Quotes / Red-Light District

I do love Siren Alley. The kind of place you go to scratch an itch you're ashamed of, even in a town with no laws. But that's not why I favor it: the place started out as the mason's quarter, all builders an' architects, proper as you please - an' it just tickles me when someone in a fancy hat falls in the mud. Like a lot of the ladies down here, Siren Alley was born with a more respectable name... but only God remembers what it was.

—Augustus Sinclair, Bioshock 2

In the heart of the city of Tampa, just down the street from the grand taxpayer-subsidized superstadium lies Drew Park. This seedy, semi-industrial neighborhood is the workplace of scores of women and the haunt of many undersexed and oversexed men - not to mention most of the city's sexual deviants and predators. A mere mile away from the stadium's waving princess palms and the oppressively cheerful veneer of expansive glass and blinding, shining chrome is a dark and depressing subculture draped in a façade of mystery, fantasy, and sex. In actuality, the thriving Drew Park subculture is a trap that seduces women into bargaining away their youth and beauty, then tricks the sex-starved into buying an empty promise. It is an industry built on unreality and the willingness of those involved to overlook that fact.

—Vampire: The Masquerade - Havens of the Damned

Hunts Point was a miniature city of industry, and among the most visible of those industries was prostitution.

The streets were already crammed with cars as I arrived, and women tottered between them in absurdly high heels, most of them wearing little more than lingerie. They're all shapes, all ages, all colors. In its way, the Point was the most egalitarian of all places. Some of the women shuffled like they were in the final stages of Parkinson's, jerking and shifting from one foot to the other while trying to keep their spines straight in what was known locally as the "crack dance," their pipes tucked into their bras or the waistbands of their skirts. Two girls on Lafayette were eating sandwiches provided by the Nightworks outreach initiative, which tried to provide the working girls with health care, condoms, clean needles, even food when necessary. The women's heads moved constantly, watching for pimps, johns, cops. The cops liked to swoop occasionally, backing up the paddy wagons on street corners and simply sweeping any hookers within reach into the back, or pink-slipping them for disorderly conduct or obstructing traffic, even loitering, anything to break up their business. A $250 fine was a lot for these women to pay if they didn't have a pimp to back them up, and many routinely spent thirty to sixty days in the can for repayment rather than hand over to the courts money that they could ill afford to lose - if the poorer ones had $250 to begin with.

—The Black Angel

Strumpets and beggars importuned from doorways and windows. Barkers and panderers even stuck their heads out of gutter grates, talking up attractions below street level. Here were cafés and cabarets, bistros and brothels, poets and painters, cutpurses and courtesans. Drinking, dining, dancing, and damnation available in cosy nooks and on the pavement. Competing musicians raised a racket. Vices for all tastes were on offer, and could be had more cheaply if mademoiselle would only step into this darkened side street...

—Guignol

As far as the deviants who visit Block 16 are concerned, it is a dozen or so underground clubs offering drugs, illegal prostitution, and sadomasochistic sex toys. Faces come and go among the employees, as is to be expected given their dangerous lifestyle. For a fee, you can sodomize a young boy, spend the night in a cage with an underage hooker, snort cocaine until your nose bleeds, or nearly anything else normal people might wish they could not imagine.

—Mage: The Ascension - Fallen Tower: Las Vegas

The cheap-thrill seekers have a level all to themselves, for their title is in itself a paradox. In certain red-hued backstreets, sad individuals scurry from shadow to shadow, regaled from dark doorways by the strident entreaties of painted succubi, seeking a glimpse of beautiful female flesh and a decent drink. They will find neither but are eternally doomed to pay dearly for weak cider and cellulite under the watchful gaze of a massive demon called Vinnie, who carries a credit-card swiper and a lead pipe.

—The Log, by Craig Charles

All roads lead to Rouge indeed. And the roads to Rouge are always alive. Into, and on through the deep of the night, the lights of Orga cruisers line the thoroughfares across the risen rivers into the great city and what awaits there. Driven by appetites obscure and profane, grandiose and mundane, they come. Joe had been there at his inception. He had worked alongside the best-built Mecha of his type: lover models that made even him look cheap, ones that worked in houses that only the wealthy could afford. Joe had loved Rouge in his own way. When he’d been sold and reissued at Haddonfield, though, he hadn’t been so disturbed about it. There were women everywhere, and everywhere they were, women were women. He serviced them at whatever location in whatever manner they desired.
But Rouge was the main playground of his kind; the place that was built as he had been, specific to suit its purpose; the place where Orga came from miles inland and from young islands to enjoy the services that Joe and his kind provided.
Rouge was on the horizon now. The bridges that spanned the Delaware entered the city through the gaping mouths of giant statue faces; women’s faces and those of ambiguous sexuality. Their mouths held open in a suggestion of what lay ahead: welcome to Rouge, the city that never blinks.

—A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, A Fan's Novelization

Lys is the "easiest" of the Free Cities, full of pleasure houses catering to every taste, no matter how peculiar. Many men lose themselves in Lys and are never found... at least alive. When a man runs out of coin, the Lysenes may grant him their other specialty - on the house: poison.

—Ser Jorah Mormont, History And Lore Of Westeros: The Free Cities

This vibrant new city was almost overpoweringly alive; all fever-bright colours and jet-black shadows, welcoming and embracing, frightening and intimidating, seductive and hateful, all at once. Bright neon gleamed everywhere, sharp and gaudy, shiny as shop-soiled tinsel; an endless come-on to suckers and victims and all the lonely souls. Enticing signs beckoned the unwary into all kinds of clubs, promising dark delights and unfamiliar pleasures, drinking and dancing with strangers in smoke-filled rooms, the thrill that never ends, life in the fast lane with no crash barriers anywhere. Sex licked its lips and cocked a hip. It was all dangerous as Hell and twice as much fun.

Damn, it was good to be back.

—Something From The Nightside

On rare occasions the militia would raid the corrupt, sumptuous houses of the red-light zone. But for the most part, as long as payments were made and violence did not spill out of the rooms in which it had been paid for, the militia kept out.

The wafts of night air brought with them something unsettling, some brimming sense of unease. Something more profound than any usual anxiety.

In some of the houses, large windows were illuminated through soft, diffusing muslin. Women in shifts and tight nightgowns rubbed themselves lasciviously, or looked up at the passers-by through coy lashes. Here were also the xenian brothels, where drunken youths cheered each other on to rites of passage, fucking khepri or vodyanoi women or other more exotic breeds.

—Perdido Street Station

Just you name it! We'll dig it up for you!
Hookers! Hustlers! Fresh from Eighth Avenue!
The book stores loaded down with sex!
Massage parlors! Movies rated triple X!...
Live models knock you for a loop!
A topless waitress serves you onion soup!
All you boys who come from ev'rywhere
Times Square is lately very far from square...

— Seesaw, "My City"

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