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A Music So Beautiful the Birds Fell from the Trees

ISAF Public Affairs/ Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Maija Liuhto | Longreads | June 2018 | 18 minutes (4,978 words)

 

Late on a Thursday night in a faraway corner of Old Kabul, a community of musicians and worshippers gathers for an evening of solemn prayer, ecstatic singing, and melodies from days long forgotten.

In a small shrine rebuilt after having been destroyed during one of the worst periods in Afghanistan’s tumultuous history, fires have been lit, milky tea is served, and hashish is being passed around. This shrine, called Charda Masoom (Persian for “the Fourteen Infallibles”), lies at the end of a muddy street with open gutters, lined with houses with cracked paint and tiny shops selling trinkets and household goods. On the surface, this congested alley looks like any other in this part of the city.

But what an outsider would not know is that for several hundred years, this street — known as Kucheh Kharabat, “the alley of desolation,” the word originally referring to taverns where people came to drink, dance, and listen to music — has been home to a vibrant artistic community of musicians, who now find themselves with their backs against a wall. Space for them in Afghan society continues to shrink.

Originally, many of them came to the area from India to provide entertainment in the 19th-century amir Sher Ali Khan’s court. Local Afghan musicians followed course and moved to this area to learn traditional Indian ragas from the foreigners, letting their own Afghan folk tunes mix with the melodies of the subcontinent. Day and night, singers sang songs by medieval Persian poets, full of references to wine, love, and passion. Tabla drummers gave rhythm to the heady, trance-inducing music.

This is how the music of Afghanistan was born, in this now-forgotten alley in the backstreets of Kabul.

But all of that is in the past. Tonight, one senses a feeling of dread. Only a week ago, the Islamic State attacked a Shia mosque in Kabul. The worshippers and musicians here, although not Shiite, also belong to a minority religious community despised by ISIS and the Taliban. They are Sufis, part of a mystical, tolerant, and inclusive strand of Islam practiced all over the Muslim world. Sufism, followers of which believe is the true heart of Islam, used to have a large following in Afghanistan, evident in the many shrines found all over the country. The Sufis’ love of saints, music, and tolerance was too much for the extremist Taliban regime, and so the movement was driven underground in the late ’90s.

* * *

Today, the Taliban are stronger than ever despite their regime’s fall 16 years ago.
The worshippers seem tense. Police stand guard outside the shrine while a group of men circle a tombstone inside, silently praying for the descendants of Prophet Muhammad who are believed to be buried here. Outside, another group of men huddles in a circle, wrapped in woolen shawls. Smoke rises from their midst and the heady smell of hashish wafts all the way to the street outside the gates.

Suddenly, small children who have been happily running around are gently asked to leave, guided to the gates by a malang, the caretaker of the shrine, who has messy hair and at least a dozen shiny rings on his fingers. A boy, curious to find out what happens after 10 p.m., lingers by the sturdy, carved wooden door — he hasn’t been noticed. He smiles cheekily and quickly runs after the others, fully aware that Thursday nights are not for children, only for adults.

The musicians have arrived. Inside the shrine, a stage waits for nights like these. A harmonium, tabla drums, and a chimta (jingling tongs) are ready for the men to start playing.


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But this is no concert or performance. This is a religious ceremony called sama, practiced by some Sufi orders, where music, dance, and chanting are used as a means to get closer to God. In Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the devotional music played at sama ceremonies is known as qawwali, made famous by the Pakistani Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in the ’80s and ’90s.

It is time to begin. Abdul Waheed Shaidayi, a middle-aged man wearing a red Kandahari cap climbs on the stage, greets everyone, and starts playing the harmonium. While he sings the introductory verses in Persian, his voice slowly soars higher and higher, picking up the pace. The tabla and chimta players join in, drumming and jingling their instruments to an intoxicating, fast-paced rhythm. The worshippers gradually fall into a trance — some aided by the hashish they have been smoking — and shake their heads while clapping furiously. When the music stops for a while, they recite prayers.

These ceremonies usually go on until 4 a.m. Then, the worshippers perform morning prayers, go to sleep, and wake up around noon. Here, in Kucheh Kharabat, the community lives at night and sleeps during the day.

These days, the sama nights are Shaidaiyi’s only chance to play the harmonium for an appreciative audience. Otherwise, he’s mostly idle, his work having long since dried up, save for occasional wedding parties where he is asked to perform. Even there, respect is hard to find, with wedding guests whispering behind the musicians’ backs, accusing them of being pimps and infidels because over the years of war people started believing music is prohibited in Islam.

These ceremonies usually go on until 4 a.m. Then, the worshippers perform morning prayers, go to sleep, and wake up around noon. Here, in Kucheh Kharabat, the community lives at night and sleeps during the day.

In Kucheh Kharabat, however, Shaidayi commands respect. Everyone greets him as he walks down the street the next day. In the local attorney’s office, a congested room where an electric guitar hangs on the wall, Shaidayi is joined by another well-known character in Kharabat: Naseer Hamahang, an imposing man in his 50s. His black hair is combed back and colorful rings decorate his fingers. Hamahang is Shaidayi’s nephew, but he is only two years younger than his uncle.

Hamahang lights a cigarette and takes a slow drag, enjoying this long-time habit that doesn’t seem to affect his singing. The two men, both native to this area, can trace their bloodlines 150 years back to all the famous musical masters of the past. Together, they have lived through days of glory, the horrors of war, and Afghanistan’s beleaguered present.

“People from other areas have come here, bad people,” Shaidayi says as he pours fragrant saffron tea for his guests. “They are insulting the street by calling it Kharabat.” In Sufism, the word desolation has an entirely different, positive meaning. It is associated with the destruction of ego and union with God.

* * *

During the 1990s there was war and years of religious extremism that turned people against this musical community and almost wiped out the culture of Kharabat. When Shaidayi and Hamahang were children in the ’60s and ’70s, their fathers Ustad Shaida and Ustad Hamahang were famous, admired musicians — so much so that most Afghans remember their names with fondness, even while musicians are simultaneously believed to be bad people by the strictly religious.

In Sufism, the word desolation has an entirely different, positive meaning. It is associated with the destruction of ego and union with God.

When the two men were little, Afghanistan hadn’t yet been through the four decades of war and political instability that changed the entire cultural and social fabric of the country. Before the communists, Soviets, and religious extremists came, the kings who ruled Afghanistan acted as patrons of the musicians of Kharabat.

As a boy, Shaidayi often accompanied his father to the royal palace where he performed for the then-king Zahir Shah. It was the king himself who would come and pick them up from Kharabat in one of his armored cars now on display in the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul — now riddled with bullet holes, because the Taliban would decades later use them for target practice.

“My father would be shaving and the king would wait,” he says, pointing out how much respect the monarch had for the musicians.

“One night I went with [my father] to the palace. I was about eight or nine years old. My father and the other musicians were singing in the king’s salon and I fell asleep. The queen came and took me to her son’s room and put a blanket on me.”

There were no formalities in the relationship between the royal family and the Kharabatis — they would all sit next to one another, enjoying the poetry and melodies of the songs.

‘My father would be shaving and the king would wait,’ he says, pointing out how much respect the monarch had for the musicians.

Once, when Shaidayi’s father was performing for the king with another musician, Ustad Nabi Gul, the birds in the king’s garden suddenly fell from the trees, he remembers. “All the palace’s workers came out and wondered what had happened. The king said, ‘Don’t touch them — it is just because of the music.’ When the music stopped, the birds came back to their senses,” Shaidayi recalls.

Even women in Kharabat used to sing, dance, and play instruments. Today, this is not possible anymore — it would be considered equal to prostitution and pimping.

“People think that we send our wives to perform at parties. But our wives are not artists, they wear headscarves,” Hamahang says, raising his voice.

Abdul Waheed Shaidayi and Naseer Hamahang. Photos by Maija Liuhto.

Back in the more tolerant days, all the great musicians of Afghanistan proudly called Kharabat their home. The street was lined with instrument shops and traditional cafés where the ustads, or masters, used to sit on takhts, traditional beds, and talk and play their instruments. Each of them had students who would come to learn the art of playing traditional South Asian and Afghan instruments in their talim khanas, or schools.

“From the day we were born we heard the sound of music,” Shaidayi says. “When the students came we would go too and listen and learn how to play the instruments.”

Once, when Shaidayi’s father was performing for the king with another musician, Ustad Nabi Gul, the birds in the king’s garden suddenly fell from the trees, he remembers.

“Growing up here was so much fun,” Hamahang says. “Our childhood was beautiful. Our fathers were very rich. They were living like kings.”

But Shaidayi was only 10 years old when he lost his father, Ustad Shaida, in an accident. “It became very difficult to survive,” he says. Not long after, his mother also passed away. He had to drop out of school after eighth grade.

“I started learning harmonium from one of my father’s students, Saleem Qandahari,” he tells me.

Qandahari’s house was right in front of Shaidayi’s. Back then, most of the musicians regularly performed live at Radio Afghanistan and would be busy until noon. Their songs were transmitted all over the city through loudspeakers, Shaidayi remembers. After that, they would come back to Kucheh Kharabat and take an afternoon nap. At 4 o’clock they finally had time to receive their students.

“Because my father was his teacher he had time for me — he respected me,” Shaidayi says. In return for the lessons, young Shaidayi ran small errands for Qandahari’s family, such as buying rice and coal.

As Shaidayi and Hamahang were slowly growing into adulthood, the prelude to war began. First, the king was overthrown by his cousin Daud Khan in 1973. But he was assassinated only five years later, in 1978, by communists who then took over in Kabul.

At the age of 18, both Hamahang and Shaidayi had to enroll in the newly communist country’s army. It was there that their musical talents were put to use for the first time.

“They noticed I was really good at singing so they asked us to create a group,” Hamahang says.

The group’s job was only to entertain the soldiers, and so it was music that saved the men from having to fight in the war that would later come to silence the instruments of Kharabat.

The communists were ruling the country with an iron fist. In a deeply religious country like Afghanistan, not everyone liked the atheism they were propagating. A resistance was being organized, led by a group of religious leaders who became to be known as the mujahideen.

Both Shaidayi and Hamahang — each around 20 at the time — were still in the army when the war started in 1979. The Soviet Union had decided to invade Afghanistan to put an end to the mujahideens’ revolt. While soldiers were sent to fight the guerrillas in the mountains of Afghanistan, Hamahang and Shaidayi stayed in Kabul, in a fort called Bala Hissar, whose ruins still overlook the muddy lanes of Kharabat.

The group’s job was only to entertain the soldiers, and so it was music that saved the men from having to fight in the war that would later come to silence the instruments of Kharabat.

But worse times were still to come. In 1992, three years after Soviet withdrawal, the mujahideen took over Kabul. An interim government was formed, but not all mujahideen leaders were supportive of it.

A violent civil war erupted, as opposing factions started shelling Kabul, destroying much of the city and killing as many as 50,000 people. Kharabat was directly in the line of fire of warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s rockets.

“It was like a rain of rockets,” Shaidayi says.

“We couldn’t go outside. No one even dared to look out of the window to see who was there,” Hamahang continues. “We stayed in the basement of our house. There was nothing to eat besides rice.”

In a matter of days, the entire city became a horrifying battlefield. Prisoners in their own homes, the Kharabatis witnessed what war can do to people.

“Many people were hit by rockets and we would have to bury them in their homes. A lot of people were buried in our homes, too,” Hamahang says.

Going outside was simply too risky. The mujahideen would periodically come to the Kharabatis’ houses, asking them to take their injured fighters to Bala Hissar, the army fort, where they could be treated. If they refused, the fighters would hang the men and cut off the women’s breasts, the men remember.

“I have seen so much cruelty in Afghanistan, so much cruelty,” Hamahang says, shaking his head.

Both men, who were now married, realized the situation was simply too dangerous for their families. They decided to leave their homes and take their families to safety in neighboring Pakistan.

“We left our homes without even shoes on our feet,” Hamahang says, describing the hurry in which they left. Had they waited only a moment longer, they may have died. When they turned to have one last look at their beloved Kharabat, they saw that rockets had hit their relatives’ homes.

“We saw that they were injured, but we did nothing because in that situation you only think of yourself,” Hamahang explains, his expression turning somber.

‘We left our homes without even shoes on our feet,’ Hamahang says, describing the hurry in which they left. Had they waited only a moment longer, they may have died. When they turned to have one last look at their beloved Kharabat, they saw that rockets had hit their relatives’ homes.

A short ceasefire allowed them to get out of Kabul unharmed.

“We took nothing with us,” Shaidayi says. There was no time to rescue precious instruments or tape recordings of their fathers’ performances. Family heirlooms and wealth accumulated through generations were left to the mercy of looting militias.

“When we left, we thought we’d be back in a couple of weeks after things in Afghanistan would calm down,” he explains. Instead, weeks turned into almost 14 years.

When the family reached the border crossing into Pakistan at Torkham, it was nighttime. There was nowhere safe for the women to sleep, so the men decided they all had to sleep on the ground and make a circle around the women, making sure no one would touch them. Peshawar, the city where most Afghan refugees were headed to, was still hours away.

But once there, the family split: Hamahang, his parents, and his wife decided to stay in Peshawar, while Shaidayi took his sisters, wife, and children south to the city of Quetta, where his brother was waiting for them. Both cities were full of newly arrived Afghan refugees, many living in congested camps on the cities’ outskirts.

“We started from zero,” Hamahang says.

The musicians were in a slightly more fortunate situation than those living in camps however because they could use their musical skills to earn money. “We rented a house [in Quetta]. The house had four rooms and we were eight families,” Shaidayi says.

Slowly, the people in Quetta started inviting Shaidayi and his brother to perform at their weddings. Many of them were Pashtuns, members of an ethnic group that lives on both sides of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Shaidayi, an ethnic Tajik and Persian speaker, started learning Pashto so that he could perform at their weddings.

As they started making money they could soon afford a bigger house. But they still lived largely hand-to-mouth.

Years went by like this, exiled in a foreign country. But Kharabat remained in Shaidayi and Hamahang’s dreams.

One day, a few years after leaving Kabul, Shaidayi heard of a new militant group on television: the Taliban. The group had taken over most parts of Afghanistan, and its militants were now moving around Kabul, brandishing their Kalashnikovs and punishing women for as little as showing their ankles.

Kharabat was now empty. Countless musicians lay in their graves, buried under their houses which had been bombed to the ground. Or, if they had been lucky, they had escaped the rockets to Pakistan like Shaidayi and Hamahang.

With the Taliban’s rule of fear, a temporary peace also came to Kabul. But there was no question of returning to Afghanistan. Shaidayi heard from his friends that the Taliban had hanged musical instruments and cassettes from trees — just like men — as a warning to musicians.

“The Taliban didn’t allow music or musicians. All those things were forbidden,” he says.

Shaidayi heard from his friends that the Taliban had hanged musical instruments and cassettes from trees — just like men — as a warning to musicians.

In Kabul, people suddenly had to hide their radios and music players out of fear of the Taliban’s brutal punishments. An eerie silence descended upon the city, broken only by the azaan, the call to prayer that rang out like clockwork five times a day, spreading from the first mosque to the next, filling the entire valley of Kabul.

But Afghans were not isolated from the Taliban even in exile in Pakistan.

“The Taliban were there in Quetta, too, but they couldn’t say anything to us,” Shaidayi says. This, according to him, was because the group didn’t have the authority to do anything on Pakistani soil.

The Taliban in Quetta could easily be identified by the way they dressed and talked, Shaidayi remembers. They also frequently carried weapons.

Sometimes, Shaidayi found himself performing at parties members of the Taliban would attend. “They would come and listen to us there. They didn’t bother us,” he says.

* * *

Almost 400 miles north in Peshawar, Hamahang was leading a similar life, recording music with his father and playing at wedding parties.

One day, upon arriving to perform at a wedding, he saw a person with kohl-rimmed eyes and a large turban on his head. “I went to sit in a corner so that he wouldn’t see me. Then I asked who he was. He said he was the chief of the Taliban’s Ministry for the Enforcement of Virtue and Suppression of Vice in Kabul. I became very afraid,” Hamahang says.

The man had come to perform the nikah, the wedding ceremony, for the bride and the groom. He signaled Hamahang to come closer and asked him who he was. “I was shaking from fear,” he says.

When Hamahang identified himself as Ustad Hamahang’s son, the man said, “Your father had a very good life in Kabul.” Hamahang said, “Don’t do anything to me, the minute I walked up to you, I became ritually impure,” meaning he had wet himself out of fear.

“I could tell my companions to take you to the other side of Torkham,” the man said to him. “There, I could do anything to you. I could kill you, but I won’t. Don’t worry, don’t do anything, don’t sing while I’m here. I will wed the couple, I will go, and then you can sing,” the Taliban chief told Hamahang.

Once the man had left, Hamahang says he sang so well that the Taliban chief’s companions became drunk on the music. Later they brought alcohol bottles and started drinking — a serious offence under the Taliban regime.

For a while, it seemed the Taliban had meant to stay in Afghanistan. Years went by. At times, the families would visit one another; a week or two in Quetta, a month in Peshawar.

The year 2001 rolled in, at first like any other. But then came the 9/11 attacks in New York City. “We didn’t realize anything would happen to the Taliban when we were watching the attacks on TV,” Shaidayi says. But Afghanistan’s fate was about to change once again. In October, the United States invaded the country and chased the Taliban and their al-Qaeda associates away. But the country was in shambles following decades of war. It was not time to return yet.

While living in Pakistan, Shaidayi and Hamahang’s fame had started spreading to all the corners of the world where Afghan refugees lived. Hamahang had already toured the United States with his father in the late ’90s. While there, he had met several famous musicians from all over the world and had even been offered the opportunity to settle in the States. But the dream of one day being able to return to Kharabat had made him refuse.

* * *

In 2004, it was Shaidayi’s turn to see the world. One day, he received a phone call from London. An Indian man at the other end of the receiver wanted to invite him to perform at a Sufi concert along with other Afghan and Iranian musicians.

A few months later he found himself in England, sitting in front of a mostly British audience.

“A lot of people asked me what I thought about London,” he says. What I always remember is that when I was singing a song about Ali [Prophet Muhammad’s nephew] and the person who was playing tabla was translating the lyrics, all the British people were crying. It was very interesting for me.”

After the concert, a group of British people came up to Shaidayi and invited him to read Sufi poetry on a hilltop. They said they were followers of a Sufi saint, Hazrat Ghaus. “When I read the lyrics of a qawwali song, they all fell into a trance.”

* * *

In late 2004, Hamid Karzai was elected president of Afghanistan. Hamahang and Shaidayi soon started hearing good news from Kabul. “Streets had been fixed, a lot of construction was taking place, and a lot of capital came to Afghanistan,” Shaidayi recalls.

In 2005, they finally packed their things, vacated their houses in Peshawar and Quetta, and headed for the Torkham border crossing, more than a decade after the first frightening night spent there.

Despite all the construction and development, a devastating sight awaited them on returning to Kabul.

“Kharabat had vanished,” Hamahang says.

Determined to see the area return to its old glory, the families started slowly rebuilding their houses. But nothing would ever be quite the same again. The years of war and horror had changed the people of Kabul.

Although many were glad to have music return to their lives after years of haunting silence, not everyone was happy to see the Kharabatis back.

“The people who had stayed in Afghanistan during the Taliban — the poor people who weren’t able to go to Peshawar — experienced a lot of terrible things, and they were psychologically affected. Because of that, some of them had very bad ideas about us,” Shaidayi says.

Still, most of the Kharabatis started teaching and performing again, hopeful that slowly things would get better. And for a good 10 years, Shaidayi had a steady, albeit meager, flow of students. But most of the students only took classes for a few months then disappeared. Two years ago, Shaidayi had to give up the small office he was renting as his teaching space. “I simply couldn’t manage anymore,” he says.

The Taliban period had influenced people’s ideas about music. It was seen as something illicit now.

“Some days ago I met with a person who wanted to learn to play the rubab [a traditional string instrument]. He told me his wife had said to him, ‘Why do you want to learn music, it’s not good.’ This is because of illiteracy. People don’t understand,” Hamahang says.

The Taliban period had influenced people’s ideas about music. It was seen as something illicit now.

Music is not explicitly prohibited in Islam. There are scholars who believe it to be permissible and those who do not. Conservative mullahs and imams of mosques often speak against music in their Friday sermons, or khutbas, because they have been influenced by extremist interpretations of religion. Their words are taken seriously in Afghanistan.

There is a mosque near Kharabat where the musicians often go to pray. The mullah there behaves well with them, partly because the Kharabatis give him money each month.

“But he is against our work. He doesn’t view it positively,” Shaidayi says.

Once, Shaidayi went to pray in a mosque further away. The mullah recognized him. “Because of that, he started his khutba by saying that music is forbidden in Islam, music is bad, and that musicians make women dance.”

Slowly, the men understood that the peace in the early years after the U.S. invasion had only been temporary. The Taliban had regrouped and Kabul became unsafe again. Now, bombs explode on a regular basis and ISIS has started targeting the Shiite community of Afghanistan. Corpses pile up and anyone who doesn’t agree with the extremists’ interpretation of religion must fear for their lives.

“From Amanullah Khan’s reign up until today, these mullahs have destroyed our lives. Not only ours, everyone’s,” Hamahang says, suddenly agitated.

And so it has become a question of life and death for the Kharabatis to prove that they are good Muslims, even though their ways of worshipping might be different from the mainstream.

“Our fathers were musicians, but they never sat behind their instruments without first performing ablutions,” Shaidayi says. “They prayed five times a day and so do we. We are Muslims.”

But it is not only mullahs, the Taliban, and other extremists who threaten the Kharabatis.

‘Our fathers were musicians, but they never sat behind their instruments without first performing ablutions,’ Shaidayi says. ‘They prayed five times a day and so do we. We are Muslims.’

One night, Hamahang saw two drunken men with guns outside his house injure a child. He ran outside and asked what was going on. “They shot me, too,” he says, showing his injured hand. The bullet went through his palm and now he is no longer able to move his right middle finger. The men, he says, were part of a criminal gang that sells drugs in Kabul. “No one can do anything to them because they are powerful.”

The gangs often lure the musicians to come to shady locations, speaking of parties and promising them money. “When we arrive, there is nothing there. They beat us, take our keyboards, and all our instruments,” Hamahang says.

Powerful former mujahideen commanders sometimes bring girls and young boys to dance at parties — a practice known by the name of bacha bazi that is often connected to sexual abuse.

“If we go to a party, how can we know that they are bringing a boy or a girl to dance there?” Shaidayi asks. “If we sing, it is uncomfortable for us when someone is dancing in front of us. And if we don’t sing, we will be beaten by them.”

It is a rainy Thursday afternoon. The houses in Kabul are cold and the smell of gas from heaters lingers on men’s traditional suits, or payraan tumbaans. Shaidayi walks down Kharabat wrapped in a woolen shawl. He has just returned from the mosque.

Hamahang appears from around a corner and greets Shaidayi. He has been invited to perform on Afghanistan’s largest TV network’s music program tonight. Occasionally the other Kharabatis go too. But interest in traditional music has decreased even among the more liberal and educated Afghans as Western-influenced music videos have taken over TV channels.

“Now people only watch. They don’t listen. … If there are no girls in the video, nobody is interested,” Shaidayi says.

While Hamahang prepares for his performance, Shaidayi wants to visit some of his former colleagues in the nearby Shor Bazaar where some Kharabatis have their offices. As he is starting to cross a busy road, a man who looks like a beggar comes to greet him. He is also a musician.

Not too long ago, the man’s desperate financial situation drove him to attempt to sell his daughter, Shaidayi explains. But the other Kharabatis, although poor themselves, intervened, collected some money, and prevented this from happening.

Finally in Shor Bazaar, Shaidayi sits in front of his harmonium on the carpeted floor of a room where some Kharabatis still continue to teach their students. The stuffy room smells of hashish and gas from a small heater. Shaidayi starts singing as the man to his left plays the tabla and the one to his right a clarinet. Immediately, everyone is transported to a different world, mesmerized by the melody and lyrics of the song. The piece is a ghazal, a genre of poetry popular in South and Central Asia, composed by Shaidayi’s father, Ustad Shaida. It tells the story of two lovers, Laila and Majnun, a Sufi parable for the relationship between God and his worshipper.

All of this would be considered haram, or forbidden, by the Taliban. But for the Kharabatis, this is the very essence of religion.

“The Taliban don’t like music. If they decide to kill someone [for that] we are the first ones to end up dead,” the tabla player in the corner says after the song has finished.

Shaidayi stands up to leave. Outside, the weather is murky and depressing. Winter has arrived. He slowly walks toward his rented flat in Kharabat, careful not to ruin his shoes in the puddles and open gutters. On the other side of the town, a bomb has just exploded. Sirens fill the air for a while as the injured and dead are transported to hospitals. Then, life must go on again. In the evening, Hamahang’s performance is broadcast on TV while the rest of Kharabatis prepare for another qawwali night in the shrine at the end of the street.

Kharabat may never again become like in the past, but the community worshipping inside the shrine will always welcome Shaidayi and Hamahang. There, away from the eyes of others, it can almost seem like no time has passed.

***

Maija Liuhto is a freelance journalist based in Kabul, Afghanistan. She covers Afghanistan for the Los Angeles Times and the largest Finnish daily, Helsingin Sanomat. Her work has appeared in Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera English, the Christian Science Monitor, and VICE.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

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This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

In early June 1958, 25-year-old John Leo Brady was in love. He was also in some trouble. His sweetheart, Nancy Boblit McGowan, had just told him she was pregnant, and he was the father. But she was only 19, married to another man. And Brady was broke.

He’d never had an easy life. He grew up poor in southern Maryland. His young parents, scraping their living from a small tobacco farm, couldn’t cope with a fussy baby. They gave him to his paternal grandparents and his Aunt Celeste, who raised him. From infancy through his late teens he suffered from serious otitis media, and his ears regularly oozed a thick, vile-smelling pus. At school, his classmates called him “stinkears.”

Brady gladly dropped out during the eighth grade to work full-time on his uncle’s farm. At 19, in 1951, he enlisted in the Air Force and served as a military policeman at bases in Washington state and Greenland. Then, over the space of four years, his otitis stopped, he got married, left the service, earned his high school equivalency, got divorced and returned home to Maryland.

In March of 1958, Brady met Nancy and her brother, Donald Boblit, because their parents were good friends with his aunt. Donald was 25, gawky, lonely and barely literate. Nancy was “just a dumb, good-looking blonde,” according to a friend, in the pre-feminist jargon of the ‘50s. Although both she and her husband, Slim, were living with her parents, they hardly spoke, and she let everyone know she intended to do whatever she wanted. Brady and the two siblings soon became close, and he and Nancy fell in love. Then Nancy got pregnant.

Brady didn’t know what to do. He was working at a local tobacco packing company for $1.50 an hour. He had recently bought a maroon 1947 Ford and was behind on his bills. But he wanted Nancy to know how much he was committed to her. She had planned a trip to New York to visit family for a week, leaving on Monday, June 23. That Sunday, when they were together, on an impulse he wrote her a check for $35,000, post-dated to July 6.

It was a dream sum—a huge number just pulled out of the air that he guessed could solve all their troubles, if he could only make it real. Nancy asked no questions; she put the check in her purse. Brady reminded her to wait. “Somehow,” he said, “in two weeks it’ll be in the bank.” Read more…

Sex Workers vs. The Internet

Illustration by Erin McCluskey

Rick Paulas | Longreads | June 2018 | 24 minutes (6,543 words)

 

Lauren couldn’t afford any more canceled dates.

A “combination of beauty and brains, exclusively available for adventures,” according to her website, she’d spent untold time and energy building her brand on the back of a modeling résumé that included portraiture in Penthouse. She’d spent thousands on website maintenance and professional photos, and another $250 to $800 a month on ads on the Eros Guide. And she’d worked damn hard for those glowing reviews — over 70 in all — posted by clients online at the Erotic Review (TER).

It allowed Lauren to charge “discerning and professional gentlemen” $500 for an hour of her time, $750 for 90 minutes of it, or $5,000 for an overnight. But like roughly half of the United States, Lauren was still living paycheck to paycheck.

There was the high cost of living in New York City, a necessary expenditure that came with the gig; unlike cam girls, she had to physically be with clients. The more pressing hit to her pocketbook, however, was the result of a serious autoimmune illness that necessitated eight surgeries over a six-year period, an out-of-pocket cost of $240,000. It was this enormous bill that had shifted her career from modeling into sex work in the first place.

“All the money I ever made [modeling] is gone,” Lauren says. “All I want to do is buy a home in the country where I don’t fucking see people. Just me and my dog.”

A stream of last-minute cancellations and no-shows, then, was extremely troubling. Not only did they leave her without the income she was expecting, but also hours she could’ve used to earn money were stolen from her. “I didn’t know why people were booking and not showing up,” she says. But a quick Google search of her name revealed the reason: a negative review posted on Ripoff Report.

“When you look up [my name], it’s the first thing that comes up,” she says.

A privately owned, for-profit website, Ripoff Report publishes anonymous complaints about products, businesses, and individuals, from multinational corporations like Walmart to self-employed freelancers like Lauren. “The evening was unpleasent [sic] to say the least,” the pseudonymous reviewer wrote. “She tried upselling me the entire evening offering a wide range of unsafe activities. I ended up cutting the date short and let her keep the 2k.” (Companies and individuals can rebut accusations — Lauren did — but the original complaint remains. “We DO NOT remove any reports,” a spokesperson for the site wrote me in an email.)

“I couldn’t tell you how much business I’ve lost due to this,” Lauren says.

Lauren deduced the reviewer’s identity almost immediately; the former client gave himself away with the same dialectical misspellings that littered previous negative reviews on other review websites. He was an hour-long date she’d had the previous year in Houston. “These hour motherfuckers can go one of two ways,” she says. “And when it goes bad, it goes really bad.”


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According to Lauren, the man paid for an hour of her time, but stayed for an hour-and-a-half, during which he “had his dinner and had it twice.” He left without giving her a tip. Three months later, he contacted Lauren to get her to “verify” him on Preferred411 (P411), a website used by sex workers and clients to “connect with others in a safe and secure way.” (On P411, clients pay $99 for a “basic” six-month membership, which can be upgraded to “basic plus” with an OK from a worker; essentially a way for workers to know the client is legit.) She said yes, and since everything in the industry is an exchange of money for time, she asked for something in return: a 10/10 review on the Erotic Review. He agreed.

She saw that while he gave her the agreed-upon 10 in the “performance” category, he’d only given her a seven in “looks.” She contacted him about the betrayal.

“I said, ‘Why would you do that?’” she says. “And he lost his fucking mind.”

The man told her she was lucky he gave her a score that high, then threatened to write another TER review about “how fucking ugly” she was. He soon made good on that threat, falsely claiming that he’d gone on another date with Lauren, giving her a 3 for “looks” and a 4 for “performance.” Lauren contacted TER with screenshots of their electronic exchanges, and they took down the new review. But the time it took for TER to process her complaint was costly; she’d lost $1,000 that night from someone who read the review and canceled. (The client’s 7/10 review, meanwhile, remained up.)

Still, it didn’t sink her business. That 7 for “looks” dragged down her average, but she’d banked enough 10/10 scores over the years that this outlier didn’t tank her score. For the next year, everything went smoothly until the “hour motherfucker” resurfaced with the aforementioned negative review on Ripoff Report and the great cancellation of dates began anew.

“Your reputation can be ruined in a heartbeat,” says Lauren, who’s since added a range of cancellation fees to her listing. “These reviews could ruin your entire business.”

* * *

Maxine Doogan remembers getting the call that revealed the future.

It was in ’98, or maybe ’99, and it came in on her landline, or maybe her cell. It was from her friend Melanie, a fellow sex worker with 25 years of experience in the field.

Melanie told Maxine to go to her computer and visit SFRedBook.com. She warned Maxine, “This is what’s coming.”

“I got on there and said, ‘Oh my fucking god, this is going to be a disaster,’” says Doogan, a Bay Area–based sex worker, activist, and founder of the Erotic Service Providers Union. “And I was right.”

RedBook was launched in 1999 by Mountain View programmer Eric “Red” Omuro. Similar to Craigslist, it was a bare-bones website composed of classified ads, but RedBook focused primarily on rating sex work. These posts, written by customers, were intended to mitigate some of the risks associated with the lack of legal protections in these business transactions. “There are women that make ads, make appointments, walk in, take the money, and walk out,” says Doogan. “And clients have no recourse.”

These rip-offs frustrated workers like Doogan, because their negative effects cultivated a general atmosphere of distrust, which then rippled into her own workplace. “Clients were treating us with suspicion, asking a lot of questions, and wanting [illegal] verbal commitments,” she says. “It made for a very difficult customer base.”

But beyond the growing concern of client rip-offs in this uncharted virtual world, Doogan saw that sex workers faced a new vulnerability. Previously, in the the street or massage parlor, workers could get a visceral sense of a potential client before choosing how to proceed. In fact, before industry norms shifted to faceless online greets before private meets, workers had ways to sleuth whether the client was on the level, a cop, or just plain bad news.

“Remember the old Thomas Guide maps?” asks Doogan. “You could use those to see if the house was their real address. And when AT&T came out with Caller ID, that helped a whole lot.”

The rise of the free online classifieds — where “everybody and her mother, aunt, brother, and grandma could put up an ad,” says Doogan, “and with no experience!” — also changed how workers spent money. Initially, this meant withdrawing the cash spent on ads in local newspapers and alt-weeklies, a shift exacerbated by some publishers’ own newfound ethical codes which led them to refuse accepting ads from sex workers. “That’s what happens when you start being the tool of moral enforcement in advertising,” says Doogan. “You lose your ass.”

That’s what happens when you start being the tool of moral enforcement in advertising,” says Doogan. “You lose your ass.

New laws targeting sex workers also aided the pull away from print as an advertising expenditure. “We all used to have ads in the Yellow Pages. They were making thousands of dollars off us,” says Doogan. “But police threatened [Yellow Pages publishers] PacBell or U.S. West with felonies, and that prompted the change.”

One way around these laws was the “personal escort” loophole, where workers sold “time” and avoided terms like “sex” in ads. It allowed Yellow Pages to continue listing escort agencies, a move that prompted independent workers to license themselves as official agencies, sometimes more than one when they could afford it. “We’d have multiple mobile phones with multiple names, so we could get listings through the alphabet,” says Doogan. “Something that began with an A, something in the middle like an M, something at the bottom.”

As print avenues dried up through stricter laws and as publishers went bankrupt, digital options filled the empty space. Eliminating physical distances and national boundaries, they offered a perceived freedom and a potential reach that print never could. But there was a catch with this new frontier. Rather than a competitive marketplace, the sites that invested in offshore servers to avoid the law’s arm and, more importantly, hired the right programmers to win the search engine optimization game, developed a near-monopoly in short order.

“Fucking Google,” says Doogan. “They’ve cut the ability to search by our name, phone number, or geographical location. It’s given Eros a lot of power.”

The Eros Guide is a classic “ad mall,” that is, simply a place to post ads. The site was founded in Oakland, California, in 2000 by Byron Mayo as a relatively obvious way to capture profits in an as-yet-unregulated market. “[The internet now] makes it possible to economically present far more information in a much more accessible fashion than ever existed before,” Mayo told the Jamaica Observer in 2001.

Doogan had one of the early ads on the site, first for free, then for “30 to 40 dollars a month.” Now, due to its paramount nature in the market, Eros makes millions of dollars a year; in 2010, Washington, D.C.–based dominatrix Jenny DeMilo estimated that the website brings in somewhere between 8 and 10 million a year. “They’re number one, so they can command what they can command,” says one sex worker, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal from Eros. “[To them], one thousand a month [for a single ad] isn’t unreasonable.”

From a worker’s perspective, it’s hard to say that money used on Eros isn’t spent well. Google “escort” plus wherever you live, and odds are good you’ll see an Eros listing. (Anecdotally, every worker I interviewed for this piece said that most of the traffic to their personal websites came from Eros.) This dominance over a worker’s ability to find clients has given Eros unchecked power over the industry; they decide who can use them and who can be banned without warning or explanation.

“They can’t give us an explanation, because it would implicate them,” says the anonymous worker. “Imagine you’re trying to work at a company, and there’s a bunch of rules in a book that you’re not allowed to see.”

Imagine you’re trying to work at a company, and there’s a bunch of rules in a book that you’re not allowed to see.

With that power comes editorial control. Unlike during the print era, when workers chose what to put in their ads, the information that workers can present is restricted by Eros’s’ legal team, limiting how they can distinguish themselves from one another. “You can’t use certain words. You have to put in your height, your weight, your hair color,” says Doogan. “They’re like, ‘The customers want to see that.’ The customers aren’t paying you! I’m paying you! I’m your customer, dumb bitch!”

In November 2017, the Department of Homeland Security raided Eros’s North Carolina call center. The raid sent a shock wave through the community after DHS obtained access to their personal information, but Eros remains active.

This creeping power of a lone, dominant ad mall wasn’t what was on Maxine Doogan’s mind when she received that phone call about RedBook back in the late ’90s. And the harrowing “disaster” on the horizon wasn’t necessarily the free-for-all ads or the rip-off-exposing message boards either. It was RedBook’s most innovative feature: the reviews section.

As described in a 2015 Wired feature about the site:

You could pay $13 a month for access to the section, where VIP customers shared detailed write-ups of their experiences with escorts, BDSM providers, and erotic masseuses. As part of their reviews, users listed the services they received, as well as details about the provider’s physical attributes.

On RedBook, clients rated workers on a scale of 1 to 10 in services, body, and face categories. Reviews was the most popular section of RedBook, and to Doogan, it represented an epochal industry shift that tilted power from workers to customers.

“Men had custody of the internet by the time Prostitution Nation got there. We were already on the internet, but we didn’t know we were on the internet,” says Doogan. “The domination of the customer over the business started on the internet.”

* * *

“I was getting ripped off,” David Elms, a frequent sex work “hobbyist” told MSNBC in 2006. “There was no way to hold people accountable.”

Elms’s solution to the claim that he was being ripped off — which could mean that a worker took his money and left without providing any services, or that they didn’t look exactly like their photographs, or that they weren’t willing to consent to every type of sexual request — was, in 1999, to develop The Erotic Review, a website where clients review their dates with sex workers. “Our reviews serve as powerful barometers that keep an otherwise illegal business honest,” reads its general FAQ section. It was RedBook’s review section hopped up on a cocktail of amphetamines and Viagra.

“Outside of America, people don’t really use it,” says Scarlett St. Clair, a sex worker based in New York and London. “But in America, they are the biggest, and they wield unfortunately a huge amount of influence.”

That “unfortunately” from the worker’s mindset makes sense. Elms’s own personal experiences, whatever they were, steered the site into a “customer is always right” ideology that persists. It’s a questionable viewpoint in an industry where, according to Sex Workers Outreach Project, its workers are 400 times more likely to be murdered on their job than workers in any other career. (To further illustrate the point, note Elms’s own record following TER’s creation: After a slew of accusations about him using his position of power to extort sex from workers, he was arrested in 2009 on several charges, including an attempt to hire a hitman to kill a sex worker; Elms and TER reportedly cut ties after the arrest.)

And yet sex workers, particularly new ones, feel compelled to use TER’s system.

“It gave me a kind of legitimacy,” says St. Clair, who joined in mid-2016. “It signaled to others that I am who I say I am and good at what I do.”

The signals of integrity, credibility, and trustworthiness are broadcast because the reviews aren’t contained in a closed, private network that only an exclusive few can examine. The low cost of entry and accessibility make TER similar to Yelp, but one where the worker-customer interaction takes place behind closed doors. “The guys who post on TER and the guys who lurk on TER are not the same set of people,” says Missy Mariposa, a worker at a legal brothel in Nevada.

TER users have two choices on the site. Basic Membership is free and allows users access to the worker’s contact information, appearance characteristics, and broad details of their reviews. A VIP Account, available for $30 a month — or free for clients who write the equivalent of one review every 15 days — gives users access to every review, a list of services offered, and more. There are forums too, where one can “hang with your favorite Hobbyists and catch up on the latest news,” but like RedBook, the reviews are the draw.

Also like RedBook, reviews use 10-point rating scales, but only for two categories. There’s “Looks,” ranging from “she was one in a million” to “I was really scared,” and there’s “Performance,” which can be rated from “it was one in a million” to “a total rip-off.” Reviews must describe encounters within the past three months and must offer “juicy” details.

As described on the site:

The Juicy Details section should be used to describe the provider, the experience, and whether or not you enjoyed the session in graphic emotional and sexual terms. Don’t make this space a recap of the General section. Instead, go for a blow-by-blow tell-all of your session with the provider from your own unique point of view.

These “Juicy Details” are a key aspect of the site used to justify the cost of a VIP membership, and thus, the site’s revenue stream. In fact, according to multiple interviews with sex workers who have used TER, reviews are often rejected by editors for not being salacious or detailed enough. As you’d expect, this focus on “blow-by-blow tell-all” leads to heavily embellished tales.

Mariposa recalls a date with a client who’d recently hurt his back. Despite being barely able to move, he wanted to keep his appointment, and so after Mariposa slowly brought him over to the bed, they had a very gentle session. “You can’t be bouncing up and down with your back broken,” she says. But when she read the date review, she couldn’t stop laughing.

“He didn’t write about how we had a lovely, intimate time,” she says. “It had to be, ‘I had her bent over. My balls were slapping everything.’ What do they call it, locker-room talk?”

TER’s FAQ section maintains that reviews are verified for authenticity, where the reviewer bears “the burden of proof.” Based on interviews with nearly a dozen workers, system checks are lax enough that a sub-industry of fake reviews has sprouted. For a fee, workers can purchase 10/10 ratings for themselves, or more insidiously, pay to take down their competitors. “You can go to a review-writing service and say, ‘I want to buy three negative reviews for so-and-so,’” says Mariposa. “You think they’re going to turn down your $175? What do they care?”

More commonly, according to workers, clients are too busy or uninterested to write reviews, so they let workers write their own. This is positive for workers; they can control how they’re perceived, but there’s an opportunity cost to spending unpaid hours writing copy hoping it will attract future clients.

There are other, more dangerous ramifications for workers reviewed on websites like TER. Whereas negative Yelp reviews may get a restaurant worker a stern talking-to from their boss, a sex worker has no real advocate other than themselves. Workers can contact TER about reviews and theoretically have them removed, but according to workers, such complaints are rarely heard or acted upon. “This company does not care about what happens to [workers],” says St. Clair. This has given TER’s reviewers — that is, the customer class — overwhelming power over the industry.

“TER’s purpose was always to push the standards of what the industry should be,” says Mariposa.

One shift in standards has reviewers dictating rates for services. This can work through a kind of rumor-based osmosis (St. Clair offers the example of a reviewer falsely claiming to have paid $150 for a service that a worker actually charges $200 for, then another worker, lurking on TER, reacting to that falsified price by adjusting their own), or it can be through a concerted effort by organized reviewers to fix prices. “There’s talk on the forums about trying to enforce lower prices by refusing to see certain women,” says St. Clair, “or by trying to make women feel guilty or bad by charging as much as they do.”

This pressure can get workers, particularly those new to the industry, to lower their prices enough that the income no longer sustains them. “The new workforce doesn’t know what to charge, so they’re chronically undercharging, and they can’t support themselves with these low rates,” says Doogan. “The turnover is higher than in the past.” But as workers accrue experience, they often learn that pricing is truly their decision.

“There was a point where I wanted to stop offering anal, so I marked it up, and people still absolutely paid,” says Mariposa, who then marked the service up again. “Guess what? They paid.”

The logical question to Mariposa’s price change is, well, if you really wanted to stop offering a service like anal intercourse, why mark it up? Why not simply refuse to offer the service? The answer? Dual pressure from customers.

First is pressure from “hobbyist” reviewers. “There were gangs of customers on RedBook who’d review a girl and falsely say she provided these services for low rates,” says Doogan. “So, the girl’s getting customers expecting these services and putting her in a bad position. That’s customers using technology over a divorced workforce to get them to provide services they don’t provide.” The second level of pressure comes from the system itself.

In December 2016, TER made a seemingly subtle change to its review system. Previously, a reviewer could score a worker anywhere between 1 and 10 in the “Looks” and “Performance” categories. But after the change, workers could only earn up to a 7 out of 10, unless they were “willing to perform one or some of the following during a session.” (With each new offering, the worker’s max score increases by one point.)

“There was no announcement, no one’s opinion was taken into account,” says St. Clair. “It just happened, and we all had to adapt.”

The four situations that allow for additional points: A “bareback blowjob” (that is, oral sex without a condom), kissing with tongue, anal intercourse, and “really bi,” which means having sex with “more than one guy.” Keep in mind, it’s irrelevant if the client wants, requests, or participates in any of these acts. If the worker doesn’t offer these services, during the review approval process, TER can lower the points of, or outright reject, the review.

The implications of the new system are obviously biased against workers. A worker who doesn’t want to participate in anal sex is now compelled to in order to score a better review. Same for a worker who doesn’t feel safe with having sex with two men at once. The change in the system also exacerbates one of the ever-present dangers of the industry: the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

“After the AIDS scare, most people use condoms for everything,” says Mariposa. “But now TER comes around and says, ‘Girls do bareback blowjobs.’ Well, now bareback blowjobs are the new standard.”

But this time, some workers fought back.

* * *

The first time Vanessa read a review of her date with a client, she felt embarrassed and ashamed.

“Not because of what I do, but because of how it’s so public and so graphic,” she says. “It was really an invasion of my privacy.”

But Vanessa, like many other workers, felt it was just part of the business. She played the review game. It was a way to feel legitimate, despite how it eroded her own power in the workplace. “Your typical TER member is like, ‘If you do this for this amount I’ll give you a really good review,’ which is really saying, ‘If you don’t, I’m giving you a shitty review,’” says Vanessa. “Everyone knows how to read between those lines.”

The first time Vanessa read a review of her date with a client, she felt embarrassed and ashamed. “Not because of what I do, but because of how it’s so public and so graphic,” she says. “It was really an invasion of my privacy.

Now and then she’d have bad experiences with TER. Like the U.K. client who gave her a 5-6 review (“5” for Looks, “6” for Performance) and said she was 90 pounds overweight. She fought that one, proving her looks to some faceless TER rep by jumping through their hoops, including taking photos in the same clothes that she donned on her personal site, while holding up hostage-like notes with the date, time, and “TER” scrawled on them. After all that, they took down the review.

Ironically, it was a relatively innocent review — her 36th, she recalls, where she received a 10/9 — that led to her leadership role in a burgeoning movement of sex workers choosing to leave TER for good.

“This guy said we did anal and he came on my face, all this bullshit that didn’t happen,” Vanessa says. “It was a great review, but none of the services I provide.” But the bigger headache was how this fake review caused friction with a longtime regular. He had wanted to book time with her, and she told him, truthfully, that she was out of town and unavailable. However, this false review suggested she was actually in town with another client at the requested time, so her longtime client felt that she was lying to him.

“It sounds immature and silly, but I have special relationships with [clients],” she says. “They want to think I’m not seeing anyone else, and that’s how I communicate with them. It’s part of the fantasy.”

To stem this, Vanessa contacted TER to tell them it was a false review. They contacted the reviewer, who doubled down on his claim that they’d met at a hotel. Vanessa asked TER to have the reviewer send a copy of their email correspondence, or anything else to prove that they’d met. The reviewer refused, citing privacy reasons. TER ultimately decided to keep the review up.

This did not please Vanessa.

“You’re not holding me hostage,” she says she told them. “You’re not my pimp, you’re not my manager!”

Vanessa went to her TER profile, copied the reviews, and pasted them on her own website. She began posting about the incident on her personal Twitter account, along with a call for other workers to copy and paste their own reviews as well. Shortly thereafter, she received a letter from TER’s attorney threatening to sue for copyright infringement. But it was something else in the letter that irked Vanessa.

“That letter was cc’d to my legal name and to an old address I was living at previous,” says Vanessa, who read these actions as threats. “They threatened to expose my legal name on the internet if I didn’t stop talking about them on social media.”

Vanessa questioned the legalities of TER’s business, musing about whether this attorney knew the amount of taxes TER paid, openly suggesting that if he didn’t maybe the IRS might. She followed these inquiries with a request for TER to remove all of her information from their website.

“Everything was gone within 24 hours,” she says.

This was Vanessa’s opening salvo against the web giant. In March 2016, she started the Twitter account @FCK_TER_, which, according to its bio, is “exposing exploitation, cyberpimping, bullying, harassment, & profiteering of sexworkers by the establishment racket known as TER.” The feed is a mix of commentary about the industry, warnings about dangerous clients, mocking quips about disgusting reviewers (known in industry parlance as “slobbyists”), and retweets from workers who are interested in or have removed their listing from TER.

There’s even a hashtag: #delisted.

While the @FCK_TER_ account currently has a relatively modest follower count around 3,600, Vanessa says that, based on her active direct messages, that number is nothing compared to those who read her feed. Often, workers will contact her privately with questions about delisting, mostly asking how to do it. Workers say TER won’t simply remove accounts upon request, using the excuse that published reviews exist for the public good. To counter that argument, Vanessa suggests legally worded threats or posting private client information, actions that seem to get TER to expedite the deletion process.

Vanessa’s DMs aren’t just about logistical concerns, but also jammed by emotional workers worried that delisting will kill their business. “Will this hurt my business? Where else should I advertise? How did you do it without TER?” she says. “It’s a whole slew of things.”

Scarlett St. Clair shared these reservations. “This is my full-time income,” she says. She spent months asking other women for tips on how to leave, trying to estimate how her business would be negatively affected if she decided to go. “There’s a lot of men who want to keep [TER] alive,” says St. Clair. “They say things like, ‘If she doesn’t have reviews she’s not legit, she’s gonna steal your money.’” Ultimately, it was an experience with a prospective client who boasted about being a “Top 50 TER reviewer” that shifted the fuzzy stressors into focus. “I don’t know them, they don’t know me, and they want to control my reputation in this industry?” she says. “I really enjoy my job and look forward to seeing clients, and this was preventing me from doing that.”

She says that she “essentially threatened legal action,” and her TER listing was removed in October 2017. “Provider information is no longer available on TER,” reads the page for her locked account.

“My dream is for TER to disappear and not have them control the careers of young women who are vulnerable,” says St. Clair. “There’s that saying, and I know I’m going to get it wrong: ‘If I see far, it’s because I stand on the shoulders of giants.’ That’s how I feel about the women of Twitter and providers online who have been a huge support.”

In fact, Twitter has become an important resource for workers educating themselves on their industry. @FCK_TER_ is merely one account devoted to recovering worker power. @FCK_ECCIE takes on a similar review forum, while @FCKP411 exposes the “exorbitant ad prices” of Preferred411.com. Laura Cohen (@ProviderSafety), a “retired escort” and “deep background screening specialist,” runs one of dozens of accounts that share tips on how workers can stay safe in this profession. Combined, their retweets, responses, and private back-and-forths compose an expanding network where workers can organize and reclaim power from client-driven websites.

“It’s snowballed,” says Vanessa. “Twitter is becoming a huge platform for sex workers.”

Twitter also doubles as a return to the era when workers wrote their own ad copy. The social media platform’s lax content restrictions allow workers the same self-determined censorship they have on their personal websites, while giving potential clients a glimpse at another selling point: their unique personalities. “It’s a wonderful resource to watch conversations, to be kind of a voyeur,” says St. Clair. “To watch these interactions and see if this is someone you want to spend time with.”

But not everyone’s buying Twitter as the savior. For some, it’s another symptom of the tech-driven work-hour creep that’s infected nearly all of employment. “It’s a waste of our unpaid labor,” says Doogan. “There’s the expectation that you have to spend unpaid time talking on Twitter to turn a prospective customer into a paying one.” Similarly the act of delisting from TER isn’t a reality for many workers who are active on the platform. “There’s a level of privilege to talk about [in delisting],” says Mariposa. “A person who gets 100 percent of their business from TER? They can’t afford that.”

Perhaps more blatantly problematic is that relying on Twitter as panacea ignores the lessons from the long history of American law enforcement’s continual and relentless clampdown on sex worker advertising, as proven by recent events.

In April 2018, President Trump signed into law FOSTA/SESTA, a bill that seeks to “clarify” the Communications Act of 1934 in a way that many sex workers believe will have a chilling effect on their ability to communicate with one another about dangerous clients. These worries have proven accurate mere weeks after the law’s passage, with many of the largest tech platforms preemptively shutting down certain elements of their sites, if not their entire operations. Most recently, those signing into Backpage.com, the popular ad-listings website, were met with a notice that the domain “has been seized” by an alphabet soup of government enforcement agencies.

No one knows how far this attempt to blockade sex workers from tech will go. But if workers are ultimately forced off even places like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and yes, Twitter, well, what’s left besides simply going back out onto the streets?

* * *

“This is a very simple concept that requires very little start-up capital, relatively little in the way of operating expenses, and will turn a profit because the concept will be embraced,” reads a boldly worded 2012 blog post by Amanda Brooks, author of The Internet Escort’s Handbook.

The post detailed a simple website that eschews the popular review-based model for one that embraces the basics. “Verification without incrimination,” writes Brooks in the post, before describing simple ways to develop a system that would allow workers to prove who they are without publicly outing themselves, while incentivizing clients to prove they’re not law enforcement, to show up for appointments clean, and to be safe on dates. Meanwhile, the problems that have previously plagued websites would be inoculated its bare-bones construction: no forums, no private messages, no reviews, no membership fees, and no explicit photos or details of the services provided.

Rather than retelling “juicy” details, a date would complete a questionnaire of simple yes-or-no questions, for example, “Did they arrive on time?” and “Would you recommend them to another person?”. A “yes” to all questions by both parties, and they’re both verified. The website would then keep a public running tally of positive and negative verifications, to be viewed by clients and workers before deciding to see someone.

“Can’t wait for someone to run with this idea,” Brooks closed her post.

“I was in my pj’s lounging when I read Amanda’s blog post,” writes Ella, owner of The Verification Guide, to me in a chat message. “I went, ‘Well, that’s fucking brilliant’ and got to work.”

Ella had spent the previous decade as a sex worker based in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. During that time, she listed her services in the usual client-driven alphabet soup that workers are forced onto. “P411, ECCIE, TER, TOB, BestGFE, Slixa, you name it,” she writes. “Oh, TRB before it was raided.”

She remembers the 2009 murder of Julissa Brisman, a 26-year-old model and internet masseuse who answered an ad on Craigslist and was shot dead in a Boston hotel room. Even with all of those systems out there, “we had nothing reliable,” she writes.

But with Brooks’s brainstorm, Ella found a blueprint that she felt could deliver. “I can’t call TVG my idea,” she writes. “We used that framework as a core foundation for our site and branched out from there.”

Despite the site’s simplistic design, Ella quickly hit a major roadblock. After months of design work, her first developer, a close friend, was struck and seriously injured by a car. “I had to start all over again with someone new, which set me back pretty significantly,” she writes. But finally, after the plodding process of redoing much of the work, the Verification Guide launched in February 2017.

“We are coming up on 1,000 users, and I’m beaming with pride,” she writes.

One worker who bought into the new possibility is Missy Mariposa, whose ads now blanket the site. “I wanted to pay their server bills,” she says. “I love the site. I would love nothing else than for it to get traffic.” For Mariposa, it’s a chance for a website that stabilizes the power dynamic between client and worker.

She walked me through a beta test that Ella conducted to counter one of the most common problems with online verification: the client falsely claiming a date had occurred. After Mariposa and a friend input their information in the system, Ella contacted the “client.” In her review, Ella asked them for a parking receipt, or a receipt for anything purchased on the same block, or an ATM receipt with the private information blurred out — anything at all to verify the story. “Guys who got ripped off wouldn’t have a problem with that,” Mariposa says. “They’d say, ‘Fuck yeah, here’s my receipt.’”

While this level of worker protection seems simple — even obvious — it’s an important ideological shift from the pure market-based approach of Eros and the customer-is-always-right ethos of TER and other review sites. Yet despite that focus, TVG has an uphill battle to relevancy; it will only be as useful as the number of clients and workers that buy into it. Like any industry shift, that necessitates disrupting strongholds that currently control the trade.

All of the above, of course, doesn’t even consider how the passage of FOSTA/SESTA has disrupted how workers communicate with one another and with their clientele.

Since I began reporting this piece, TER has blocked access from U.S. addresses until “such time as the courts have enjoined enforcement of the law, the law has been repealed or amended, or TER has found a way to sufficiently address any legal concerns created by the new law.” The response to this news has been predictably mixed, with the anti-TER contingent full of gloating glee, while those relying on it for business have promoted work-arounds and struggled with what to do next. As Christina Parriera, a sex worker in Nevada, summed up: “No ability to screen = coming into contact with dangerous clients. Predators. = Rape. Assault. Murder.”

Meanwhile, TVG’s site has also been taken down, although Ella assures me they’re “making big changes to protect ourselves as well as our members, but we will not being going anywhere.” She tells me that they’ll be moving to a new site called Have We Met?, which will function in much the same way as the original TVG, but now, because of FOSTA/SESTA, only accessible to those who register. It’s a big change.

“In reality, having aspects of the site public will still put our members at risk of being easily found and having their ads misconstrued by overzealous law enforcement,” Ella writes. “The goal in this situation is to not be the low-hanging fruit.”

Sex workers, as always, move forward into the murky ether of constantly shifting laws, hoping that this time they’ll claim more control than they had before. One new development has been the creation of Switter by a collective of sex workers, which anticipates a crackdown on Twitter by developing a “sex work–friendly alternative to mainstream social media.” To remain active in the United States, they’ve set servers up in Australia, where sex work is legal, and developed their system using “a decentralized, open-source network.” It attracted 20,000 members in less than two weeks of operation.

But even that seems like fighting for scraps against the forever game of U.S. taxpayer–funded whack-a-mole.

With each site’s closure in this latest generation of communication crackdown, sex workers, already unprotected as a workforce, will be left further vulnerable to dangerous clients as they wait for the next online portal to fill the current power vacuum. And if the internet’s long relationship with sex workers is any indication of the future, there’s no reason to expect that the next dominant website, whatever it may be, will have that class’ best interests in mind.

“There would be no market for such a shoddy online platform as Backpage was if sex work wasn’t a crime. No one need defend that,” the journalist, Melissa Gira Grant, wrote in response to Backpage.com’s seizure. “There are no martyrs here, just increasingly poorer sex workers.”

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Rick Paulas has written plenty of things, some of them serious, many of them not. He lives in Berkeley, is a White Sox fan, and is working on his second novel. He can be found at rickpaulas.com.

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Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact checker: Ethan Chiel
Illustrator: Erin McCluskey
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

A Frustrating Year of Reporting on Black Maternal Health

Danielle Jackson | Longreads | June 2018 |3370 words (14 minutes)

“It’s in fashion to talk about black women’s maternal care,” Bilen Berhanu, a Brooklyn-based full-spectrum birth doula told me recently. I’d asked her about the outpouring of news stories, from multiple national outlets, about infant and maternal mortality over the past twelve months.

The reporting has added flesh and aching detail to what I’ve come to think of as an embarrassing public health crisis in the United States. Among industrialized countries, our nation has the highest rate of infant deaths. We’ve had dramatic declines since 1960, but we have not kept pace with other nations we’d consider peers. New American moms face similar danger: The rate of maternal mortality in the U.S. has been rising since 2000 while falling for most other nations in our subset.

Deep, persistent inequality — access to safe neighborhoods and hospitals, functioning schools, healthy food — plays a part. But across family income levels and educational attainment, the infant mortality rate for black babies is more than twice than it is for whites, according to data from 2007-2013. Black mothers are also more imperiled than white ones — they are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes leading up to or within a year after giving birth. In New York City, black mothers are 12 times more likely to die than their white counterparts. Read more…

The Mr. Memory of Jazz

AP Photo/Jean-Jacques Levy

I’m a huge fan of saxophone genius Charlie Parker, the man known as Bird. Recently I’ve been listening to live recordings instead of his studio work, most taken from scratchy acetates of ancient radio broadcasts or lo-fi private recordings made by fans like the legendary Dean Benedetti. Even in our internet era, it can be hard to find detailed, reliable information about live recordings from, say, 1947 at LA’s long-defunct Hi-De-Ho Club. In the process of researching, I found David Remnick‘s 2008 New Yorker article “Bird Watcher.”

In it, Remnick profiles jazz historian and Charlie Parker devotee Phil Schaap, who’s hosted “Bird Flight,” on Columbia University’s radio station for three decades. Although this article is a decade old, it remains relevant because Bird’s art remains relevant, or as Remnick puts it, “There is no getting to the end of Charlie Parker.” Parker died in 1955, yet new CDs keep coming out containing historic live recordings that have finally been remastered or re-sequenced. Schaap’s knowledge is so deep that when Dean Benedetti’s lost live recordings of Bird — one of jazz’s true holy grails — needed preserving and documentation, Schaap did the job, reinforcing eight miles worth of disintegrating tape by hand. A repository of information, he relishes minutia and arcana; his show’s winding, digressive style blurs, in Remnick’s words, “the line between exhaustive and exhausting.”

Schaap is not a musician, a critic, or, properly speaking, an academic, though he has held teaching positions at Columbia, Princeton, and Juilliard. And yet through “Bird Flight” and a Saturday-evening program he hosts called “Traditions in Swing,” through his live soliloquies and his illustrative recordings, commercial and bootlegged, he has provided an invaluable service to a dwindling art form: in the capital of jazz, he is its most passionate and voluble fan. He is the Bill James of his field, a master of history, hierarchies, personalities, anecdote, relics, dates, and events; but he is also a guardian, for, unlike baseball, jazz and the musicians who play it are endangered. Jazz today is responsible for only around three per cent of music sales in the United States, and what even that small slice contains is highly questionable. Among the current top sellers on Amazon in the jazz category are easy-listening acts like Kenny G and Michael Bublé.

For decades, jazz musicians have joked about Schaap’s adhesive memory, but countless performers have known the feeling that Schaap remembered more about their musical pasts than they did and was always willing to let them in on the forgotten secrets. “Phil is a walking history book about jazz,” Frank Foster, a tenor-sax player for the Basie Orchestra, told me. Wynton Marsalis says that Schaap is “an American classic.”

In the eyes of his critics, Schaap’s attention to detail and authenticity is irritating and extreme. He has won six Grammy Awards for his liner notes and producing efforts, but his encyclopedic sensibility is a matter of taste. When Schaap was put in charge of reissuing Benny Goodman’s landmark 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall for Columbia, he not only included lost cuts and Goodman’s long-winded introductions but also provided prolonged original applause tracks, and even the sounds of the stage crew dragging chairs and music stands across the Carnegie stage to set up for the larger band. His production work on a ten-disk set of Billie Holiday for Verve was similarly inclusive. Schaap wants us to know and hear everything. He seems to believe that the singer’s in-studio musings about what key to sing “Nice Work If You Can Get It” in are as worthy of preservation as a bootleg of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. Reviewing the Holiday set for the Village Voice, Gary Giddins called Schaap “that most obsessive of anal obsessives.”

When Charlie Bird died, fans painted “Bird Lives!” on buildings around New York City. Thanks to fans like Schaap, the epitaph holds true for fans like me.

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The Prosperity Plea

Poor People's Campaign

Livia Gershon | Longreads | May 2018 | 10 minutes (2,395 words)

On Monday, May 14, I was among some ninety people gathered at the capitol building in Concord, New Hampshire. We sang old Civil Rights songs and held signs with slogans like “Starving a Child is Violence,” and “Systemic Racism is Immoral.” People told harrowing stories about growing up anxious over acquiring basic necessities and brushes with disaster when a child got sick and needed a parent at home. David Jadlocki, a pastor, gave a fire-and-brimstone sermon. “We will never be free, we will never be whole, we will never be happy, as long as our fullness is bought at the expense of another’s existence,” he said. “As long as there are children living in our nation who wake up each morning and go to bed each night gripped by the pains of hunger and the shame of poverty, we are not free.”

The crowd comprised mostly the kinds of people you would expect to find at 2 p.m. on a weekday—retirees, students, workers who could duck out early—and the civil disobedience was less dogs-and-firehoses than a polite exchange with Officer Friendly; when a group blocked a street, we were gently escorted for a brief stay in jail. None of this may have appeared particularly extreme. But the message on display was something radical, a national revival of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, taking place over 40 days, in 39 states plus Washington, D.C., with the slogan “a new and unsettling force.” The movement aims to challenge the way most Americans view the economy, by overthrowing the treasured, toxic American ideal of personal responsibility. There’s no personal shame in being poor, the campaign’s leaders argue, what’s shameful is maintaining a society in which poverty exists.

Read more…

Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose

AP Photo / CSA-Printstock, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Elisa Albert | How This Night Is Different | May 2018 | 23 minutes (5,706 words)

October 2004

Dear Philip,

You must be aware of the intimidation factor inherent in anyone’s writing to you, but I wonder if maybe the paradigm is similar to what happens when a stunning woman walks into a room: no one approaches her, she’s simply too beautiful; everyone assumes they have no shot. Maybe you don’t get many letters. Maybe you haven’t received a truly balls-out, bare-assed communiqué since 1959.

You once signed a book for me. That’s the extent of our connection thus far, but it’s something, isn’t it? The book was The Counterlife, but I had yet to read it when I presented it to you for signature. You were unsure of the spelling of my name, and so there’s an endearing awkwardness, a lack of flow, to the inscription. For E, you wrote, and the pen held still too long on the page, leaving a mark at the point of the lowest horizontal’s completion while you waited for me to continue spelling. L, you continued on, and then, again, a spot of bleeding, hesitant ink before the i and the s and the a, which proceed as they should before your slanted, rote, wonderful autograph. I remember being all too aware of the impatient line behind me, people clutching their copies of Portnoy’s Complaint, Goodbye, Columbus, The Human Stain, the odd Zuckerman Unbound. I tried to meet your eye, I tried to communicate something meaningful. The others, of course, didn’t get it. I wanted you to know: I got it. Later, when I found my way to reading the book, I actually purchased a whole new copy so I wouldn’t sully my signed paperback. I cherish our moment of eye contact, your pen hovering over the title page, my name circulating in that colossal mind of yours.

But wait. This is no mere fan letter; no mere exercise in soft-core intellectual erotica constructed for your amusement. I have an objective. How old are you now, Philip? Early seventies, is it? You are, of course, notoriously private. I have the books, sure, like everyone else. And the reviews of the books, each of which mentions the notorious privacy. And there’s the Claire Bloom debacle, which I hesitate even to mention, given its complete disrespect of the notorious privacy (though you might be happy to know that I couldn’t find “Leaving A Doll’s House” in any of the four sizable bookstores I checked and had to finally order it on Amazon). And The Facts, which I made a point of reading after the Claire Bloom, for balance. A graduate school friend of mine was your research assistant for a few years while we pursued our MFAs and it took her almost a year of post-workshop drinking to slyly confess, to a rapt audience of salivating young writers, her association to you. (Otherwise you’ll be happy to know she was loyal; she professed total ignorance of your life, your private matters, even your address. She seemed, in retrospect, somewhat terrified of you. I half-seriously offered her boyfriend a blow job if he’d get me your address. The table of young writers giggled madly and took big sips of beer.)

Read more…

More than Make-Work

Jobs Guarantee
Illustration by Lily Padula

Livia Gershon | Longreads | May 2018 | 10 minutes (2,366 words)

In the past several weeks, a flurry of U.S. Senators have come out in support of a federal jobs guarantee. Bernie Sanders announced that his office will propose a plan; Cory Booker filed legislation for a pilot program with Jeff Merkley, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Elizabeth Warren as cosponsors. “Creating an employment guarantee would give all Americans a shot at a day’s work, and by introducing competition into the labor market, raise wages and improve benefits for all workers,” Booker said.

The idea—that the government should provide a job for anyone who wants one—is both radical and impressively well-liked. A recent study found that 52 percent of Americans support it, compared with just 29 percent who say they’re opposed. David Shor, a senior data scientist at Civis Analytics, which conducted the research, told The Nation, “This is one of the most popular issues we’ve ever polled.”

That’s not all that surprising. Americans overwhelmingly believe that everyone who can work should work, and the obvious corollary is that everyone who wants to work should be able to find a job. In its broadest form, this premise appeals across the political spectrum, not just to liberals who want to raise wages and improve labor’s bargaining power. A Trump supporter I met while covering the 2016 New Hampshire primary, a guy deeply convinced that the country is being ruined by lazy moochers, told me, “If you can work, maybe we need to put you to work in government offices or something.” Read more…

A Chance to Rewrite History: The Women Fighters of the Tamil Tigers

Illustration by Cornelia Li

Kim Wall | Mansi Choksi | Longreads | May 2018 | 22 minutes (5,980 words)

Kim Wall and Mansi Choksi met at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2012. Mansi returned to India after graduation and Kim soon followed; it was the start of a writing partnership that took the pair on reporting trips to Africa and Sri Lanka.

“We went on our first reporting trip together to write about an emerging Chinatown in Kampala in 2015,” says Mansi. “And then the next year, I moved to New York, where she was living, so we would spend our afternoons working together.”

Mansi and Kim traveled to Sri Lanka in 2016. Mansi recalls Kim’s dedication to telling the story of the women who fought with the Tamil Tigers during Sri Lanka’s brutal, 25-year civil war.

“Kim genuinely fell in love with the women we were writing about,” says Mansi. “You can hear it in her voice, in the tapes of our interviews.”

Not long after Mansi and Kim filed this story, Kim Wall was murdered while on another reporting assignment. The story of the Tamil Tiger women became the last piece she wrote. We have been humbled to work with Mansi over the past several months to give this story a home at Longreads.

To honor Kim’s memory, the Kim Wall Memorial Fund was created to “fund a female reporter to cover subculture, broadly defined, and what Kim liked to call ‘the undercurrents of rebellion.'”

–Krista Stevens, Editor

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Velu Chandra Kala was 17 when she charged into her school principal’s office with a bag of milk toffees. She was small and jumpy, with dimpled cheeks and a woolly fringe. The principal took a toffee, briefly looking up from his desk, and assumed it was her birthday. Next, she was in science class, surrounded by howling classmates. They were hugging her, weeping into her palms, begging her not to leave. The cookery teacher took a toffee, and teared up. Next, the vice principal. Afterward she left the toffees in her mother’s kitchen, by the stove. She was on her way to join an armed conflict.

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