The first time we see a penis on The Deuce debut "Pilot" it seems to be its own entity, practically detached from any living man; it’s more like a needy random appendage that could belong to anyone. That’s because it appears while Vincent Martino is making his way through the seedy, pre-Giuliani version of Time Square, which is made up of neon signs reading “Girls! Girls! Girls!” and sex workers on various “dates.” One of those so-called “dates” is going down in a phone booth. First we see a glimpse of an old man’s face in unsettling ecstasy. Seconds later, we look into the booth from Vinny’s point of view and see a sex worker on her knees, holding the man’s shiny penis in her hand, mid-blow job. She looks bored of the activity. There is absolutely nothing appealing about the idea of an septuagenarian forcing young women to perform oral sex on him for money — it’s especially unappealing to know that it's happening in the middle of the street. That’s the point: sex work isn’t glamorous in the way movies like Pretty Woman make it out to be, and what these women have to do is oftentimes unnecessarily degrading.