Feminists and other scholars have debated theoretically what exactly is being purchased in the prostitution transaction and whether sex can be “a service like any other”, but they have scarcely tackled these questions empirically. This article draws upon field observations of and interviews with male clients of commercial sex-workers and state agents entrusted with regulating them to probe the meanings given to different types of commercial sexual exchange. Manifested by client arrests and re-education, vehicle impoundment, stricter laws on underage prostitution and the possession of child pornography, recent state efforts to problematize male sexuality throughout the USA and Western Europe have been developed alongside an increasingly unbridled ethic of sexual consumption, as evidenced by soaring demand for pornography, strip clubs, lap-dancing, escorts, telephone sex and “sex tours” in developing countries. By situating commercial sexual exchange within the broader context of post-industrial transformations of culture and sexuality, we can begin to unravel this paradox.
The Meaning of the Purchase Desire, Demand, and the Commerce of Sex 1
The Meaning of the Purchase Desire, Demand, and the Commerce of Sex 2
]]>This article stems from an interest in some of the recent debates in American feminist theory over sexuality and empowerment. By the late eighties, participants in the already polarized “sexuality debates” had formed two clearly demarcated camps around such policy issues as pornography and prostitution, and around the underlying questions of power, resistance and the possibility of female sexual agency under patriarchy. While the figure of the prostitute has served as a key trope in the writings and arguments of both groups–as symbolic of either the expropriation of female sexuality in general, or alternatively, of its socially subversive reappropriation–there has been surprisingly little empirical research done to investigate the lived conditions of contemporary prostitution.
]]>Despite the frequent equation of “prostitution” with “the oldest profession,” what many of us typically think of as prostitution has not existed for very long at all: large-scale, commercialized prostitution in the West is a recent phenomenon, emerging out of the dislocations of modern industrial capitalism in the mid 19th century.
For social scientists, legal scholars, and feminists (not to mention state actors) who have been attentive to the issue of prostitution, a key question has concerned what societies should do about it. Underlying this dilemma are a number of important ethical and political concerns: Is there anything inherently wrong with the exchange of sex for money? Should prostitution be considered a crime? In the mid-1990s, while serving as a participantobserver on the San Francisco Task Force on Prostitution, I got the chance to directly witness the ways in which policymakers and local activists responded to these questions. The Task Force had been created by the city’s Board of Supervisors to suggest amendments to existing prostitution laws. In tandem with this work, I also began what would become a seven-year ethnographic project of my own to map the transformations in the city’s commercial sex trade, as well as attempts to regulate it in San Francisco and other cities.
The Transformation of Sexual Commerce and Urban Space in San Francisco
]]>On Sunday, February 18, 2007, 5,800 Protestant churches throughout the United States sang the song “Amazing Grace” during their services, commemorating the two-hundredth anniversary of the abolition of slavery in England. As the congregants sang the lyrics of John Newton, the British ship captain turned abolitionist, they were simultaneously contributing to a growing political movement and to the promotion of a justreleasedfilm. The film, Amazing Grace, which focuses on the role played by British parliamentarian William Wilberforce’s evangelical Christian faith in his dedication to the nineteenth-century abolitionist cause, was produced in explicit coordination with a campaign to combat “modern day” forms of slavery, of which the organized Sunday sing-along was a part (Virgil). “Slavery still exists,” notes the movie’s Amazing Change campaign Web site, which directs Web-browsers to “become modern-day abolitionists” through prayer, donations to sponsored faith-based organizations, and the purchase of Amazing Change t-shirts, buttons, and caps. As Gary Haugen, founder of the International Justice Mission (one of the campaign’s four sponsored humanitarian organizations) has sought to emphasize, “[T]here are approximately twenty-seven million slaves in ourworld today—not metaphorical slaves, but actual slaves. That’s more slaves in our world today than were extracted from Africa during four hundred years of the transatlantic slave trade” (Terrify 21).
]]>In anticipation of the 2006 World Cup games in Munich, a broad international coalition of feminist and faith-based activists joined together to protest Germany’s world-renowned system of legalized prostitution. Although Germany’s system of licensed, regulated, and taxed prostitution has been regarded by some commentators as a progressive exemplar of sex workers’ rights, a diverse spectrum of antiprostitution activists were able to ignite a fervor regarding an anticipated epidemic of sex trafficking on the occasion of the World Cup, recasting the German state’s embrace of prostitution as a human rights catastrophe and rallying cause. In the antiprostitution activists’ analysis, human trafficking had little to do with the vast economic inequalities that propel individuals of all genders to migrate west and north under hazardous conditions, but was instead a manifestation of unchecked male desires run rampant—desires that, like Germany’s prostitution system itself, were badly in need of reform (see, for example, Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, 2006; Lopez, 2006; “Sex Isn’t a Spectator Sport,” 2006).
Sexual Commerce and the Global Flow of Bodies, Desires, and Social Policies.
]]>Drawing from fieldwork and interviews with middle-class sex workers, this essay considers the relationship between the class-privileged women and men who are increasingly finding their way into sex work and more generalized patterns of economic restructuring. How has the emergence of new communications technologies transformed the meaning and experience of sexual commerce for sex workers and their customers? What is the connection between the new ‘respectability’ of sexual commerce and the new classes of individuals who now participate in commercial sexual transactions? This essay concludes by exploring some of the key transformations that are occurring within middle-class commercial sexual encounters, including the emergence of ‘bounded authenticity’ (an authentic, yet bounded, interpersonal connection) as a particularly desirable and sought-after sexual commodity.
Sex Work for the Middle Classes
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Contrary to modernist predictions that religion would retreat into a private zone of worship and practice, recent decades have seen religion become increasingly salient on the political stage worldwide. Does this matter? From the point of view of women’s rights and gender equality, much is at stake. UNRISD research shows that politicized religion impinges on women’s rights in problematic ways. The challenge to gender equality comes not just from fundamentalist agendas, but also from those who instrumentalize women’s rights for political ends.
]]>During a blusteryNew York City winter in the final weeks of 2008, two very different cinematic events focused on the politics of gender, sexuality, and human rights stood out for their symmetry. The first event, a benefit screening of Call and Response (2008), a just-released “rockumentary” about human trafficking made by the Christian rockmusician- cum-filmmaker Justin Dillon, showed at a hip downtown cinema to a packed and enthusiastic mixed-gender audience of young, predominantly white and Korean evangelical Christians. The second event, a public screening of the film Very Young Girls (2008), a sober documentary about feminist activist Rachel Lloyd and her Harlem-based nonprofit organization for teenaged girls in street prostitution, was populated primarily by secular, middle-aged professional women with a long-standing commitment to the abolition of the sex trade. Despite the obvious demographic contrasts between the participants and the different constellations of secular and religious values that they harbor, more striking still was the common political foundation that the two groups have come to share.
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