As part of research into her new show “Sell/ Buy/ Date,” about prostitution, Sarah Jones enticed johns from a window in the red light district of Amsterdam, recalled how she felt when L.A. police officers mistook her for a streetwalker, and mused about dancing in skimpy outfits in a rapper video.The contradictory emotions evoked by those experiences as well as the feminist debates at her alma mater, Bryn Mawr, are blazingly brought to life through the dozen or so characters she slips into in her solo show at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage II. As she so brilliantly demonstrated in “Bridge & Tunnel,” her 2006 Tony-winning play presented by Meryl Streep, Jones has a facility for exposing the souls of her characters which in this case she frames as a lecture, set in the year 2032, looking back on the antediluvian attitudes of the early part of the century. From Bella, a pole-dancer, to Cookie Chris, a pimp, Jones takes what she calls “a vertical plunge” into the lives of her characters and emerges with empathy, insights, and some surprising post-feminist conclusions.Jones recently spoke to BLOUIN ARTINFO, proffering strong arguments for the legalization of prostitution, examining the harmful effects of the “hooker with a heart of gold” trope, and why she might love to sensually dance around in a rapper video.You’ve said that the play germinated when you taught poetry workshops to women at Riker’s prison, many of whom were jailed for prostitution.It was one of the seeds. Even before Riker’s, there were also the college years when staunch feminist women in my class and above me were running their own feminist porn operations and talking about what it looks like to do sex work while going to school. Were these feminist ideas or not?Had those formed any biases that you had to shed to approach the topic more objectively? For one thing, the conversations I had with people in Europe gave me a new series of questions for myself about what self-determination looks like and the social safety net. I’d hear, “In the United States, you don’t have healthcare, you can’t afford to go to college, some don’t have means of gainful employment. We are empowered sex workers, we consider ourselves voluntary participants.” It did bring up the idea what choice means when you have limited social ability.You couldn’t find in America what you found in Europe? I hate to say this, but every time I tried to find what I called my “unicorn,” after some research into their background, there’d be some kind of dysfunctional story or tricky personal narrative. “Oh, I can see why this woman made these particular choices and it wasn’t some utopian moment of clarity.” What it did do is give me a window onto a larger conversation about commercial exploitation.What stood out about those “dysfunctions”? “Dysfunction” is actually a misleading word because it suggests there’s this mythical “functionality.” All human relationships are flawed and complicated in some way. And then when you add gender, politics and sexuality to that mix… Let me put it this way. One of the women I didn’t get to interview was a woman studies major at Duke who was “outed” by some fellow students for performing in porn films to pay for school. She got a lot of media attention and it took me back to my Bryn Mawr days and the conversations about women who feel empowered in engaging sexually on their own terms. And I then I learned that she was self-mutilating. She’s not a bad person. But let’s be more investigative about who we’re calling self-empowered.How did you apply what you learned to your own life? Well, I remember these rapper videos, Biggie Smalls and Tupac, and if one of these guys wanted me to be in their videos, I think I could see myself dancing in a skimpy costume![ laughs]. I’m an empowered feminist but my feminism is wide enough to allow me to do that and have a good time. I have a lot of privilege and choices but if I didn’t, I could easily have become someone involved in sex trade.Were you able to draw on any personal experiences for the show? Yes! [laughs] I and a friend, a Mexican-American woman, were walking along Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. I was a newbie to the city and didn’t realize you could get a ticket for jay-walking. We were dressed like office workers and yet these cops pulled us over and immediately assumed we were prostitutes. It was absurd and the political underpinning was that we were two women of color. So I had this awareness of various angles on sex work or commercial sexual exploitation.For research, you also stood in a window in the Amsterdam red light district. How did that make you feel? Very vulnerable and very compassionate for any woman who has to do that for a living. People look at you and you try to be attractive enough to get them to the point of negotiating a price. I cannot tell you how not sexy I felt by the end. It was a very strange experience. I had an interesting conversation with the woman who coached me through the experience, how she compartmentalizes her work, who she is at work and who she is when she’s with her boyfriend. It’s work and nothing more.Did you have a conversation with a potential john?Never did. When people tried to negotiate, my guide sent them away with a prohibitive price.How harmful is the “hooker with a heart of gold” trope in films like “Pretty Woman”? I feel strongly that the images I saw, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, those wisecracking women in buddy cop films who end up in jail, you’re not really supposed to see these women as human, someone with dreams and hopes and a life of her own. There is some kind of failing on their part which has landed them there. The challenge with a film like “Pretty Woman’ is that it relies on such “patriarchal” tropes - I can’t believe I used that word! - that it’s this man, who is a john after all, coming in to rescue a woman who couldn’t be empowered on her own. It’s problematic on multiple levels.Is she a total fiction given that you couldn’t find your “unicorn” in America? Well, even in Europe, when you got really down to talking about experiences, I asked this one woman, an Australian, “Do you want your daughter to do this?” And even though she is a woman who has addressed parliaments around the world about some of legalization of prostitution, she looked away. It was a painful moment. And I gathered that all other things being equal, if she really truly had choices, she might not want to do this.What role does nomenclature play? If as society calls them “comfort women,” as Koreans do, is it any less offensive than whore or hooker? We’re at a moment in history that is so pre-revolutionary around these ideas that language itself is of almost no help. I don’t believe that language changes the dynamic if we call someone a “courtesan.” She’ll be just as likely to face danger in her work and will have come from a background that has created vulnerability in the first place. Maybe my unicorn is still out there but we aren’t post-racial, post-class equality, post homophobia enough that we see a balanced view of these issues. We can only hope for the day when everybody has truly democratic access to all possibilities in life. Then we can see how the conversation develops.
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