Despite some commentators’ confidence that normality and abnormality can be defined, it is impossible to draw a line between all the above-mentioned commercial services and those that provide spaces for partner swapping, swinging and polyamoury, or those devoted to health and well-being, where sex may be opportunistically sold. Moreover, the sale of sex aids has a long history (virility potions, aphrodisiacs, contraceptive devices) even before the modern medical industry began to define dysfunctions and to prescribe therapies that may involve paid surrogate sexual partners.36
Queer theory questions the idea that one kind of sex or sexuality is more natural than others. Those who oppose ‘prostitution’ believe that a good, healthy, full sexual relationship must proceed along a prescribed route and that financial payment ruins everything, making true intimacy out of the question.37 Research on sexual desire shows, however, that
For some people, it is important that sex be embedded in contexts resonant with meaning, narrative, and connectedness with other aspects of their life; for other people, it is important that they not be; to others, it doesn’t occur that they might be.38
Many commentators believe that diverse services encouraging ‘the fantasy of sensuous reciprocity’ are replacing traditional street ‘prostitution’. 39 Such a change can be called the commercialisation or com-modification of intimacy and posed as wholly negative, or it can be viewed as more normal.
The retailing of intimacy is a common feature of modern life and of other paid work like therapy and massage ... [where] equality and reciprocity are not usually features of the professional relationship.40
The variable among [the] ‘listening occupations’ is the degree to which a client may assume that the service provider is genuinely concerned about the client or the intimate revelations the client has unilaterally offered ... the psychotherapist – explicitly seen as a ‘caregiver’ – is assumed to care the most while the barber, bartender, and nonsexual masseuse are expected to care the least; expectations about the call girl’s caring probably lie in the middle ground.41
This normalising logic offends those who deplore all sexual acts that are paid for. The two perceptions – that sex is incomparable to anything else and that it is comparable – are so fundamental and so opposed that alone they explain why the traditional debate has lasted so long.
But those who sell sex themselves reveal that their jobs are far from being ‘just sex’:
I only went upstairs with three or four, I couldn’t do more, it was hard for me, not like for other women who did ten ... The truth is I worked more with drinks, because I like talking with people and there a lot of people go to talk with you ... you become a bit of a psychologist for them. For me it worked well to talk with people, I like that a lot.42
When we go out and eat, the customer tries to pretend he’s a man of the world ... They try to make interesting conversation ... but they can’t manage, they’re incredibly boring. My role is to cast a glow over them, so the older men look like they’re out with an attractive woman, who looks expensive.43
When you’re simpático, it’s not because you want to be, it’s to earn money. There’s always a lie.You have to maintain the lie, maintain the illusion ... It’s like a game of cat and mouse.You have to provoke illusions.44
What I try to do is get the client to invite me to his table, get into conversation in order to make friends and so he doesn’t feel he is paying and I don’t feel he is paying me. I have regular clients who are rich who buy me champagne that costs C= 250 or C= 300 a bottle. You try to make it last ... and then you don’t have to be with so many people.45
Men who sell to women also sell more than sex:
The street guides present themselves as friends, as someone who wants to help. As street guides told me over and over again, their foremost aim is to make tourists senang – happy. If the tourist is happy, then he or she is in the mood of spending.46
As do men who sell to men:
Yes, of course, I give a boy money or buy him clothes or something like that. But that doesn’t mean he’s a prostitute ... There is just no affection like there is in Prague, where the boy really wants to be with you and where you can have much more than just a one-night stand.47
Sex-service discourse is not so different from discourses on housework and caring, all trying to define tasks that can be bought and sold as well as assert a special human touch. Paid activities may include the production of feelings of intimacy and reciprocity, whether the individuals involved intend them or not, and despite the fact that overall structures are patriarchal and unjust.
The ability to maintain emotional distance is an aspect of the work that some workers master and some do not.48 Hochschild explains the concept of emotional labour in her study of flight attendants, arguing that their ability to handle the job is determined by ‘control over the conditions and terms of the exploitation of [their] emotional resources’.49 Sex workers often perform their own sexual arousal and orgasms for clients who feel more excited and gratified if they believe that workers are;50 they also act out flirting, counselling and diplomacy.51 But there is no reason to limit such faking to those selling sex: babysitters and carers of grannies may also pretend to care, by smiling on demand, listening to boring stories, or doling out caresses without feeling affection.
These kinds of practices can be viewed as conventional professional efforts to control the job, reduce risk, guard against annoyance, and maximise profits, all ‘considered admirable demonstrations of sound work ethic in any other regular profession’ but read as ‘signs of greed and laziness’ when associated with sex.52 Research on the management of sex businesses also reveals conventional practices.53
Perceptions of service are subjective, too. How can we define ‘good sex’ or pleasure? Clients are not satisfied by orgasms alone. What makes them feel fulfilled? How are sensuality, lust, sexual acceptance and caring performed? The success of every commercial sex interaction is open to individual judgements, and few clients limit definitions of satisfaction to the purely physical.54 Moreover, not only buyers but at least some vendors want to feel satisfied by their work, as do some shoeshine boys and street sweepers, likewise tasks viewed as low-skill and low-prestige. Some find selling sex more enjoyable than other jobs:
I know I should get out of this business, but I don’t know if I would like any other job as much. In the bar, I spend my time dancing, drinking and talking.55
The stuff I did in minimum wage service industry work – this is where I can draw the most comparisons, and this is where I can see why sex work is so much more preferable. The things I like least about clients you can see in bosses who don’t respect you in the service sector. At least in sex work, you’re there for only an hour and you’re being paid as much as you’d make in a week at McDonalds.56
For me, this is not really work, like in a factory or store. I like living here in Makati and working in the bar ... sometimes the customer will take me to a nice restaurant or disco; I also go on vacation with customers sometimes ... and we stay in nice hotels.57
I work in a bar and actually it’s not really sex work. Partly it is, partly it isn’t ... because you only get with a man if you want to, if not then not. There in the bar you are mainly paid for talking to the men and drinking with them.58
I can satisfy my [sexual] need at work! Earning money and earning pleasure at the same time. Ha ha ha!59
Although much discourse treats those who sell sex as damaged, drugged or incapable of handling emotional relationships, the flexible schedules and independence of the work are attractive to and empower many.
One day I met a friend of mine while I was walking in the town centre ... I learned that she was a prostitute so her children could live in a decent way. This work has the advantage of financial ease and freedom to work schedules that allow spending more time with the children. (French woman of Algerian parents in France)60
At the beginning he was giving me a lot of money but later on he started
to perceive me as his living partner ... His family and his friends know me and accept me but I don’t want to marry him although I love him. I’m afraid that if I marry him our love will disappear, he won’t value me any more, he will try to restrict my freedom. So I started to go into the suitcase industry and also to work as a sex worker. (Kazakh woman in Turkey) 61
In a way, you can’t say you like it a hundred per cent, but you can’t say you don’t like it, either. Because it’s interesting. Also you meet a lot of people. Whether you like it or not, [clients] are ... of all kinds. (migrant in Murcia, Spain)62
For many, it is obvious that selling sex is a job – not like any other, but still, a feasible occupation.
About the sex itself, many say they don’t feel anything when they are with clients, while others feel disgust, fear, loneliness, sadness, or a sense of sin.
We go to mass at least once a week. But we can’t take communion because we do this work. We can’t because we are committing adultery; because we do it with married men.63
But people also mention feeling disgust and sadness in their jobs cleaning bathrooms or bodies, and they experience emotional dangers when living in houses and taking care of children not their own. At the same time, there are those who enjoy the sex in sex work at least some of the time. Finally, there are emotional pitfalls for those who buy services, as well: clients fall in love with professionals, whether sex workers or carers.
Once we replace the concept ‘prostitution’ with commercial sex, debates about whether ‘it’ can ever be a job seem irrelevant. As for whether these activities are services or not: if they are not, what are they? To give them no name means erasing them and all the people doing them, whether to survive, get ahead, become wealthy or support other people, as well as eliminating all the nonsexual support and management services implicated in the industry. In the end, it is only possible to isolate sexual services from other services if sexual communication and touching are accepted as utterly different from all other contact. This isolation also requires us to accept that the only thing that happens in a sexual service is ‘sex’, reducing the relationship to physical contact between specific points of the body and pretending that nothing else happens. And this is patently not true.
The Sex Industry
The term sex industry attempts to convey the large scale of sex markets in general, their capacity to generate income, their interrelationships with other large industries and infrastructures and also the diversity of the businesses involved. Growth follows conventional patterns of diversification and proliferation under contemporary globalised capitalism. Incomes cannot be known where businesses are not regulated or included in government accounting. In Europe, Holland and Germany regulate some operations, but others remain outside the system. Governments may recognise businesses on the basis of their providing other, nonsexual products and activities, such as alcohol. The sex industry is estimated to generate enormous sums; in Germany alone €=5 billion a year.64
The International Labour Organisation (ILO), in its report The Sex Sector, published statistics on Thailand indicating that, of a total of 104,262 employees in 7,759 establishments where sexual services could be bought, 64,886 people sold sex while 39,376 were support personnel, owners, managers, intermediaries and ‘procurers’. This means that more than one third of the employees did not sell sex but gained their livelihood from the industry.65 Supporting employees include parking attendants, waiters, guards, drivers, cashiers, cleaners, cooks, barmen and laundry workers.
However, a host of other people participate: investors in property, entertainment and tourism; business owners and entrepreneurs; lawyers; accountants; airlines, limousine and taxi services; tele- communications businesses (land and mobile telephones, lines and equipment, phonecall shops, phonecards). Internet services are essential for virtual sex, peeping, escort services, freelance workers, the rental and sale of explicit sexual materials, catalogues of possible girlfriends and wives as well as clients’ information exchanges. Newspapers and others that publish announcements and advertisements make the crucial link between consumers and those offering sex for sale. Businesses that manage money are central (bank and commercial electronic transfers, money orders). Many kinds of vendor specialise in selling costumes, makeup, hair products and wigs, drinks, food, cigarettes and condoms at sex venues, and behind these are specialist manufacturers.
The industry can also be viewed as an array of sites: brothels, bars, clubs, discotheques, cabarets, sex shops, peep shows, massage parlours, saunas, hotels, fetish clubs, flats, barber shops, beauty salons, restaurants, karaoke bars, dungeons, bachelor and hen parties and, in fact, anywhere that occurs to anyone, including boats, airplanes, automobiles, parks and the street. In many activities, consumer and vendor are located in different places, interacting via online cameras, chat or videos or via telephones. In the case of magazines and films, time as well as space separates the moment of sexual production and the moment of consumption.
Theoretically, there are many ways the industry might be measured: the number of consumers of services, the number of services consumed, the incomes of owners of businesses, the number of employees of all kinds, business profits, tax payments, prices charged for products and services. Such measurements require that businesses be included in government accounting procedures, meaning that conventional data become available for them. Data on Malaysia, for example, relate the location of the worker (freelance, with ‘pimps’, in brothels, at home and so on) with hourly rates and averages and weekly transactions and averages.66
Although different countries offer local forms or traditions, businesses have more in common across borders than not, as the following four settings from Spain illustrate:
• Lavish,multi-storeyed clubs paved in marble and offering videos, live shows and jacuzzis, sites of conspicuous consumption where customers pay as much as ten times the ordinary price for drinks. Long-distance truck drivers mix with businessmen, young men in groups, lovelorn bachelors and widowers amidst a kaleidoscope of workers representing many nationalities and languages. Customers may spend hours drinking, talking and watching without purchasing any sex at all, and if they do, it typically occupies no more than 15–20 minutes. Workers pay daily rates to live and work for three-week periods. C= 5,000 a month is a conventional income.
• Whereas many clubs specialise in ostentation and publicity, private flats offer discretion, in respectable-looking buildings and neighbourhoods. Clients ring up to make an appointment, managers arrange for clients not to run into each other, and interiors appear ordinary, with floral-patterned spreads and stuffed animals on the beds, crucifixes and images of saints on the walls and the aroma of home cooking wafting from the kitchen. These businesses rely on classified advertisements and mobile telephones, the two elements that also explain the boom in independent workers who run businesses from home.
• Near the vast plantations where Europe’s vegetables and fruits are grown under plastic, two kinds of sex venues coexist. The first is of luxurious bars with private cubicles located directly across from the plantations, where clients are from the managerial class and sex workers come from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The second consists of poor rental housing located up inconvenient or nonexistent roads, where customers are undocumented migrants from northern and western Africa and sex workers are Nigerian women offering a domestic ambiance.
• Businesses along highly developed tourist coasts display the effects of expatriate cultures and hybridity. Brochures on commercial sex include sections for Gay Bars, Swapping, Private Establishments, Contacts and Sex Shops. A plethora of clubs, bars, party rooms and flats advertise, mentioning as specialities piano bars, saunas, jacuzzis, Turkish baths, dark rooms, go-go shows, striptease, escort services, bilingual ‘misses’, private bars, dance floors, a variety of massages, private booths ‘with 96 video channels’, gifts for stag and hen parties, latex wear and aphrodisiacs. 67
Equivalents of such locales
exist everywhere, varying according to local norms and legal contexts. Some of these businesses may demonstrate ‘McDonaldisation’, in which efficiency, rapidity and standardisation are primary.68 Others are more customised, traditional or even premodern. Working conditions vary enormously: giving a blowjob inside a car, or in an alley in the rain, is not the same as doing it as part of a shift inside a comfortable club. People also perceive jobs in different ways: some find working in a brothel less alienating and isolating (than working from home or being a live-in domestic); others prefer working from the street because they feel more independent. Every job is easy for some people and impossibly difficult for others. Many work only part-time or occasionally. As in every sector, workers feel confident and in command of their work when they have more experience. Generalisations about ‘sex work’ and ‘prostitution’ can only mislead.
At the heart of many jobs are social relationships with a physical or sexual element. ‘Sex acts’ are sometimes imagined to be executed by everyone in more or less the same way, and sometimes they are divided into ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. But those who sell sex discover the multiplicity of human desires, tastes and preferences, as well as the variability of ideas about naturalness. Vendors learn how to perform sexual and emotional acts in order to satisfy customers, as well as how to manoeuvre and manipulate so as to receive the greatest amount of money for the least amount of work. Since workers are also individuals with tastes and values, when possible they seek out work sites where they can at least tolerate the acts required of them.
Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry Page 8