Assignation in Utopia

Nostalgia and the Love Market

“Stop!” 1926 Soviet anti-prostitution poster.

The American journalist Eugene Lyons, a communist fellow traveler who grew disillusioned with the Marxist project while living in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, wrote in his highly readable 1937 memoir Assignment in Utopia of his joy upon arriving in the Workers’ Paradise:

The red stars, with their insignia of crossed hammer and sickle . . . seemed to glow on the peaked caps of the Red soldiers with an inner light of their own . . . They shed an aura of intimacy and authenticated, in the mysterious language of symbols, the revolution and everything it stood for in our minds. After a life-time in which established authority is synonymous with reaction and exploitation, the flesh-and-blood vision of a communist soldier or a communist policeman verges on the miraculous.

Soon afterward, however, he was taken aback when confronted with the ubiquity of prostitution in Moscow.

At every step we were accosted by women, in high felt boots, their heads wrapped in thick shawls, their faces glowing with the cold, cigarettes smoldering between painted lips.

He explained that:

Prostitutes, beggars, food difficulties. I had known these things existed . . . I was fully aware that Russia in 1928 was far from socialism and that it contended with many of the evils of other lands and some of its own. In my romantic heart, however, I had not quite credited this knowledge. The tangible evidence had to be assimilated.

Eugene Lyons.

Prostitution, considered a parasitic means of acquiring income unearned by actual labor, was not only illegal in the Soviet Union; it was condemned as a corrosive symbol of the corruption of bourgeois society. Contemporary progressives in the west take a wholly different approach, contending not only that, in the popular phrase, “sex work is work,” but that it is something more, something ineffable, a form of expression and self-actualization that should be protected — though not legalized, since legalization would

put the state in control through regulations, taxes, and penalties, making workers beholden to brothel owners. “If sex work or prostitution became legal in Oregon, that means that all of the assholes that already own strip clubs would just own brothels,” says Elle Stanger of the Oregon Sex Workers Committee. “And then in order for me to legally be able to make money, I have to be hired and managed by these assholes.”

The formerly-progressive desire to eradicate prostitution and the need for it has given way to its conflation with both feminism and neoliberal ideologies, in which regulations are out and guardrails are up, and sex or its simulations are commodities to be sold on the free market. Whereas classical Marxists saw prostitution as the most vampirish form of capitalism, dehumanizing women and exploiting men for profit, modern-day progressives reframe it as an empowering and lucrative form of self-realization, and even of care for the other.

A topless dancer writing under the nom de plume Riley Renegade describes the tension between her deeply-held anti-capitalism and her involvement in sex work:

I’ve been anti-capitalist for a long time, as well as involved in the labor movement, but I’ve learned in this job that I really enjoy selling [private] rooms [a mechanism that gives strip club patrons, for a hefty fee, the opportunity for private and more intimate encounters with topless dancers]. I used to be terrible at upselling, and I would always apologize about how expensive everything is, but I have a ton of confidence in sales now. It’s less about the monetary amount, and more about the emotional process of them feeling excited, forgetting they are getting hustled. I also know my time and attention is very valuable, and people will pay absurd sums for intimacy. I also care a good deal about my kind customers, and do not see them as only wallets, so that helps. People just want to just get treated like they matter, and they do.

There is very little difference between Riley Renegade’s sales pitch for a private room and Don Draper’s pitch for the Kodak slide carousel in Mad Men. As Renegade notes, “people will pay absurd sums for intimacy . . . forgetting they are getting hustled” by a woman who is exploiting their emotions, and Don Draper notes that it is nostalgia for a time when they knew they were loved that drives people to buy things.

Though Renegade describes herself as anti-capitalist, she cheerfully participates in the free market, strategizing ways to maximize profit, as any good capitalist would do (though she denies seeing her customers “as only wallets”). She also does outreach to streetwalkers, apparently seeing them as less well-situated colleagues.

Some friends who knew I was a sex worker referred me to the Sex Worker Outreach Project. We’re focused on street-based workers, and people who do more survival-based sex work. Most of the population is black and trans women. We do street outreach every other week: giving condoms, lube, candy, water, tampons, and seasonal items. We talk about what’s going on out there, and how they feel. . . Some businesses have tried to push sex workers out of the area. There was a new law proposed by Baltimore City Councilman Kristerfer Burnett to increase the fine for johns that we fought against success-fully. The bill was dropped after we publicized that it would adversely affect sex workers. Councilman Burnett essentially realized it was not actually helping who he perceived it to be helping, and instead further targeted a marginalized population.

I’m sure the Black and trans women selling survival sex on the streets of Baltimore appreciate the condoms and the candy.

In a reflective mood, Renegade acknowledges that “sex workers do have a lot of trauma,” but she defends their nightly re-traumatization by giving a textbook definition of Freud’s theory of “repetition compulsion” — the behavior of trauma survivors who are driven to recreate the circumstances that damaged them in the vain hope of changing the outcome: “It is empowering to be benefiting from men while they are desiring you, sexualizing or objectifying you, and paying your rent with it,” Renegade explains; however, “it is also disempowering because many men see sex workers in a reductive way, and there’s something that is in the dynamic that’s still commodification. It is not always a wholesome connection” [emphasis mine].

Finally, Renegade tries to square the circle of celebrating sex work as liberating, while acknowledging it as capitalism at its most exploitive:

It is difficult to convince people constantly that sex work is real work. It’s like anything you have to unlearn about white supremacy and patriarchy. . . I’ve come across that mentality on the left a lot, that sex work would not exist if patriarchy did not. I think commodification creates a particular dynamic in sex work, but I don’t believe sex work is predicated on objectification or oppression—it is more so the allure of the power of sexuality and connection. That is not something that’s going to be abolished with capitalism. It is a form of labor that is incredibly sacred, beautiful, and connecting. It’s one of the best things about being alive [emphasis mine].

In short, Riley Renegade believes that the withering away of the capitalist state and the ushering in of a free society based on mutual aid will not obviate prostitution — and, what’s more, that they should not. Sex work “is incredibly sacred . . . It’s one of the best things about being alive.” While this is a far cry from the classical Marxist view, it’s emblematic of the contemporary sacralizing of many things once considered transgressive.

But it raises the question: Is sex work really work? Or is it something completely different?

Any form of work is a transaction in which skills are traded for money. But Riley Renegade suggests that in sex work, the real commodities are not her skill, but her time and attention — condensed into the symbolic gestures of dancing topless and performing simulated sex acts (Renegade hedges that her “personal boundaries are that I don’t do anything that involves direct contact with their genitalia”). And she acknowledges that the time and attention she confers upon clients who pay $780 for a half-hour with her in a private room is really a surrogate for something else: respect, affection, love; the fleeting chance to transcend the ravages of this world, and perhaps of trauma and disability; to make the clock go back to a time when the paying customer was a new, innocent being, completely and wholly cherished.

Renegade:

One of my favorite parts about the job is being sexually validating for people who aren’t normally validated or don’t feel attractive. A lot of them are men who are awkward or have low self-esteem. . . the vast majority of my customers I feel very connected to, and I respect them. They are essentially just grateful for touch because a lot of people are deprived of that in their lives, and it feels good to be able to be that for them.

As Klaus Groth asks in a poem set with devastating effect by Brahms, “Ah! why did I seek my fortune/and let go of my mother’s hand?”

Nevertheless, the class divide between the work that Riley Renegade performs — which she asserts is beautiful and even sacred — and that of the desperate street prostitutes to whom she gives candy is so vast that I would hesitate to say that they’re working in the same profession at all.

Bertolt Brecht.

As an orthodox Marxist, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht disparaged sex work. The leading characters in many of his plays — all of them cynical and compromised — are prostitutes, including in some of the great works he wrote with composer Kurt Weill, like The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Nevertheless, he also wrote a sympathetic and meditative poem about an aging prostitute in Weimar Germany, “Nannas Lied” (Nanna’s song), in which he suggests that even in those days of hunger and desperation a woman who will never see seventeen again will also be unable to maintain her foothold in the “love market.”

Nanna’s repeated chorus is a famous quote from the medieval poet-thief François Villon’s lament for lost beauty: “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”

In spite, or perhaps because of, the success of his collaborations with Weill, Brecht broke with him in the 1920s, because Brecht

wanted theatre to be openly political, even at the destruction of the audience’s pleasure. Troubled by the popular success of The Threepenny Opera among the Berlin public, he killed the chances of the successor, Happy End, by getting his wife, Helene Weigel, to pull out a Communist party pamphlet in act three and read it out, at length. Weill, who later observed that he could not set the Communist Party Manifesto to music, was not consulted in advance.

After the end of their partnership, Brecht embarked on a lifelong collaboration with Hanns Eisler, a composer far more politically scrupulous than Weill. Hanns Eisler and his brother Gerhart spent the 1940s in America as refugees from the Nazis; Hanns wrote the first book on film scoring, and Gerhart, it was alleged by the House Un-American Activities Committee, served as the Comintern’s representative to the U.S. Gerhart was also a friend of my grandmother, Josephine Nordstrand, and according to my mother a frequent guest at their home during her childhood. He stowed away on a Polish ship in 1949 in order to escape a prison sentence for contempt of Congress stemming from his HUAC testimony, and later became the propaganda minister of the German Democratic Republic. Hanns had left the previous year in advance of a deportation order.

Hanns Eisler and his wife, Anna Louise, at La Guardia Airport before boarding the flight that would allow them to leave the U.S. voluntarily in advance of his deportation order, 1948.

Once in East Germany, Hanns teamed up again with Brecht, also returned from exile in America, and the two continued to collaborate until the ends of their lives. Hanns Eisler is best known for composing the East German national anthem:

But in the 1920s he had also written a setting of “Nannas Lied.” His song embodies all the cynicism of the Weimar era: the music is modernistic and spiky, dripping with irony. Eisler seems to have missed the uncharacteristic tenderness and nostalgia of Brecht’s poem, giving us instead the sonic portrait of a tired-out and unlovely old sex worker:

Kurt Weill also wrote a setting of “Nannas Lied” during the same era. His setting is quite different from Eisler’s. It is lyrical and sensitive, imbued with an ambiguous nostalgia, on the whole more reminiscent of Brahms than of Brecht.

Lotte Lenya as the prostitute Jenny in G.W. Pabst’s 1931 film of The Threepenny Opera.

Weill dedicated the song to his wife, the actress Lotte Lenya, who had herself worked worked in prostitution beginning at the age of 11, and often played prostitutes in the Brecht-Weill plays.

On the love market, as in any commodity exchange, one trades work or goods for cash or food, or drugs, those evanescent tools of temporary flight from trauma. But what one sells in sex work is not really sex; perhaps sex work is not really work after all.