Philadelphia’s alt-weeklies are awash in she-males.
You only need to open up the Weekly or City Paper classifieds to find them. You might not see them at first, but they’re right in front of your nose: it’s just that there are so many of them that you might not notice. In fact, the default setting for prostitutes in these pages is ambidrogenous. Ladies of the night offering boring ol’ hetero sex are compelled to add “100% Female!” to their ads so that customers know what they’re getting.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with this sort of thing, aside from the basic illegality of prostitution. Your sex life is your own business in a properly enlightened, liberal society. Still, it seems as though the market’s interest in these strangely half-gendered individuals hints at a deeply repressed or conflicted sexuality that must be fairly widespread.
Besides which, it seems clear that the services on offer are particularly filthy. Most of the ads include a line saying there are “X reasons you should call me”, where X is a number ranging from around 7 to well over a dozen. Presumably this refers to the menu of sexual acts on offer. But my laughably naive schoolboy mind struggles to fill it out with monetizable sex acts. I can only complete the list by including services that are either deeply unwise or thoroughly implausible.
All in all, it paints a seedy picture of the city — one that must be embarrassing to its residents.
Still, it could be worse.
I find another interesting barometer of a city’s moral fibre is how many pages you have to turn into the alt-weekly to find your first ad for breast augmentation. San Francisco’s are usually in the page 4 to 8 range, but my beloved East Bay Express hides them well beyond page 10. The one I read in Los Angeles devoted page 2 in its entirety to plastic surgery ads, under the depressing/hilarious banner “Get Ready for Summer!!!”