Labor of Love (23 page)

In an article that appeared in
Wired
magazine in 2002, Nerve.com's founder Rufus Griscom declared that the ascendancy of online dating was inevitable.

“Twenty years from now, the idea that someone looking for love won't look for it online will be silly, akin to skipping the card catalog to instead wander the stacks because ‘the right books are found only by accident,'” Griscom wrote. “We have a collective investment in the idea that love is a chance event, and often it is. But serendipity is the hallmark of inefficient markets, and the marketplace of love, like it or not, is becoming more and more efficient.”

Had we come
Back to the Future
? At the dawn of dating, all sorts of people had decried the fact that courtship was moving out of the home and into an anonymous, public world where money changed hands. Policemen worried that making dates was equivalent to turning tricks. Love was supposed to lie outside the economy; women could only give it away. By the 1980s and '90s, however, respectable people were celebrating the possibility that courtship might be made to behave as rationally as the market was supposed to, via technologies that let you “do comparison shopping of potential dates from the comfort and privacy of your own home.”

*   *   *

The undercover vice investigators who stalked Charity Girls in the 1900s and 1910s were horrified by their transactional approach to romance. However, an odd couple that appears all over Hollywood comedies of the 1980s suggests that by then, mass audiences embraced it. The couple consisted of a prostitute and an entrepreneur.

It started with
Risky Business
(1983).

In
Risky Business
, when his wealthy parents leave him alone for a weekend, the high school senior played by Tom Cruise phones a call girl, Lana, on a dare. After their night together leaves him in her debt, and her pimp steals his parents' chichi furniture, Tom Cruise must go into business with Lana to earn the money he needs to buy his heirlooms back. They team up to run a prostitution ring out of his family home for one night.

“My name is Joel Goodson,” Cruise announces after it has all worked out. “I deal in human fulfillment. I grossed over eight thousand dollars in one night.” Today, the portrait of the entrepreneur as a young pimp—or, rather, teen male madam—feels prescient. Had Joel Goodson been born two decades later, he might have founded Facebook. Like Mark Zuckerberg, he uses his parents' capital to create a platform where others can exchange attention and emotions so that he can skim off the surplus.

In the Calling Era, the parlor, watched over by the lady of the house, was the inner sanctum of a female world entrusted with taming male tendencies toward aggression, greed, and lust. By the time of
Risky Business
, the parlor had become a living room and then a pop-up brothel. No parents were home.

The mythology of the 1980s and early '90s glorified the escort and the entrepreneur as a perfect match because neither had anything he or she would not be willing to sell. In
Pretty Woman
, Richard Gere puts this bluntly. “You and I are such similar creatures,” his suave businessman tells the streetwalker played by Julia Roberts. “We both screw people for money.”

There was a lot embedded in this crude pun. For one, the idea that at the bottom, the escort and the entrepreneur did the same kind of work. In the late 1970s, the United States continued to deindustrialize, and the country experienced a trade deficit. Unable to keep up with increased competition from Japan and Germany or to afford the increasingly expensive oil that had once powered industrial production, the United States grew its service sector. Both the streetwalker and the stockbroker belonged to it.

In this sense, Richard Gere was right: They were not so different. Yet this service sector itself continued to split into two increasingly unequal groups. On the one side was the precarious and poorly paid majority; on the other were finance aristocrats. The kind of work the first did tended to be thought of as female—cleaning, serving food, handling customers, and so on. The kind the second did was quantitative and competitive; in their broad-shouldered suits, its icons projected masculinity. So while they had their similarities, these lovers were also opposites. They both screwed people. But they had very different power relationships with them and received different rewards.

Pretty Woman
became the highest-grossing love story of this era, because it turned the disappearance of the American middle class into a fairy tale.

Many other romantic comedies told tales of class mobility, where humble, honorable people manage to marry out of dead-end positions into yuppiedom. The 1988 classic
Working Girl
, for instance. The title wink-winks, yet again, at the fundamental similarity of the businessperson and the sex worker. In the beginning, the “working girl” secretary played by Melanie Griffith must commute from Staten Island to work in a Wall Street office as a personal assistant to the pantsuited megabitch played by Sigourney Weaver. However, when an improbable series of events lead Melanie to impersonate her boss, she ends up landing a big deal. She also manages to steal her boss's fiancé, Harrison Ford.

The final scene shows what happily ever after in a yuppie household looks like. Getting ready to leave for work in the morning, Melanie and Harrison wolf down their low-cal breakfast in a wordless ballet. As she pours his coffee, he pops the toast out of the gleaming toaster, and sticks it in her open mouth.

*   *   *

Calling and old-fashioned courtship, the scenery and setting of the parlor, encouraged the fiction that love had nothing to do with the economy. For bourgeois people, marriage was supposed to be a matter of spontaneous, spiritual affinity; for others, it was supposed to propagate a community or bloodline. But as dating neared its centennial, the situation reversed. Dating came to be seen as just another kind of transaction. Many people struggled to reconcile their desire to live efficiently with their desire to feel sexual desire itself.

Shortly after the 1987 stock market crash,
Newsweek
reported that a new disorder was troubling the yuppie population. “Psychiatrists and psychologists say they are seeing a growing proportion of patients … whose main response to the sexual revolution has been some equivalent of ‘Not tonight, dear.'” The Viennese psychiatrist Helen Singer Kaplan, who had established the first academically accredited sex therapy institute in the United States, in New York in the 1970s, diagnosed this. She called the problem “inhibited sexual desire” (ISD). It entered the
DSM-III
in 1988.

“Over the past decade ISD has emerged as the most common of all sexual complaints. By varying estimates, anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of the general population may experience it at some time, to some degree,”
Newsweek
reported. “One clinician goes so far as to call it ‘the plague of the '80s.'” Against this backdrop, the sex worker starts to look like the prototype for a new woman who is expert in managing feelings—inspiring particular feelings in others and repressing her own—until the time when revealing them might be advantageous. This expertise allowed her to convert the desires of others into money, which was what any yuppie lover most wanted. She made feelings economically productive.

In
Pretty Woman
, Julia Roberts lands Richard Gere by doing precisely this. Richard Gere admits to being a commitmentphobe who has never felt capable of falling in love; friends Julia Roberts meets when he takes her to a horse race emphasize that he is universally desired. No one seems struck by the fact that his professed inability to have feelings qualifies him as a textbook sociopath.

Richard Gere is handsome and eligible, and Julia seduces him by masterfully turning her own body into a commodity. “Did I mention, my leg is 44 inches from hip to toe?” she asks, in an early scene when she embraces him in the bathtub in his swank suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. “So basically we are talking about 88 inches of therapy, wrapped around you for the bargain price of $3,000.”

When Richard returns a necklace that he had borrowed for her to wear to the opera, after failing to man up and become her boyfriend, the jeweler sighs. “It must be hard,” he says, as he accepts it back, “to give up something so beautiful.”

It is these words
equating Julia Roberts with the necklace
that make Richard realize that he has made a terrible mistake. He sprints away to get her back, scrambling up her fire escape just in time for the happy ending.

Bret Easton Ellis's novel
American Psycho
came out several months after
Pretty Woman
. Whereas
Pretty Woman
was instantly beloved,
American Psycho
was and remains highly controversial. Several publishers dropped the manuscript before Vintage finally published it. But
American Psycho
basically tells the same story as
Pretty Woman
in another genre: horror.

Like Richard Gere, the protagonist Patrick Bateman is a wildly successful, handsome finance guy with a good pedigree who cannot feel anything without engaging the services of sex workers. Richard Gere consumes Julia Roberts figuratively. By letting him treat her body like a beautiful object, she helps him find it in himself to feel love. Patrick Bateman literally murders and eats the prostitutes he sleeps with.

“When I see a pretty girl walking down the street,” he jokes to a colleague, “I think two things. One part wants me to take her out and talk to her and be real nice and sweet and treat her right.”

“What does the other part of him think?” the colleague asks.

“What her head would look like on a stick.”

Over the course of the novel, Bateman gnaws girls' pussies off with his teeth and rips their limbs apart. He stuffs their orifices with Brie and prods a pet rat to eat their bodies from the inside out. He tries to cook girls into sausages and meat loaf. He fails. The matronly apron he wears is a joke. He is no good at cooking; he has clearly never had to do any housework for himself.

Bret Easton Ellis leaves his narrator unreliable. But the fact that we cannot be quite sure whether Patrick Bateman really kills anyone or is just hallucinating the whole thing should not reassure us for a minute. It is just another symptom of a terrifying kind of feelinglessness, the total devaluation of emotion in his world.

American Psycho
highlighted the dark underside of a dating market that said that anything anyone wanted and could pay for was fair game. It exposed the yuppie as more than dysfunctional. He was satanic.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, downtown, a real-life nightmare was unfolding.

 

CHAPTER 8.
PROTOCOL

“No wonder Africans called it ‘The Horror,'” Andrew Holleran wrote in 1988, in the introduction to
Ground Zero
. The collection of essays and articles documented the early years of AIDS in New York City, where Holleran, who had recently published his first novel, was writing columns for the gay magazine
Christopher Street
. At first, his “New York Notebook” mostly covered gallery openings, clubs, and the music that played at them. Then, in 1982, Holleran's friends and lovers started falling sick.

Week by week, Holleran watched healthy young men go blind and grow emaciated. Lesions appeared on their faces and limbs; they lost their hair to chemotherapy. Holleran recorded his experiences visiting friends in the hospital. He brought them magazines. He searched for places on their bodies with no tubes running in or out, where he might lay a hand.

“Living in New York,” he recalled, felt like “attending a dinner party at which some of the guests were being taken out and shot, while the rest of us were expected to continue eating and make small talk.”

In November 1986, the lesbian artist and activist Jane Rosett attended a party at the home of her friend David Summers. In 1997, she would describe it in a eulogy for
POZ
, a magazine for people living with HIV. David had full-blown AIDS. His partner, Sal Licata, had organized the gathering to celebrate their seventh anniversary. He invited friends over to their apartment to “hang out in bed and hold David while he pukes.” Despite his suffering, David projected warmth and wit.

“It was a party,” Rosett wrote. “David held court and stressed how honored he was to have lured a lesbian into his king-size bed.” When his guests relayed gossip of who was sleeping with whom, he cheered. “More people are in love than in the hospital!” Within a few days, however, David died. Rosett returned to keep Sal company as he waited for movers to arrive and empty the apartment. He played the piano and taught her a song as they waited.
Miss the touch, the touch of your hand, my buddy
it went. During World War II, gay men in the armed forces had used it as a code. The next year, Sal passed away in a hallway of St. Vincent's Hospital.

“Within a few years,” Rosett recalled, “everyone else in David's bed that day—except me—was also dead.”

*   *   *

The Centers for Disease Control had noticed the first signs in the summer of 1981. In June of that year, the CDC's
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
noted a strange outbreak of
Pneumocystis carinii
pneumonia in Los Angeles. Between October 1980 and May 1981, five young men had been diagnosed with the disease. The article speculated that it might have to do with “some aspect of the homosexual lifestyle.” The next month, the
MMWR
reported that in the prior thirty months, twenty-six young gay men in New York City and California had been diagnosed with Kaposi's sarcoma, a cancer that was extremely rare in the United States and all but unheard of except among the elderly. By June 1982, 355 Americans were known to be suffering from KS and other opportunistic infections. Doctors and the press had started calling what afflicted them GRID, for “gay-related immuno deficiency.” In July 1982, the CDC would rename GRID “AIDS” and identify four populations that were especially at risk: homosexuals, heroin users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians. As shorthand, doctors called them the “4 H's.”