Nevertheless, many American women—and some men—have at one time or another earned their livings through the sale of explicitly sexual services. For pay, they have participated in interactions that regularly produce sexual arousal in their purchasers. Informal estimates place the American commercial sex industry in the vicinity of $8 billion to $10 billion a year (Weitzer 2000; Schlosser 2003: 61). Those occupations have only occasionally and contingently overlapped with courtship. Let us call the entire array of specialized sex-providing occupations “sex work.” Such occupations include telephone sex, production of pornography, peep shows, some forms of massage, escort services, and a wide variety of prostitution. They vary enormously in duration of encounters, extent and character of physical contact, range of intimacy, setting, and overall style. We need not survey the entire range of sex work, however, to make this chapter’s main points: in this zone of intimacy as in others (both sexual and otherwise), couples mingle economic transactions with intimate attentions; implicitly consult available matrices to define their relations; mark the boundaries of those relations emphatically; match relations, transactions, and media according to established conventions; yet within those limits negotiate their own versions of intimacy. Meanwhile, third parties generally act to defend the boundaries, as observers invoke separate spheres/hostile worlds ideas and practices to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable relations. Comparison of two frequent forms of sex work— taxi dancing and prostitution—will underline these points.
Let us begin with taxi dancing, an occupation that moral critics of the 1920s and 1930s often lumped with treating and prostitution. In early-twentieth-century American cities, dance halls became increasingly important sites for encounters between single men and women. In fact, treating women often met their companions in popular dance halls. These ranged from social club dances to public, commercial establishments (McBee 2000). The taxi-dance hall, typically restricted to male patrons, was a remarkable setting for social encounters. The men paid an entrance fee and then purchased ten
cent tickets for sixty to ninety seconds of dancing with a young woman. The taxi dancers worked on a fifty-fifty commission arrangement, with half of the money going to the dance hall owner.
At first glance, taxi dancing seems like a peculiar form of sex work: a fleeting, flirting contact between man and woman akin to telephone sex or a peep show. On closer examination, however, it turns out to contain a whole differentiated world of intimacy. Within its commercial framework, men and women formed friendships, paired off for liaisons outside the dance hall, initiated courtship, and created a complex economy of favors, gifts, tips, and obligations. From one perspective, the taxi dance hall operated as a crass commercial establishment. From another, it served as a remarkably sophisticated and effective matchmaker.
Speaking of the 1930s, Leo Rosten, chronicler of American immigrant and working-class life, recalled a Saturday night tour of three New York taxi dance ballrooms and his encounters with the women who made their living by dancing with paying customers (Mona, Jean, Honey, and others). At Seventh Avenue’s Honeymoon Lane Danceland, Mona led him to the dance floor letting “her body, all marshmallow, flow against mine. . . and murmured a voluptuous ‘Mmmm-mmh!’ ” After dancing for a moment “approaching ecstasy,” a buzzer loudly “honked.” Mona quickly “disengaged her clutch” instructing him to get more dance tickets. When Rosten protested that he thought his ticket was for a whole dance, Mona announced that “a dance is every time the buzzer buzzes.” Which was every minute.
After Rosten promptly returned with ten more tickets, Mona was once again “warm and yielding in my arms—until the buzzer finished its tenth pecuniary decree.” Jean later explained that the dancers kept half of the price of their tickets, plus “you have to add the presents. .. like nice lingerie, a bracelet, a purse, a piece of jewelry, maybe an evening gown.” Or sometimes cash. At the Majestic Danceland, Honey told Rosten about a St. Louis real-estate dealer who dated her: once “he leaned over in the cab he was taking me to some scrumptious Chinese food in, and without one single word he leaned over and kissed me—nothing rough or forcing, just a real
sweet little kiss. Then he handed me ten dollars without a peep” (Rosten 1970: 289-91, 297). Clearly more was happening in and around the dance hall than the simple exchange of dimes for dances.
Sociologist Paul Cressey provided a systematic account of Chicago taxi dance halls in the 1920s. He started out as a case worker and investigator for Chicago’s Juvenile Protective Association, but later reported his findings under the supervision of the great University of Chicago urban sociologist Ernest W. Burgess. Analyzing the phenomenon, he invoked classic hostile worlds reasoning. First he worried about the “mercenary and silent world” of taxi dancing, where “feminine society is for sale, and at a neat price” (Cressey 1932: 11). As a result, “the impersonal attitudes of the market place very soon supersede the romantic impulses which normally might develop.” Still worse, romanticism “becomes merely another acceptable method for the commercial exploitation of men” (39-40). But then Cressey noted how the “romantic impulse” often undermined the rational economic order of the taxi dance hall preferred by its proprietors. Indeed, as we’ll see, dancers often made private arrangements that cut into the owners’ profits, for example, by offering free dances to favored customers. Owners acknowledged their repeated failure to restrict intimate relations between their dancers and patrons. As one proprietor noted, “As long as boys are boys and girls are girls they’re going to get together somehow” (quoted in Cressey 1932: 50).
Despite his moral qualms, Cressey provided dramatic, careful observations of what actually went on. Here he describes the standard encounter:
As soon as the girl receives a ticket from the patron, she tears it in half, gives one part to the ubiquitous ticket-collectors, and the other half she blandly stores with other receipts under the hem of her silk stocking—where before the evening is over the accumulation appears as a large and oddly placed tumor. She volunteers no conversation, as the music begins, she nonchalantly turns toward her new patron ready for the dance with him. (6)
The dance lasted ninety seconds and shrank to sixty seconds near closing hour. After closing time—between midnight and 3 a. m.—those men who had not already made arrangements to meet women after the dance often stood outside the dance hall waiting for the women to emerge, pairing off with them if possible (McBee 2000: 109).
In the course of his description, Cressey actually distinguished five different relationships that sometimes existed between taxi dance girls and their patrons, each with its own rules of payment: (1) the standard dance session; (2) “free dances” for more “favored suitors”; (3) “mistress” arrangements, an “alliance” in which for a few months a man paid for the dancer’s rent or groceries; (4) the “plural alliance,” where the girl “enters an understanding by which she agrees to be faithful to a certain three or four men,” who through “separate arrangements” meet her “financial requirements” of rent, groceries, or clothes; and (5) dates, running from a shared drink or show to what Cressey called “overnight dates,” which according to him, “quickly take on the character of clandestine prostitution” (4850). In some cases, a sixth relationship emerged from one of the first five: the dancer and the patron married (see, for example, Cressey 1932: 115-17; Vedder 1947: 155-58).
Although a standard dance session usually initiated acquaintance between a man and a woman who later went on to more extensive companionship, the date provided a crucial pivot among these relationships. From a date the couple might move on to longer-term cohabitation, exclusive or shared. But they might also simply return to the occasional dance session. Preoccupied to some extent with his moral conceptions, Cressey understated the extent to which the taxi dance hall was operating as a local social center. In fact, his descriptions document a wide range of flirtation, friendships, and matchmaking. In a later study of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit taxi dance halls, Clyde Vedder—who worked as pianist in several dance halls—revealed a broad scope of social relations between patrons and dancers, matched with a striking variety of payments. Besides gifts and generous tips, the remunerations included the following possibilities, each of which clearly entailed far more than quid pro quo for dances and sexual services:
• Redeeming a dancer’s pawned items
• Assistance in building and furnishing a dancer’s home: labor and materials (cement for foundation, roof, electrical wiring)
• Cosigning a dancer’s charge account at various stores
• Down payments on major purchases
• During World War II, ration coupons, including gas coupons, and rationed products such as butter, toilet paper, nylons, Kleenex, butter, cigarettes, and gasoline (Vedder 1947: 136-40)
Thus, despite Cressey’s misgivings, none of the various patron — dancer relationships equated with prostitution, the straightforward sale of sexual services. Indeed, Cressey himself acknowledged the distinction. Patrons eager to obtain an after-dance date with one of the girls, he observed, were “polite and courteous”:
Since the girl’s society outside the dance hall—so much sought after by many of the patrons—can be secured only through the dubious process of courtship rather than the more dependable method of bargaining, the popular taxi dancer has a favorable status. .. which seems to arise in part from the very uncertainty of her favors. (37-38)
One patron explained his courting strategies:
I’ve found that the main thing to remember in trying to interest these girls is that they are not hard-boiled prostitutes. They don’t want to make money that way. But they do like presents, and—most of all—attention.. .. They are great on expecting presents. But I soon found that an inexpensive present would do just as well as an expensive one. What they are interested in is its sentimental value. They want presents, not for their money value, but as keepsakes to remind them of their good times and their men friends. (Quoted in Cressey 1932: 141)
Clearly, taxi dancers and their patrons were negotiating individualized relationships within the limits of available conventions. Far from a pathetic imitation of courtship or a furtive neighbor of prostitution, the world of the taxi dance reveals a terrain of differentiated ties, each with its own matching of relation, transactions, and media.[23]