The other thing Holly Golightly is that what she does is something that is not quite prostitution but is akin to it and is very common in cities.
I remember first noticing while sitting it the Pub St. Alexandre in Quebec City back in the 1980s. Not in the Pub itself, which is a great place that I strongly recommend, but on the street outside. You can see it everywhere but perhaps nowhere more blatantly than on that section of that street at that point in time. A whole lot of young people hung out around there and the more attractive women would come hang around the Pub (and others like it, there was nothing particular about the St. Alexandre beyond it being my favourite place to go in those days) to meet guys.
At first I thought they were hookers but I made a bit of a study of them and they were not. They were attractive young woman who were hoping to meet attractive young male tourists who wanted company. There was no quid pro quo. The deal was, "Pay my tab tonight and invite me out for dinner tomorrow and if I like you I'll stay with you in your hotel room and you can continue to take me out and I'll continue to sleep with you for the rest of your vacation and oh, by the way, I like presents."
They were Holly Golightlies. They were in town to get away from their family lives that they found boring and restrictive. They didn't want to get away permanently. They knew they would eventually have to face reality and get a career and a real home somewhere and I'm sure that, if a pollster asked them, the vast majority would say they plan to get married. Eventually.
It's something that goes on in every city but, as I say, not quite so blatantly as in a tourist town like Quebec City.
Here in Ottawa, you see hundreds of young women who came to town to be near political power. They have jobs ranging from waitress or stylist to public service or political staffer but even the ones at the top end of that range aren't careerists. They don't feel they have to be because they are young and hot and know how to dress and behave with a certain sophistication and they feel that is all they have to be (and, by the way, a little help with the bill for the clothes wouldn't help, shoes don't grow on trees you know).
When the Serpentine One and I first started dating there was a very real Holly Golightly named Leah across the hall from me. She was nice and beautiful and smart and funny and her boyfriend was a powerful Liberal Party staffer who drove a Jaguar. One night I came home and I could hear Leah crying hysterically and smashing things in her apartment as I unlocked my front door. I pretended I hadn't noticed but when she told me a week later that she was moving out I took her out for dinner because she looked like she needed cheering up.
She told me she'd been dumped. She'd been dreaming of marriage and she broke the subject with her guy. His response was I like you but you don't really think I'd marry someone like you do you? And she went home and thought about it. Once, she remembered, when they were supposed to go to a big do on the Parliament Hill, she'd put on a dress she knew to be his favourite and he'd arrived and rejected it. It was his favourite because it was really slutty but he couldn't have her dress like that for an event his bosses would be at. It was when she remembered that, she said, told me that she realized what she'd become.
She'd spent years pursuing this guy. She was, she told me, thousands of dollars in debt. She had several credit cards and they were all maxed out. Even though he picked up the tab for every night out they'd had together, she'd had to spend a fortune on her clothing, on her hair and on her makeup. She told me that she was going to move home and go work at the beauty salon where her mother got her hair cut and had the pull to get her daughter hired to pay of her debts and then she was going to see about getting a career of some sort.
And here we can see a gap between the dream and the reality. (A gap that Breakfast at Tiffany's acknowledges by the way, Holly is always broke. Sex and the City is considerably less realistic on this.) It's just as true today as it was when Breakfast at Tiffany's was made. Read the Candace Bushnell book that Sex and the City is based on and you will find a much grittier story than you saw on the TV show. And research into real-life Carrie Bradshaws is very gritty stuff indeed.
But the thing that is really ugly, no one wants to confront and that is that the fact that Carrie Bradshaw and Holly Golightly freely chose to be what they are doesn't make what they are a good thing. I won't repeat the word Leah used to describe what she'd become here but I think she had it right. She was trading trading sex for a good time and, she ultimately hoped, a status marriage. There is a whole boatload of ugly words to describe that.
Women not like—independent women, strong women, admirable women—live within their means and pick up their own tab.
I remember first noticing while sitting it the Pub St. Alexandre in Quebec City back in the 1980s. Not in the Pub itself, which is a great place that I strongly recommend, but on the street outside. You can see it everywhere but perhaps nowhere more blatantly than on that section of that street at that point in time. A whole lot of young people hung out around there and the more attractive women would come hang around the Pub (and others like it, there was nothing particular about the St. Alexandre beyond it being my favourite place to go in those days) to meet guys.
At first I thought they were hookers but I made a bit of a study of them and they were not. They were attractive young woman who were hoping to meet attractive young male tourists who wanted company. There was no quid pro quo. The deal was, "Pay my tab tonight and invite me out for dinner tomorrow and if I like you I'll stay with you in your hotel room and you can continue to take me out and I'll continue to sleep with you for the rest of your vacation and oh, by the way, I like presents."
They were Holly Golightlies. They were in town to get away from their family lives that they found boring and restrictive. They didn't want to get away permanently. They knew they would eventually have to face reality and get a career and a real home somewhere and I'm sure that, if a pollster asked them, the vast majority would say they plan to get married. Eventually.
It's something that goes on in every city but, as I say, not quite so blatantly as in a tourist town like Quebec City.
Here in Ottawa, you see hundreds of young women who came to town to be near political power. They have jobs ranging from waitress or stylist to public service or political staffer but even the ones at the top end of that range aren't careerists. They don't feel they have to be because they are young and hot and know how to dress and behave with a certain sophistication and they feel that is all they have to be (and, by the way, a little help with the bill for the clothes wouldn't help, shoes don't grow on trees you know).
When the Serpentine One and I first started dating there was a very real Holly Golightly named Leah across the hall from me. She was nice and beautiful and smart and funny and her boyfriend was a powerful Liberal Party staffer who drove a Jaguar. One night I came home and I could hear Leah crying hysterically and smashing things in her apartment as I unlocked my front door. I pretended I hadn't noticed but when she told me a week later that she was moving out I took her out for dinner because she looked like she needed cheering up.
She told me she'd been dumped. She'd been dreaming of marriage and she broke the subject with her guy. His response was I like you but you don't really think I'd marry someone like you do you? And she went home and thought about it. Once, she remembered, when they were supposed to go to a big do on the Parliament Hill, she'd put on a dress she knew to be his favourite and he'd arrived and rejected it. It was his favourite because it was really slutty but he couldn't have her dress like that for an event his bosses would be at. It was when she remembered that, she said, told me that she realized what she'd become.
She'd spent years pursuing this guy. She was, she told me, thousands of dollars in debt. She had several credit cards and they were all maxed out. Even though he picked up the tab for every night out they'd had together, she'd had to spend a fortune on her clothing, on her hair and on her makeup. She told me that she was going to move home and go work at the beauty salon where her mother got her hair cut and had the pull to get her daughter hired to pay of her debts and then she was going to see about getting a career of some sort.
And here we can see a gap between the dream and the reality. (A gap that Breakfast at Tiffany's acknowledges by the way, Holly is always broke. Sex and the City is considerably less realistic on this.) It's just as true today as it was when Breakfast at Tiffany's was made. Read the Candace Bushnell book that Sex and the City is based on and you will find a much grittier story than you saw on the TV show. And research into real-life Carrie Bradshaws is very gritty stuff indeed.
But the thing that is really ugly, no one wants to confront and that is that the fact that Carrie Bradshaw and Holly Golightly freely chose to be what they are doesn't make what they are a good thing. I won't repeat the word Leah used to describe what she'd become here but I think she had it right. She was trading trading sex for a good time and, she ultimately hoped, a status marriage. There is a whole boatload of ugly words to describe that.
Women not like—independent women, strong women, admirable women—live within their means and pick up their own tab.
I agree with you about all of this, from the girls who do this to Sex and the City (except maybe for Miranda who made good money but lived more frugally than Carrie). And I never thought Holly was a prostitue or even a high class call girl.
ReplyDeleteI think what you're describing happens a lot, more than anyone wants to admit. I've heard that this can be seen in some of the tonier restaurants in and around Hartford--HARTFORD! So if its going on in provincial CT it has to be happening in spades in NY and the other large cities. I think for some young women this is still part of their American dream, and for others who aren't good looking its their fantasy. I also think their motives can be different though, I think some want to marry wealth and power, others do it as a rung up the ladder of their success. I remember during the Monica Lewinsky fiasco, a feminist no less--the then head of NOW--depolored what she called the "power fuck" where young girls sleep with powerful men in the hopes of marrying them or advancing their careers.
You never answered my question, does Joan Holloway fit into this category?