Women at Work: Curbside Trade Thrives in Commuterland : Prostitutes: Their enduring presence on the boulevards of Orange County is a barometer of suburban success that the local burghers can’t abide.

Orange County’s tourist brochures do not mention one sight that visitors are bound to encounter: the women who walk the sidewalks of Harbor Boulevard. A topographical detail as durable as Disneyland, these women, by certain infelicities of birth and opportunity, have found a niche here no less symbolic. They are ideograms of some darker version of community life, a version not acknowledged by the Chamber of Commerce.

The prostitutes of Orange County are a cultural prototype the suburbs tend not to cotton to; brash, unmindful of the general suavities of the middle class, their lives and livelihoods are an unwelcome distraction. Migrating according to the vicissitudes of trade and season within the quadrangle formed roughly by the cities of Buena Park, Westminster, Anaheim and Santa Ana, they are confirmed capitalists; like CEOs, they evidence little interest in matters not immediate to their purpose.

These “home girls” or “circuit” prostitutes are no one’s dream of sophisticated vamping: Their look runs to Levi’s and long hair, high-heeled sandals or black boots. They bargain with the brittle savvy that comes quick to women used to being dealt a losing hand. There is something almost hypnotic about their pacings, their orbit of a block, their cadenced swerve toward curbside to deal with a stopped car in the private semantics of buyer and seller, an unambiguous twining of the sexual and the economic.

That they are involved in a high-risk business, an endeavor that a good portion of the community considers distasteful (and a good portion does not, to judge by the upscale cars stopping) is to belabor the obvious. That they are women with a less-than-rewarding career is clear--no child grows up wanting to be a prostitute. Denuded of the cultural baggage of the middle class, they make an unsettling statement about woman’s worth and her value as commodity. They are here foraging on the street because to the powerless, sex is a symbol of power. Of such sad necessity is composed many lives.

A great portion of their lives is spent outside, under public scrutiny, an ironic discomfort, considering the private nature of their work. It is a particularly bleak stretch of landscape they inhabit, this artery of fast-food outlets and weekly motels. Disneyland, close by to the north, is the magnet on everyone’s compass but theirs. They work the back door of the county, where overdevelopment has reached its nadir. This area is home to many individuals who found themselves lacking the tools needed to break the permafrost of Orange County’s economics. It is in this matrix that these canny metronomes of the boulevard chart their lives. Their transactions on the street corners, then, offer a kind of revisionist view of the county’s commerce.

When the issue of prostitution is covered at city council meetings it is apt to engender a certain awkwardness; the moment’s lull is filled with the coy cliche about “our oldest profession” until the most vexed of the elect comes forward to play Cotton Mather to the zealots in the audience, whose huffing then ignites a flurry of official countermeasures. As the days pass, these plans tend to sink into a certain entropy. Few irate citizens seem aware of the fact that prostitution is a misdemeanor, and at a statewide average cost to taxpayers of $1,900 per arrest, those less swollen with indignation might see a more cost-effective use of law enforcement resources.

One precipitate of all this watchfulness was, of course, the Orange County Centennial last year. The county wanted to crop from the picture whatever did not lend itself to the wholesomeness of the festivities. The peristaltic flow of hookers was high on the prohibitionists’ list.

That life in any city entails being in proximity to others whose lives we find distasteful seems not to have occurred to the sign-carriers in Anaheim and Garden Grove. And it is a measure of the county’s failure to wrest itself from its Pentecostal moorings that elected officials thought they really could erase these shadows on the fabric of an increasingly cosmopolitan society.

It may be hopeless to suggest that a really progressive community would be celebrating its first 100 years by tackling critical problems in transportation and affordable housing. How much easier it is to chase working women off the street.