In the night world of San Francisco, Fillmore Slim, Soulful Spider and Bobby Joe from Baltimo' practice the same profession. All three are black players in "the game"—pimps in the world of prostitution. They and about 40 of their fellows, along with the hundred prostitutes who support them, are the principals in a study submitted to the annual convention of the American Anthropological Association. That study is about to earn a Ph.D. and a professorship for its author, a shapely, 27-year-old redhead who, as "Tiger Red," recently completed a stint as a topless (and sometimes bottomless) barroom go-go dancer.
The $20-a-night job was Christina Milner's way of financing her graduate work in anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. But she soon found that her new colleagues were more interesting than the primate fossils she was supposed to be studying. Propositioned by a "player" and then threatened by his jealous "ho" (for whore), Tiger Red learned that the bar was a hangout for players and hos. She enlisted the help of her anthropologist husband, Richard, as fellow researcher and began making friends with the bar habitues. As they struck up conversations and collected taped interviews, the Milners came to the conclusion that what they were doing was "no different from studying any other remote culture." Among academics, Christina soon came to be known as "the Margaret Mead of North Beach."
To Iceberg Slim, a former pimp interviewed at great length by the Milners, successful pimping requires an outright loathing for women. "That's where the thrill was," he said. "In the absolute vilification, in the degradation. I had this intense hatred. To be a great pimp, I think you've really got to hate your mother." Bruce, a pimp who went to college, thought that society had twisted and perverted the Biblical role of the sexes: "Pimping goes back to the man controlling the situation before Eve bit the apple, see, and brought him down to her level and stuck the apple in his mouth. She was rebelling against Adam's authority. When Adam let Eve tempt him into taking the apple, he gave up his manhood, and today man is fighting to regain it."
Many players think that they have already won it back, and that pimps are the only real men left in America. To get a feeling of control over his stable of women—who may be either black or white and number from two to 20 —the pimp makes them treat him deferentially, light his cigarettes and speak only when spoken to. Said James, a pimp who, like his favorite ho, is an excellent painter: "Notice how quiet she is. You know why she's quiet? 'Cause I'm talking, not because she has nothing to say. She's as smart as I am, or smarter; she got two degrees. But she's a quiet, humble, beautiful woman because she knows the position of her place, she likes it." And he added: "Each ho thinks her man is God. Do you understand how beautiful that is?" Iceberg Slim even admitted to playing God, because "what lowly little whore can resist God?"