It’s funny the “Yo, dawg” 2000s-ass Pimp My Ride on MTV and ridesharing, the practice of putting your car on the street in a commercial capacity, as one of the few avenues for poor people to make money, are completely unrelated

That’s actually an odd thing about panics about domestic “sex trafficking” (a term associated at the start of the 2010s more with cross-border human smuggling) and to a degree “grooming”. Like oh, there are people taking young women from place to place, employing them as prostitutes, and keeping the money? Women who were approached, lured, and seduced as adolescents by manipulative older men?

Congratulations, you’ve discovered pimping. Or I should say rediscovered, there are literally scores of centuries-old English folk ballads about this dynamic. But that’s not the closest history. The question is, how do you live through the 90s and 2000s and completely miss the figure of the pimp?

Like, I’m sure you have an image in your head, from the Iceberg Slim tradition – loud clothing, maybe furs, styled hair, hat with a big feather. Jewelry, “pimp cane”, “pimp cup”, drives a customized decades-old luxury car? Not even like the basic relation was totally obscured, either, remember the “pimp slap”? “Where’s my money, bitch?” as a catchphrase?

That guy was alllll over those decades. How do you miss that?

But circling back to Pimp My Ride, I think part of it, and this was very 90s to pre-crash 2000s must have been that “pimp” was represented as an identity of consumption. The good-times bonhomie urban outlaw of the rap era, compared to the harder dealers and triggermen.

Makes sense, however ersatz the luxury it is luxurious, he is the focus of a stable of sexual women. Maybe it’s a backlash from being confronted with what the poor black urbanity this came from knew all along, that pimping isn’t about spending money and impressing bitches, it’s about enthralling bitches to make money.

The pimp, who provides nothing to workers operating entirely with their own skills and bodies, takes all proceeds, and provides them with only meager food and shelter in return, is like a caricature of the Marxist vision of bosses, and it’s kind of striking that the wave of left-sex work politics doesn’t draw on it that much

On the other hand, a lot of the action there comes from independent operators whose issues about the work itself are about how they interact with clients, the government, and venues/platforms… which are exactly the relationships pimps served to broker.

So is this a story of internet-driven disintermediation? Freelancification?

I’ve wandered a bit but I never really had a thesis here, I just started thinking about pimps and kept going.