“Valley girls giving blowjobs for Louboutins
What you call that? Head over heels”
-“Work,” Iggy Azalea, 2014
As the San Fernando Valley began to cultivate a seedy reputation in the 1970s and 1980s, tensions escalated between suburban respectability and local economic forces. While some residents tried to maintain the aggressively homogenized middle-class aesthetic of the Valley, sex work began to grow in the area, adding another sordid dimension that was anchored in the women who lived here. This shift generated a misogynistic response in broader Los Angeles and beyond: Valley Girls are “sluts.”
Through the 1990s, this tension between vice and virtue was exercised a lot through the image of the Valley Girl1. Her literal body and likeness became contested terrain, a litmus test for who actually belonged. And, most effectively, the antagonism for sex work became synonymous with a disdain for the Valley Girl.
The antagonism for sex work became synonymous with a disdain for the Valley Girl.
The growth of the sex work industry in the Valley from the 70s through the 90s solidified its enduring reputation as a place where “easy” and “trashy” fame-hungry girls live; truly talented, enterprising creative genius is cleanly preserved for places like Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, and Bel-Air. The popular 2014 Iggy Azalea lyric “Valley girls giving blowjobs for Louboutins” brings this perception into the 21st century, indicating that we are always one sexual transaction away from a “better” address.
But the stereotype of the “slutty” Valley Girl has significant historical roots.
A Los Angeles Times article from 1971 declares that sex work “is changing its face and slipping more and more into the Valley.”2 The lede says that Hollywood is too competitive for sex work and so more “girls” are working in the Valley. The language of “invades” and “slipping” communicates how protective, entitled, and adversarial the class divide is here, even though a number of the sex workers reported in this piece are from the Valley: “teen-aged girls hitchhiking on Valley streets who are available for a few dollars” or “a housewife who wants some extra cash.”
This is significant because these are the two essential gender archetypes key to maintaining the Valley’s suburban sheen: middle-class, white or white-coded teenage girls and middle-class housewives. To assert that there were sex workers (and likely some sex-trafficking victims) that fit these paradigms was a red alert for the Valley residents trying to hold onto their white middle-class 1950s ideals. And this cultural erosion was measured directly by the transactional sexuality of women and girls.
This cultural erosion was measured directly by the transactional sexuality of women and girls.
One of my favorite pieces of archival research related to this project is a 1985 Los Angeles Times article entitled, “Neighbors resent the immorality and the damage to their marigolds. Hookers Amid the Honeysuckle.” The reporter, Al Martinez, says that he gets wind of “a kind of Neighborhood Hooker Watch” by residents along Sepulveda Blvd3 to prevent the presence of sex workers allegedly picking up clients in the suburbs (the Valley).
Hookers, boasting few graduate students among them, have taken to doing their business on the side streets to avoid the attention of cruising police cars, selecting front lawns, flower gardens and lobelia-lined pathways to satisfy their customers.
This has naturally attracted the attention of neighbors who resent the noise, the immorality and the damage to their marsh marigolds…I have heard of Neighborhood Watches against burglars and Community Arson Watches against fire-setters, but never a Prostitute Patrol.4
This article valuably distills a particular moment of tension in the Valley’s quest for respectability: when its seedy reputation was just starting to encroach on its suburban ideals. And more importantly, how the white, proper Valley was responding.
Martinez interviews a local Valley resident named Judi Lirman, one of the organizers against the sex workers and protector of “marsh marigolds,” about the community’s response:
I asked Judi how she would recognize a hooker if she saw one. She said she would be on the alert for women "hanging out on the street and not looking as though they were coming back from the grocery store."
Oh.
"They have a leisurely pace," Judi added wisely. But as we discussed the problem, she admitted that other hookers do not fit the traditional pattern:
"Some wear jogging shorts, T-shirts and sweats and look as if they're out exercising. Casual hookers."
While women like Judi began trying to sniff out sex workers using classist and racist lenses, sex workers were savvily blending into neo-suburban stylings. In the Valley in 1985, sex workers were known to dress in “casual” workout gear, to pass as friendly, young suburbanites, further blurring the lines between a “safe” middle-class woman who smiles a lot on her jog and a professional sex worker5 looking for clients.
Using Judi’s new criteria, Martinez goes looking for sex workers himself:
Recognizing a prostitute will not be easy. I wandered the Sepulveda Boulevard area all day and the closest I came was a young woman in French-cut shorts, a light T-shirt with no bra, frizzy hair and bare feet. She could have been a hooker or she could have been a feminist. Sometimes it's hard to tell.
At the end of the piece, Martinez does see “an attractive woman in a jogging suit sashaying down Sepulveda and not at all looking as though she had just come from the grocery store.” And when an “older man in a Buick” pulls up behind her and honks, he feels like he is finally getting the scoop. But the woman reportedly turns around and identifies the driver as her father. So, not a client. Bust.
The aforementioned 1971 Los Angeles Times article, also acknowledges that “the traditional types6 [of sex workers] are fading and being replaced by girls in the new categories” – middle-class, hippie teenagers trying to get up to Topanga Canyon, and housewives. But this reporting offers another distinguishing regional detail: “Valley call girls are different, vice officers say, in that they work in their apartments, instead of in a pad away from their residences as they do in Hollywood.”
She is sullying the wholesome Valley with her physical body but also the sanctuary that is the white suburban single-family home.
So, the Valley Girl works from home, unlike the other sex workers who commute to “an office.” (Very ahead of her time.) This presents another searing infraction: the Valley Girl is having transactional sex in the Valley proper. She doesn’t even have the decency to take clients somewhere else. She is sullying the wholesome Valley with her physical body but also the sanctuary that is the white suburban single-family home. This building block of the suburbs was supposed to distinguish its inhabitants’ class, moral superiority, and adherence to a shared ideal— and it was essentially being used as a brothel.
The fusing of wholesome, white, suburban aesthetics with a potential hourly rate introduced an ambiguity to the Valley Girl: if you passed one in the street or in the grocery store, you just never knew if she was sexually available. Middle-class conventions (jogging shorts) communicate that she is not, but therein lies the appeal, because she just might be.
It’s telling that in “hunting” for sex workers, the reporter Martinez ultimately happens upon a valley girl7 in a conversation with her father. It’s assumed that this relationship is not what he’s looking for, but given the implied aesthetic, I would argue it is. The exact sex work dynamic he’s allegedly seeking out exists (and hides) in this wholesome interaction: a young woman interacting with her dad, a mom on her way back from the grocery store, a teenager on a suburban jog. Was he sure that “dad” wasn’t a client?
If the Valley Girl was a threat to middle-class ideals, what does it say about the suburbs that created her?
Much like Martinez, I see Judi Lirman watching women for “a leisurely pace” and the clothes of “casual hookers” ultimately leading her right back to those in her community. There is such a regional echo here; the timeless policing of the suburbs for “slutty” forces despite that these women and girls are as innate to the surroundings as the marigolds. What is trying to be rooted out and isolated is actually generated locally. A bigger question looms: if the Valley Girl was a threat to middle-class ideals, what does it say about the suburbs that created her?
What these panicked sex work articles8 primarily evidence is the ways in which gender was not being performed correctly, according to regional mores. The Valley Girl is not supposed to be holistic; she is only supposed to reflect the commercially-sanctioned parts of her namesake: normative families, manicured lawns, and the Galleria. Her values and priorities are determined by commerce, middle-class respectability, and racism (a lot more on this later).
The conundrum of the Valley Girl as “good,” suburban, but also wanton, would continue to develop and grow when the porn industry really took off in the Valley the following decade.
Next week: The Valley is porn.
Uppercase “Valley Girl” to indicate the manufactured caricature.
Hansen, Ken. “Old Profession Changes Face, Invades Valley.” Los Angeles Times, 3 Oct. 1971.
Sepulveda is a very special road to me as a valley girl. Before I was brave enough to drive the freeways, Sepulveda was a street I solely relied on to get places outside the Valley.
Martinez, Al. “Neighbors Resent the Immorality and the Damage to Their Marigolds. Hookers Amid the Honeysuckle.” Los Angeles Times, 7 Aug. 1985.
These are two perceptions of women that are not supposed to go together, according to regional sexual mores.
By “traditional,” the reporter means racist and classist depictions of sex workers.
Lowercase “valley girl” to indicate a female-identified or pangender individual who happens to be from or inhabits the San Fernando Valley.
Another LA Times article I found from 1969 is headlined “Topless Girls Cleared of Two Charges.” In Van Nuys, two women in their 20s, from Encino and Tujunga respectively, were arrested “while sweeping out the driveway at their Tujunga apartment house clad only in bikini bottoms and pasties.” Both women are identified as “former topless dancers.”