Late Night, Bourbon Street

by Shaker BrianWS, who may or may not become a full-time contributor someday, depending on a number of mysterious factors that I cannot reveal without tearing apart the universe at its very seams. Sorry!

[Content Note: Misogyny; hostility to consent; harassment.]

I went to New Orleans for the first time last week for a business trip. It was my first time there, and it was really cool to see parts of New Orleans I'd only ever seen before on television. The unique culture of the town is incredible and complex, but that is a whole other post. What I'm writing about today could, and does, happen in lots of places.

I was on Bourbon Street one night, my second time at a bar with a house band so great I had to go back. I was with a work colleague, another white man, and we were approached by a roving bartender, a young white woman. She'd approached us the previous night, too, on both occasions making some sexually suggestive moves with the test-tube shots she was hawking.

Jovially, I made a joke to the effect of, "I mean, you're really adorable, but you're totally barking up the wrong tree here!"

She put the test tubes back in the tray, laughed, and leaned over to tell me, "I'm just doing what works!"

I just looked at her for a second as my brain processed that admission, and she went on, telling me, "The guys on Bourbon St. expect something more. They don't just want a shot—even if it's from the prettiest woman in here. They want to kiss you or touch you or make you do those kinds of things if they're going to buy one from you."

I told her, "That's so fucking gross. I'm so sorry."

And she said, "I know, but I've got a 3-year-old daughter, and I get $24 for every tray of these shots I sell, and the more I do that, the faster they go. That's all that matters to me."

She stood with us for a few minutes and chatted over the excellent house band. During that conversation, the work persona she had to affect to make a living fell away. The woman I was now chatting with had an entirely different demeanor—the self-protective mask had fallen away and here was just a person trying to make ends meet. She was kind. She was funny. She was candid with us. She didn't owe us that, but she offered it anyway. And I really liked the person she let me know, a little bit, in that noisy bar.

What kept echoing in my head were her words, "the guys on Bourbon St. expect something more," and I knew that it wasn't just here on Bourbon St. that men "expected something more."

But it's the wrong kind of expecting more.

In a culture that routinely objectifies women, and in which every bit of casual misogyny aims to reinforce the idea that just being a woman isn't enough, the guys on Bourbon St. wanted more. And they felt entitled to it. They felt entitled to demand access to a woman's body if they were going to make a purchase, something that obviously wouldn't be an expected part of the purchase were it a man selling the product.

That's the problem. When even the smartest, most powerful women are routinely told what to do with their bodies by a patriarchal and misogynist culture (Stop running for the White House now! Now run for the White House!), it leaves someone like our roving bartender little more than two choices.

She can grudgingly offer something more—a touch, a kiss, access to her body—and sell out her tray of items to men who are only interested in the way her performance will please them, rather than the goods she is actually selling, or she can refuse to pander to a neighborhood culture (found in many neighborhoods) where misogyny rules, sell fewer items, and go home with less money to take care of her daughter, to take care of herself, to provide food and shelter.

She chose the former, and I could hear in her voice the way she had resigned herself to doing something she didn't want to do, but the only thing that mattered to her was having enough money at the end of the night, the end of the week, the end of the month, to take care of the most important person in her life.

I left the bar angry that night. Angry not at the choice she had made, but at the choices she had been offered—the choices that are created by men in a culture that has taught them in so many ways that a woman's body is not her own, but something meant for their satisfaction. Angry that the difference between making money and not making money in that atmosphere all came down to whether she was willing to stroke the egos of drunk men, and suggestively go along with their groping, their touching, their demands, all in the name of selling alcohol.

I don't begrudge her the choice she made. And I don't judge her for making it.

I am angry that she was given no truly meaningful choice in the first place.

[Related Reading: Why I'm Pro-Choice, and My Boyfriend Is, Too.]