be only part of the explanation for what happened to her. The same is true for Plath. Her friend Alfred Alvarez believed that too many people have painted her as “the poet as a sacrificial victim, offering herself up for the sake of her art,” and he’s absolutely right. That distorts who she is: it says her identity was tied up entirely in her self-destructiveness. Coupling forces us to see the stranger in her full ambiguity and complexity.
Weisburd has a map that, I think, makes this point even more powerfully. It’s from Jersey City, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
The dark area in the middle—bounded by Cornelison Avenue, Grand Street, and Fairmount Avenue—is a prostitution hot spot and has been for some time. A few years ago, Weisburd conducted an experiment in which he assigned ten extra police officers—an extraordinarily high number—to patrol those few blocks. Not surprisingly, the amount of prostitution in the area fell by two-thirds.
Weisburd was most interested, though, in what happened in the lighter part of the map, just outside the triangle. When the police cracked down, did the sex workers simply move one or two streets over? Weisburd had trained observers stationed in the area, talking to the sex workers. Was there displacement? There was not. It turns out that most would rather try something else—leave the field entirely, change their behavior—than shift their location. They weren’t just coupled to place. They were anchored to place.
We found people would say to us, “I’m in this area. I don’t want to move because it’ll make it hard on my customers.” Or, “No, I have to build up a business again.” There are all these objective reasons why they’re not moving. Another reason would be, “If I go someplace else, it’s good for drugs, to sell drugs. There’s already people there, they’ll kill me.”
The easiest way to make sense of a sex worker is to say that she is someone compelled to turn tricks—a prisoner of her economic and social circumstances. She’s someone different from the rest of us. But what is the first thing the sex workers said, when asked to explain their behavior? That moving was really stressful—which is the same thing that everyone says about moving.
Weisburd continues:
They talked about how hard it would be for business. They’d have to reestablish themselves. They talked about danger, people they don’t know. What do they mean by people they don’t know? “Here, I know who’s going to call the police and who won’t call the police.” That’s a big issue for them.…When they’re in the same place, they begin to have a high level of correct prediction about people. Going to a new place? You don’t know who these people are. Someone who looks bad could be good. Someone who looks good, from their perspective, could be bad.
The interviewer said, “Well, why don’t you just go four blocks away? There’s another prostitution site.” Her response: “Those are not my type of girls. I don’t feel comfortable there.” That hit me.…Even people with these tremendous problems, with these tremendous difficulties in life, they respond to many of the same things as you or I.
Some of them may have children in nearby schools, and grocery stores where they shop, and friends they like to be close to, and parents they need to look in on—and as a result have all kinds of reasons not to move their business. Their job, at that moment, is sex work. But they are mothers and daughters and friends and citizens first. Coupling forces us to see the stranger in her full ambiguity and complexity.
Was Sexton determined to take her own life, by any means possible? Not at all. She would never use a gun. “For Ernest Hemingway to shoot himself with a gun in the mouth is the greatest act of courage I can think of,” she told her therapist. “I worry about the minutes before you die, that fear of death. I don’t have it with the pills, but with a gun there’d be a minute when you’d know, a terrible fear. I’d do anything to escape that fear.”
Her chosen method was pills, downed with alcohol, which she considered the “woman’s way out.” Take a look at the following chart, comparing different suicide methods by fatality rate.
People who overdose on pills die 1.5 percent of the time. Sexton was coupled to a method of suicide that was highly unlikely to kill her. That is not a coincidence. Like many people with