when i was studying women who went to spain from the caribbean, back ages ago, the problems of domestic and sex work seemed very similar and people moved back and forth.

failing at housework usually meant just that spanish employers were dissatisfied with some aspect of their employee, including her attractiveness to husband or son.

It’s just another example of people with their heads in the clouds – they would rather believe that sex workers are “failed” housemaids than accept that sex work might be a more attractive option.

You folks might want to keep an eye out for it.

It went out to Sexual Policies Watch at the end of September and should be up on their website and available to all, soon.

The SPW people have kindly agreed to revise its Portuguese (which is something I generally have to pay for) in return for a free English translation by myself. The current version has legible – but very rough – Portuguese. If you’d still like to give it a go, mail me at Macunaima30@yahoo.com.br and I’ll send you the unrevised Portuguese version.

Matt, I don’t know if it’s so much failing as housework, exactly…

We have a couple of informants who are prostitutes precisely because it allows them to continue with housework. It’s the only job that gets them enough money that, with two days of work a week, they can meet their families’ financial needs AND take on the role of housewife-mom.

cherylovers@gmail.com

The Paulo Longo Research Initiative. Human Rights and Bioethics.
School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine Monash University
Alfred Hospital Campus Melbourne, Victoria 3004 Australia

Landline. + 61 3 9903 0019
Mobile. + 61 4 02367792
http://www.med.monash.edu.au/epidemiology

A word of warning – our reading of the Ethiopian study may be very different than how it is read/used in Ethiopia. I worked in the Wise Up project in 2007 and 2008 and I know it’s a struggle for the sex workers there to deal with resources being shifted from rights based work to prevention of sex work.

Dubar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC). “A survey of the various types of social, physical and occupational oppression heaped upon our sex workers before and after their entry into sex work.”

http://www.chezstella.org/stella/dmsc20071018.pdf?PHPSESSID=5ade61ab4179080b588ab1ff7747ffe6

This survey has been conducted by the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), a forum representing the interest of more than 60,000 sex workers of West Bengal, India. DMSC is active in promoting the Rights and Development of sex workers and their children. It runs various projects and, works in coordination with a few associate organizations. An important component of DMSC’s activities is its attempt to devise various ways and means of resisting and neutralizing the various forms of social, physical and occupational oppressions heaped upon our sex workers. For these activities DMSC needs data on these oppressions. The objective of the present survey is to collect and analyse such data. (Author Abstract)

Here in Brazil we have recently published an article on the economics of prostitution which confirms what you say here.

In Rio de Janeiro, a huge number of our prostitute informants report leaving straight jobs – maid, beautician, check-out girl – to work in the sex industry. Not a single woman we`ve interviewed so far – even among the older (40+) and cheaper (1 real per minute) workers – reports wanting to leave sex work to work as a maid. Many of these women make a specific point of this. As Matt points out, many of them also report having sexual relations with bosses as maids or check-out girls as well.

Matt, the same goes with compulsory sex worker STI-testing as patriarchal punter protection.

The power of wording and definition regarding choice for me is outcome of controlling the power of sexuality as archaic life force and secondly the controlling of dependent vs. independent people, of worker vs. boss and later of work vs. capital. The split called capitalism is culturally more accepted or entrenched than the split of sex and love with sex for money aka prostitution.