Excerpt from Playgirl, January 1974. We got a letter one day telling us about something called COYOTE: A Loose Women’s Organization. From the accompanying flyer, we learned that COYOTE is a group of prostitutes, housewives, and other women working for the decriminalization of prostitution and a redefinition of its role in society.
A quick poll of our editorial staff revealed that none of us had ever sat down for a quiet talk with a self- proclaimed prostitute. All we knew about “the oldest profession” had been gleaned from beady-eyed articles in men’s magazines, movies like Never on Sunday and Klute and Broadway musicals featuring an assortment of harlots with hearts of gold.
Several of us owned up to rather mixed feelings about prostitution: (a) We didn’t want to know about it, and/or (b) we disapproved of it, and/ or (c) we were curious about it. We considered the fact that prostitution has usually been written about from a male point of view, while for women’s magazines, the subject has generally been considered a big no-no.
Since we’ve already torn the veil of mystery from the nude male form and the world didn’t come to an end, we decided to throw what remained of our caution to the winds and rack up another first: a frank discussion of prostitution from a woman’s point of view.
What follows is an abbreviated account of author Stephanie Caruana’s conversation with some COYOTE members and friends. We feel it contains some interesting insights on women’s relationships with men, from an unusual perspective. This discussion is an exploratory dialogue; your comments and reactions will be most particularly welcome — Editor.
I sat with a group of women of widely varied backgrounds and occupations, on the sunny back porch of Margo St. James’s Marin County refuge, half an hour from San Francisco. The house says a great deal about its occupant. It began life as a rustic redwood cabin, perched on a densely forested mountainside, visited daily by red-tailed hawks, coyotes, and other wild beasts. It grew slowly, like the Chinese House of the Bead Game, into a marvel of form and texture, unpretentious but a delight to all the senses. It might be the home of an artist, a writer, or a philosopher. Margo is all these and more: long-distance runner, ex-cocktail waitress, ex -secretary, ex-law student, ex-wife, ex-call girl, and currently chairmadam and founder of COYOTE. Superbly intelligent and cunning, like the outlaw coyote who is her totem animal, she is a tall, rangy woman of thirty-five, who speaks with uncanny though unconventional logic, deadpan humor, and a wide, engaging grin. When she meets you, she moves right in, violating your body space immediately. She thrusts her long face so close you can feel her breath, and speaks in a slow, understated drawl. “Deal with me,” her body insists. “Listen to me.”
She exists in an intricate human network, a loose-knit Mafia of artists, writers, lawyers, business freaks, and others of the avant-garde counter-culture, who support each other in marvelously complicated ways. She recently obtained a grant from the Point Foundation for COYOTE. She is often invited to speak to legal, educational, and cultural groups, and is working on a book, The Coyote Papers.
Caruana: What is COYOTE trying to do?
Margo: Our chief goals are to remove the stigma from prostitution — to better our working conditions, stop police harassment for what is essentially a victimless crime, and organize legal aid to keep these women out of jail. After that, we’ll see.
According to the chronicles of pop culture, sexual freedom has become a part of our society. Sex isn’t such a difficult commodity to obtain. Why do some women get paid for it?
Sexual freedom — or “free sex” — is more of a myth than a reality. Very few people say they are getting all they want. People who pay for it do so because it’s convenient or it’s entertainment, or a fantasy like romance, or for friendship, or just to try something new.
Why do so many women resent prostitutes and support the laws against them?
Margo: It’s a cultural hangover. Prostitution used to be okay. Mimi Goldman wrote a history of prostitution, about Virginia City. At the beginning, the whores took care of everyone. They did the nursing, ran the orphanage, did charity work, and kept everybody together. They were the first women on the frontier. Then the men who made money in the gold mines brought respectable women out to be their wives. These women raised a hue and cry and shunted the whores off to the red-light district. They cut them out of the charity work. At that time, a hundred years ago, there wasn’t much for a woman to do except be somebody’s wife, totally dependent on a man, emotionally and financially. Today, with women’s lib, a whore is more accepted. Ti Grace Atkinson thinks the whore is the ideal liberated woman. I agree with her completely. On the other hand, there is a dialectic. There is a rise in prostitution today because of the so-called aggressive sexual activities of the liberated non-hookers. They are scaring the pants off the men. Men are not having their illusions catered to any more. They are not IT for some woman who is lying at their feet. Instead, the women grab them by the coattails and say, “Hey baby, let’s get it on; I’ll get on top!” The men can’t quite accept that at first. They’re frightened. So, they pay a woman to create the illusion that the man is really the potent person. In actuality, the hooker is usually in charge. She manipulates the man subtly. She knows what he likes and how much time he is going to spend getting undressed and into bed — about ten minutes. And how much time it will take him to come — about two minutes. So much for that.
Kathy: (A fresh-faced woman, in her early twenties; a former call girl who looks like the college girl next door; Kathy recently wrote a magazine article called “Who’s Hustling Whom?”) You give the man what you think he expects, to the nth degree. You give him value for the money.
Chris: (Serious; highly educated, attractive. Profession: organization! development.) You have to do the fake orgasms and all that. I’d rather not do that.
Margo: It’s hard to be straightforward unless you are taking money. If you are emotionally involved with the man, you feel inhibited — because you don’t want to correct him. A woman’s key to control over the man is her sexual responsiveness. That’s what turns him on. He feels he is doing it for this woman. If it’s easy to make her come, and she never says a mean word to him and never tells him what to do, he feels as though he knows exactly what’s happening. That’s the illusion.
White Panther: (COYOTE name of a very pretty, blonde call girl, who is supporting her parents and putting herself through college with a major in English, on her substantial earnings.) He’s not at all embarrassed if he comes in two minutes, because she pretends that’s exactly what she wanted.
Chris: But when you’re getting paid, don’t you feel you have to put on a good performance?
Kathy: Even if you’re not taking money, you feel that way. The difference is, maybe he’ll leave you, if it’s a romance situation; and if it’s not, maybe he won’t come back and give you more money.
Margo: I feel that if they are paying me, I am going to tell them the truth. I rarely fake an orgasm. If a man comes too fast for me and gets up to leave, and he has already paid me, I won’t say anything. But if he sticks around and seems to want some direction, I tell him exactly what to do. In fact, I boss him around a little bit. Most of them love it. I say, “That was almost perfect. Next week, bring more money!”
Caruana: Some of the more honest cads of my acquaintance say they would rather visit a prostitute than go to the trouble of making it with more “respectable” women. Why?
Margo: Because a man can feel more sexually secure with a prostitute. She doesn’t criticize his technique. Or if she does, it’s with tact and humor. And he also feels secure because he knows she isn’t going to demand anything more than a certain amount of money because they balled. It’s a finite situation.
Beverly: (A highly respected attorney who has been active in several civil rights cases.) There are no strings. He doesn’t have to pretend and go through the whole romance and I-love-you bit.
Margo: They are two people who are developing a completely courteous relationship. Each wants something the other person has. The man doesn’t want to irritate the hooker, because just when he is coming, she may make some ill-timed move and ruin it for him. So he’s going to tell her that she’s the greatest. Actually, the whore depends on his admiration, compliments, and flattery as much as he depends on the illusion she creates for him.
Kathy: What do you expect to get out of this discussion?
Caruana: A philosophy. To me, the most interesting thing about COYOTE is that people who have been extremely put down by society are suddenly taking a superstrong position.
Kathy: Why is it a super-strong position to say that prostitution should be decriminalized?
Caruana: It’s more than that. You’re saying, “We aren’t criminals, we are citizens; we demand so-and-so. We perform a necessary service.” It is like a social revolution from the bottom up. One of the upsetting things that happens to women is that our female sexuality is used against us so much. “You are a sexy creature; therefore, you are an instrument of the devil and must be kept under control.” Women have been brainwashed and frightened by this attitude. To me, the prostitute is a symbol of all women, carried to the extreme. When the Christian religion evolved, Mary was considered the only woman without sin — because she managed to conceive without having sexual intercourse. But it was all right for Joseph. From a religious point of view, any woman who goes to bed with a man is a sinner, but it’s not true the other way around.
Margo: Women have to start taking pride in their genitals, the way men do…
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