Sex Work

by Frédérique Delacoste

  For both sex worker and client, prostitution involves a merging of sex with power: for the customer, the power consists of his ability to “buy” sexual access to any number of women and, he believes, the right to have whatever service he wants performed for him; for the prostitute, the power consists of an ability to set the terms of the sexual transaction, and to demand substantial payment for the time and skills involved. Of course so long as many or all aspects of prostitution remain a crime, the true power resides in the state, with its ability to enact and enforce laws. Through discriminatory enforcement that is directed primarily at women, and men whom the police perceive to be woman-like, the state ensures that the worker’s power is fragile.

  Although prostitution is considered to be a uniquely human profession, there is some evidence to the contrary from both field and laboratory studies of nonhuman primates. Bonobos, a close relative to both chimpanzees and humans, use sex as a social discourse in their societies, a way of cementing group affiliation and keeping the peace. The sex is not limited to heterosexual contact, as males also have sex with males, and females with females. Human observers have noticed food changing hands in some cases, publishing descriptions of males who provide females with fruit, which is suggestive of a sex/food exchange (De Waal & Lanting, 1997). Moreover, economic transactions are deeply rooted in many societies’ marriage institutions, overtly in societies with customary dowries and bride prices, covertly with lingering customs as to who gives flowers to whom, pays for dinner, purchases an engagement ring, and pays for the wedding. Not to mention assumptions about which partner is supposed to be the primary, if not exclusive, breadwinner. And I think this last assumption is a major contributor to the discomfort with prostitution, in which women are often the primary earners in committed relationships with men.

  The Organization of Prostitution

  To a significant extent sex work is organized along economic lines, with the price per transaction tied to the place and/or means of contact, and where the actual transaction takes place. However, in the aggregate, the workers with a low per transaction price may earn as much as a worker with a high per-transaction price, due to differences in the number of transactions per day and/or the number of days worked in a week or month. In my original paper, published in 1987, I described the organization of prostitution in the context of the United States, where there is an apparent hierarchy from lower-priced street work to higher-priced escort and independent in-call work. However, looked at internationally, the hierarchy varies somewhat from place to place. Thus, although in the United States, Canada, Australasia, and most of Europe, street prostitution is the worksite with the lowest per-transaction price and the highest occupational risks of arrest, violence, and ill health, in many countries in Africa, the women who contact clients on the street are more likely to be part-timers who derive income from tourists and businessmen, while the lowest income-per-transaction workers work fulltime in residential compounds, often near open-air markets. Similarly, although contacting clients in bars and nightclubs is mostly a higher-income level of prostitution in the United States, some of the lowest-paid prostitutes in Brazil contact clients in bars in the zona, or tolerated district. Moreover, with the growth in popularity of crack, the smokable form of cocaine, in the United States, a variation on prostitution developed in so-called “crack houses,” where some women and men provide sexual services, primarily fellatio, to many male crack purchasers in succession, often for very little money or directly for the drug itself. Although crack is available in Europe, it generally sells for approximately twenty dollars a rock (a smoking dose), compared with three to five dollars in the United States, so that crack-related prostitution and/or sex-for-drugs trading seems to be less common there.

  Many people believe that all prostitution is controlled by men, acting as “pimps,” who are defined by the law as “living off the earnings of a prostitute,” which is illegal in virtually all countries. The stereotype of street work is that male pimps recruit lonely or desperate women to work for them as part of a group, often called a “stable,” with a hierarchy of authority among the women, some of whom act as supervisors when the male pimp is not there. However, if that was ever the rule, it is not typical today. When I worked with COYOTE, in San Francisco, beginning in 1976, that stereotypical arrangement was already on the decline, as many women who worked from the street refused to relinquish control over the money and/or the way they worked. After listening to many sex workers in San Francisco and New York, where I have been since 1993, I have concluded that it is the younger women who tend to work in a group, often with younger men as managers and/or polygynous partners of all the women in the group. Once they have gained experience, the women branch out on their own, or select a male partner who is more willing to be in a dyadic relationship with them. In some cases, younger women join a group only after they have worked on their own for a while, sometimes invited to do so by women they meet in jail after they have been arrested for the first time. The managers of street-based groups are usually male, but not exclusively so. Among street youth, or adolescents who have run away from home, those engaged in sex work, sex-for-favors, or sex-for-drugs trading, often form informal groups, sharing living space in abandoned buildings or homeless shantytowns. If a manager conforms to the stereotype of a brutal pimp, he does not stay in business very long, as women leave the group and word of his abusiveness spreads. Prior to the explosion in homelessness in the 1980s, street-based sex workers, whether alone, in dyadic relationships, or in groups, often lived in hotels or apartments that could be rented by the day or week, moving from one city to another in response to police crackdowns or changing economic conditions. For example, when a major conference, convention, or sporting event is scheduled in a city, some prostitutes may migrate there for the duration of the event. However, as low-cost and transient housing has become increasingly hard to find, and as crack has become a prominent drug, more and more street prostitutes are essentially homeless, and about a third of the women served by FROST’D, the street outreach HIV/AIDS prevention project where I work in New York City, are either homeless or live in unstable housing, for example with friends or relatives. Few of the women we work with are in organized groups, although many are independent or have a lover—male or female—whom they support. One couple I know, who have been together for several years, usually live in a room in a hotel for which they pay about forty dollars a day. When she is in jail, which she is several times a year, he moves to a flophouse where he can stay for ten dollars a night. After she gets out of jail, and as soon as she is able to earn enough money, they move back to the hotel.

  Some street-based sex workers also contact clients in bars and clubs, often on or near the street strolls where they usually work. In countries with more or less formal red-light districts, the bars and clubs are often connected to hotels, or otherwise facilitate access to a room where the actual sexual transaction takes place, as in Brazil, Thailand, and the Philippines today (Sturdevant, Stoltzfus, 1992), or New York City at the turn of the last century (Gilfoyle, 1992), or the brothel-saloon that is a common staple of the Hollywood or television western (e.g., “Gunsmoke”). This form of prostitution is sometimes management controlled, as when the workers take their clients to a room connected with the contact point, but it can also involve independent workers who meet clients there and go back to the client’s hotel. In the latter case, the prostitutes often give large tips to the bartenders and/or the owners of the establishment, but they do not actually work for them. Although they may have to conform to certain standards of decorum while in the bar or club, the management has no control over the sex work transaction, including the price, the sex acts performed, and whether or not condoms are used. In some countries, this form of bar-based prostitution overlaps with brothel and/or massage parlor prostitution, with the sex workers living as well as working on the premises. In that case, the sex work is likely to be controlled by management, which sets the prices and may determine
the sex practices, including condom use.

  Massage parlors are often visible from the street, with signs euphemistically offering their services, while brothels and bordellos are usually invisible from the street, in an enclosed building with little indication of the nature of the business inside, although in countries with officially recognized sex work districts, the brothels may be identifiable as such from the street. In parlors and brothels, both the contact and the transaction take place on the premises. Whether the establishment is owned by a man or a woman, in most cases it is managed by a woman, who is commonly known as a “madam” or “mama-san,” although she, too, is defined by the law as a pimp and/or promoter of prostitution. In the United States outside of rural counties in Nevada, all such businesses are illegal, as they are in most countries.

  In some countries, brothels operate legally under some sort of regulatory system. Traditionally, women who worked in tolerated brothel systems have been restricted in their movements outside of the brothel, as they were in France and Italy in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, and as they are in Nevada today. In rural Nevada, the towns have imposed a large number of restrictions on the women who work in the legal brothels, with few restrictions on their employers. The women are not allowed to enter a gambling casino or bar at all, or to be in the company of a man on the street or in a restaurant. They are also not allowed to reside in the same community in which they work (the women generally work a three-week shift in the brothel, after which they are off for a week or more). Although the management directs the women’s labor, it treats them as independent contractors, neither withholding their taxes for them, nor providing workers’ compensation, disability insurance, or health insurance. The women are required to undergo examinations for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) before being hired, and are checked weekly thereafter for gonorrhea and chlamydia, and monthly for syphilis and HIV, all at their own expense. In Mombasa, Kenya, prostitutes are required to report to the government run Ganjoni clinic every week or so, or face being arrested and jailed for working without an up-to-date health permit. Similar systems are in place in such countries as Singapore and Uruguay, where the prostitution is legal so long as the prostitutes are regularly tested, and in Thailand and the Philippines, where the prostitutes are more or less tolerated if regularly tested, but subject to arrest as prostitutes on the whim of public officials. Usually, however, brothels and brothel-like establishments are completely illegal, without additional regulation of the prostitutes. San Francisco is something of an exception, in that the Board of Supervisors enacted legislation in the 1970s requiring massage parlors and masseuses to obtain licenses. However, the system maintains a fiction that prostitution is not the purpose of these establishments by denying licenses to anyone with a conviction on prostitution charges within the previous three years, and revoking the license of anyone convicted on prostitution charges after becoming licensed.

  A large number of prostitutes, perhaps the majority, work outside of “houses.” The traditional “call girl” worked independently, with a “book” of clients accumulated through clients’ word of mouth and/or referrals from other sex workers. Historically, they either received clients in their homes, as many still do, or met clients outside, at their hotels, for example, after the client called to make an appointment. In the 1960s and 1970s, a system of “escort services” developed (originally as an “outcall” service offered by massage parlors), which connect clients and sex workers, who then meet elsewhere. Whether they work through an escort service, or completely on their own, the prostitutes who work in this way are the most independent, and the most in control of their lives on and off the job. The owners and operators of an escort service can be arrested for violating laws against pandering (serving the needs of clients), procuring (producing a prostitute), or promoting prostitution, all of which are felonies. The relationship between sex worker and the management of the service is strictly a business one, and there is often little or no personal contact between the prostitute and her agent, although in some cases, the agency provides a place for the women to rest and get to know each other between dates (Barrows, 1986). While a few brothels are legal in Nevada, all escort services and all independent outcall prostitution is illegal in the United States, again with a partial exception in San Francisco, which also licenses escorts and escort services while pretending it is not licensing prostitution.

  The legal definition of prostitution in California is “a lewd act in exchange for money or other consideration.” However, sex acts for which all participants are being paid by a third party (viewer, pornographic film maker, etc.), and in which there is no direct sexual contact between payer and payee, are deemed legitimate and/or are tolerated, while the laws continue to prohibit the same actions if one participant is paying the other directly. In effect, a legal, third-party managed form of prostitution developed as a result of the court decisions which decriminalized pornography, and the proliferation of magazines, books, films, videotapes, and adult bookstores has been matched by the growth of the live erotic performance. The line between pornography and prostitution is becoming extremely thin, especially in peep shows and lap dancing theaters. Although the production of pornography is legal, albeit subject to police harassment under obscenity statutes, the state has neither recognized the performances as work, nor enacted occupational safety and health or other workplace regulations to protect the worker from employment-related harm.

  Beginning in the early 1990s, erotic dancers began organizing themselves and, in some cases, trying to affiliate with trade unions to engage in collective bargaining for better working conditions. The first dancers to join a union, in 1997, worked at the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco. Although the dancers in some other shops have attempted to unionize, so far the Lusty Lady workers are the only ones to do so successfully.

  Unresolved Issues

  The issue of forced prostitution is often used by feminist activists and prostitution abolitionists to obscure the issue of sex workers’ rights. Therefore, it is important both to discuss this issue separately and to distinguish between being forced by a third party (e.g., a “pimp”) to work as a prostitute, particularly where violence or deceit is used, and being forced or pressured to make that decision by economic reality. Most people who work for compensation do so because they need the money—for themselves, for their children. In any society, people make decisions about work based on some kind of evaluation of the options open to them. And most people choose what they perceive to be the best-paying job for the skills that they have, the hours they are willing to work, and what they are willing or able to do. It is easy for outsiders to judge the nature of the work, but it is up to the individual to make her or his own decision about what work to do, including agreeing to or refusing a particular job. That being said, in the technologically developed countries, where most women are at least functionally literate and there is a significant array of occupational choice, about ten percent of women who work as prostitutes are coerced into prostitution by third parties through a combination of trickery and violence. This figure appears to be relatively constant in the United States, as reflected in studies done at the turn of the century (Rosen, 1982), and current estimates by COYOTE and other sex workers’ rights organizations.

  At the other extreme, in India, with massive poverty and few occupations open to women, and where wives are sometimes killed by the husband’s family when their illegal dowries run out, a much larger proportion of the women who work as prostitutes have been coerced by third parties, in some cases their families, in other cases brokers who originally offered other work, into beginning prostitution. Nonetheless, programs that offer women alternatives to prostitution often find that once women have become skilled at what they do, many prefer to continue to work as prostitutes, and recently sex workers in India have been organizing for their rights as sex workers, not victims, particularly in Calcutta (Sleightholme & Sinha, 1996).