing while they're in
school. ("It's a small neighborhood. They'd a heard anyway.") When
I inquire about their father, she responds abruptly: "He's dead." I
get the feeling it's more of a "He's dead to me" than really dead,
but I don't push it.
Most of her career, Princess has worked in one office or
another--the past five years as office manager for a now-defunct
design firm. The slowdown in business over 2008 made her aware that
things weren't going well for the company, so she'd already been
cutting back on expenses and saving every extra penny in
preparation for that day last winter when her boss called everyone
together to announce the company would be closing. "It was sad, but
it wasn't a surprise," she recalls.
What did surprise her was how difficult it was to find a new job.
"There's nothin out there. Nothing. I put in applications and
resumes for every kind of job. Hundreds. But, nothin," she says. "I
tell you, though, now I've been doing this a couple months, I'm not
sure I'd ever go back to working in an office."
"Like daddy says, there ain't no shame in bein' a ho," Princess
explains. "Society may look down on us, but that don't mean
society's right. Catholic priests tell us how to live while they's
diddling little boys in their free time. Reverends tell us how to
live while they's hiring male hos and doing meth. Nu-uh. Don't no
one tell me how to live. I have a mind and I can decide what's
right and what's wrong for myself."
Princess starts ticking off sins on her impeccably manicured
fingers: "Hurting people's wrong. Causing pain's wrong. Lying's
wrong. Judging people's wrong. Stealing and murder, obviously,
wrong. And hypocrisy, that's sometimes the worst wrong."
The way Princess does business seems somewhat unconventional for
the sex industry. She charges standard rates for Philly: $100 for a
half or $150 for a full hour. ("I hadda research that on
Craigslist.") But she doesn't work for an escort service, advertise
on Craigslist, hang out in high end hotel bars, or walk the
streets. She's totally independent. Her clients come through
referrals from friends. Most of them live in her neighborhood; some
she has known for years. "I have a couple of regulars, they been
wanting me for years. When I told them I's opening my pussy for
business, it was like Christmas had come early." No one comes near
her without a condom.
"I cause pleasure. I provide a service that brings people pleasure.
I won't service married men or women, men of the cloth. See even
hos got rules of morality," she laughs. "But seriously, I can
understand why people who been brought up one way think it's
immoral. I don't understand why it's illegal. With our government
needing money, I wish I could pay taxes."
http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/christina_davidson/2009/12/aint_no_shame_in_bein_a_ho.php