Streetwalkers in the Arts and Media

Then:

Streetwalkers as victims of grave misfortune are a trope that existed back in the 19th century in Paris. For example, Fantine in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1862) is a grisette who loses her status as a kept woman and is forced to take to the streets to sell her body. Hugo portrays Fantine as a tragic character, martyred by the depths of human cruelty; she is entirely without the agency that we know from sources like Parent-Duchâtelet that streetwalkers had in the 19th century.

In novels, like Guy de Maupassant’s L’Odysée d’une fille (1883), streetwalkers were often depicted with images of abjection, or as prostitutes with hearts of gold. The girl in L’Odysée grabs ahold of the narrator’s arm while a police dragnet descends over the streets, looking for women soliciting sex, and tells him her tale of exploitation and woe between solicitations of her own. At 16, she says, she was forced out of her simple country life and relentlessly pursued by rapacious men--grocers, policemen, soldiers, judges--until she accepted her lowly state in life and begins turning tricks in the streets of Rouen and Paris.

These later authors like Maupassant and Hugo are part of a trend that is also visible within newspapers of the period. In the press, there was a general shift from seeing streetwalkers as a nuisance to viewing them as victims of human trafficking between 1835 and 1907. [1] In 1882, La Lanterne, a political newspaper, ran a front page book review of La Prostitution, a sympathetic work by Yves Guyot. In La Prostitution, Guyot details why he was scandalized not by sex work itself, but by the lack of medical care received by unlicensed streetwalkers. [2]

The photograph to the left is from Dreams Deferred, an episode of Law and Order SVU. The title alone provides a glimpse of how the show portrays Jeanne, the streetwalker who is the main focus of the episode. The cops clearly view her as a woman in need of saving from a job riddled with drugs, alcohol and dangerous situations. In the end of the episode, the police force Jeanne to spend a night on a bench in a jail cell rather than release her back onto the streets (she was not homeless -- she talks about needing to pay her rent). The cops then bring in her family and stage an intervention to convince her to go to an alcohol and drug rehabilitation center.

In terms of news outlets, current reports on street prostitution are varied. Fox News appears concerned with underage street prostitution, and has featured “a woman forced to work as a sex slave after running away from home.” [5] NPR has done many stories on prostitution, many of which are based on getting prostitutes off the street and saving them. With headlines such as “Legal Prostitution Condones Humiliation of Women,” CNN clearly thinks that prostitutes are in need of saving. This article was stored under “The CNN Freedom Project: Ending Modern Day Slavery.” [6]

A savior mentality is clearly demonstrated throughout the media analyzed for this exhibit. This idea was propagated in 1988 by Laura Agustin in her book Sex at the Margins. [7] The media rarely acknowledges that streetwalking can be a choice, and instead projects the idea that people who engage in streetwalking would be better off in different jobs and need someone to pull them out of their situation.