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Good-time girls and other non-professionals taking money for sex

6 May 2013 in sex work by laura agustin | 4 comments | print print

Formalised money-sex exchanges get the attention and conflict: debates about exploitation and violence. Lots of other exchanges are ignored, a line is drawn between commercial and non-commercial sex. But that line is imaginary. Many people who expect to be compensated for their company will never call themselves sex workers or escorts, on the basis that they never ask for money. In Breakfast at Tiffany’s (the book, not the romanticised film), Holly Golightly distinguishes between professionals and others:

He asked me how I’d like to cheer up a lonely old man, at the same time pick up a hundred a week. I told him look, darling, you’ve got the wrong Miss Golightly, I’m not a nurse that does tricks on the side. I wasn’t impressed by the honorarium either; you can do as well as that on trips to the powder room: any gent with the slightest chic will give you fifty for the girl’s john, and I always ask for cab fare too, that’s another fifty.

Good-time girl (or guy) is only one of the names less professional people have been called. A few years ago I quoted a character in a  Lawrence Block book who described herself as a girlfriend taking money from friends. Another time I ran excerpts from a 1950s investigation that describes B-girls (B for bar) who are said to have drifted into prostitution after the easy promiscuity of bars. The police are perplexed because the girls look clean-cut.

Here’s another example, from The Sins of Our Fathers (1976), also by Lawrence Block. A young woman has been murdered, and there’s ambiguity about whether or not she was a prostitute. The investigator asks someone who had been her roommate a while back and then left the flat:

“What did she do, pass on one of her dates to you?”

Her eyes flared. She closed them briefly, drew on her cigarette. “It was almost like that,” she said. “Not quite, but that’s pretty close. She told me a friend of hers had a business associate in from out of town and asked if I’d like to date the guy, to double with her and her friend. I said I didn’t think so, and she talked about how we would see a good show and have a good dinner and everything. And then she said, ‘Be sensible, Marcia. You’ll have a good time, and you’ll make a few dollars out of it.’ . . . Well, I wasn’t shocked. So I must have suspected all along that she was getting money. I asked her what she meant, which was a pretty stupid question at that point, and she said that the men she dated all had plenty of money, and they realized it was tough for a young woman to earn a decent living, and at the end of the evening they would generally give you something. I said something about wasn’t that prostitution, and she said she never asked men for money, nothing like that, but they always gave her something. I wanted to ask how much but I didn’t and then she told me anyway. She said they always gave at least twenty dollars and sometimes a man would give her as much as a hundred. The man she was going to be seeing always gave her fifty dollars, she said, so if I went along it would mean that his friend would be almost certain to give me fifty dollars, and she asked if I didn’t think that was a good return on an evening that involved nothing but eating a great dinner and seeing a good show and then spending a half hour or so in bed with a nice, dignified gentleman. That was her phrase. A nice, dignified gentleman. . . I was earning eighty dollars a week. Nobody was taking me to great dinners or Broadway shows. And I hadn’t even met anyone I wanted to sleep with.”

“Did you enjoy the evening?”

“No. All I could think about was that I was going to have to sleep with this man. And he was old. . . Fifty-five, sixty. I’m never good at guessing how old people are. He was too old for me, that’s all I knew.”

“But you went along with it.”

“Yes. I had agreed to go, and I didn’t want to spoil the party. Dinner was good, and my date was charming enough. I didn’t pay much attention to the show. I couldn’t. I was too anxious about the rest of the evening.” She paused, focused her eyes over my shoulder. “Yes, I slept with him. And yes, he gave me fifty dollars. And yes, I took it. . . Aren’t you going to ask me why I took the money? . . . I wanted the damned money. And I wanted to know how it felt. Being a whore.”

“Did you feel that you were a whore?”

“Well, that’s what I was, isn’t it? I let a man fuck me, and I took money for it.”

I didn’t say anything. After a few moments she said, “Oh, the hell with it. I took a few more dates. Maybe one a week on the average. I don’t know why. It wasn’t the money. Not exactly. It was, I don’t know. Call it an experiment. I wanted to know how I felt about it. I wanted to… learn certain things about myself. . . That I’m a little squarer than I thought. That I didn’t care for the things I kept finding hiding in corners of my mind. That I wanted, oh, a cleaner life. That I wanted to fall in love with somebody. Get married, make babies, that whole trip. It turned out to be what I wanted. When I realized that, I knew I had to move out on my own. I couldn’t go on rooming with Wendy.”

This woman finds out about herself through an informal sex-money exchange some people call prostitution while others don’t. Another roommate might have been more enthusiastic about Wendy’s offer to share her lifestyle. Modest amounts of money are involved, but Wendy is spared taking a dull, ill-paid full-time job. Not much like more lucrative sugar-daddy arrangements? Or the same on a different scale? And does it matter?

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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The prohibition of things: Deterrence, Punishment and Rescue

15 April 2013 in sex work by laura agustin | 4 comments | print print

The idea of a government outlawing activities accomplishes only one thing clearly: It tells citizens that government has decided something is Wrong and now outlaws doing it. Sending A Message is the principle act behind the Swedish state’s promotion of its law against buying sex, and it is the principle act behind all the other politicians and would-be policymakers who want the law for their countries. Everyone wants to be seen to be Taking a Stand against immoral behaviour. Try bringing evidence into the conversation and you will quickly learn how irrelevant it is; you can find Swedish promoters themselves saying things like We know it doesn’t work but we want to be in the forefront of Gender Justice. This is about standing up for how you think society should be and doing it publicly, and trying to save people from their own immoral selves by outlawing bad things that attract them.

Any other claim about what prohibitionist laws achieve when they outlaw social activities like sex, drinking and drugs is not supported by evidence. That’s because, after the law is passed and the message is sent, individuals deal with prohibition deviously. That is, social pressure is strong to go along with the moral stand taken, but on the private level folks don’t intend or aren’t able to stop taking their own pleasures. So buyers and sellers of drugs, alcohol and sex become creative, some of them maintaining a disapproving stance in public at the same time.

The main claim made by prohibitionism is its deterrent effect, which holds that people will be put off breaking the law a) simply because it is illegal; b) because they are afraid of being put in prison; c) because they do not want to be publicly shamed and lose social status, whether they go to prison or not. In Foucauldian terms a punishment has to be threatened that can rob the crime of all attraction, so the potential perpetrator stops. Shaming is thus proposed by those who would prohibit buying sex (names and photos published on a website, for instance). Heart-rending pictures of victims are distributed to add to the shame at wanting to participate. When those don’t seem to work, or when perpetrators go ahead and pay fines when they are caught instead of resisting charges, prohibitionists propose the ante be upped to obligatory jail sentences.

I wrote about deterrence early on in Sex Workers and Violence Against Women: Utopic Visions or Battle of the Sexes? The theory of deterrence sounds as though it might work to put people off getting punished, but people are not very logical or sensible when it comes to their bodily pleasures – eating, smoking, drinking, drug-taking, sex. I hope someone is documenting the techniques being used as part of a criminology project somewhere – let me know if you are! [Other uses of deterrence are more complicated, see Deterrence in Criminal Justice.] I do wish Foucault were here to talk with me about this.

The prohibition of alcohol in the USA provides insights, though we shouldn’t generalise about everything and everywhere on the basis of them. I only bring it up because Slate just published these elegant cards patrons could carry and show at the door of drinking clubs in midtown New York between 1920 and 1933, the years when making and selling alcohol was prohibited. Calling it a club didn’t make drinking there legal, but if drinkers belonged to insider networks they would get a card, and doormen felt safer letting them inside the venues (the theory being that police and their informants wouldn’t manage to get a card).

Slate says

These cards represent clubs both famous and obscure. The card on the upper right would have admitted a partygoer to the glamorous Stork Club in its second home, which it moved into after it had been “raided out” of its first on West 58th Street. . . All of these cards are for establishments located on roughly the same latitude in midtown Manhattan. In the Prohibition years, according to Irving L. Allen, the blocks between 40th and 60th streets in Manhattan were rife with speakeasies.

The cards show how deviance develops when a market exists for an outlawed activity. Buyers and sellers find each other, including in upper social registers where patrons obviously must include some of the very people who have Taken a Stand and voted in a prohibitionist law. The cards also show how little deterred alcohol-drinkers were.

Then, of course, and far more convincing: all kinds of buying and selling sex are prohibited by criminal law all over the US, except in those few rural counties of Nevada where brothels are allowed. How in the world anyone could propose prohibiting the buying of sex as a deterrent is beyond me.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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The Cultural Study of Commercial Sex: Needed more than ever

4 March 2013 in sex work by laura agustin | 7 comments | print print

When I first began reading about people who sell sex and people who want them to stop, in the late 1990s, I was struck by the repetitive nature of the majority of books and articles, both academic and non-academic. When research was done, it produced the same knowledge over and over, generally about women who sell sex in streets – which was odd since many were already pointing out the diminution and even dying out of most street prostitution. The Internet is the New Street, it was said – and that was 15 years ago.

When what I read was ideological, it centred on an abstract term, prostitution, but it soon became obvious that this term has no stable meaning, signifying a raft of different things to different people of different social classes and cultures. A great deal of academic research did exactly what had been done before but now in a new city – or country – or part of town! Identities tended to be essentialised, particularly regarding race, drug use and low income.

In 2005 I proposed that researchers use a broader framework to take in all exchanges of sex for money, presents or other benefits, anywhere and anytime (historical research included, in other words). I followed this up in 2007 when invited to edit a special journal issue for Sexualities that contained eight articles using the cultural framework. Given that so much research – not to mention campaigning for better laws and policies – relies on scanty knowledge of what is actually going on, this is more relevant than ever. Otherwise, you get collateral damage, penalising people and activities unintentionally (I am assuming most people do not approve of collateral damage, but some actually claim it is ‘necessary’ for the Greater Good).

The Cultural Study of Commercial Sex- Sexualities, 8, 5, 618-631 (2005). Click the title to get the pdf.

The article begins like this:
Why create this framework

Societies’ twin reactions to commercial sex – moral revulsion and resigned tolerance – have paradoxically permitted its uncontrolled development in the underground economy and impeded cultural research on the phenomena involved. Affirmations that the global sex industry is growing and its forms proliferating are conventional in government and non-governmental fora, in the communications media and in scholarly writing. Commercial sex businesses and trafficking for sexual exploitation are blamed for massive violations of human rights, but the supporting information is unreliable, given the lack of agreement on basic definitions, the difficulty of counting clandestine objects and the fact that much of this stigmatized activity forms part of conventional social life.

Little work exists in a sex-industry framework, but if we agree that it refers to all commercial goods and services of an erotic and sexual kind, then a rich field of human activities is involved. And every one of these activities operates in a complex socio-cultural context in which the meaning of buying and selling sex is not always the same. The cultural study of commercial sex would use a cultural-studies, interdisciplinary approach to fill gaps in knowledge about commercial sex and relate the findings to other social and cultural concepts. Recent work has demonstrated how people who sell sex are excluded from studies of migration, of service work and of informal economies, and are instead examined only in terms of ‘prostitution’, a concept that focuses on transactions between individuals, especially their personal motivations. With the academic, media and ‘helping’ gaze fixed almost exclusively on women who sell sex, the great majority of phenomena that make up the sex industry are ignored, and this in itself contributes to the intransigent stigmatization of these women. While the sexual cultures of lesbian/gay/ bisexual/ transgender people are being slowly integrated into general concepts of culture, commercial sex is usually disqualified and treated only as a moral issue. This means that a wide range of ways of study are excluded. A cultural-studies approach, on the contrary, would look at commercial sex in its widest sense, examining its intersections with art, ethics, consumption, family life, entertainment, sport, economics, urban space, sexuality, tourism and criminality, not omitting issues of race, class, gender, identity and citizenship. An approach that considers commercial sex as culture would look for the everyday practices involved and try to reveal how our societies distinguish between activities considered normatively ‘social’ and activities denounced as morally wrong. This means examining a range of activities that take in both commerce and sex.

The purpose of this article is to point out the scarcity of research in these areas and reveal the kinds of issue that are up for study. Although public debate and academic theory on commercial sex abound, few participants are familiar with the wide variety of forms and sites involved; most are dealing with stereotypes and interested solely in street prostitution. This is an area where more information and images need to be disseminated, a project for which I make a small beginning here with some descriptive material from Spanish sex venues.

Since this is the beginning of what I hope will become a new field, I do not here offer any solutions to what is too often characterized as a ‘social problem’. Rather, I hope to interest others in taking up the call to study not ‘prostitution’ but the sex industry in new ways and to gather much more information on the object of governance before offering blanket solutions. This does not mean that important moral and ethical issues are not at stake nor that there is not widespread injustice in the industry. On the contrary, my proposal takes these injustices very seriously, laments the absence of workable solutions up to now and hopes that with better research these may be found.

Further headings are How study has proceeded so far, Definitions of the sex industry in general, Local particulars: examples from Spain, Elements of culture and researcher positionality and a raft of good References.

More examples of writing on sex-industry cultures outside the well-worn paths:

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Sex on Sunday: Sleaze and survival, taxi-dancing in Times Square

24 February 2013 in migration by laura agustin | 2 comments | print print

The increase in coverage of anti-trafficking operations and Rescue Industry rhetoric is such that I only blog about a tiny fraction of it. I post much much more on facebook, short commentary on media articles, and sometimes interesting conversations ensue. You can subscribe to my facebook posts (I don’t accept many friend requests now). You can also follow me on twitter.

As part of my thinking about how the sex industry fits within everyday cultures, here are photos showing how striptease and taxi dancing were traditionally wedged into the Times Square landscape. Some venues survived the clean-up of the 1990s, especially on upper floors, but few are left now. Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York records losses such as these. Both he and I are perfectly aware that developers as well as a lot of middle-class folks consider these places to be sleazy, the adjective usually invoked for such small sex-businesses run on shoe-strings and charging little to the clientele, crunched into small spaces on streets that get less public sweeping than they need. Some see beauty in them or just appreciate the individuality of the facades, so unlike the shopping-mall homogeneity now dominant in Times Square, often called Disneyfication.

We don’t have to be overly sentimental or ignore sexism and other injustices perpetrated inside these little businesses to appreciate that they look like individual places – workplaces for some, entertainment places for others. It’s appealing, too, that dance venues are sandwiched between lighting shops and delis – note Parisian dancing above Whelan’s Drugs.

Taxi-dancing, which some of these palaces offered, involves a lot of waiting around for the dancers, who must try not to look too bored. It’s a break in the emotional labour of flirting while at the same time keeping distance.

Images of taxi-dance girls as immoral seductresses abounded not so long ago.

Although it sounds charmingly antique, taxi-dancing lives on in other parts of New York. And here are some non-taxi dance pictures from an earlier Sunday: erotic, exotic, artistic, talented). Below, taxi-dancing far from Times Square, in the state of Montana.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Christmas in the Brothel, Edvard Munch, 1905

25 December 2012 in sex work by laura agustin | 1 comment | print print

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Sex boxes are not boxes: Regulation of prostitution in Zurich

2 December 2012 in sex work by laura agustin | 9 comments | print print

A German sex box: passenger side provides space for escape

Sex boxes are not boxes. And they are not Dutch-style prostitution windows, either, as a lazy reporter at Spain’s ABC egregiously wrote. In English these are called booths or boxes and even garages, but they are parking spaces with walls on three sides. Germany and the Netherlands have used these for sex-money transactions for years: This is not Big News.

The announcement from Switzerland was Zurich regulates sex industry: this is a story about regulation, city planning and social welfare. In the announcement on a new policy, Michael Herzig, whom I met when giving talks in Zurich, said:

We want to regulate prostitution because until now it was the law of the jungle. . . It was the pimps who decided the prices for instance. We want to as much as possible the city to regulate prostitution, the city to define what we have in Zurich. . .  but we are trying to go to a situation which is better for the prostitutes themselves, for their health and security and also for the population which lives in Zurich.

The purpose is to screen the sight of people having sex in cars; the pictures here show examples of boxes in other places; we haven’t seen the design for Zurich. The spaces will be located in an industrial area of the city. Herzig said

The big difference is that until now prostitution has been in the public space. Now we are going to change this, move it from the street to a private space in an old industrial area, which belongs to the city. This gives us the possibility to define the rules of prostitution in this area.

The policy is also about harm reduction, as the spaces/boxes include features intended to increase safety for sex workers and avoid condom rubbish in the street. Sex workers will be required to buy medical insurance and a licence to use them, and put five Swiss francs into a roadside ticket machine each night when they clock on.  This is pragmatism at the highest level; thus the absence of moral outrage on anyone’s part in the announcement – not about AIDS, trafficking, crime or victims.

What isn’t mentioned however is that, whenever this sort of plan arises, anywhere, numerous street workers simply refuse to transfer their activities to the regulated zones, which are always far away from bustling areas if not in downright deserted ones. Instead, they move into some other commercial/residential neighbourhood, where the cycle begins again. Clients in cars may well be willing to drive to the new zones; it’s the sex workers that don’t like them.

The other side of this regulation means prohibition of street walking on the Sihlquai, where residents have long been complaining for the usual reasons: too much noise and mess, too close to children. In this report from swissinfo.ch, an increase in numbers of sex workers is attributed to migrants from eastern Europe; in Zurich they have largely come from Hungary.

Note on the legality of selling sex in Switzerland: The official line is that only completely independent sex work is permitted (windows that look like this on ordinary houses are common). There are, of course, scads of businesses providing workplaces for workers, but the owners call the workers sub-contractors, which supposedly means the owners are not employers and thus not capable of ‘exploiting’ anyone. Typical city-father contradictoriness where commercial sex is concerned.

For anyone interested in the background to this policy-change, I published the following news story a couple of years ago, when sex boxes were also in the news.

Zurich ponders use of ‘sex boxes’ to control prostitution

by Marta Falconi, 3 September 2010, Swisster

After encouraging results in Germany, Zurich city officials are considering the installation of “sex boxes”, fenced parking areas, where prostitutes and their clients can conduct business away from the public eye. In a city where prostitution is on the rise, the measure could help protect residents and prostitutes alike. The drive-in “sex boxes” resemble makeshift parking spaces, surrounded by three tall metal fences to provide more privacy for prostitutes and their clients.

Already in use in some German cities, such as Cologne and Essen, the “sex boxes” are the latest idea suggested by Zurich city authorities after receiving thousands of complaints over the hordes of scantily clad prostitutes (and their actions) who patrol the main financial hub of Switzerland’s largest city.

Prostitution in Zurich increased by some 20 percent last year, according to some reports, which said that police had recorded more than 3,700 sex workers, mostly operating in the former red-light district in Zurich West, around Langstrasse, known as a busy multicultural melting pot and for occasional petty crime. The women generally gather on the artery of Sihlquai – a busy road along the river, behind Zurich’s main station – and wait in small groups for drivers to stop at pretty much any time of the day. The district is heavily populated and the area around the Sihlquai is also a common meeting point for students and families.

Reto Casanova, a spokesman for the Zurich police, told Swisster that the situation was “tolerable, but not as we want it”. He said the sex boxes have proved successful in Germany and could be an option for Zurich as well. “We are looking for an acceptable solution for everybody, with the goal of maintaining people’s safety and dignity,” he explained. Casanova said the ultimate decision on whether to adopt the boxes remains with the city council. However, he added, a police delegation is planning to travel to Germany in the fall to gather more first-hand details about the practice. In Cologne, social workers have reported encouraging results from the installation of the boxes. “In the past, the street girls were often chased by police. Now the officers are even protecting this legal street sex activity,” Sabine Reichard told Deutsche Press.

Further protection for sex workers is also built into the boxes’ design, which provides a handy alarm for the passenger within easy reach, while the parking set-up allows the prostitute an easy escape but blocks the driver’s door. So far it’s unclear whether using the enclosures will require a “parking” fee .

The rise of prostitution, with most women coming from Eastern European countries, is a worrisome problem for the city and its authorities who try to control the trafficking of women behind it, especially when individuals of 16 can legally sell their services in some parts of the country. Politician Luc Barthassat has called for the legal age to be raised to 18 and told Swissinfo recently that “Switzerland risks becoming a major sex tourism destination.” Zurich resident, Giuseppe Spina told Swisster he did not understand how big the phenomenon was until he found himself driving along the Sihlquai one recent night. ”It is a different world, somehow connected to ours, but still hidden in obscurity,” he said. “I had a problem with the car and had to stop one metre away from two prostitutes who were waiting there. I couldn’t help but pity them.”

Don’t ask me what his pity has to do with anything.

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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The Sex Industry in Spain: Sex clubs, flats, agriculture, tourism

21 April 2012 in sex work by laura agustin | 11 comments | print print

During the 20 years I’ve been consciously thinking about migration and prostitution, sex work and the sex industry, I have rarely seen such a bad portrayal of these deep and complex topics as in a New York Times piece on sex slaves I lambasted the other day. I lived a number of years in Spain, and it struck me early on that the endless discussion of prostitution failed to comprehend the variety of kinds of sex for sale within the industry, in all sorts of venues and situations that could be seen as good, bad or indifferent but that ought not to be reduced to any abstract, simplifying, uncontextualised term.

Here are researched descriptions of four types of places where different kinds of sexual services are for sale in Spain: large highway clubs, private flats, small houses associated with agriculture and the international coastal zone. After each description, I highlight the socially interrelated themes that arise from even such a brief glance, in order to point out how a cultural study of commercial sex – not prostitution – might proceed, on the assumption that knowing more about the specifics will help promote justice for more people.

Puticlubes (from puta, whore)

Streams of cars and trucks roar along multi-laned routes that connect Spain with France, Germany and other states east and with Portugal to the west. For long-distance truck drivers, the backbone of European commerce, long stints of solitary driving must be broken up with places offering rest and recreation. The buildings strung along these superhighways, as well as along smaller, provincial roads, are known informally in Spanish society as puticlubes (whoring clubs), but to those that work there they are hoteles de plaza, a term that refers to the employment system used, in which those offering sex for sale pay a daily rate for a place to live and work for three-week stretches. These businesses may house 50 workers or more, and in some areas, such as between Burgos and the Portuguese border, numerous clubs are located close together, forming a veritable erotic shopping area. With multiple floors, luxurious decorations, videos, live shows, jacuzzis and ‘exotic’ music—the latest rock from Moscow, for example—these clubs have come to represent luxurious sites of conspicuous consumption. Here customers pay as much as ten times the ordinary price for drinks, and it is the job of those working there to get them to buy as many as possible, since this is the owner’s major source of income. The array of nationalities living in the club at any one time is a phenomenon surely unique to sexual milieux: a German or Spanish truck driver or businessman may find himself surrounded by Rumanians, Nigerians, Colombians, Ukrainians, Brazilians and Moroccans. Imagine spaces filled with people speaking many languages, spaces where people from very different cultural backgrounds mix: the result may feel extravagantly cosmopolitan to some customers, who use these lavish venues to entertain and impress their own business clients. Other habitués include young men wanting a night out (and perhaps a sexual initiation) and lovelorn bachelors or widowers seeking company, all of whom may spend hours drinking, talking and watching. There is no requirement to purchase sex at all, and if it is, it occupies no more than twenty minutes (rules of the house, which wants workers back promoting drink as soon as possible). A large number of support personnel is needed to keep these high-overhead businesses going, and because they employ many migrants, good public relations are necessary with local police and immigration inspectors. Workers move on after their three-week stints, assuring that novelty will always be on offer.

To consider this venue as only ‘prostitution’ requires focussing exclusively on the 15-20 minutes when customers may retire to a private room with workers. Much feminist polemic has been written about concepts of exploitation, coercion and the lack of choice suffered by women in these jobs, as well as how they have reached this destination. Ignored are the work and lifestyles of long-distance truck drivers; cultures of entertainment among businessmen; multi-ethnic workplace cultures; the performance of masculinity and femininity and the reproduction of gender roles; homosociality (masculine bonding, competition, deal-making); financial advantages of owning such businesses and the extent to which lack of regulation makes it possible; relationships with local communities, employees and management and how sites may be used to accumulate social and cultural capital.

Private Flats

Where clubs specialise in splashiness and publicity, private flats offer discretion. They exist in most towns. Here the client rings up first to make an appointment in the kind of building that suggests tenants are ‘respectable’ middle-class families. The manager of the flat arranges for clients not to run into each other, and the flat itself displays few or no sexual signs; on the contrary, it may have floral-patterned covers and teddy bears on the beds, crucifixes and images of saints on the walls and the smell of home cooking wafting from the kitchen. A chain and cuffs hanging from a hook on one wall may indicate special services offered. If the customer has not requested a worker he already knows, he makes his selection and goes to a bedroom. Again, the mix of nationalities and ethnic groups is notable. These businesses rely on classified advertisements and mobile telephones, the two elements also making possible the boom in independent workers who run their own business from their own flat.

Again, most theory has focussed on the sexual acts that occur in flats and the extent to which women workers have chosen to perform them. Subjects that need researching include the cultural role of privacy and discretion; the possible meanings of domesticity as a sexual setting, including religious and family icons; communications technology’s contribution to the development of businesses.

The Agricultural World

In the southern province of Almería, a large proportion of the tomatoes and other vegetables Europeans eat are grown under plastic in vast plantations operated under semi-feudal conditions. Closeby, various kinds of sex businesses coexist, ranging from luxurious bars with private cubicles to rustic, poor housing where tenants open their doors to clients. The luxurious are located close to the plantations, even directly across from them, and those who enter and pay the prices are Spanish owners and other ‘whites’ from the managerial class, many of them men who were once agricultural labourers themselves. Women who work here come from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The rustic are located farther away, sometimes up inconvenient roads with few public services; here the clients are ‘non-white’, often undocumented, migrants. Here, Nigerian women offer offer sex and other domestic services in their houses (meals, drinks, washing and ironing, music, a place to stay the night). Occasionally tourists wander up from the beaches, seeking something different from the nightlife of the tourist coast.

While ‘prostitution’ is present here, this form of commercial sex attests to a traditional link with migrant sectors such as farming, mining and shipping. Useful research would look at the interrelation of commercial sex with other industries; the intersections of different informal-sector economies and forms of servitude; how the business segments by class, colour and ethnic group. Ethnographic work would consider what kind of relationships are developed among subaltern employees in different expatriate sectors.

The Cosmopolitan Frontier

This is the area of Spain where Spanishness fades and cosmopolitanism, tourism and hybridity reign. Businesses in Torrelinos, Marbella and smaller towns along the coast highway advertise in a brochure called Encuentros (meetings) which categorises its offerings under the terms Gay Bars, Swapping, Private Establishments and Contacts and Sex Shops. A plethora of clubs, bars, party rooms and flats advertise, mentioning as specialities piano-bars, saunas, jacuzzis, turkish baths, dark rooms, go-go shows, striptease, escort services, bilingual misses, private bars, dance floors, a variety of massages, private booths with 96 video channels, gifts for stag and hen parties, latex wear and aphrodisiacs. Apart from the sexual products and services available, other conditions are announced, such as air conditioning, valet or private parking, swimming pools, credit cards, select clientele, television and accessibility for the handicapped. Many adverts play down the commercial aspect by emphasising the ‘non-professionals’ present. Fitting the international environment, businesses are called Milady Palace, Play Boy, Melody d’Amour, Dolly’s, New Crazy, Glam Ur Palace Club and Titanic. Many are located in ordinary shopping strips.

Obviously, ‘prostitution’ occurs in these venues, but further areas for research include the influence of tourism and its correlation with questions of image and class in services; the positioning of gay culture and diverse sexual subcultures with commercial sex; the existence of subcultures within commercial sex; the role of entrepreneurism in the proliferation of sites. It would be interesting to know which kind of customer goes to which kind of place, how entrepreneurs decide what to offer in such a compact area chockful of sex businesses and how long businesses last. Are there sexual cultures here that extend into the rest of Spain or that tourists take home with them?

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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New York Times’s cheesy ersatz reporting on migrant women, sex work and trafficking

15 April 2012 in migration, sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 6 comments | print print

Aquí no hay puticlub: There’s no sex club here. This sign was erected by a British landowner along a rural route in Spain where customers in search of a commercial sex venue apparently drive in error. There are many sex clubs, bars and brothels of all shapes and sizes in Spain, where selling sex is not illegal, but key activities surrounding it are. I wrote about the different types of venues years ago when arguing for a cultural study of commercial sex.

I wonder if future historians will track how misinformation about migration and sex work was so willfully reproduced during the present period, how news publications with a reputation for actual investigation began to copy chunks of pseudo news and paste them together, were satisfied to quote only society’s most predictable, official and reductionist sources and failed to admit that the police force of any country is not the place to find out about complex social problems.

Any authentic interest in the topic at hand could not be titled In Spain, Women Enslaved by a Boom in Brothel Tourism – a cartoon-like story full of the most superficial sensationalist cliches, mostly derived from police sources and a few abolitionist advocates. Yet this is the story The New York Times published on its front page the other day, complete with a ludicrous photo of a young woman in high red boots worthy of the cheapest rag. As the story claimed to be about brothels (indoor venues), why did they illustrate the story with a picture of street prostitution – again, on the front page? I know of no serious research that talks about brothel tourism, by the way. On the other hand, men who live in places where no venues are available have always been known to cross borders or travel distances to get to them. There is no news about that.

The issue is failure to investigate and report dysfunctional migration policy and how growing economic inequalities promote the taking of unregulated, unprotected jobs in in underground economies, including in the sex industry. If this article had appeared in the New York Daily News or Britain’s Daily Mail, I wouldn’t even bother to comment, and it would take too long and be too annoying for me to critique the entire article, but here are a few of the most misleading simplifications:

* Young Men Flocking to Spain for Sex With Trafficked Prostitutes: title to a banal set of photos, some taken at a big sex club on the Spanish border near France. Border crossings for all sorts of reasons, sex, wine and rambling among them, have been going on forever in that area not only pottery and leather goods as the article says. How old can these reporters be that they seem to be describing naive tourists from the US in the 1950s?

* Sob story implying migrants’ families are heartless:

The police came across one case in which Colombian traffickers were paying one family $650 a month for their daughter. She managed to escape, he said. But when she contacted her family, they told her to go back or they would send her sister as a replacement.

One police case plucked out of thousands to imply how awful other places are, because there could never be a cruel or desperate family in the US, right? And no mention of the many more family projects that do not involve such melodrama.

* Pretense that something new and different is happening:

…experts say that prostitution — almost all of it involving the ruthless trafficking of foreign women — is booming, exploding into public view in small towns and big cities.

When selling sex is not illegal it may occur anywhere without people hiding, if that’s what they mean by public view – that is hardly surprising news.

* The report says one migrant still owed them more than $2,500, as though it were an egregious amount. In fact, that much can often be paid back in a fairly short time – one, two months – by someone working in a busy sex club. And as I have written many times, migrants pay for a series of valuable services, so without knowing a lot more about this particular story we do not know what this sum means.

* Attempt to cause moral panic about the young.

In the past, most customers were middle-aged men. But the boom here, experts say, is powered in large part by the desires of young men — many of them traveling in packs for the weekend — taking advantage of Europe’s cheap and nearly seamless travel. “The young used to go to discos,” said Francina Vila i Valls, Barcelona’s councilor for women and civil rights. “But now they go to brothels. It’s just another form of entertainment to them.”

All research for a long time has suggested that young men in groups habitually drop into clubs and drive through streets with sex workers as part of nights out. The same evening easily includes both discos and sex clubs. The word packs makes the men sound predatory, of course.

* Then they try to make it a problem of growing demand for sex services from younger tourists, so ignorant about travel outside the US they don’t know that people in neighbouring countries here rarely refer to each other as tourists. In Europe, everyone moves around all the time, the Schengen agreement meaning no border checks. This is not news. And to claim that Spain has also become a go-to destination for sex services is laughable. Spain has been a major tourist destination for decades. Holidays may always include sex, paid or not, and there is definitely a market for men visiting numerous European cities to enjoy stag parties. Spain is not particularly famous for these, but trends may change.

* Ignorance about migration:

Thirty years ago, virtually all the prostitutes in Spain were Spanish. Now, almost none are. Advocates and police officials say that most of the women are controlled by illegal networks — they are modern-day slaves.

Women from Latin America travelling to Spain to work in domestic service or sell sex is indeed a decades-long phenomenon, so that different generations in the same family are involved and networks are mature. Networks are illegal because migrants are undocumented, not because they are sinister. This is just yellow-press exaggeration.

I have to stop here; there is just too much irresponsible rubbish in this article. Toward the end a few interesting facts slip in that indicate the subject is far more complex than the cheesy reporting has so far let on – the reporters must not have realised. I also could provide numerous links to my own writings, many based fundamentally on my own years of living and researching in Spain, but the New York Times will never be interested.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Kolkata Sex Worker Collective DMSC Celebrates 20 Years

8 March 2012 in sex work by laura agustin | 1 comment | print print

DMSC's Avinash clinic. Photo: Indranil Bhoumik/Mint

The most popular page on this website is a 2009 story about prices in Sonagachi, a red-light area in Kolkata. It got more than 200 comments, mostly from clients, some from pimps, others from morally outraged folks, mostly in India. I used to work at deleting the nasty ones every day, and then I stopped allowing comments, or there would be heaven knows how many by now. I have more than once been asked to remove the most sexist and deplorable comments, but how would this make sense, given my interest in understanding what’s going on in commercial sex and gender relations? Not to mention that erasure would be a weird form of End Demand.

DMSC, or Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, the sex worker collective described in a story below, operate a project in Sonagachi. Their principles are

  • Respect and dignity to sex work and towards sex workers
  • Reliance on the knowledge and wisdom of the community of sex workers
  • Recognition of sex work as an occupation and preserve and protect their occupational and human rights

Accusations have been made by anti-prostitutionists (among them Nicholas Kristof) that there is something sinister about DMSC. The slurs, which have never been substantiated, probably derive from the collective’s requirement that journalists, academics, philanthropists and other tourists seek permission before swanning in to take photos of people. DMSC consider such behaviour to be theft. For those who want to abolish prostitution and make everything into trafficking and slavery, Durbar’s refusal to play along with gawkers must be annoying, given the collective’s size, but that is no reason to slander the whole project.

In the following birthday story please note how many areas they are active in: culture, health, sports, children and publishing, as well as advocacy, lobbying and other kinds of activism. I especially like the description of a party for the marginalised, in which taboos are taboo.

The New Rhythms of Sonagachi

Kolkata Chromosome/Shamik Bag, 24 February 2012, livemint.com

As the city’s sex workers collective turns 20, we meet members who have found confidence in their enhanced social presence. For what is sometimes referred to as the world’s oldest profession, a mere passage of two decades can seem irrelevant in the life of Sonagachi—the red-light area in Kolkata and among the largest brothel districts in Asia. Yet, in these 20 years, 38-year-old Swapna Roy has seen a change in the way people refer to her—from being sneeringly mentioned in the coarse Bengali equivalent of slut, Roy today is a jouno kormi—a sex worker.

Roy’s daylight hours are busy—every day she is on the field in areas like Ultadanga and Janbazar as the joint coordinator of a project which sensitizes around 3,000 sex workers on safe and hygienic practices. She also keeps a tab on her two schoolgoing children, one of whom got a first division in the Madhyamik examinations last year. There is no unease about the business of her sundown hours. “We have come to realize that sex work is like any other work and I’m like any other worker. In these two decades, we have learnt to appreciate this.”

We are in the office of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), a collective of 65,000 sex workers from West Bengal. The organization works for women’s rights and is at the forefront of the fight against HIV/AIDS and related issues. Sex workers are the primary office bearers and stakeholders at DMSC, and in the 20 years of its existence, the organization has been responsible for bringing out into the streets—and into middle-class drawing rooms, through newspaper and television coverage—the issues facing sex workers, including the demand for legal sanction for the profession.

“You will find bank managers trying to woo them for their accounts and senior police officers calling up to seek appointments. Many of them are frequent fliers to Delhi and some travel abroad every three months on official work. There has been a cultural shift in society’s perception of sex workers,” says Shubha Ranjan Sinha, a senior DMSC official, sitting in the spacious front room of Durbar’s Nilmoni Mitra Street office, near Sonagachi. Posters with slogans like “Liberty, Equality, Sexuality” and “Only rights can stop the wrong” adorn the walls.

The three-storey office is abuzz. The next day, 15 February, would mark 20 years since a team of medical professionals, led by Smarajit Jana of Kolkata’s All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health, visited Sonagachi on an HIV intervention research study. In due course, Dr Jana realized that for the sex workers, their children’s education, access to financial services and fending of police harassment and torture by local thugs was more important than urging a client to use a condom. So Dr Jana founded DMSC, with sex workers as stakeholders, based on the value of “collective bargaining power”. From 12 members in 1995, DMSC draws its current strength of 65,000 members from 48 branches across the state, each headed by an elected secretary, according to Dr Jana.

The following day, the terrace of the Durbar office, the venue of the anniversary celebrations, is cheerfully decorated with streamers and balloons. With a cake waiting to be cut, speaker after speaker gives short speeches to mark the occasion. There is much to cheer about, it seems. In 1995, Usha, the consumer cooperative society and micro-credit programme under DMSC, convinced the Bengal government to alter the state’s cooperative law to register it as a sex workers cooperative instead of being wrongly labelled a housewives cooperative. With more than 5,000 members putting in their small savings, Usha, as of 2006-07, had an annual turnover of Rs. 9.75 crore and has disbursed Rs. 2.12 crore in loans to members. This came against the monopoly of Sonagachi moneylenders, some of whom charged 300% interest against loans. Some sex workers also have health insurance, while some have got voter identity cards with the Election Commission of India recognizing their Usha membership as valid identity proof. State Bank of India has also begun to recognize sex work as a profession while opening accounts, says Dr Jana. DMSC also runs 17 non-formal schools for children of sex workers, and two hostels at Ultadanga and Baruipur. There are regular teachers who give tuition to boarders (students who are pursuing higher education) in different subjects.

Members of Komol Gandhar, DMSC’s cultural wing dedicated to dance, drama, mime and music and run by the children, get invited regularly for paid shows. Eminent theatre personalities like the late Badal Sircar and Rudraprasad Sengupta have earlier trained its theatre unit. The Durbar football team, largely comprising children of sex workers, has for the first time in the 2011-12 season, participated in the nursery football league conducted by The Indian Football Association, West Bengal. They have won six of the seven games they have played so far, says coach Biswajit Majumdar. Some of the young footballers, says Majumdar, have represented Bengal at national-level junior championships.

Mrinal Kanti Dutta, one of the 12 founding members of Durbar, is the author of three non-fiction books, one of which is based on his experience of living in the Kalighat red-light area with his mother. While the three books have been published by Durbar Prakashani, the in-house publishing wing which has around 25 titles and brings out a popular monthly magazine, Dutta’s forthcoming novel, Pakhi Hijrer Biye, will be launched soon by a well-known College Street publisher. Dutta dropped out of college out of fear of getting ridiculed after his batchmates spotted him in the Kalighat red-light area.

Yet, on various occasions, Durbar has been hauled up for its insistence on legalizing sex work, its inability to eradicate violence and exploitation in red-light areas, and for not disclosing to patients the positive results from HIV tests. As Dr Jana says, HIV+ results are not disclosed only on occasions when Durbar has to follow norms under National AIDS Control Organisation’s (Naco) “unlinked anonymous” testing programme, even while admitting that more needs to be done to stem violence.

The terrace party comes across as a zone that is manifestly liberated from the moral scruples of the greater society that surrounds Sonagachi. Here, taboos are taboo and the fringe of Kolkata life—sex workers, their children, cross-dressers and transgenders —are comfortably cocooned through their commingling. Part of the confidence and inspiration comes from the story of Bharati Dey, secretary, DMSC. Dey is a frequent flier and has already exhausted the pages of two passports. As a sex worker in the mid-1990s, Dey is well-known for the movement she launched in 1997 in the Naihati- Barrackpore industrial belt against the mafia and political extortion. As she speaks, words like attempted murder, lynching, revolver and gang rape flow effortlessly—almost as if she is nonchalant to the indicators of her earlier existence. But, as Dey admits, it is life’s experiences that have shaped her and these days words and phrases like AGM (annual general meeting), Geneva Conference, donor agencies, advocacy and human rights, are uttered as easily.

“We don’t dissuade adult and willing girls from entering the profession. It is easy to say sex work is bad, but most girls come from poverty stricken families and are uneducated,” says Purnima Chatterjee, who sits on a self-regulatory board, which works as a watchdog body in all DMSC branches against trafficking and introduction of minor and unwilling girls into the trade…

It’s close to noon, and outside the clinic, where we meet, Sonagachi is stirring after what must have been yet another late night out in an area that is home to an estimated 11,000 sex workers. Bare-bodied men soap themselves frenetically at a public bath, a juice vendor peels the skin off pineapples, rickshaw-pullers wait for passengers, petticoats and blouses are collected from clotheslines in surrounding brothels. Crows and vultures fly above an overflowing garbage dump next to a black granite-faced building named Night Lovers.

Through this scene, 23-year-old Mita Mondal’s thin voice can be heard. Mondal is the lead vocalist and face of the Durbar band. She was rescued as a minor from the streets of Sonagachi eight years ago. The band practises on the vacant third floor of the building which houses the Avinash clinic, and the strident music filters out of the open windows to the streets below. Mondal occasionally goes off key and the conga player misses a rhythm or two. But everything falls into place when Mondal begins singing the Durbar anthem. It seems well-rehearsed, the dholak player shakes his head like a wound-up toy, and everybody mouths the chorus lines amid a sudden outburst of collective energy.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Commissario Brunetti’s world-weariness with prostitution, migration and other crimes

10 December 2011 in migration by laura agustin | No comments | print print

In a notable cultural contrast, anti-prostitutionists feel it important to constantly manifest their strenuous indignation through yelling and hyperbole, whereas those searching for more nuanced sex-work policy generally employ a calm, reasonable tone, overtly not getting excited. That is a sort of capsule description of the difference between a moralistic stance and a scientific one – not that the science involved here is the hard kind that can produce the indisputable evidence everyone longs for.

Commissario Brunetti, protagonist of Donna Leon’s popular crime series set in Venice, exudes the jaded tone of the pragmatists in this passage from A Question of Belief. Leon, like other contemporary novelists of Europe, now includes the everyday realities of undocumented migration routinely as background and often enough as part of the main plot. The presence of exploitative networks is simply not something to get wound up about anymore, even though acceptance involves stereotyping migrant groups. The fact is, though, that undocumented migrants operate through networking, and first networks are with people whose ways they are already familiar with (their families, neighbours, friends).

In this excerpt, the air temperature in Venice is overwhelming the commissario’s will to work:

Brunetti wondered at the possibility of making some sort of deal with the criminals in the city. Could they be induced to leave people alone until the end of this heat spell? That presupposed some sort of central organisation, but Brunetti knew that crime had become too diversified and too international for any reliable agreement to be possible. Once, when crime had been an exclusively local affair, the criminals well known and part of the social fabric, it might have worked, and the criminals, as burdened by the unrelenting heat as the police, might even have been willing to cooperate. ‘At least until the first of September,’ he said out loud.

. . .how to convince the Romanians to stop picking pockets, the Gypsies to stop sending their children to break into homes? And that was only in Venice. On the mainland, the requests would have been far more serious, asking the Moldavians to stop selling thirteen-year-olds and the Albanians to stop selling drugs. He considered for a moment the possibility of persuading Italian men to stop wanting young prostitutes or cheap drugs. (pp 15-16)

For more world-weary novelistic depictions of sex work see posts on novels by Lawrence Block, Ian Rankin and John Rechy.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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