Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (26 page)

And as the researchers point out, the John Jay study demol- ished virtually every other stereotype surrounding the underage sex trade.

For the national study, researchers are now hunting for underage hookers in Las Vegas, Dallas, Miami, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area, and interviews for an Atlantic City survey are complete.

Curtis is reluctant to divulge any findings while so much work remains to be done, but he does say early returns suggest that the scarcity of pimps revealed by the New York study appears not to be an anomaly.

A final report on the current research is scheduled for comple- tion in mid-2012.

“I think that the study has a chance to dispel some of the myths and a lot of the raw emotion that is out there,” says Marcus Martin, the PhD who’s leading the Dallas research crew. “At the end of the day, I think the study is going to help the kids, as well as tell their story.”

If the work Ric Curtis and Meredith Dank began in New York is indeed going to help the kids, it will do so because it tells their story. And because it addresses the most difficult—and probably the most important—question of all: what drives young kids into the sex trade?

Dallas Police Department Sergeant Byron Fassett, whose police work with underage female prostitutes is hailed by child advo- cates and government officials including Senator Wyden, believes

hooking is “a symptom of another problem that can take many forms. It can be poverty, sexual abuse, mental abuse—there’s a whole range of things you can find in there.

“Generally we find physical and sexual abuse or drug abuse when the child was young,” Fassett continues. “These children are traumatized. People who are involved in this are trauma-stricken. They’ve had something happen to them. The slang would be that they were ‘broken.’”

Fassett has drawn attention because of his targeted approach to rescuing (rather than arresting) prostitutes and helping them gain access to social services. The sergeant says that because the root causes of youth prostitution can be so daunting to address from a social-policy standpoint, it’s easy—and politically expedient—to sweep them under the proverbial rug.

And then there are the John Jay researchers’ groundbreaking findings. Though the study could not possibly produce thorough psychological evaluations and case histories, subjects were asked the question: “How did you get into this?” Their candid answers revealed a range of motives and means:

4
“I can’t get a job that would pay better than this.”

4
“I like the freedom this lifestyle affords me.”

4
“My friend was making a lot of money doing it and introduced me to it.”

4
“I want money to buy a new cell phone.”

Though the context is a different one, Dank and Curtis have, not unlike Byron Fassett, come to learn that their survey subjects’ responses carry implications that are both daunting to address and tempting to deny or ignore.

For example, the John Jay study found that when asked what

it would take to get them to give up prostitution, many kids expressed a desire for stable, long-term housing. But the widely accepted current social-service model—shelters that accommo- date, at most, a ninety-day stay—doesn’t give youths enough time to get on their feet and instead pushes them back to the streets. The findings also point to a general need for more emphasis on targeted outreach, perhaps through peer-to-peer networks, as well as services of all kinds, from job training and placement to psychological therapy.

Regarding that last area of treatment, Curtis believes that kids who have made their own conscious decision to prostitute them- selves might need more long-term help than those who are forced into the trade by someone else.

“Imagine if you take a kid off the street and put them in therapy,” he says. “Which do you think is easier to deal with: the kid who’s been enslaved by another human being, or the one who’s been enslaved by him- or herself—who only have them- selves to blame? In my view, healing those kids is a steeper hill than the one who can point to somebody and say, ‘He did that to me, I’m not that kind of person,’ and who can deflect the blame.”

Which raises the question: who’s willing to pay the freight to guide kids up that hill?

The original Blonde

n eal Gabler

Jean Harlow, who would have celebrated her one hundredth birthday this year, was so original a sex goddess that she invented a whole new style in cinematic seduction. When Harlow burst onto the Hollywood scene in the early 1930s, there had been vamps and sirens and floozies and hussies and slatterns and It girls and nice girls next door. But there had never been a bombshell. As the word implies, being a bombshell meant that you deto- nated. Harlow was certainly that kind of ordnance. She didn’t just appear on-screen, she exploded. Novelist Graham Greene wrote, “She toted a breast like a man totes a gun.” She was brassy, sassy, no-nonsense, tough, self-possessed, carefree, wildly extroverted and, of course, buxom. Her hair was the color of platinum, her skin the color of alabaster. Though she was a tiny woman, there was always something outsize about her, a sexual too-muchness that made her the perfect antidote to the parsimony of the Great

Depression. Other actresses frowned. Harlow always wore a giant smile to signal just how much fun she was having. Inevi- tably, Harlow’s style became a national style. Women peroxided their hair and painted their lips in a Cupid’s bow the way Harlow did so they could not only look like Harlow but attempt to
be
like Harlow. She was a force untamed.

What made Harlow original wasn’t the type of dame she played. Marlene Dietrich once described her as a “tart with a heart,” and her basic persona was the familiar one of a cynical, hardboiled broad on the outside hiding a sentimental, decent girl on the inside. Her originality was in her attitude—in the way she flaunted herself as her own aesthetic object. Her characters are not only outré, they cultivate that quality. They luxuriate in it. They are highly conscious of the effect it has, especially on men. In some ways it makes Harlow the first postmodernist sex symbol. One part of her, the mental part, was always measuring the other part of her, the physical part. No sex symbol has ever been as brainily self-aware.

That physicality was also like no other actress’s before her. If Harlow on-screen seemed to be loose figuratively, a good-time girl who threw herself at men, she was also loose literally. Where her major screen rivals, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer and Bette Davis, were all thin, hard, bony and aristo- cratic, Harlow was soft and uncorseted—the kind of woman a man wanted to squeeze and bury himself in. Her softness was accentuated by the silky gowns she often wore draped lightly over her luscious body so you could see the contours under- neath. This wasn’t sex by suggestion; this was the real thing. The fact that Harlow never wore a brassiere was almost as much a trademark as her hair. When she moved, she jiggled—not just her ample breasts but her whole being. It was as if, in freeing

herself from her undergarments, she had also freed herself from the restraints of her age.

Harlow’s flouncy freedom made a lasting impression, one of the most iconic of Hollywood, and it is all the more remark- able when we consider how young she was and how short her career was. She was born Harlean Carpenter in Kansas City, Missouri, to an erstwhile-dentist father and an overbearing, social-climbing mother whose family had come into wealth through real estate. The mother, named Jean, had acting aspira- tions herself. She divorced the dentist and took her daughter to Hollywood. When her career didn’t pan out, she slunk back East. It was that summer, while dining at the Sherman House hotel in Chicago between trains, after Jean had picked Harlean up from camp, that they met an ambitious con man named Marino Bello, who was so smitten with Mama Jean that he got a divorce and married her. Meanwhile, Jean enrolled Harlean in boarding school in Lake Forest, Illinois, where a classmate introduced her to a young man whose parents had died in a boating accident, leaving him their fortune. The two decided to elope. Harlean was only sixteen. Both couples then headed back to California.

Despite the fact that she was already fetching, Harlean had no Hollywood ambitions. She was happy to be a teenage housewife. But as the story goes, she was hosting a luncheon for some friends when one of them said she had to leave for an appointment with a casting director at Fox Studios. Harlean offered to drive her, and naturally she caught the casting director’s eye. He gave her a letter of introduction to the Central Casting Bureau, which hired extras. Harlean filed it away until another friend dared her to go. She took the dare, signing the register as “Jean Harlow,” her mother’s maiden name, and thus began her film career.

It wasn’t much of a career at first. She was just an extra, but she

was a noticeable extra. Eventually producer Hal Roach signed her to a five-year contract, mainly playing eye candy in two- reel comedies. While working as an extra in a ballroom scene in a feature comedy, she came to the attention of actor James Hall. Hall invited her to shoot a screen test for his next picture, a World War I epic titled
Hell’s Angels
that young millionaire Howard Hughes was producing and directing. Hughes had begun the film as a silent with Norwegian actress Greta Nissen in the female lead, but when he decided to convert it to a talkie, he needed an English-speaking actress to replace her. Hence Harlow’s screen test. Hughes gave her the part and a contract.

You could say the rest is history, except it wasn’t. Harlow got brutal reviews playing the trampy girlfriend of a British flier in the picture. And though she was certainly an eye magnet, critics ridiculed her acting abilities in movie after movie, even as her roles grew. “It is unfortunate that Jean Harlow, whose virtues as an actress are limited to her blonde beauty, has to carry a good share of the picture,” said one critic of her performance in
Iron Man.
“The acting throughout is interesting, with the exception of Jean Harlow,” opined the
New York Times
critic of her perfor- mance in
The Public Enemy.
“Miss Harlow, as the society girl, is competent but not much more,” wrote another critic of her performance in
Platinum Blonde.
This was the consensus. Perhaps no other major star had been flagellated by the critics as much as and for as long as Harlow was. It was almost as if they resented her man-taunting routine—or at least the obviousness of it. That may have been because Harlow hadn’t evolved into Harlow yet. She hadn’t learned how to make that routine her own.

The tide began to turn when MGM, the biggest and most glamorous of studios, purchased her contract from Hughes and cast her as a wanton working girl who seduces her rich boss into

marrying her in
Red-Headed Woman,
made under the supervision of production wunderkind Irving Thalberg. Part of the critical reversal may have been the change in hair color so that Harlow couldn’t be accused of acting with her perm. But a larger part of it was almost certainly the abandon with which she approached the role—the scale of her performance. Harlow finally gave a performance large enough to match the extremes of her sexy appearance. She wasn’t acting to type as she had in her earlier pictures; she was creating a new type: a woman with a liberating lust and appetite and a certain degree of calculation about how to use them. She was a happy conniver.

The tide turned further when MGM paired her with one of its biggest male stars, Clark Gable, in
Red Dust.
The two had appeared together in a crime melodrama,
The Secret Six,
when both were bit players, but stardom liberated them, made them bigger, matching Gable’s hyperbolic male with Harlow’s hyper- bolic female. Their screen romance is based not on great profes- sions of love or treacly sentiments but on mutual toughness, on a
lack
of conventional romance. They are both hard-bitten cynics, people who have been around the block and know the score, and their relationship is a battle of wills that in some ways helped reinvent the whole idea of love. For them, love isn’t lofty. It is both primal and practical—a deal.

These MGM pictures softened the critical whippings Harlow had received, but what catapulted her into the first rank of stars was a discovery she made early on, one that the studios were slow to recognize. Harlow knew she wasn’t a great dramatic actress. She realized as well that playing gun molls, tramps and hookers was a dead end. More to the point, she understood how ridicu- lous the exaggerated sexuality she projected was—from the hair to the makeup to the gowns to the lipstick. She realized that the

lusty, wisecracking girl she typically played wasn’t a tragic figure but a comic one and that she herself was basically a comedienne who appreciated just how much fun (and how funny) sex could be. As
Time
wrote in 1934, “Instead of becoming Hollywood’s number one siren, she has become its number one comedienne.” In truth, she was both.

Mae West had already made the same discovery about sex and humor, turning herself into a parody of the man-eating woman. The difference between West and Harlow was not only one of degree—Harlow was soft and accessible, while West was like a fortress—but also one of self-consciousness. West was a joke, and her movies were basically occasions for her to make wry, sugges- tive comments, mutter innuendos and issue ripostes. They are cold because West shows us only one side of herself. Harlow was less a joke than she was jokey. Her movies, though not necessarily any funnier than West’s, are more human and even occasionally touching because Harlow had that self-regard—that postmod- ernist ability to stand back and view her own image—that West didn’t have. West was all one thing: a sexual omnivore. Harlow was several things at once, not least a body and a brain.

Harlow wasn’t just a simple floozy. As she moved more deeply into comedy, contradictions emerged in her screen persona, many of them having sprung from her own life. She was both a sophisticate and an innocent, both cagey and obtuse, both hard- boiled and tenderhearted. All these qualities no doubt contrib- uted to her appeal, since they gave her a breadth few previous sex symbols had. But the biggest of these contradictions may have been the one between woman and child. For all intents and purposes, Harlow was a child. She was still in her early twenties when she began to achieve stardom, and in some ways she was even younger than her years. Her mother had called her Baby