In my excursions into the night of downtown Manhattan with Mogutin, I noticed a weird phenomenon. So similar were the scenes we visited to those I used to frequent in old Times Square that even a few players I had known there ten years hence had resurfaced. Their old values were intact, and their only
thought in the go-go dancing, lap dancing, or cruising they did, and which Mogutin photographed, was the hope of making a buck. What astonished me, on the other hand, were the others. Like the former hustlers of old Times Square, they were dancing half-naked on the bar, their cocks lolling within their nearly transparent underpants or occasionally peeking out of them, or jutting forth in codpieces fashioned from socks and kept erect with rubber bands that served as cock rings; their underpants slipping far past their butt cracks; their dancing lascivious; their bodies mocking the new anti-sex laws. But they were doing it, they told me, purely for something they called fun. These were young men from the middle class, who didn’t need the money, and I was greatly perplexed by them, until the behavior of everyone—middle class and underclass, both of whom appear in this volume—came together in one epiphany, the realization that a very common metaphor for desire itself these days is prostitution.
This metaphor embraces so much about our current civilization. In the sleazy gestures of go-go dancers, the naked gyrations of partiers at hole-in-the-wall clubs and the chance exhibitionists, we find desiring bodies in deliberate but often sham postures of exploitation, aping prostitution as a way of cruising or partying. And most incredible is the fact that many aren’t forced to. Postures of exploitation are, instead, their joy, their choice, their wielding of power and even their quest for love. The language of prostitution, then, may be the only means of erotic communication available to some in our new society of exploitation. And what better artist to serve up this disturbing metaphor than a person who has seen himself stripped of nationality and set loose in New York as an artist on the make, at the moment when all differences between East and West were being ground down into twin models of cynical capitalization?
Slava Mogutin has understood that exploitation is the new flirtation. The pleasure is in the showing. So go ahead. Look.
—Bruce Benderson
