Local people may also be genuinely assisted and cared for by tourists.
He was very traumatized, to see the situation in which I lived ... He said he would help me while he was here ... I told him I was alone ... and that there was no one I could leave the boys with. So we waited until the boys went to sleep and ... we became intimate. After that, he visited every day. He gave me money, bought us food, and many other necessities. This was a beautiful situation but only lasted for about 20 days because he had to return to Italy. Before he left, he gave me 500 dollars ... (Cuban woman in Cuba)155
Caribbean women in times of structural adjustment have been described as making do, trading in the informal economy and in sexual relationships, manipulating and switching partners, selling sex, resorting to relationships of convenience or getting involved with other women’s men.156 Young people’s relationships with older men and women that involve sex, money, security and protection are documented in many African countries and in Japan, Taiwan and other parts of Asia,157 in traditions well outside anything called ‘prostitution’.
Sexual cultures can be understood as comprising a continuum of relationships in which sexual labour is present, without differentiating absolutely between marital and extramarital sex. Many people who sell sex do not see it as separate from other activities or as directly commercial. In different parts of the world, relations combining feelings, sex and money are considered conventional, and both sides of the relationships may have names.158 Viviana Zelizer analyses the myriad ways that money intersects with intimacy:
Different forms of payment signify differences in the character of the social relations currently operating. To label a payment a gift (tip, bribe, charity, expression of esteem) rather than an entitlement (pension, allowance, rightful share of gains) or compensation (wages, salary, bonus, commission) is to make claims about the relationship between payer and payee. Negotiation, then, runs in both directions: from definition of social ties to selection of appropriate payments, from forms of payment to accepted definitions of ties.159
These multi-faceted relationships exist in wealthier countries as well. In Liverpool, in the 1980s:
The women typically spend the evening drinking and dancing with the same client, before accompanying him back to the ship for the rest of the night ... it is not uncommon for a woman to spend up to several weeks without leaving the docks at all, working, eating, and sleeping on board then moving on to the next ship. For some, it is like a holiday, free food and drink, plenty of money, and parties on board every night.160
Although there are few shipboard parties in Liverpool these days, this tradition is alive and well in many ports. On a trip to Colombia, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, I encountered such ship culture, with local intermediaries advising women when boats come in and ferrying them out for parties lasting days. Many of those who spend time with seafarers do not see themselves as sex workers but rather describe themselves as ‘good-time’ or party girls.
Kiwi ship-girls [exchange] sex with foreigners they find attractive or agreeable for money, meals and drinks, rather than an agreed upon fee-for-service arrangement. If a woman decides to spend a night with one of the men, he will, at the very least, give her enough money to cover her taxi fare home, and pay for child-minding expenses.161
Some feminists in Europe, too, have long been aware that the difference between marriage and ‘prostitution’ is imaginary162 – a topic too large to go into except in one small way.
Marriage
Marriage (and now, in some countries, civil union between people of the same sex) is still one of the easiest ways for migrants to acquire legal status in Europe and thus access to all kinds of jobs. A brochure for potential Latin American migrants, Alemania ¿Un paraíso para mujeres? (Germany, A Paradise for Women?) dedicates several pages to the topic.163 Increasingly, potential spouses must put on a very good show for immigration officials, living together for some time and demonstrating a convincing affective history; at the same time, marrying migrants is now a standard way to demonstrate solidarity among (especially, younger) Europeans. Some marriages last; in others divorce is planned from the outset. In some cases, migrants begin to sell sex, which may have been foreseen (or not), involve coercion (or not) and benefit both partners (or not).164 Sometimes observers lump all such situations together as exploitative, but such a conclusion masks the diversity, resourcefulness and flexibility found among migrants themselves. Annie Phizacklea mentions the bride who ‘has calculated that marriage will be the easiest and possibly only legal route of gaining employment commensurate with education and qualifications’.165 The melding of sexual, domestic and labour necessities that characterises this chapter may find its epitome in this kind of migrant marriage.
‘Anti-prostitution’ discourses frequently condemn matrimonial agencies that use catalogues and websites. Although intermediaries have always arranged conventional marriages in cultures across the world, there is no doubt that some of them now advertise potential mates using the same techniques that sex businesses use. There is also no doubt that some would-be husbands are looking for wives who will be more submissive than they believe western women are. But it is impossible to distinguish between abusive and non-abusive matrimonial agents by simply looking at their catalogues, and many women married through such agencies reject the derogatory label ‘mail-order brides’, considering themselves to be actively looking for good partners.
Research on matchmaking reveals a variety of unions arranged commercially: trade marriages, blind marriages, arranged marriages, love marriages and marriages of convenience.166 Some of these arranged marriages turn out well, others not. Many women creatively use marriage abroad to avoid oppression at home and create new possibilities for themselves.167 And westerners are hardly alone in looking for spouses abroad; consider a recruiter of Japanese husbands for Thai women:
They don’t stay long or come too often. Husbands we choose for ourselves are not as nice as this. To marry a man from the village is to suffer. This way, we don’t get tired and we don’t have to worry. We only want money. What’s more, if we go into prostitution, we’re at risk from disease ... It’s like having a husband who works abroad to send us money. We are faithful to them ... They are happy to support us.168
When people buy sexual services in Europe, or get into holiday romances where they pay a local for spending time with them, or marry someone willing to be a ‘traditional’ spouse, the relationships often occur across cultural, ethnic, class and age boundaries. For many participants in the ‘prostitution’ debate, this point is definitive, proving that the male service-buyer is not only sexist but racist. Some studies of the sex industry rely on an analysis of imperialism and globalisation that makes the west’s rapaciousness in the third world as sexual as it is economic.169 In most of these works, women, darker people and the poor are positioned as powerless beside men, whiter people and the rich. A desire to relate to exotic Others may characterise many commercial sex relations, but the vendor may be whiter than the buyer, and the buyer may be the foreigner or migrant.170 Besides, clients don’t all have the same ethnic prejudices.171 For managers of businesses, it is important to have a variety of phenotypes and nationalities on offer:
The difference is with the clients, if they tell me ‘a Spanish woman’ then I send a Spanish woman; it’s not racism because I have some girls as blonde and white as the Spanish and they don’t work ... ‘I won’t give my money to a foreigner’, and a foreigner can be white, from India or from wherever you like, but she’s foreign ... There’s something for everyone here, it’s a boutique. (Dominican woman manager of a flat in Spain)172
Some years ago, when migrants selling sex in Europe were mostly Asians and Latin Americans, a colour-based analysis seemed plausible, but nowadays large numbers of light-coloured people from Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union are selling sex, under similar conditions and subject to similar discourses of victimisation and agency. If we substitute ethnicity for
race, we find that everywhere societies create hierarchies of social value for nationalities, ethnicities and regions. ‘Whiteness’ may be ranked, as in the Greek comment that ‘Russians and Ukrainians [are] at one end of the scale and Albanians at the other’.173 These distinctions change according to cultural context: Albania and Greece share borders, which means they share rivalries, prejudices and jokes and know each other’s histories, whereas at the other end of Europe, in Spain, say,Albania and the Ukraine may seem to be two undifferentiated countries in ‘the east’. And workers are just as prejudiced as customers:
Normally in a club they don’t accept more than three or four Africans, because they have a very bad way of working. They approach a client and if the client doesn’t want anything they just stay and stay until the client leaves ... The Russians have messed up the job. They do whatever they are asked, anywhere and in front of anyone. (Colombian woman in Spain)174
Studies of sexual relationships between European colonists and the peoples they colonised reveal a complex of social, cultural, psychological, economic and symbolic elements175 that also need to be investigated if we are to understand how the exotic functions in commercial sex relations.
Contemporary westerners tend to believe that work constitutes a unique way to realise personal identity, but this belief is not universal. Doing low-prestige service work can, for many, be the instrument to realise other ends, even other identities. I end this chapter with the words of a Filipina domestic in Switzerland:
We look at migration as neither a degradation nor improvement ... in women’s position, but as a restructuring of gender relations. This restructuring need not necessarily be expressed through a satisfactory professional life. It may take place through the assertion of autonomy in social life, through relations with family of origin, or through participating in networks and formal associations. The differential between earnings in the country of origin and the country of immigration may in itself create such an autonomy, even if the job in the receiving country is one of a live-in maid or prostitute.176
To understand how discourses developed that so uniformly disqualify this kind of testimony, I started reading about the past. And there I found the answers I was looking for.
NOTES
1 Mechanised and industrial cleaning (as in office buildings and plants) and hospital nursing are other markets.
2 Folbre 1991; Folbre and Wagman 1993;Agustín 2003d
3 Tilly and Tilly 1998: 22
4 Bose 1987: 101
5 Ironmonger 1996: 39–40
6 Anderson 2000:14. It should also be pointed out that many European employers of domestic labour consider many employees incompetent at the most basic of tasks, in need of training, lazy and so on (Colectivo Ioé 2001).
7 Parreñas 2001: 155
8 Bakan and Stasiulis 1995: 325
9 Benería 1981; Chadeau 1985; Bose 1987;Waring 1988; Folbre 1991
10 Levitas 1998: 8
11 Smart and Smart 1978: 3
12 Folbre and Nelson 2000: 7
13 Bubeck 1995: 129
14 Ironmonger 1996: 55
15 Parreñas 2001: 117
16 Anderson 2000: 114
17 Chadeau 1985: 241
18 Anderson 2000: 119
19 Dinnerstein 1976; Gilligan 1982; Chodorow 1978; Hochschild 1983;Wouters 1989; Abel and Nelson 1990
20 Tronto 1987: 652
21 Tadiar 1998: 938
22 Hochschild 2000a
23 Parreñas 2001; Hochschild 2000b
24 Kellner 1999: 21, citing figures from Economic Trends
25 For example, Shrage 1994;Alexander 1995; Chapkis 1997
26 Barry 1979;Dworkin 1987
27 Simmel 1978: 377
28 Pateman 1988: 562
29 Chancer 1993:145
30 Marx [1857] 1986: 202 and Engels 1884
31 Bailey 2002: 2
32 Bailey 2002: 12
33 Perkel website
34 Good summaries of the array of ideas are given in, for example, Barbara Sullivan’s ‘Rethinking Prostitution’ (1995), Jo Phoenix’s Making Sense of Prostitution (1999) and Belinda Carpenter’s Re-Thinking Prostitution (2000). The sheer quantity of analyses produced in this area is striking.
35 See also Agustín 2004a and Weitzer 2005.
36 Linda Singer shows how the AIDS industry commodifies health in the same way (1993: 58).
37 Daly 1978; Leidholdt and Raymond 1990; Jeffreys 1997
38 Sedgwick 1990: 25. See also Rubin 1984;Vance 1984; Califia 1994.
39 Bernstein 2001: 402
40 Sullivan 1995: 184
41 Lever and Dolnick 2000: 86
42 Oso 2000
43 Høigård and Finstad 1986: 54
44 Oliveira 2004: 157
45 Casal 2001
46 Dahles 1998: 30
47 Bunzl 2000: 88
48 Hochschild 1983;Wouters 1989; Chapkis 1997
49 ‘While some [flight attendants] distance themselves from the job by defining it as “not serious”, others distance themselves from it in another way ... They use their faces as masks against the world; they refuse to act. Most of those who “go into robot” describe it as a defense, but they acknowledge that it is inadequate: their withdrawal often irritates passengers, and when it does they are forced to withdraw even further in order to defend themselves against that irritation’ (Hochschild 1983: 135).
50 Lever and Dolnick 2000
51 Diplomacy is necessary toward a client unable to perform sexually (Kong 2006: 420). Other kinds of emotional labour involve the use of humour (Sanders 2004) and setting boundaries (Ho 2000; Kong 2006).
52 Ho 2000: 16
53 For example, Sanders 2005
54 World Sex Guide, PunterNet and other online fora for clients
55 Agustín 1995
56 Murphy and Venkatesh 2006: 149
57 Ratliff 2004: 43
58 frauenlesbenfilmkollectif 2002: 5
59 Ho 2000: 9
60 Cabiria 2002: 286.
61 Gülçür and Ilkkaracan 2002: 415
62 CATS 2006: 7
63 Riopedre 2004: 222
64 Laskowski 2002, from notes to Bundestagsdrucksache 14/5958. The Economist gave a figure of US$20 billion a year worldwide in 1998. An Indonesian figure was US$1.2–3.3 billion, or 0.8–2.4% of the Gross National Product of the country (Lim 1998). There are no standard rules for these calculations.
65 Lim 1998: 9
66 Lim 1998
67Encuentros 2002; also see Ocio 2004.
68 Hausbeck and Brents 2002
69 For example, Mukherjee 1989; Sleightholme and Sinha Indrani 1996; Hart 1999; Cheng 2002; Davies 2006
70 Comment by sex worker Elisabeth Molina, public lecture, Quito, Ecuador, March 2005
71 The definition for the term ‘sexual exploitation’ used by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women says:‘A practice by which a person achieves sexual gratification, financial gain or advancement through the abuse or exploitation of a person’s sexuality by abrogating that person’s human right to dignity, equality, autonomy, and physical and mental well-being; i.e. trafficking, prostitution, prostitution tourism, mail-order-bride trade, pornography, stripping, battering, incest, rape and sexual harassment’ (CATW 1991).
72 Ariès 1962
73 Montgomery 1998:146-7
74Economist, 14 February 1998
75 Bindman 1996
76 See www.sexworkeurope.org
77 IUSW 2000: 3; see also Lopes 2006
78 Sex Workers in Europe Manifesto
79 CATS 2006: 13
80 Polanía and Claasen 1998: 105
81 Riopedre 2004: 223
82 Bonelli et al 2001: 94
83 Challenges to this prohibition were brought by sex workers from countries with Association Agreements with the EU (European Communities 2002); also see Laskowski 2002.
84 Oso 2000
85 Kennedy and Nicotri 1999: 32
86 Oso 2000
87 CATS 2006: 14
88 Lim 1998; see also Agustín 2007
89 Oso 1998; King and Zontini 2000
90 Folbre and Nelson 2000: 1
91 Rapp et al 1983: 235
92 Stone 1977; Davidoff and Hall 1987; Sorrentino 1990; Bourdieu 1996; Silva and Smart 1999
93 Weeks 1995: 44
94 Consider a long erotic tradition associated with maids (Stallybrass and White 1986; McClintock 1995). In addition, they are often urged to feel they are ‘one of the family’.
95 Giddens 1992
96 Nelson and Robinson 1994
97 Frank 2002
98 Gagnon and Simon 1973;Weeks 1982; Plummer 1982
99 Foucault 1979b, 1985, 1986
100 Connell 1987
101 Weeks 1995: 38
102 Allison 1994; Bird 1996; Leonini 1999
103 Irigaray 1977; Snitow et al 1983; Nead 1988
104 Ratliff 2004: 40
105 Connell 1987; Berger et al 1995
106 McIntosh 1978
107 Weeks 1995: 45
108 Urry 1990
109 Sequeiros 1996: 62
110 Bernstein 2005: 108
111 Barry 1979;Dworkin 1987; Høigård and Finstad 1986
112 O’Connell Davidson and Sanchez Taylor 1999
113 Seabrook 1996
114 Walker and Ehrlich 1992
115 Stein 1974
116 Allison 1994
117 Brody 1999
118 Hart 1999
119 Lyngbye 2000
120 Perkins 1999: 46
121 Frank 2002, 2005
122 Cutrufelli 1988: 24
123 Campbell 1997: 49
124 Perkins 1999: 44
125 Gerrit Bloemen quoted in Fundación Esperanza 1998: 62
126 Bailey 2002: 4
127 Richards 1980: 199-200; see also Ericsson 1980: 335
128 Pateman 1983; for a more recent argument, see Miriam 2005.
129 O’Connell Davidson and Anderson 2003
130 Crimi 1979
131 Hernández Velasco 1996
132 Cutrufelli 1988: 26
133 O’Connell Davidson 2001
134 Cheng 1996;Anderson 2000
135 SOLIDAR; Kalayaan
136 See, for example, Bunzl 2000
137 World Sex Guide website
Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry Page 11