The XX Factor: What women really think.

A Stitch in Mime ...

Right, so my best friends and I occasionally went to bars and told men we were on spring break from mime school. Then we would do “mimes climbing the rope” and “mimes feeling the wall in front of them” until someone bought Sevgi a drink. Of course Sevgi could have burped the alphabet and someone would have bought her a drink. Someone remind me how this has anything to do with politics?

Aliases

I had a friend one time who decided to tell the men at the bar she was a forensic pathologist. I am not sure what, if anything, it accomplished. I guess it beat telling them she was a lawyer.

And so do you think the guy sitting next to me on the plane that time hadn't really participated in the Iranian hostage rescue mission?

My Name Is Brandi, and I'm a Part-Time Mermaid ...

In college, I had a friend whose favorite thing was trying on different personas in bars, spinning all kinds of wild life stories just for the fun of it. (Excellent storyteller, that one.)

So one time when I went home with her for the weekend, she got me to try it too. (In my defense, keep in mind that this was Indianapolis we're talking about, so you can imagine how easy it was to get caught up in the whole anything-goes spirit.) Anyway, as a beginner, I decided to keep most of the bio I was born with but change one thing: In the Indy version, for reasons that have long since escaped me, I had a summer job in the water-ski show in Cypress Gardens. Or so I told the quite appealing guy I met that night—who, as it turned out, was from very near where I lived and soon thereafter called to invite me to come and hang out with him—of course, on his ski boat. And I couldn't go because I didn't want to have to fess up that I was not only a big fibber but actually quite a disaster on skis! So, lesson learned. But I suspect that my friend, who really should have gone into acting but became a stockbroker in Texas, might still change things up a little now and then, just to keep her skills up.

Masquerade

I like the following detail of Ashley Dupre's (I mean, "Kristen"; I mean, Ashley Youmans) biography. According to the New York Post, part of the reason she left home was that she crashed her oral-surgeon stepfather's Porsche. Like you, Hanna, I thought of Margaret Seltzer, concocting a gang identity out of her prep-school childhood. But Ashley actually did make the descent into the tawdry. Will we ever find out why a girl with a seemingly decent childhood becomes a prostitute, any more than we'll ever understand why a governor throws his happy, successful life away because of that prostitute? And speaking of false identitities, don't forget that when "Kristen" showed up at the Mayflower, she was told by her john that his name was "George Fox."

Meet Hanna

Well, fine then. How does this sound:

I am 24 years old. I grew up in Venezuela, although my mother was Danish. When I was 8 years old, a child welfare worker discovered I'd been abused by my stepfather and placed me in a black foster home. (Oh wait, sorry, that's Margaret Jones.) When I was 18, to support myself, I took to modeling. There were nights when I wore mink and drank Courvoisier to my heart's content and other nights when I slept in a cardboard box and called the city rats my friends. I am now an aspiring singer, in a style you could call Reggaeton/Folk. I like sweet tarts, and golden monkeys.

The Many Faces of Ashley

Funny Hanna, I am having no trouble at all reconciling sweet middle-class baby-sitting Ashley with starving streetwise Ashley with elegant upscale hooker Ashley. They’re all clichés. At one point or another I had each of those Barbies in my collection. (Upscale hooker Barbie had the BEST shoes.)

I’m willing to double-down on Melinda’s post about these folks as vehicles for our own shifting sense of who we are. I think we are a culture of people who have learned to build an identity for every occasion. MySpace is not about who you really are, its theater. So, for that matter, is hooking. We had a version of this conversation back when we talked about the MySpace tragedy: We are all too busy constructing identities—perhaps in the event that a reality show lands in our laps.

Just Another Pretty Face

Hanna,

I think it’s always a better story to go from rags to riches as a pop singer than to be just another pretty face from the privileged ’burbs, isn’t it? That hasn’t been sexy since Debbie Gibson, if it ever was—or at least it’s not nearly as compelling.

There was an interesting e-mail discussion among Slate “XX Factor” contributors today about why wealthy politicians like Spitzer are always killing themselves to appear middle-class, a phenomenon that Michael Kinsley deconstructed (albeit on Bill O’Reilly rather than a politician) here. It seems that Ashley and Eliot deserved each other—both were trying to appear like someone they are not, and both were blinded by their own ambition. And posturing to be from a lower class background than you actually are presumably helps you whether you’re singing or on the stump. (And many professions in between, most likely. America loves an underdog.)

And as a postscript, I’m just glad someone took the time to do the reporting. The New York Times seemed to fall for Ashley’s MySpace story hook, line, and sinker.

Ashley, Please Babysit

OK, so I am a sucker, or at the very least confused. Ashley grew up in a nice middle-class suburban neighborhood? She spent her young days cheerleading and putting up signs for baby-sitting? So, can someone answer me these questions?

1. Why does a nice suburban girl pretend she was homeless and broke? Do you get more play on MySpace if you're abused? Does this make for better American Idol fodder? Was she just ashamed of being a hooker so had to invent a sad past so when she got busted people like me would feel sorry for her?  

2. Could there have been something weird going on in that nice suburban home of hers, with the stepfather?

3. Could something have happened when, as a teenager, she went off to live with her own father?

4. Or, like Venkatesh writes, is being a high-class hooker now a middle-class aspiration? 

All I can say is, the fathers of Wall, N.J., must have been begging her to baby-sit.

Ashley, Revealed!

Sort of. On MySpace, all is not as it seems. Who'da thunk it? So, I retract what I said about "working class," and I hereby downgrade Ashley Dupre to merely "messed up."

Eliot Is a Rorschach Test, Too

"Deserve got nuthin' to do with it."—Snoop (and before her, Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven.)

Whatever the mix of bad breaks and pathology and misguided, "I Wanna Be a Supermodel" ambition that led Ashley Dupre to the Emperors' Club, I feel sorry for anybody who would wind up in that situation. And whatever unseen cracks there were in Spitzer's foundation, the same goes for him.

But this whole thing also has me thinking more about what Dahlia wrote about how this political season has so far been all about us, about identity politics and how we see ourselves in the presidential candidates—or don't—and then feel put down or lifted up accordingly, bouncing along on the waves of their campaigns. And I wonder how identity—and class in particular—might have shaped our initial reactions to this Spitzer story. [Update: Rosa points out that Ashley's stepfather was actually an oral surgeon! But we obviously didn't know that, and my own assumption was definitely that she must have been struggling financially.]

Hillary Clinton has in the past played the class card against women who claimed to have been involved with or taken advantage of by her husband; she and her surrogates suggested that these women were the real perpetrators, and her husband the victim—of low-rent gold-diggers manipulated by his political enemies, and of his vulnerability as someone caught between the first two women in his life—his mother and grandmother—throughout a difficult childhood. Aren't there also some class-based assumptions involved in seeing 22-year-old Ashley as the "vixen'' and the governor of New York as the hapless unfortunate? What does it mean that prostitution is an OK career choice for "certain women"? If it's not OK for our daughters, is it OK for anyone's daughters?

We all see the world through the prism of our own identity and experience—who else's?—so my first reaction to this story, because I am a wife and a mom, who sometimes even wears pearls, was to put myself in Silda's shoes, rather than (as I might have done if I were younger or poorer) in Ashley's presumably strappy stilettos.

Emily B., when you mentioned your disappointment that Spitzer had blown (sorry) his shot at becoming the first Jewish president, did you mean that that made you any more (or less, for that matter) sympathetic to his situation? I never really related to my fellow Catholic John Kerry as such, other than to wish that our church would stop beating up on him, but as the first Catholic president, JFK sure walked on water for a lot of my coreligionists of an earlier generation. To the point that they would have looked the other way, even if they had known at the time what a cad he was with women? We'll never know, but I'm guessing yes. Identity is so powerful still today, in 2008, that as Dana notes, even Obama's grandmother, who raised him -- and did one fine job of it, obviously -- talks unselfconsciously about distrusting what people who are different from us might have to say. 

Victims and Villains

Liza and Maureen: I guess I think that asking whether Ashley is a "victim" is the wrong question. I agree, whatever her childhood circumstances, she's a moral agent and she made a bunch of choices that landed her in that hotel room with Eliot Spitzer. Those choices weren't completely unconstrained, but they were still choices, and we can have empathy for the unique and perhaps crappy circumstances that shaped her choices without completely letting her off the hook (no pun intended) for the decisions she made.

To me, the relevant question isn't whether she's a victim in some abstract sense—we're all victims of our circumstances, blah blah blah, so who cares—but this: in that locked hotel room, who held more power, 22-year-old, 105-pound Ashley with her worries about paying the rent (and presumably with at least some anecdotal awareness of the statistics Emily cites about physical assaults experienced by high-end prostitutes)? Or Spitzer, older, stronger, smarter, and able to throw thousands of dollars around like it's loose change? It's the enormous power imbalance that bothers me—and the sense that he liked that power imbalance, and did his best to exploit it—to get prostitutes to do things women who had more power might have refused to do. (Yeah, I'm still just hung up on that "unsafe" stuff.)

Searching for an analogy here ...  Well, OK: on a more mundane level, say I employed a nanny who was an undocumented worker. (I don't, but say I did). "Favors" I might ask of an American college kid who babysits for me ("Listen, would you mind staying really really late tomorrow night? And the night after? And the next night, too?) are favors I would hesitate to ask of a nanny working without legal documents. The college student doesn't lose much if she says, "Gee, sorry, I can't," whereas the undocumented nanny is a whole lot more dependent on me—and under far more pressure to say yes. The power balance would make it hard for her to say no to my requests, however unreasonable.

Delusions of Grandeur

I think it’s worth reading Ashley’s MySpace page pretty carefully. I guess I have a lot less sympathy for someone whose rent troubles seem fueled as much by delusions of grandeur as by poverty, abuse, or lack of education. If she had so much trouble paying rent, did she really need to live in Manhattan? Of course she did, because in the tradition of American Idol, if she wanted to be famous, then of course she’s a fabulous singer and that’s where she needed to be. (I don’t think I believe the anecdote about the musician and his friend bursting into the bathroom while she belts out “Respect,” either. When does that really happen?). She couldn’t possibly have lived anywhere else more affordable? Come on.

I’m not sure where I come down on prostitution, so I don’t begrudge her the choice. But I don’t think she’s necessarily a victim in all this, having made the choice to go with prostitution rather than, say, waitressing or one of the other myriad jobs women slugging it out everywhere take to get by.

I Guess I Wasn't Kidding

Ashley Needs To Get a New Agent

Hanna and Rachael, I too was struck by the vulnerability of Ashley that emerged in today's New York Times' profile.  I noticed a "primary source" ("Hot Document" speak) for the profile was the young woman's MySpace page, which by "Thursday at noon ...appeared to have been corrupted." If I were Ashley's mother (alas, I could be her grandmother) in addition to making sure she got her own lawyer (attorney Don Buchwald was appointed by the court to represent the 22-year-old—although his bio of has the feel of someone QAT Consulting could really use), I might tell her to also get some technical and PR support that will get that MySpace storefront humming again. (Tips on traffic management are available by checking out Tila Tequila's page.) I can picture the stampede of TV bookers now thundering to the Flatiron apartment leased by the young entrepreneur once known as Kristen. Since her male source of support "walked out on me," and she is clearly "not a moron," she might as well be in charge of her own image as straightforwardly ("listen, dude ...") as she took control of clients at her last job. 

Poor Powerless Eliot

The Lesson of Ashley Dupré

Hanna,

Your post about Ashley Dupré has me wondering whether her story gives lie to some of the arguments made for legal but well-regulated prostitution. Isn't the ideal version of legalized prostitution something like the Emperors' Club? An agency that handles booking and vets "clients" seems far less dangerous than street pimps who abuse their prostitutes and send them into potentially dangerous situations, right? Makes it seem more like a career choice and less an act of desperation. But then we see that Ms. Dupré is worried about making her rent payments and considering returning to the family that she described as "broken" and that inspired her to strike out on her own as a teenager. As the Spitzer scandal has played out, we've seen outrageous sums of money thrown about: $4,300 for the infamous session at the Mayflower, the $80,000 that Gov. Spitzer may have spent with the club overall, etc. But I have yet to see a breakdown. How much do the escorts keep from their fees? Does the agency's cut go toward testing for STDs or toward health care for the women? How much better off are they than a typical street hooker?

I don't have strong feelings one way or the other about the legalization issue. But as we learn more about the Emperors' Club and "Kristen"/Ashley, it seems like even this upscale version of the world's oldest profession thrives by taking advantage of women who are vulnerable or have suffered misfortune, and that that should be taken into consideration before we rush to make this a legitimate profession.

Poor Ashley Dupré

Over the last couple of days of reading XX Factor, I have been lured into this notion that this scandal is not about powerful men having their way, that in fact it was poor Eliot Spitzer who got played by a young vixen, a conniving madame, petty payment schemes, and a culture that suffocates its public figures. I can often bring myself to believe that prostitution, as Judith wrote, should not be illegal but highly regulated, and that for certain women it's a smart career choice. Then, this morning comes the Ashley Dupré moment (and there is always in these sordid connections the Ashley Dupré moment). She is like the pathetic contestants in the early phases of American Idol: broken, rejected, exploited through a fantasy in which she willingly particpates. I read her story and the old '70s feminist in me (admittedly, a tiny presence) rears up. A broken home on the Jersey shore. Abused as a kid. A nightclub singer. Worried about paying her rent. Men walking out on her. "Broke and homeless," and known for giving extra food to homeless guys. OK, so she's not a Thai village girl smuggled into Amsterdam. But she is a sad American type: This is Marilyn Monroe territory—a woman who can play the role of sexy and powerful but is always herself being played. I think about Ashley looking at an eviction notice and Spitzer cavalierly wiring $4,300 from one account to another, and it's very hard for me to feel sorry for him. 

Read the rest of our discussion about Ashley Dupré.