AP Tackles Proposition K, Prostitution, and Pot
By Tiffany Maleshefski
Looks like someone’s never been to San Francisco. Or at least hasn’t been to San Francisco since it’s NOT been the Barbary Coast.
The Associated Press wrote what stands to be the most dramatic story yet on Proposition K, the ballot measure that would decriminalize prostitution in San Francisco. Now, regardless of where you stand on this measure, or prostitution in general, this story reads more like a movie trailer than actual journalism.
First off, you have got to love the lede.
"In this live-and-let-live town, where medical marijuana clubs do business next to grocery stores and an annual fair celebrates sadomasochism, prostitutes could soon walk the streets without fear of arrest."
That’s right folks, here in wild and crazy San Francisco, where the average price on a 1-bedroom flat is between $1,600 and $2,200, and the average salary is in the six figures, the law is something that's more suggested than enforced. Yeah, so what if after a happy hour filled with $14 cocktails and bar bites that include grass-fed burgers and Hog Island oysters, we pop into a cannabis club, smoke a fat joint laced with crack and then hit up Safeway for some Doritos. That’s why they have to be right next door to each other, or all hell would break loose. That’s just called good city planning. Then we go home and whip each other on our Barcelona chairs in our SOMA lofts.
Even better is the accompanying picture of "Violet," who looks more like she just left an MGMT concert at the Warfield then the Land Rover of some pervy jon looking to get some dirty action before he returns to his wife in Pac Heights.
For reals, are those little whales on her knee-high socks? And didn’t I just see that modest, knee-length skirt at H&M? That’s a prostitute???
At the very least, you’d think the AP could at least have found a picture of a real prostitute, not the kind like Violet, who no doubt have a law degree hidden somewhere under their skirts, and is going to turn this experience into a best-selling book-cum-screenplay.
Where are the cracked out trannies on Polk Street, or the cracked out homeless women in the Tenderloin, or hell, the cracked out ladies lining McAllister Street, between Larkin and 7th, who you just know are selling their bits for way below market value to dudes with masters degrees. Or the hopelessness, and desperation, and alarmingly obvious reminder of how life can go wrong and no one is there to fix it. That’s the picture of San Francisco AP should have chosen to portray, the one where we look at a measure that will either harm or help the people who the economic crisis isn’t actually affecting because their entire life has been an economic crisis. Obviously, this particular reporter (who goes unnamed) was too wussy to travel any further than well-lit Market Street. And really, that’s where there’s a better story.