Disciplining Contemporary Streetwalkers

Cover art for the 1990 Julia Robert's film Pretty Woman.

While not a reflection of classist regulation, Julia Robert's portrayal of Vivian Ward in the 1990 film Pretty Woman is one of the most well-known representations of the contemporary American streetwalker and is indicative of this archetype's reception in popular culture. As depicted in the film's cover art, Pretty Woman opens with Vivian attired in thigh-high black leather boots, a mini dress with large side cutouts to expose her mid-drift, and a short blonde wig. (1) The film is premised upon a wealthy businessman's debunked expectations of the low-class streetwalker. Played by Richard Gere, financier Edward Lewis recruits Vivian for an evening of company in his luxury hotel and is surprised to discover that, rather than uneducated and drug addicted, his prostitute is instead both witty and endearing. The rest of the film witnesses Vivian's transformation to a civilized woman, as she fawns over Edward's access to jewelry and learns how to properly cut her meat at a black tie function. The film concludes with Edward rescuing Vivian from her life of poverty and whisking her away under the umbrella of his vast financial resources. Pretty Woman performed record-breaking feats in the box office, grossing the highest number of ticket sales ever in the United States for a romantic comedy in 1990. (2) While the film initially attempts to combat the cultural stigma of the streetwalker as drug-addled and incapable, Vivian's portrayal as the exception to the norm and the plot's fantastical rags-to-riches resolution serve to glamorize the notion that one can escape from prostitution, rather than that one can find a balanced existence within it. 

A streetwalker is arrested in Nashville after an encounter with an undercover police officer. 

While regulated sex-work was tolerated in nineteenth-century Paris, prostitution is illegal in the twenty-first century Unites States, with the exception of certain isolated rural areas in Nevada. The motivation on the part of contemporary American law enforcement officials to police prostitution ranges anywhere from a moral impetus to the public health concerns. Where public policy is most likely to execute stringent enforcement, however, is when it is implemented in response to public concerns regarding visibility and public aesthetics. (3) As explained by scholar Elizabeth Bernstein in Temporarily Yours, the gentrification of urban centers has made streetwalkers, and other old-fashioned methods of prostitution, less acceptable for their visibility in upwardly mobile areas. (4) Middle-class residents and tourists alike do not want to view women in short skirts or condom wrappers on sidewalks, and will complain that their children should not be exposed to such evidence of sexual depravity in an effort to bring about these women’s' expulsion from the area. Following this line of thought, police are disproportionately motivated to persecute streetwalkers when their region is faced with heightened national or global attention, for example while hosting a sporting event or convention. (5) A "Police sweep" of the streets of a lower-class or gentrifying area is just one example of the indiscriminate policing methods used to target streetwalkers, while leaving their upper-class contemporaries unscathed. (4) Because lower-class prostitutes do not have access to the amenities of an escort or call girl, the visibility within which streetwalkers must conduct their business has left them to bear the burden of cultural prostitution stigma enforced through classist policing.