Sex Work Matters: Exploring Money, Power, and Intimacy in the Sex Industry - Softcover

Melissa Hope Ditmore; Antonia Levy; Alys Willman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848134347 ISBN 13: 9781848134348

Publisher: Zed Books, 2010

Synopsis

Sex Work Matters brings together sex workers, scholars and activists to present pioneering essays on the economics and sociology of sex work. From insights by sex workers on how they handle money, intimate relationships and daily harassment by the police, to the experience of male and transgender sex work, this fascinating and original book offers new theoretical frameworks for understanding the sex industry.

The result is a vital new contribution to sex-worker rights that explores the topic in new ways, especially its cultural, economic and political dimensions. Readers weary of the sensational and often salacious treatment of the sex industry in the media and literature will find Sex Work Matters refreshing.

About this title

About the Author

Melissa Hope Ditmore is a post-doctoral fellow at NDRI. She has investigated ethics in research, the effects of police raids on sex workers and trafficked persons, and violence against sex workers. She is an author on the three reports produced by the Sex Workers Project. Melissa Ditmore has written about sex work, migration and trafficking for The Lancet and SIECUS Report. She is a contributor to Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered (2005) and The Affective Turn (2007.)

Antonia Levy is a member of the PapertigerTV collective and a part-timer organizer for her union, the Professional Staff Congress at CUNY. She has been co-chair of several academic/activist conferences and workshops, including Sex Work Matters: Beyond Divides and the Second Annual Feminist Pedagogy Conference.

Alys Willman is a feminist economist specializing in gender, violence and illicit markets. She is the author of What's Money Got to Do With It? (2009) and numerous articles in both academic and grassroots publications. She has produced a documentary Mateando en la Gran Manzana on Argentine immigration to New York. Alys Willman has worked in a dozen countries throughout Latin America with NGOs, the United Nations and the World Bank. She holds a doctorate in Urban and Public Policy from The New School University in New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sex Work Matters

Exploring Money, Power, and Intimacy in the Sex Industry

By Melissa Hope Ditmore, Antonia Levy, Ays Willman

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2010 Melissa Hope Ditmore, Antonia Levy and Alys Willman
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84813-434-8

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, vii, 
FOREWORD • Alys Willman and Antonia Levy, ix, 
Introduction: Beyond the Sex in Sex Work Alys Willman and Antonia Levy, 1, 
A Beyond Divides: New Frameworks for Understanding the Sex Industry, 7, 
1 Sex Work Now: What the Blurring of Boundaries around the Sex Industry Means for Sex Work, Research, and Activism Barbara G. Brents and Kathryn Hausbeck, 9, 
2 The (Crying) Need for Different Kinds of Research Laura Agustín, 23, 
3 The Meaning of the 'Whore': How Feminist Theories on Prostitution Shape Research on Female Sex Workers Juline A. Koken, 28, 
B Managing Multiple Roles, 65, 
4 To Love, Honor, and Strip: An Investigation of Exotic Dancer Romantic Relationships Mindy S. Bradley-Engen and Carrie M. Hobbs, 67, 
5 Sex and the Unspoken in Male Street Prostitution Kerwin Kaye, 85, 
6 enforced ab/normalcy: the sex worker hijras and the (re)appropriation of s/he identity Mashrur Shahid Hossain, 117, 
C Money and Sex, 141, 
7 Let's Talk About Money Alys Willman, 143, 
8 Show Me the Money: A Sex Worker Reflects on Research into the Sex Industry Jo Weldon, 147, 
9 Selling Sex: Women's Participation in the Sex Industry Melissa Petro, 155, 
D Sex Work and the State, 171, 
10 Pimping the Pueblo: State-regulated Commercial Sex in Neoliberal Mexico Patty Kelly, 173, 
11 Deviant Girls, Small-scale Entrepreneurs, and the Regulation of German Sex Workers Anne Dölemeyer, Rebecca Pates, and Daniel Schmidt, 184, 
12 Sex Work, Communities, and Public Policy in the UK Maggie O'Neill and Jane Pitcher, 203, 
E Organizing Beyond Divides, 219, 
13 Sex Workers' Rights Activism in Europe: Orientations from Brussels Giulia Garofalo, 221, 
14 Conclusion: Pushing Boundaries in Sex Work Activism and Research Melissa Hope Ditmore, 239, 
CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS, 243, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 247, 
INDEX, 266, 

CHAPTER 1

Sex Work Now: What the Blurring of Boundaries around the Sex Industry Means for Sex Work, Research, and Activism

Barbara G. Brents and Kathryn Hausbeck

We have been doing research on the sex industry and the legal brothels in and around Las Vegas for the past ten years. We have watched Las Vegas become the fastest-growing city in the United States precisely because it is a global tourist destination for the consumption of vice — sex and gambling, but especially sex. As feminists we have struggled to understand this. It is tempting to see Las Vegas as unique, as the 'other' to 'normal' culture. However, the more we look, the more we see that Las Vegas is symbolic of broader cultural and economic shifts that have been transforming our sexual attitudes and the commercial context surrounding sex for the past fifty years. Understanding these broader changes is crucial for scholars, sex workers, and activists, as we struggle to make sense of sex work and the sex industry in the twenty-first century.

In this chapter we argue that the lines around the sex industry are blurring. The cultural and economic changes driven by global, late capitalism have created a consumption-driven, service-based economy that increasingly sells human interactions and emotional exchanges. The sale of personal service, leisure, spectacle, and tourism places more and more components of human relationships onto the market. This has contributed to two important trends. First, there has been a marked sexualization of culture where sexualized images are proliferating, and diverse sexualized practices, identities, and values are becoming more acceptable. The second trend is the mainstreaming of the sex industry. As the adult commercial sex industry expands, the more formal and upscale parts of the industry are increasingly organized and operated more like mainstream businesses. However, this mainstreaming often heightens the impact of social class inequalities.

The result of these two trends is that mainstream culture and the adult commercial sex industry are, in some important ways, converging. This is happening most clearly in venues with more resources and capital, but the trend is clear. This convergence has radical implications for sex workers, sex work researchers, and their allies, and it presents both opportunities and challenges. Here we examine the research identifying these trends. We then discuss the opportunities and challenges these trends present for scholarship, activism, and the practice of sex work.

The sexualization of culture

'Sex ... has become the Big Story,' said sociologist Kenneth Plummer in 1995 (Plummer, 1995). The British scholar Feona Attwood argues that scholars are paying more and more attention to dramatic changes in social norms surrounding sexuality since the mid 1990s. Culture has become sexualized, as marked by

a contemporary preoccupation with sexual values, practices and identities; the public shift to more permissive sexual attitudes; the proliferation of sexual texts; the emergence of new forms of sexual experience; the apparent breakdown of rules, categories and regulations designed to keep the obscene at bay; our fondness for scandals, controversies and panics around sex. (Attwood, 2006, p. 78)

This sexualization of culture is a central by-product of a large economic transformation that has occurred in recent years. Beginning in the years after World War II and accelerating in the 1970s, Western economies have changed from production-based (extracting raw materials and producing durable goods in rigidly organized large factories) to consumption-based (producing predominantly services, ideas, and cultural products by means of more independent workers in decentralized workplaces). Most recently, entertainment, leisure, and tourism comprise a large and growing share of the service economy Even non-tourist services are increasingly 'touristic' — that is, rather than selling products or services with specific outcomes, services sell experience, spectacle, fantasy, adventure, and escapism (Frank, 2002; Lash & Urry, 1994; Mandel, 1975;Rojek, 1994;Rojek & Urry, 1997; Urry, 2002).

Scholars argue that consumer economies have transformed culture, creating consumers driven to constantly create and re-create fragmented, flexible individualistic lifestyles (Gergen, 1991; Giddens, 1991; Harvey, 1989; Lash & Urry, 1994). In this context there has been an increasing commercialization of intimacy (Hausbeck & Brents, 2002; Hochschild, 1983, 2003; Illouz, 1997; Zelizer, 2005). Pleasure, sexuality, and the erotic have become central components of globalized late capitalist leisure culture (Bauman, 2003; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Giddens, 1992; Hawkes, 1996; Plummer, 2001; Plummer, 2003; Simon, 1996).

Several analysts of media culture argue that the increasing centrality of sexuality to consumer culture has created an ever-blurring line around what we used to consider 'obscene' (McNair, 2002; Plummer, 1995). Brian McNair argues that we have become a 'Striptease Culture', where sexual revelation, voyeurism, and sexualized looking are permitted and encouraged throughout the media and commercial culture. Others point to heightened public attention to scandals, controversies, and moral panics, which exemplifies a fascination with sexualized looking (Attwood, 2006). McNair describes a 'pornographication of culture' where the images and practices we used to call pornography are increasingly a part of urban upscale culture and popular advertising. The visual cultural landscape is replete with highly sexualized images employed to sell mostly non-sexual goods and services. Non-pornographic advertising, fashion, art, education, comedy, movies and television and their celebrities are all experimenting with representations and parody of porn. There is a style-based class element to this. 'Porno-chic's' pastiches of porn in avant-garde, upper-class cultural forms are hard, glossy images that play with porn, but are culturally validated as art. Hypersexual public images of seduction and eroticized objects are 'in.' And in fast-paced urban youth markets, flirtation, seduction, and sexual expression are hip and cool. This may not be very different from the quintessential teen experience of the past seventy-five years, but it is unique in that now there is a stylized upscale youth culture, both public and private, that routinely involves a broader range of sexual play, including multiple sexual partners, homosexuality, bisexuality, playful intimacy, partying, and even parts of the actual sex industry.

These changes are transforming norms surrounding sexuality. Over the past fifty years we have witnessed an increasing acceptance of women's sexual agency, sex outside of marriage, sexual pleasure, and homosexuality in the general population (Hawkes, 1996; Jackson & Scott, 2004; Roseneil, 2000; Seidman, 2003; Stacey, 1996). Giddens argues that a consumer culture has created a 'plastic sexuality' that has freed sex from reproduction and created much more gender-egalitarian intimate relationships. There is plenty of evidence in attitude surveys across the globe that the average citizen in late capitalist cultures is becoming more accepting of sexual pleasure and diversity. Various surveys in advanced industrial nations show a greater tolerance of premarital, heterosexual sex, casual sex and serial relationships since the 1980s, and greater tolerance of gay sexuality. Even in the context of liberal trends, there are complications. There remain biases toward monogamy, and anxiety about the specialness of sex (Jackson & Scott, 2004).There is increasing polarization, often drawn along social class or ethnic lines, or urban/rural geographies, especially in the United States, over moral issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and tolerance of permissive sexual attitudes. The opposition to the sexualization of culture is smaller in number but often very active, and it does represent a religious and moral backlash in some circles against this sexualization of culture. These circles forestall liberalizing trends in social policy and law, and complicate the politics of sexuality However, it is clear that sexual attitudes are in the midst of a major transformation.

Consumer economies also transform the nature of work. Far more workers are engaged in interactive service work that markets, packages, and sells human experiences, and emotions for profit, including sales, fast food, personal service, and a wide variety of jobs in leisure and tourist industries. More and more workers sell leisure, touristic forms of escape and experience, to consumers. Many aspects of interactive service work have become feminized and sexualized as women and men working in these jobs are subjected to an objectifying gaze inherent in selling emotional services (Adkins, 2002; Adkins & Merchant, 1996). Many scholars have analyzed the ways in which service and tourist industry workers do emotional labor, acting, and selling commodified human interactions (Hochschild 1983, 2003). What recent research finds is that today's service workers have become adept at emotional labor. Depending on the conditions of the job, workers are able to engage in a variety of strategies that allow them to perform different emotions and portrayals of their personality for customers without psychological harm (see Wharton, 2009). Sexuality is also increasingly a part of the performance for many service workers, from waitresses to fitness instructors and even corporate executives who subtly self-brand to manage sexual aesthetics (Wolkowitz, 2006). Thus, the performances of intimacy, connection, and sexuality are increasingly part of labor in the mainstream leisure economy

Mainstreaming of the sex industry

How have these cultural and economic changes affected the sex industry, itself? Changing attitudes and an increasingly sexualized culture have pushed more consumers to accept the consumption of sexuality as a legitimate market transaction. At the same time, neoliberal laws and policies that reduce constraints on business and encourage entrepreneurship have allowed sexually oriented businesses to proliferate (Brents & Sanders, 2010). The sex industry businesses and mainstream business are converging. This convergence includes a growth in the sex industry generally, diversification in formal sex industry businesses, corporate structures, partnerships with mainstream businesses, and shifts in marketing to appeal to expanded, often more upscale audiences. Not all aspects of the sex industry are affected equally, but trends are clear.

The global sex industry has grown tremendously since the 1990s. Exact numbers are hotly debated. Ten years ago the global sex industry was estimated to be worth 'at least $20 billion a year and probably many times that' (Economist, 1998). That same year another study estimated that the sex industry was between 4 and 13 percent of gross domestic product in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand (Lim, 1998). Researchers estimated the UK's massage parlors to be worth £534 million in 1999, and that lap dancing bars generated £300 million in 2002 (Moffat & Peters, 2004; Jones et al., 2003). There are estimates that in the United States the sex industry is bigger than the major national sports — football, baseball and basketball combined — generating as much as $12 billion in 2005 (Free Speech Coalition, 2006; ABC News, 2004; Ackman, 2001; Schlosser, 1997). Between 2,500 and 5,000 strip clubs operate across the US (ABC News, 2004). In 2005, the entire erotic dance industry in the US brought in approximately $2 billion (Spain, 2007).

The adult industries are more visible than hitherto in mainstream media culture. In the US, cable networks increasingly air adult content in 'specials' such as HBO's 'Real Sex', or series such as G-String Divas, Pornocopia: Going Down in the Valley, or reality TV shows based on various sex industry themes, like Showtime's reality TV series Family Business about adult film star Adam Glasser (Seymour Butts) and his family. HBO's Cathouse is a 'documentary' series about legal prostitution. HBO and Showtime are exceedingly low key about marketing these shows. Yet the Cathouse series was viewed by an average of 1.3 million viewers and Pornocopia averaged 1.6 million viewers in 2005 according to Nielsen Media Research, higher than a number of highly advertised mainstream shows (Hibbard, 2005). Sex toys are gaining increasing respectability as stores appear on high streets in the UK (for example the Ann Summers chain) and the US, and adult videos are increasingly marketed toward women (Storr, 2003; Comella, 2008). Porn stars are becoming cult heroes. Pole dancing is taught in fitness clubs.

Mainstream businesses have recognized the profit potential from the adult industries and are getting involved, especially in adult video and strip dancing markets. Large communications and hotel chains reap huge profits from the pay-per-view porn business in hotel rooms (ABC News, 2004; Schlosser, 1997). Strip clubs have been opening chains and going public for a number of years.

This mainstreaming has a distinct class element. Sex industry businesses with the capital to do so are diversifying to attract upscale audiences. Gentlemen's clubs are redecorating and going upscale, expanding services, and opening on site restaurants targeting the lunch and dinner business crowd. In Antwerp, Belgium, a new upscale 'mega brothel' opened in a legal red-light district in 2006, decorated by superstar architects and designers (Castle, 2006). In the US, a legal brothel an hour's drive outside of Las Vegas added a non-brothel resort hotel to its site, and the corporation opened two strip clubs in Las Vegas. One is a traditional midsized strip club on the industrial corridor off the Las Vegas strip. The other is a large upscale ultra modern gentlemen's club that at 4 a.m. becomes a swank ultra lounge with $20 million state-of-the-art lighting and a unisex restroom. This level of capital investment was unprecedented in any company also owning a brothel.

Sex businesses of the past are nowadays under market-driven pressure to act, organize, and market themselves much more like mainstream businesses to compete in this environment. As the Adult Entertainment Expo, an industry trade show held in Las Vegas, has pointed out in its slogan for the past several years, 'It's Sexy. It's Powerful. It's Business!' These adult industry conventions hold workshops on marketing and consumer demand, as well as health insurance, investments, workplace rights, lobbying, website development, internet business practices, and self-branding for both business owners and workers (Comella, 2008).

There is also pressure, particularly for those sex businesses with high capital investment, to treat their employees better to compete with other service industries. For example, in legal brothels in the US state of Nevada, many owners are under pressure to offer women more flexible schedules than in the past. The larger, more upscale brothels are changing rules that require workers to live on premises, providing more standardized work rules, and offering more incentives for quality labor (Brents & Hausbeck, 2007; Brents et al., 2010).

The mainstreaming of the sex industry takes place in an exceedingly diverse and unequal set of businesses. On the one hand, there is certainly more acceptance of and growth in businesses that are already legal, and have the capital to be more visible. Adult video stores, sex toy stores and even strip dancing, as they have remained legal businesses, are those experiencing the most mainstream embrace. Attitude polls show that a significant majority of the population is still against prostitution where it is illegal, though that percentage has been decreasing. The World Values Survey of attitudes in a variety of nations across the globe has found that in many countries, the number of people who said prostitution was never justifiable has declined. In the United States those who said it was never justifiable dropped between 1982 and 1999 from 65 per cent to 47 per cent (Ingelhart, 2004). Studies of the US find support of prostitution is more likely to come from men than women, whites than non-whites, older than younger, Western US more than the South, unmarried more than married, and those with more education rather than less (May, 1999). May argues that there is such a high correlation between acceptance of activities such as gambling and homosexuality, that it might be better to assess public sentiment about legalizing prostitution without directly asking that question.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Sex Work Matters by Melissa Hope Ditmore, Antonia Levy, Ays Willman. Copyright © 2010 Melissa Hope Ditmore, Antonia Levy and Alys Willman. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1848134347
• ISBN 13: 9781848134348
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Melissa Hope Ditmore, Antonia Levy, Alys Willman