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Un ‘First World’ Problème

An American living in the Pigalle district of Paris is angry because Rudy Giuliani is driving the porn theaters out of Times Square all over again. So to speak. Excerpt: When my wife and I first moved here in 2011, I wasn’t sure what to make of living in the middle of a functioning red-light […]

An American living in the Pigalle district of Paris is angry because Rudy Giuliani is driving the porn theaters out of Times Square all over again. So to speak. Excerpt:

When my wife and I first moved here in 2011, I wasn’t sure what to make of living in the middle of a functioning red-light district. Our neighborhood, though safe and well on its way to gentrification, remained funky in the original sense of the term. In addition to cigarette smoke and baking bread, there was the whiff of dirt and sex in the air. It took a while for me to get used to the tap-tapping on windows — or hissing and tongue clicking from open doors — that greeted me as I passed the bars on my way to fill a prescription or buy a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé.

I have never quite gotten used to the transsexual hookers who traipse the Boulevard de Clichy outside the area’s various sex shops and with whom I must share the carnivalesque sidewalk on my way in and out of the post office. Frankly, they make me uncomfortable.

But I’ve come to see that unease as a good thing the longer I stay in this corner of France, a country where the world’s oldest profession continues to enjoy a special patrimonial status and where, try as it might, the government can’t seem to un-sew that tawdry patch from the national quilt. (It is now considering criminalizing johns, which prompted incensed writers and luminaries to pen a spirited manifesto in protest.)

We should be grateful to be jolted from our anesthetized routines, confronted when we can be with surroundings and neighbors that are not injection-molded to the contours of our own bobo predilections.

Boy, I hate this kind of thing. If you don’t welcome whorehouses down the block as part of a Henry Miller wonderland, you’re some kind of sellout? Really? There is a certain kind of precious person who thought Times Square was better when it was filthy and seedy and authentic. Why are porn shops and whorehouses more “authentic” than The Gap and Starbucks, or better for the soul than the Park Slope chi-chi perfectionism? In the best of all possible worlds, I would want to live and raise my family in a neighborhood that wasn’t overrun with strip-mall chain stores and that prefab culture, or with Park Slope Co-Op preciousness — but I’ll take those any day over the blight that writers like this expat New Yorker romanticize.

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