Tag Archives: Europe

Christmas in the Brothel

Christmas in the Brothel
Edvard Munch, 1905

Snake Oil: A Memoir on the Rise of ‘Trafficking’

­When future historians try to understand what ‘trafficking’ meant in the first 20 years of the 21st century, I hope this memoir gives them pause. Recording how my questions about migration from 25 years ago coincided with the rise of a thing called trafficking as major social issue, this piece is both personal and political.*

­Snake Oil

Swindle, chicanery, skullduggery, con. There’s no one perfect word to describe how trafficking came to be hailed as one of the great problems of our time. Excess in rhetoric has known no bounds, with campaigners saying theirs is the new civil-rights movement and claiming there are more people in slavery today than at any time in human history, amongst ever-intensifying hyperbole.

And there was me thinking it was about folks wanting to leave home
to see if things might be better elsewhere.

The outcry had begun in insider-circles when I stumbled onto the scene in the mid-1990s, but I didn’t know the lingo or even what ideology was. Novels were my reading, not social theory. I hadn’t ‘studied’ feminism but felt myself to be part of a women’s movement since the early 1960s. I believed I was asking reasonable questions about a puzzling social phenomenon and refused to be fobbed off with explanations that made no sense. My trajectory as a thinker happened to coincide with a piece of governmental legerdemain that switched the topic of conversation from human mobility and migration to organised crime, like peas in a shell game.

At the time I was thinking about how so many, when faced with adversity, decide to try life in new places. I was not specially disrespectful of laws, but, like most migrants, didn’t feel that crossing borders without paper permission was a criminal act. I had no preconceived notions about prostitution; the women I knew who sold sex, poor and less poor, understood what they were doing.

For a while I had a job in an AIDS-prevention project in the Caribbean and was sent to visit parts of the island known for women’s migrations to Europe, where they would work as live-in maids or prostitutes. I visited small rural houses where daughters living abroad were money-sending heroes. At a film showing migrant women being beaten up by Amsterdam police, campesina audiences scoffed: their friends and relations in the Netherlands told the opposite story. A funding proposal I worked up for improving the experiences of migrants was returned with everything crossed out except ‘psychological help for returned traumatised victims’, an element I’d never included in the first place.

At a daylong event in Santo Domingo that was organised by black bargirls who called themselves sex workers, I sat in the last row. After a series of testimonies by the women and expositions by local legal experts, a speaker appeared who was said to have flown in from Venezuela. Addressing herself to the women in the first row she said ‘You have been deceived. You are not sex workers; you are prostituted women’.

I was horrified: How could she be so rude to her hosts? Someone said she was a member of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, but I didn’t know what that meant. From my place at the back I couldn’t see the bargirls’ reaction, but no angry words or protest ensued, perhaps because at that somewhat formal event a certain middle-class respect held sway.

A couple of years later, working in Miami as a secretary, I got on the Internet. When I finally learned how to search properly, I connected to a forum of escorts and activists who seemed to be on my wavelength about selling sex. Advocates of rights, they spoke about their personal experiences, and while they didn’t share the migration context, their feelings about this livelihood were the same as those of migrant women.

So now I was really puzzled: Where did the disparity of ideas about prostitution come from? What was the uproar about? What about the women I knew? No one was talking about migrants. When I set out to read about them, I found nothing at the public library.

To cut the story short, I ended up in a Master’s programme in something called International Education, which led to my first visit to a university library, call-number for prostitution in hand. Books with this number stretched from the top shelf to the bottom and up and down again into the distance. Beginning at the first book I began to read, but it didn’t take long for the books to seem indistinguishable. I began to riffle though tables of contents and key chapters, looking for discussions of my common-sense questions. When I found nothing, I wondered how there could be so many books so short on actual information. No one like my friends was ever mentioned, migrant or not. Something strange was going on.

For fieldwork purposes I proposed a short ethnographic stint in Spain, where I’ve often lived, amongst migrant women selling sex. One application for funding got me onto a shortlist, but at the interview by a committee, a political science professor slapped my proposal impatiently. ‘These women’, he jeered. ‘How do they get there?’ ‘In airplanes’, I replied.

My limited but grounded experience was whole discourses away from how such academics had begun to talk. Later I was told he was acquainted with Kathleen Barry, whose books hating prostitution had figured in my reading.

This was my first experience of bias based on my having framed the subject wrong: rather than Migrant Women Selling Sex, my proposal should have been titled Trafficked Women. I know this now, but at the time I was only mystified.

@rigels, Unsplash

Soon after, I was invited to speak at an event for International Women’s Day to be held in the community centre of a small New England town. Someone had to drive me hours through heavy snow to get there, but upon arrival we were told my name had been removed from the agenda. Some influential person, probably an academic, had been outraged that I’d been invited, but I never met them, knew their name or received an apology. This was my second experience of bias against my way of thinking.

After that, I lost count.

In 1998, I was invited to join the Human Rights Caucus at meetings to draft protocols to the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime. My ideas were welcome to this group, but I said no, because I still believed there was a misunderstanding. I thought there must be women I hadn’t met who could be understood through this concept of trafficking, and since I wasn’t studying them I saw no reason to get involved.

But as time went on and I presented my work here and there, I realised we were all talking about the same thing: women who leave home and make a living selling sex, in a variety of circumstances. But where I was describing how they try to take control of their lives, others were denying them any part in their fate. In the process of defining women who sell sex as victims, all differences in experience were being erased. I considered the result to be the antithesis of interesting and meaningful intellectual work.

I had set out to understand the disconnect between what I saw around me, amongst my friends and increasing numbers of acquaintances who were selling sex and how they were discussed by outsiders. At the end of the Master’s degree I had inklings of what was going on but hadn’t answered my original question: Why were women who opted to sell sex such a source of discord? And the corollary: Why were so many vowing to save women from prostitution?

Rather reluctantly, I pursued these as a doctoral student in Cultural Studies in England, but I spent several years in Spain doing the field work. My research topic was not migrant women, since there was no mystery to me about what they were doing. Instead, my subject was those social actors who professed to help migrants and sex workers, in governmental, NGO and activist projects. They were my mystery. When I started in 1999, none of them were talking about trafficking, but polemic about prostitution was ubiquitous.

In 2000, the editor of a migration-oriented journal in Madrid invited me to write about migrants who sold sex, sin polémica (without polemic), because by now outraged ranting was the only tone heard in public. By this point I was observing in a consciously anthropological fashion, so her requirement suited me. The resulting article, Trabajar en la industria del sexo (Working in the sex industry), led to a high official’s infiltrating me into an event held by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, to spite an abolitionist rival. Although I had no intention of making my presence known, I did attend, and for one long day listened to the ravings of some of the world’s most well-known anti-prostitutionists.

I won’t forget how Janice Raymond narrowed her eyes and dropped her voice when denouncing those who disagree with her fanatical abolitionism: ‘There might even be some of them in this room’, she said.

I backed against the wall where I was standing, wondering if she knew I was there. Later they trooped into a luxurious salon for smug feasting on elegant canapés and wines, inside the hyper-bourgeois Círculo de Bellas Artes.

When the Palermo Protocols were published I saw the human-rights group had managed to limit the damage, but I was glad I had decided to stay away from meetings to draft them. While trying to understand the humanitarian impulse to ‘help’ the poor I had appreciated Cynthia Enloe’s work showing how ‘womenandchildren’ are treated as an indistinguishable mass of helpless objects. Now here these objects were, enshrined in a trafficking protocol that scarcely acknowledged women as migrants, while migrant men exercised agency in the smuggling protocol.

It was soon obvious to insiders that the situating of migration- and sexwork-issues within the ‘organised crime’ framework was a fatal event that would determine the nature of all conversation afterwards. Many who believed distinctions between smuggling and trafficking could be maintained and the trafficking concept kept within bounds soon threw up their hands. Ever more activities were said to be trafficking, causing numbers of presumed victims to skyrocket.

My counter-narrative formed part of a calm and conventional report on migrant women’s jobs in Spain carried out by a collective of Madrid sociologists glad to have someone to do the sex-work section (2001). A few years later Gakoa published my various writings so far in a book called Trabajar en la industria del sexo, y otros tópicos migratorios (2001, Working in the sex industry, and other migration topics). I was reaching an audience skeptical of the news they were being fed in mainstream media about migrant women.

Trafficking became a big-time crime issue not because of its truth but because it served governments’ purposes. The interminably warlike USA loved a reason to go after bad men of the world on the excuse of saving innocent women. European states got justification to tighten borders against unwanted migrants. The UK could pretend it was going to be the new leader of anti-slavery campaigning just as their empire comes to an end. The UN was authorized to set up numerous new programs and initiatives. A range of other governmental entities benefited; Interpol and many police services were able to expand to new areas of ill-informed expertise.

And then the NGO sector began to sign up to this infantilisation of women, just as if we were living hundreds of years ago, when East End social workers set out to raise the fallen women of London. Even Hollywood actors jumped on the bandwagon as ambassadors claiming to be ‘voices for the voiceless’. The urge to Rescue was mainstreamed.

Meanwhile, I finished the PhD and put the thesis away. For several years I ignored a contract I had signed with Zed Books to publish, because I’d answered my own questions and didn’t imagine others would be interested. Eventually I changed my mind and edited the thesis to become accessible to more readers. When Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labor Markets and the Rescue Industry came out in 2007, it spoke to a growing social controversy and, rather than die the usual quick death of even quasi-academic volumes, has continued to sell, as relevant now as it was 13 years ago – alas. This was the birth of the term Rescue Industry. Mainstream media were interested; I wrote for some established news sources.

By 2010, when the BBC World Service invited me to speak at a televised debate on trafficking at an event sponsored by Madame Mubarak in Egypt, anti-trafficking had taken over the airwaves. But 50 minutes called ‘debate’ needed drama, and so far the panel was composed of guests all singing the same Rescue tune. I demurred: Why would I subject myself to such nonsense? Everyone would hate me – No. Then they said I could bring a friend, and I gave in, ending up on a stage in the Temple of Karnak. I managed to keep a straight face at the piffle flowing forth until Siddharth Kara’s pretence of expertise made me laugh out loud, causing Hollywood actors Mira Sorvino and Ashton Kutcher to rise from their seats in the audience to deplore me and deplore the BBC for having me. The meaning of the word ‘debate’ had escaped them. Symbolic, really.

Nothing that has happened since has changed my mind about the Protocols. A complex situation was deliberately obscured by governmental actors who set up a straw man so frightening scads of educated liberal folks were bamboozled, and through heavy financing and institutionalisation of programmes the fraud continues. I do not refer here to what is called moral panic, though that helps explain how the general public got caught up in the frenzy. I’m referring to the cynical selection of a fake tragic and terrifying cause as governmental policy.

Mechanisms to frame policy based on lies are not uncommon: a similarly egregious recent case involved ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that didn’t exist. And just as hardcore war was waged based on that lie, softcore belligerence has been endlessly launched at migrants and women who sell sex, via the claim that everyone who facilitates a trip is a criminal, everyone who buys a trip is a victim and every prostitute must be rescued. Embarrassing mainstream pundits like the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof elide all kinds of commercial sex with trafficking, in an undisguised campaign against prostitution that allows them to take imperialistic jaunts such as live-tweeting brothel raids in Cambodia (2012), shenanigans moral entrepreneurs carry out in an effort to look like heroes.

The actual earthly problems behind all this derive from poor economies and job markets that spur people to go on the move in search of new places to work. Sometimes home-conditions are direr than usual; sometimes there is gang conflict, war or natural disaster. At times societies are so unjust that those persecuted for beliefs or personal characteristics feel compelled to abandon them. In all these cases, when they illegally move into other countries, anti-foreigner sentiment, underground economies and social conflict flourish.

Which alternative policy-frameworks might have described this complexity, and which policy responses could have ensued, had honesty prevailed? In countries of origin, better distribution of wealth via economies that provide jobs with wages that can be lived on. In destination countries, an overhaul of government accounting so that more jobs are included in the formal sector, coupled with migration policy that allows more work-permits allotted for jobs not defined as ‘highly skilled’.

There are challenges here, but the ideas stick to the ground where ordinary people pay other ordinary people to help them travel, get across borders without visas and get paid jobs without holding residence or work permits. This includes women who opt to at least try selling sex.

Which mountebanks sold the snake oil first? Who suggested laws against trafficking were the way to solve migration problems? Moral entrepreneurs who cry about wicked foreigners are never scarce in times of stress. By the 1990s, scare-tactics increasingly turned to bogus estimations about illegal migration. Statisticians, tech-personnel and macroeconomists professed to provide data on how many criminals move how many victims around, with fancy new graphics and obfuscating equations.

None could have any real idea how many undocumented migrants work in informal-sector employment; they are extrapolating and estimating, often based on crude and random police reports. More recently, projects of surveillance using algorithms claim to tell us how many females are snapped up by sex-predators on the web. This disinformation was and continues to be promoted by a variety of opportunists for their own ends. The nonsense appears to have no end, as even certain emojis used in social media are banned as prurient.

It is not difficult to understand why politicians and government employees decided to buy the miracle product of trafficking: they stood to gain money and power. Trafficking narratives present a struggle between Good and Evil in which masculine men are protagonists, and a women’s auxiliary takes up the veil of Rescue. As time goes on, terrorism and war are mentioned more often, with victims a kind of collateral damage that justifies more programming and more police.

Ten years into the skullduggery I had a request for an interview from a young woman studying journalism and wanting to support sex workers’ rights. We met in a small old pub in Islington where, after the usual niceties, she put her question in a pleading tone. ‘Are you sure it’s not true?’ ‘What?’ ‘There aren’t millions of women trafficked into sex-slavery?’

I pointed towards the busy City Road. ‘Do I think lots of women are chained to radiators in flats out there? No. But I’m sure there are women who considered that coming to London to sell sex was a feasible way to solve their problems, and some will have paid a lot of money for help getting here’.

I have since 2008 done public education from a blog and other social media. By 2013 the disconnect between what mainstream news was feeding the public and what I was saying led to so many requests for clarification that I published Dear Students of Sex Work & Trafficking. I deconstruct Rescue-Industry claims, debunk research methods and statistics and track the progress of Law-and-Order projects to surveil sex workers and other undocumented folk.

In the 17th year after the Protocols I published a novel, hoping for a better way to tell the truths underneath bamboozling policy. Set in Spain amongst migrants and smugglers, many undocumented and selling sex, The Three-Headed Dog is a fiction version of Sex at the Margins, to be enjoyed as story and glimpse of reality.

In the 20 years since the Protocols were published, nothing has improved for migrants, sex workers or teen runaways. Things have picked up greatly for smugglers, though.

­

Sometimes Yoko went down to the port to watch the ships sail off to places she only wished she could go, 1964, Michael Rougier, Life Pictures/Getty Images

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Works cited

Agustín, L. (2000). Trabajar en la industria del sexoOfrim suplementos, Número 6, dedicado a Mercado laboral e inmigración.

Agustín, L. (2001). Mujeres migrantes ocupadas en servicios sexuales. In Colectivo IOÉ (Ed.), Mujer, inmigración y trabajo (pp. 647–716). Madrid: IMSERSO.

Agustín, L. (2005). Trabajar en la industria del sexo, y otros tópicos migratorios. San Sebastián: Gakoa.

Agustín, L. (2007a). Sex at the margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London: Zed Books.

Agustín, L. (2007b). What’s Wrong with the Trafficking Crusade? The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Agustín, L. 2012a. A man of moral sentiments. Review of Siddharth Kara, Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, H-Net, February.

Agustín, L. 2012b. The soft side of imperialismCounterpunch, 25 January.

Agustín, L. 2013. Dear students of sex work & trafficking. 25 March.

Agustín, L. 2017. The three-headed dog. Amazon, ASIN: B01N2V79UC.

BBC World Trafficking Debate, Luxor, Egypt. 2010. The full videos have been removed, probably because of the Mubaraks’ disgrace, but the event and line-up are visible.

Highlights of the debate are available, thanks to Carol Leigh.

Many of my other publications, including those published in Spain when I was living in Madrid and Granada, can be got from the top menu of this website.

A somewhat different version of this piece appeared in a specal issue of the Journal of Human TraffickingPalermo at 20, written at the invitation of Elzbieta Goździak. The present version was also published by Public Anthropologist.

*Photo: David Clode, Unsplash

­

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sexworkers’ long history as political experts, English translation: Thierry Schaffauser

I’ve translated Thierry’s reflections published the other day as faithfully to his tone as I could and checked with him, so here’s the piece with the same title, now in English.

Sexworkers’ long history as political experts – the English version
by Thierry Schaffauser, 7 November 2020

Last night I was listening to a longtime campaigner in the battle against AIDS and a sincere person, telling me that the emergence of sexworker activists in his organisation was recent, and that it would take time for sex workers to assume leadership roles, that it wasn’t enough to be a sex worker to have the skills — in response to my insistence that incompetent people who know nothing about sex work should be replaced by those concerned.

I was annoyed because I realised that the place and the role played by sex workers in the battle against AIDS, and in this organisation, had been forgotten. It annoyed me because my personal history in the battle against AIDS was not always simple, the feeling of not always being taken seriously, of not always being respected, because of being a sex worker, perhaps a bit hysterical, with a load of anecdotes in my head too long to list, but also annoyed to have to admit that I myself for a long time partly believed this story of the ‘cultural incapacity’ of my own community, because I also have been affected by the stories of certain sociologists and ‘experts’ that describe us as an ‘improbable movement’ ‘dependant on allies’.

I had to go to Geneva, invited by Swiss colleagues who have preserved the archives of Grisélidis Réal. All her life she spent time conserving and photocopying press articles, letters, messages, correspondence between activists, in a time when organising happened in real time, without the Internet. Loads of documents in French and other European languages, because she was a fluent speaker of French, English, German, Spanish and I think also some Italian. The Swiss, eh? And after a few moments I discovered what a lie I had believed for almost 20 years: that since 1975 and the occupation of the churches, nothing had happened. What shame I felt.

In the boxes at the Grisélidis Réal centre, there is a whole history of collectives, of trials and legal battles, of appeals to different governments, town halls, protests, all the militant work done now was already being done in that period when officially I had been taught there was nothing, because the supposed leaders of 1975 had used their mobilisation to become aware of the undesirable ‘prostitute condition’ and finally ‘changed their lives’, thanks to what they learned in a process of ‘consciousness-raising’ and ‘emancipation’. All of which can be understood as whore-hating bullshit, because Ulla’s departure from the movement can be seen, in the documents, as the result of a conflict with other leaders of different prostitute collectives, notably in Marseille and Paris.

The first cases of AIDS among prostitutes arrived in the 1980s, and mobilisation was practically immediate. The issue appeared in 1985 at the World Whores Congress and took a serious place in the manifesto of the World Congress of 1986. In reality, some of the first activists in anglo-saxon countries tried to mobilise even before those first cases, because many had homosexual friends and were already sensitised. The friendship whore/fag would also be a thing to study for that matter, for example between Grisel and Jean Luc Henning. And again Grisélidis is a bad example, since for a long time she took up the anti-hygiene discourse and denied the extent of AIDS, and she complained about having to use condoms.

Nevertheless she preserved many issues of GayPied from the 80s, with their articles on male prostitution and classifieds that reveal meetings between hookers and clients. ‘Generous man offers travel and holidays in company of a young man.’ Many activists were also bisexual and lesbian. It’s forgotten that Margo St James and Gail Pheterson, the founders of Coyote in California, were also a couple. Obviously the arrival of AIDS was immediately an event in that community, even if the first documented cases among cis women appeared four years later than among homosexual men.

There are real skills, there is real expertise. There are real battles. And it’s even astonishing, when you think about it, not to see that the whole prostitutes’ movement is since 1990 a movement that principally exists via the battle against AIDS, the only slightly official political space that lets us in.

And yes, in 2020, after more than 30 years, almost 40 in the battle against AIDS, there has never been any sex worker on the board of directors of certain organisations, even though we are a key population on whose behalf volunteers are sent to perform screenings every day.

I’m at the point where I’m tired and fed up with being angry. I don’t want to shout and I know well how quickly we are labelled bitter old queens with our obsessions, our frustrations and our failures. But I would just like there to be at least the realisation that no, the sex worker movement isn’t a ‘recent’ phenomenon. There have always been resistances, even before the 1970s, revolts of prostitutes in prisons, revolutions led by ‘common women’, salons held by courtesans to influence thinkers and decision-makers, artists creating new cultures influencing their society, innovation, audacity and courage. There is something to be proud of in being a whore, and that continues.

···

Thierry and I have long shared a wish not to rely on personal testimonies in discussing sexworker issues, but sometimes a personal piece rings a bell for many in the community. That’s what happened with Thierry’s facebook-post, and is why I suggested putting it on this blog, and why I decided to translate it. Non-insiders can undoubtedly guess what’s behind some of the more opaque comments, or they can search on google.

The photo, by Miroslav Tichý, is I believe in the public domain. If that’s wrong, please let me know how to credit you.

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sexworkers’ long history as political experts: Thierry Schaffauser

Saul Leiter, Untitled, 1950

The other day Thierry Schaffauser posted some reflections on facebook on the history of sexworkers as thinkers and leaders in activism for social change. Objecting to the exclusion of sexworkers from prominent roles in political groups, Thierry was told it was too soon to expect anything different, because sexworker-leadership was a recent phenomenon.

In this piece, Thierry goes back more than 40 years to remember sexworkers who were very much leaders and reflects on the apparent disappearance or ignorance of this history, even amongst friends.

He mentions the emergence of the idea that sexworkers won’t be able to achieve anything on their own; that ‘allies’ in the form of academics and big NGOs are crucial to success.

He highlights the longtime collaboration between gay and sexworker activists,
not only in the struggle against AIDS.

This is both a personal and very informative piece, which we’ve titled

Sexworkers’ long history as political experts
by Thierry Schaffauser, 7 November 2020

Hier soir, j’écoutais un militant de longue date de la lutte contre le sida et quelqu’un de sincère qui me disait que l’émergence d’activistes travailleurSEs du sexe dans son organisation était récente et que ça prenait du temps pour que des TdS prennent des places de leadership, qu’il ne suffisait pas d’être TdS pour avoir les compétences en réponse à mon exigence que des personnes incompétentes qui ne connaissent rien au TdS devaient être remplacées par des personnes concernées.

Je me suis un peu énervé parce que je me suis rendu compte que la place et le rôle joué par les TdS dans la lutte contre le sida, y compris dans cette organisation, a été oubliée. Ça m’a un peu énervé parce que mon histoire personnelle dans la lutte contre le sida n’a pas toujours été simple, le sentiment de ne pas avoir toujours été pris au sérieux, de ne pas avoir toujours été respecté, parce que travailleur du sexe, peut être trop hystérique, avec plein d’anecdotes en tête que je ne pourrais toutes lister, mais aussi un énervement à devoir admettre que moi même j’ai longtemps cru en partie dans cette narration de “l’incapacité culturelle” de ma propre communauté, parce que j’ai aussi été marqué par certaines lectures de sociologues ou “experts” non concernés, parlant de “mouvement improbable” de “dépendance aux alliés”.

Il a fallu que je me rende à Genève à l’invitation des collègues suisses qui ont conservé les archives de Grisélidis Réal. Toute sa vie, elle a passé son temps à conserver et photocopier les articles de presse, les courriers, les communiqués, les correspondances entre activistes qui n’avaient pas Internet à l’époque pour s’organiser en temps réel. Plein de documents en français et d’autres langues européennes car elle parlait couramment le français, l’anglais, l’allemand, l’espagnol et je crois aussi un peu d’italien. Les Suisses quoi. Et en quelques instants, j’ai découvert comme un mensonge que j’ai cru pendant presque 20 ans, à savoir qu’après 1975 et l’occupation des églises, il n’y avait rien eu. Qu’entre 1975 et 1990 c’est à dire la création du Bus des Femmes à Paris, il n’y avait rien eu. Quelle honte.

Saul Leiter, Inez, printed 1970s

Dans les cartons du centre Grisélidis Réal il y a toute une histoire de collectifs, de procès et batailles judiciaires, d’interpellations aux différents gouvernements, mairies, de manifestations, tout le travail militant fait aujourd’hui était déjà fait pendant cette période où officiellement j’avais appris qu’il n’y avait rien eu parce que soi disant les leaders de 1975 avaient profité de leur mobilisation pour prendre conscience d’une “condition prostituée” peu enviable et finalement “changer de vie” grâce aux compétences acquises grâce au processus de “conscientisation” et “d’émancipation”. Tout ça est bien entendu du bullshit putophobe car le départ d’Ulla du mouvement apparait surtout à la lecture des documents comme le résultat d’un conflit avec les autres leaders des différents collectifs de prostituées notamment celui de Marseille et Paris.

Les premiers cas de sida chez les prostituées arrivent au milieu des années 1980, et la mobilisation est quasiment immédiate. La question apparait en 85 au Congrès mondial des putains et entre sérieusement dans le manifeste du Congrès mondial de 86. En réalité, des premières activistes dans les pays anglo saxons tentent de mobiliser avant même ces premiers cas car beaucoup avaient des amis homosexuels, étaient déjà sensibilisées. L’amitié pute/pédé serait aussi un truc à étudier d’ailleurs, par exemple entre Grisel et Jean Luc Hennig. Et encore Grisélidis est un mauvais exemple car elle a longtemps repris les discours anti hygiénistes et de déni de l’ampleur du sida, et se plaignait de devoir adopter le préservatif.

Néanmoins elle a conservé plein de GayPied des années 80 pour leurs articles sur la prostitution masculine ou les petites annonces qui révèlent des processus de rencontres entre tapins et clients. “homme généreux offre voyage et vacances en compagnie d’un jeune homme”. Beaucoup des militantes étaient aussi bisexuelles et lesbiennes. On oublie que Margo St James et Gail Pheterson, les fondatrices de Coyote en Californie ont été un couple pas que militant! Donc évidemment que l’arrivée du sida a tout de suite été un événement pour cette communauté, même si les premiers cas documentés chez les femmes cis sont apparus quatre ans après ceux des hommes homosexuels.

Il y a de vraies compétences, il y a une vraie expertise. Il y a de vraies luttes. Et c’est même étonnant quand on y pense de ne pas voir que tout le mouvement des prostituées puis des travailleurSEs du sexe est depuis 1990 un mouvement qui existe en réalité principalement à travers la lutte contre le sida, seul espace politique un peu officiel qui nous est admis.

Saul Leiter, Snow, 1960

Et oui en 2020, après plus de 30 ans, bientôt 40 ans de lutte contre le sida, il n’y a toujours eu aucunE TdS dans les conseils d’administration de certaines organisations alors que nous sommes une population clé auprès de laquelle on envoie des volontaires pour des actions de dépistage tous les jours.

J’arrive à un point où je suis fatigué et j’en ai marre d’être en colère. Je n’ai plus envie de “gueuler” et je sais bien qu’on est vite désigné comme une vieille folle aigrie avec nos obsessions, nos frustrations et nos échecs. Mais je voudrais juste qu’il y ait au moins cette prise de conscience que non, le mouvement des travailleurs du sexe n’est pas un phénomène “récent”. Il y a toujours eu des résistances, même avant les années 1970, des révoltes de prostituées dans les prisons, des révolutions menées par des “femmes du peuple”, des salons tenus par des courtisanes pour influencer les penseurs et décideurs, des artistes créant de nouvelles cultures influençant leur société, de l’innovation, de l’audace et du courage. Il y a de quoi être fierES d’être putes, et ça continue.

···

Photographs by Saul Leiter, thanks to the Howard Greenberg Gallery

If anyone can easily produce a wonderful translation of this text, let me know. Ten years ago, Thierry translated a number of my writings into French, at a time when the French government were considering bringing in an anti-sexbuyer law (which they later did):

Rapport douteux sur la loi d’achat de sexe
original Tvivelaktig rapport om sexköpSvenska Dagbladet, avec Louise Persson, 15 July 2010
Version anglaise

Grandes prétentions, peu de preuves: la loi de Suède contre l’achat de sexe
original Big claims, little evidence: Sweden’s law against buying sexThe Local, 23 July 2010.

Rapport suédois basé sur de mauvais chiffres danois de la prostitution de rue
original Swedish report based on wrong Danish numbers for street prostitution, 3 July 2010.

La fumée dans les yeux: l’évaluation de la loi anti-prostitution suédoise offre de l’idéologie, pas de la méthodologie
original Smoke gets in your eyes: Evaluation of Swedish anti-prostitution law offers ideology, not methodology, 15 July 2010.

Derrière le visage heureux de la loi suédoise anti-prostitution
original Behind the happy face of the Swedish anti-prostitution lawLouise Persson, 4 July 2010.

Pas de méthode dans l’évaluation de la loi Suédoise contre l’achat de sexe
original Skarhed admits scientific method was lacking in evaluation of Swedish law against buying sex, 19 Jan 2011.

L’utilisation irresponsable des données relatives à la traite, ou: Mauvaises entrées de données, mauvais résultats
original Irresponsible use of trafficking data, or: Garbage in, garbage out, 14 August 2010.

···

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Naked Anthropologist News for Radio Ava: Jan 2020

Since last spring I’ve been providing Naked Anthropologist News to Radio Ava, a sexworker project in London. Something between tweeting and blogging, these news-bits are meant to be brief and critical, if not downright cutting. I choose a few things that struck or angered me most from the previous month’s online news. I link to an original news story and then quote sex workers as opinionators whenever possible as well as saying what I think. The latest edition was for 9 January. Note on the photos at the end.

In France

250 sex workers in France appeal to the European Court of Human Rights

Two hundred fifty sex workers in France have taken the 2016 law criminalising their clients to the European Court of Human Rights. Reasons given include:

‘We’ve exhausted the legal possibilities in France…
‘We reproach the French state for not assuring the fundamental liberties of sex workers…
‘Voices of sex workers are systematically ignored.’

To make a human-rights case, plaintiffs must show systematic discrimination, as when a governmental structure fails over time to take specific testimonies into account, not because of momentary bias or apparent coincidence. And not because of whore-hating writings by fanatics!

In China

China Scraps Extra-Judicial Forced Labor for Sex Workers

China banned prostitution after the Communist revolution in 1949, sending women into ‘custody and education’ programmes: Rehabilitation via forced labour, in other words.

The government wants us to believe Communism succeeded in abolishing prostitution and now claim prostitution ‘returned with a vengeance after landmark economic reforms began in the late 1970s.’ Since abolition rhetoric doesn’t suit China’s current public image, they’ve announced the ‘system’s historical role has been completed.’

Meaning what? Do they think all sex workers have been cured of the impulse to sell sex? No, because if they were then why does prostitution remain illegal, with punishments of both detention and fines?

The usual police ‘crackdowns’, as China routinely calls them, are sure to continue as usual.

In Nigeria

Nigerian judge declares sex work is not a crime

The judge said it’s not a crime to sell sex ‘since there is no law that forbids it’ and awarded damages to 16 women arrested for prostitution in 2017 when police raided private homes. The item goes on to mention more than 60 women arrested for prostitution in the capital city, Abuja. The women said they were harassed, extorted and publicly shamed.

Although the judgement sounds like good news, it will be open to different interpretations. In Spain, for example, where there is no law defining prostitution as either legal or illegal, sex workers’ rights campaigners have long protested police behaviour and confusing policy. They want a statement in law.

Let’s see what happens next in Nigeria, where police are sure to be very annoyed.

In London

Police make 14 arrests in modern slavery raids on south London nail bars

It was International Migrants Day when police carried out anti-trafficking raids on nail salons in Southwark. The 5-month multi-agency investigation claimed to be motivated by ‘concern for the safety and wellbeing of the women, children and other vulnerable adults caught up in this despicable trade.’

Familiar rhetoric.

Vietnamese migrants often work in UK nail salons, as we well know from recent deaths in a smuggling cock-up in Essex. Numerous researches and the sms-texts of migrants themselves show that they look hopefully forward to working in nail salons, and their travel-projects are supported and paid for by their families.

Reports like this from Southwark function as public-relations rhetoric for the Rescue Industry, as when arrest and detention are said to be followed by ‘support’. They want us to believe that sad young foreigners are being comforted by special employees, but you know what? The state will deport all these nail-workers as soon as they can, because that’s the legal solution to undocumented migration.

It’s the worst hypocrisy, pretending migrants want to be arrested and sent back where they started.

Naked Anthropologist News has a theme-song: Ten Cents a Dance, a taxi-dancer’s lament about her job, sung by Nebraska-born Ruth Etting in 1930. Taxi-dancing is one of those jobs that is or isn’t sex work, depending on your point of view: ‘All that you need is a ticket, Come on, big boy, ten cents a dance.’

About the photos: ‘Miroslav Tichý was a photographer who from the 1960s until 1985 took thousands of surreptitious pictures of women in his hometown of Kyjov in the Czech Republic, using homemade cameras constructed of cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials… Of his technical methods, Tichy said, “First of all, you have to have a bad camera”, and, “If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world.”‘
Right up my street. More photos at Michael Hoppen Gallery. And isn’t his camera glorious?

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Christmas in the unexciting brothel

Edvard Munch painted Christmas in the Brothel in 1905, and every year I feel the same fondness for it. I don’t pay much attention to the ceremonies of Christmas, but I like the holiday in this scene, particularly the woman making notes in a small book. There’s such a fuss nowadays about those who manage sex-businesses, making them into fiends, but this picture could be any non-glitzy bar anywhere. Munch painted numerous brothel pictures

When so-labeled Expresionist Munch painted the scene there was already a body of Impressionist works depicting prostitutes lounging and sitting with expressionless faces as they wait for clients. Toulouse-Lautrec painted this one of many in 1894.

The women are sometimes naked, but the tone is unexcited, the poses often awkward. Degas made this painting in 1879, the low-key colour-scheme contributing to an absence of titillation.

The Three-Headed Dog has this understated tone as well. It was partly the product of many years’ witnessing over-excited coverage of the sex industry, especially of everything related to migrant women who sell sex. In this novel, migrants work in different sorts of businesses run by others, some of them flats you might call brothels where, at this season, there are Christmas trees.

One of the reasons I haven’t been writing on this blog is a sensation that trafficking campaigns have all just gone too far now to even comment on. What we’re witnessing is neither panic nor hysteria but an institutionalised and highly misleading ‘social problem’ fed by media coverage that continuously reproduces a lurid fairy story. Engaging with it feels pointless. I’m sorry Sex at the Margins is still totally relevent.

More about The Three-Headed Dog:
Sexwork and Migration Mystery
Jobs in the sex industry
Location and nation
To go with sex tourists or smugglers?

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sexbuyer laws: War on clients, says Israeli MP

Sexbuyer laws now exist in eight countries at the national level: Israel, France, Canada, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden. I use the term sexbuyer laws because in mainstream news ‘Nordic Model’ appears more and more frequently in its fundamental meaning: a kind of social democracy Nordic countries generally espouse. And also because the legislation no longer attaches to any region, rather pointing to a vision of Gender Equality focussed on universal symbolic meanings. Prostitution appears to be the most powerful symbol of women’s oppression this vision knows, and laws to punish men who buy sex are currently its most popular goal. Such a campaign has just succeeded in Israel.

MP Shelly Yachimovich commented the war on the clients of prostitutes is similar to the war on slavery and the freeing of slaves, no less.

It’s not the first time war has been mentioned by campaigners against prostitution. In 2011 I said in The Bad Vibrations of Anatomical Fundamentalism I feel like the veteran of a long, drawn-out war. I first knew it as the War Between the Sexes… Now it feels like a World Gender War, in which a small number of women endeavour to bring all men and all disagreeing women to their knees.

With talk of war we leave conventional liberal justice-discourse deploring prostitution as violence against women. Yachimovich’s comment wants to increase the symbolic weight of anti-prostitutionism by invoking war and slavery. This has been done in the US by Rescue-Industry figures engaged in raising their own status: See The Thrill of Rescue, in which an NGO head says:

… Growing up just after the 1960s I feared that I had missed my chance to take part in the most important movement in our country. I now know that I have found my place — and that all of us can step up and join a movement that matters. This year, I became CEO of The Global Fund for Children… The torch has been passed to us. Putting an end to modern day slavery is our civil rights movement. Now it’s our time to make a difference, and we must continue to work together to ensure that people everywhere are free.

Years later I continue to be struck by this individual’s fear she might ‘lose out’ if there were no transcendent cause to devote herself to; is this what the true ‘social-justice warrior’ needs to exist? You might think the desire to grant meaningfulness to one’s life is harmless, but when one’s driving an NGO, ‘non-profit’ status fails to describe the benefits that accrue to those claiming to help, save, lift up and enlighten.

The desire to help may be sincere, but when observing a longterm mess like prostitution policy it’s essential to take into account how helpers benefit themselves. See The Construction of Benevolent Identities, the archtype of which you see in the picture of a nurse with her lamp. Woe betide anyone who doubts this kind of helping. MPs campaigning for a law reap prestige that aids their careers.


 
I think of sexbuyer laws as ‘European’ in style, and certainly the rhetoric and actions taken by Israeli campaigners align with a vogue in which young women demonstrate against prostitution. In one protest women put themselves on display in a shopping mall complete with descriptive price-tags. Israel’s Law Against Prostitution Heralds a New Era of Gender Equality booms a headline. But another title noted Israel joins small club of nations, evoking a Euro-elitism in which equality is not exactly the goal.

Israeli news items mention government-backed research released in 2016 in relation to the legislation. The report describes workers in various sectors of the sex industry in three cities via a standard sociological survey. There is nothing surprising in it. More than half the sexworkers came to Israel from another country, which is unremarkable in the Mediterranean context. All the research does is demonstrate the existence of a sex sector providing jobs to women, with stories of how they needed money and couldn’t find better jobs. You can read a short description in English of the research results but note the twist when they say ‘economic hardship’ is prostitution’s cause and prostitutes ‘could not stop’. It’s a way to make money many take as preferable to other options; it’s work.

Two points are interesting to me. First, interviewers were recruited through an entity called Awareness Institute for the Fight against the phenomenon of prostitution, which means inevitably they were biased. Even when only reading questions from a form, interviewers transmit attitudes interviewees detect and may respond to – either by refusing to say much or by providing answers they think interviewers will like. There’s no way to know, but it’s a flaw and odd the investigating team didn’t explain it. They did comment on possible bias because only male interviewers were allowed into most brothels to talk to workers. For my money, the anti-prostitution defect is greater.

Second, in a not new but currently unconventional wrinkle, the law criminalises the fact of simply being in ‘a location chiefly used for prostitution’. Perhaps it’s meant to make the whole business easier, since sexbuying charges are notoriously difficult to prove. The state stands to make a lot of money in fines if patrons continue to visit (fines only are the penalty). If they don’t continue to visit, what happens to sex workers trying to make a living? Sure, ‘rehabilitation and reintegration’ are part of this sexbuyer law, but – need I say again how fruitless such efforts always are? Never mind, symbolic helping has once again been done.

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Migrant sex worker: a term that has arrived

I wouldn’t have been surprised if the term migrant sex worker had died out except amongst rights-activists, given the hegemony enjoyed by reductionist trafficking narratives. When I was doing the intellectual work required to produce Sex at the Margins, I didn’t use labels for people but rather described a group of women leaving home for elsewhere and getting by cleaning houses and selling sex. Not all migrants who sell sex are women but women’s presence selling sex was what was manifestly ignored, in a way that reminded me of a lot of other ignoring I’d seen in my life. When I started there was no mention of these women anywhere in the media and then when I searched further I also found nothing in academic articles or books, even in the field of migration. Apparently they didn’t qualify as migrants, or could it be no reporter or student was interested in them as subjects of study? As time went on I understood, from reactions when I spoke about my work, that something else was going on and that au contraire everyone was really perhaps sometimes even too interested.

My favourite straightforward piece of early writing on migrants who sell sex is The (Crying) Need for Different Kinds of Research: Not all is trafficking and AIDS. Later on I published in academic journals, but never easily, as peer-reviewers who knew the subject could not be found in those days, and who was I supposed to be citing if no one had written yet? Who could have vouched for it except for the subjects themselves? Academic publishers consulting objectified subjects: absurd idea.

Anyway, eventually I published A Migrant World of Services: the emotional, sexual and caring services of women, 2003, and Migrants in the Mistress’s House: Other Voices in the Trafficking Debate, 2005 and, taking two and a half years to get published in a migration journal, Disappearing of a Migration Category: Migrants Who Sell Sex, 2006. Still my preference was never to label people migrant sex workers, as no one I’d ever known talked that way about themselves. They were travelling, they were working at night, they were prostitutes, they were helping families, they didn’t want to be maids.

In Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, published in 2007, I believe I only used the phrase migrant sex workers once:

But people who desire to travel, see the world, make money and accept
whatever jobs are available along the way do not fall into neat categories: ‘victims of trafficking’, ‘migrant sex workers’, ‘forced migrants’, ‘prostituted women’. Their lives are far more complex – and interesting – than such labels imply.

Of course by writing the book I drew attention to actions and lifestyles that can add up to an identity, even if it’s only temporary and not used by subjects themselves.

About labels and categories: You often see, in European web material, references like ‘street-based sex workers’. Sometimes that’s a covert way to say migrant sex workers, because there are always migrants selling sex on some street in European cities. Many more aren’t on the street, but only those on streets are readily identifiable by NGO workers and police, who engage in naming and counting. And then there are all the references to victims of trafficking who consider themselves to be migrants.

Projects with migrant sex workers are flourishing in the world of activism. Take Crossings:

A sex-worker produced documentary about the poverty, criminalization, and struggle of migrant sex workers in Europe. The film features the stories of sex workers from 5 European countries, Ukraine, Norway, France, Spain, and Serbia and was collaboratively produced by sex worker organizations and the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe. The project was supported by the Public Health Program of the Open Society Foundations.

That’s right: George Soros’s Open Society funding supports work on migration and sex work both. Tampep (The European Network for the Promotion of Rights and
Health among Migrant Sex Workers) gets EU funding, because, while fanatics rant to exclude migrants absolutely, governments know how easily they get in, and you know how scary ‘threats to public health’ are. Specially sexual ones.

The term is also normalised in Canada, where Butterfly Asian and Migrant Sex Worker Support Network operates. See their report Anti-trafficking campaign harms migrant sex workers, which ends

We believe women when they tell us they are not trafficked and we believe them when they say they are. And when others like us are targeted or deported, we will not be held as complicit in violence against women because we are sex workers and refuse to be framed as victims. We do not consent to this status.

Some academics use the term, for example when demonstrating that all is not exploitation and misery when foreigner workers are concerned.

University of Otago, Christchurch releases first study of migrant sex workers: The majority of migrant sex workers in New Zealand who participated in new University of Otago research, are in safe employment situations and working to fund study or travel rather than being desperate, exploited or trafficked, the research shows.

Since the exclusion of migrant sex workers is the flaw in New Zealand’s rational prostitution law it’s logical that academics there should be using the term rather than wailing about trafficking.

I didn’t use the term migrant sex worker in The Three-Headed Dog, although numerous of the characters can be called that. It’s a novel in which people migrate to Spain and sell sex in different ways and settings; labels are irrelevant. But if you want to know what the term means I recommend this book over everything else you can read, including Sex at the Margins. These are not activist or academic or politician or Rescue-Industry voices: they are just human voices.

Give it as a holiday gift to someone who doesn’t understand at all. You buy it as an ebook on Amazon; you don’t need a kindle but just tell what eformat you want it in. It is Safe For Work, no fear.

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex workers may unionise – but can prostitutes? The case of Sindicato OTRAS

Last week a Madrid tribunal declared that sex workers can unionise but prostitutes can’t – or that’s what it comes down to. Sindicato OTRAS was granted conventional union status in the summer, having filed the necessary paperwork. But when the news got out, scandalised politicians vowed they wouldn’t allow it, because the current government has declared itself abolitionist. Before long, several women’s organisations in different parts of Spain had put together a lawsuit against the union, on the grounds that prostitution can’t be a job (because it’s violence against women, slavery and so on). I’m simplifying, but believe me, you don’t want to read the convoluted legal language involved.

I spent two evenings with members of Aprosex in late May in Barcelona, one of them a conversatorio with me and many enthusiastic participants held at the headquarters of t.i.c.t.a.c. Shortly afterwards, Aprosex filed papers to become a union: Sindicato OTRAS (Organización de Trabajadoras Sexuales). Sex workers who call themselves anything are welcome: cam-girls, phone-sex operators, strippers, porn actors, bar hostesses, escorts, workers in flats. Some of these offer services many consider to be prostitution.

Job-titles don’t say everything. Some who’ve embraced the term sex worker hate the word prostitute, but a lot of others comfortably use it, especially in Romance languages. A recently-formed group call themselves Colectivo de Prostitutas de Sevilla. The whore-word puta is in process of reclamation, appearing on banners as you see above. Some feel okay calling themselves sex workers as long as it’s clear that they aren’t prostitutes. The paperwork for OTRAS referred to sex work in all its forms, which abolitionists immediately interpreted to mean prostitution: the thing they love to hate.

I don’t need to describe the arguments made by the women’s-group plaintiffs; they are well known. I note their horror that prostitutes, who exist because of patriarchy, can argue that a union will combat it. I have written about anti-prostitution ideas many times, last in The New Abolitionist Model.

But the specific Spanish legal context determined how opponents could argue a lawsuit. In the Penal Code prostitution is not defined as illegal, which rights activists complain leads to alegal status that disadvantages sex workers. You may well think that if an activity is not prohibited or defined as wrong in law then it must by default be considered part of ordinary (legal) life. But the ambiguity has been exploited to claim that if prostitution is not defined as legal work by law and listed in a national register of occupations then it can’t be a job. Porn acting and web-camming might be. The term sex worker seems not precise enough to be, and anyway abolitionists read it as a euphemism for prostitute.

However, it’s more complicated than that. Amongst jobs that are listed in the national register is work in clubes de alterne, bar-venues with private spaces in the back or upstairs for workers to take clients for sex. The word alterne, from the verb alternar, refers to socialising and drinking with customers, and chicas de alterne is a common euphemism for women who work in clubes de carretera, hoteles de plaza, casas de citas and puticlubs – all names of public businesses that may get called brothels, but they may also have a lot more going on in them: films, shows, dance-floors, jacuzzis, who knows what else in a place like the one above in Málaga. Businesses you can call brothels also exist in residential buildings. All these are legal. I wrote more about them in The Sex Industry in Spain. In other parts of the world chicas de alterne are known as bar girls or hostesses.

The Audiencia’s decision noted there would be no problem if chicas de alterne wanted to unionise on the basis of their work socialising. They also do prostitution? No problem. If you find this bizarrely contradictory, consult the Mad Hatter – he understands perfectly. Loopholes like these provide endless paid occupation for lawyers and campaigners like Plataforma 8 de marzo, Comisión para la Investigación de Malos Tratos a Mujeres and L’Escola: women’s organisations who took Sindicato OTRAS to court.

In this case they made many familiar claims about prostitution being violence against women and an obstacle to equality, citing Spanish legislation. They leaned heavily on arguments about trafficking and prostitution being inseparable, quoting EU and UN declarations. But they also claimed that prostitution’s not being an occupation inscribed in Spain’s national job register means that those who practise it can’t be workers because their job does not exist.

Further complications relate to the requirement that workers forming unions need to have the status of employees in a setting where employers define and regulate their work. In the case of prostitution, plaintiffs argued, this would mean managers telling prostitutes how to have sex with clients, which they don’t do. To underscore their point claimants expressed outrage at the possibility that bosses and workers might be able to damage the highly personal nature of sex (personalísimo). The way these repressive arguments opportunistically use the principle of sexual freedom frankly makes me sick.

Requiring workers to assume self-employed status is common practice in sex-industry businesses in many countries, allowing bosses to avoid accusations of pimping and also avoid providing decent working conditions. Being self-employed means workers have no right to negotiate terms or problems in what obviously are workplaces. Individuals may complain to bosses, but only trade unions have the ability to negotiate formally with management without being ignored or simply dismissed. Nota bene: Caveats apply. There is no one meaning to the term trade union, and national contexts differ. Freelance/self-employed/autonomous workers are generally excluded, but new unions want to change that.

OTRAS will appeal to the Supreme Court and meanwhile, despite misleading press headlines, have not been declared illegal. The Audiencia’s decision annulled the group’s statutes (by-laws) but hasn’t the power to dissolve the union (the whole long cryptic decision is at the bottom of the previous link). El Diario did better on the decision than most media outlets.

Everyone wants to know why the association of sex-business owners is allowed to exist. ANELA was inscribed in the national register of associations in 2004, defining their activity as dispensar “productos o servicios” a terceras personas ajenas al establecimiento, “que ejerzan el alterne y la prostitución por cuenta propia”: provide products or services to self-employed third persons… who practise alterne and prostitution.

It is interesting that ANELA’s first attempt to register was also frustrated by the mention of prostitution. Told to remove it because it isn’t legal employment, they refused, citing a 2001 EU court decision that prostitution may be an economic activity for self-employed persons, in the absence of force or coercion. In the same Audiencia (Sala de lo Social) where the case against OTRAS was held, ANELA was initially refused inscription. They appealed to the Supreme Court and won, judges saying that providing the conditions for prostitution to take place doesn’t necessarily make an owner a pimp (proxeneta). Go figure.

Meanwhile, if you weren’t already dazed by contradictions, another sex workers’ union opened this past summer, also in Barcelona. Unión Sindical de Trabajo Sexual was founded as a branch of the already-existing Intersindical Alternativa de Catalunya, and moral crusaders have no argument with it. Not because of which job-titles the workers claim but because, as a branch, they are not a separate autonomous legal entity. I know – it just doesn’t add up.

Enough. I’ve understood for many years that the term prostitution can never be pinned down. It isn’t ‘just a word’: its meaning is far from obvious; its connotations reach deep into patriarchal mechanisms for keeping women down and divided against each other. The comfortable middle-class Spanish feminists desiring to bring down a trade union for sex workers perfectly prove the point. In Prostitution Law and the Death of Whores I went into this in detail.

When I was revising this I saw I hadn’t tagged for Rescue Industry. The hostility of government spokesfolk and organisations that agreed to do their dirty work goes beyond any pretense to be helping and saving. This is about upholding the status quo for a small but influential cadre of privileged women who believe that they Know Best about everything under the sun. Patriarchal hierarchies work for women at the top.

Some things I’ve written about Spain, in English (note Spanish at the bottom):

A novel, The Three-Headed Dog, is set on the Costa del Sol and Madrid, amongst migrants doing various kinds of sex work. In the sequel the setting moves from Galicia through Málaga to Calais and London.

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

Highways as sexwork places, with chairs

Who are migrant sex workers?

Sexwork and migration fiction, part 2: Jobs in the sex industry

Change the world by getting men to stop buying sex: Spain

In Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, the field work was carried out in Spain.

Lista de publicaciones mias en castellano

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Highways as sexwork-places, with chairs

When the topic is selling sex outdoors, mainstream media stick to the same photos over and over. Generally now posed, the shots show young female bodies chopped off at the head or feet or waist, standing in dark city streets. I don’t need to give an example because you’ve instantly visualised what I’m talking about. So when I posted an item on facebook from The Local that carried this photo with pink and green chairs, many people sounded surprised.

If you don’t bring a chair, sometimes there’s a kerb to sit on. If there’s not, you might lean on metal barriers. But chairs of all portable types are common along highways in Cataluña, despite longtime attempts by local communities and police to stop the whole activity. Gavà, Castelldefels, Viladecans, Les Filipines – not far from the beach or downtown Barcelona. Places where traffic slows down, where there’s a place to pull over.

These are workplaces to which workers bring staple items: a rucksack with food, makeup, clothes, towels. A parasol, wastebasket, extra plastic bags. A book to read, a thermos of coffee, sunscreen. I mention all this because anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution campaigns focus exclusively on the question of choice: whether any of these women really knew what selling sex would be like when they came to these highways from Rumania, Bulgaria or anywhere else. Whether they can be granted any agency at all, whether prostitution carries a transcendent meaning for feminism. Abstract questions rather than everyday culture in which individuals experience their own workaday lives. Looked at from this other viewpoint, it’s clear women treat these sites as workplaces, and that’s whether the person coming to pick them up after their shift is a friend or some kind of controller.

This isn’t a merely ethnographic value to be pooh-poohed by hard-hitting ideologues. To know about sex work you need to do more than think in the abstract. You need to look at what there is to look at, listen to the music and read more than tweets and policy-papers. Observing the workplace, even if you feel appalled that it’s out on a highway in the hot sun, allows you to see that the women are not only waiting passively as if with a whip over their heads but exercising small choices about their comfort.

The most ethereal of these pictures come from Txema Salvans, whose project The Waiting Game shows many more shots of sex workers along these highways.

Some of the chairs are not so portable after all, but I really like the empire-style fringed one above. The pictures also show that some workplaces are shared – and some chairs.

I’ve written about sexwork-places in Spain many times before, including:

Who are migrant sex workers?

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

Sexwork and migration fiction, part 2: Jobs in the sex industry

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Back to Barcelona: Migration and Sex Work

In the late 90s I created an email listserv called Industria del Sexo for migrants and sex workers to discuss issues in any Romance language (excluding English was important). There were some academics but no journalists or politicians. Before social media and using the list, a few of us, Spanish and migrants alike, organised an event in Barcelona in 2002, to coincide with an industrial International AIDS conference. It took place in the Centre Cívic Pati Llimona, pictured above. Migration and Sex Work were on the agenda, and migrant sex workers definitely Spoke Out.

I’ll be at Pati Llimona again on 22 May, in a public event organised by Latin Americans in conjunction with the (also industrial) Latin American Studies Association conference (which I’m not attending). I’m in the panel of speakers that begins at 0945: Sexualidades y movilidades, where I’ll try to explain how feminism got so acrimoniously divided over prostitution and the results for migrants. The address is Calle Regomir 3 in the Barri Gòtic; more about the rest of the day on facebook

On 24 May I join Aprosex, Asociación de Profesionales del Sexo, in an event held at TicTac, Calle Santa Dorotea 9, not far from Plaça d’Espanya. Note this is a conversatorio, not me giving a planned talk. Questions to be discussed can be submitted on scraps of paper and later hands raised in hopes of a livelier event (specially for me).

Otherwise, I’m planning to walk my feet off in my usual solitary fashion, flaneur that I have always been. I’ll  enjoy the odd copa here and there, including, amazingly, with a couple of women who were there in 2002. If you know anyone who’d be interested in either of these events, please let them know.

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Grid girls and the Presidents Club: Women and sexist jobs

In 1995, my friend’s 17-year-old daughter Ermina was looking for work in Santiago, Chile. The obvious job available to her was posing in a short skirt beside cars or washing machines in public showrooms – standard promotional technique to this day. What made her hesitate? Girls who took those jobs in Santiago were assumed to be loose – no better than they should be. She might ruin her reputation whether she went on to do more than pose or not. There were also jobs in coffee bars, but they carried an even graver stigma. But Ermina didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of her mother and aunt, who had both migrated to Madrid to work as live-in maids. This was the kind of story I ran into everywhere in Latin America amongst poorer people back in the 90s, and is why I ended up writing Sex at the Margins.

Recently jobs like these have been in the news in the context of the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment but they also appear in long-running campaigns against prostitution and trafficking. All objections are increasingly positioned as evidence of Gender Inequality. I thought about writing this post after an event called the Presidents Club got undercoverage – a Financial Times reporter got a job as hostess. Scandal was provoked by revelations of the conditions of work for hostesses – conditions that have been conventional for aeons and most people know about. For those interested in labour rights, reports of low pay and a requirement to sign non-disclosure contracts stood out. For those who felt scandalised, it was having to wear skimpy frocks and accept being groped.

These jobs are widespread, because sexism is everywhere, because women without a lot of education and training have few options for work and because some women like hostess or modeling-type jobs better than whatever others are available. I understand why successful middle-class women denounce the existence of this work. I know this is objectification of women’s bodies and appearance, you don’t have to tell me. But what does it mean to call for their abolition except fewer jobs for women? And although the denouncers are appalled, many other women like or don’t much mind this way of making money.

The Presidents Club got much publicity because it’s an event for elite men. A class issue, as though those men ought to be better than others? Consider what happened ‘lower down’ the culture hierarchy.

Formula 1 ended its tradition of using grid girls because ‘it was at odds with modern societal norms‘.

The men drive the cars, they make the cars, they fix the cars and the women handed out drinks, refreshed the buffet… The grid girls would be led out, a bit like prize cattle, just before the race and stand on the grid where the cars are, with an umbrella or a number of which position the car was in. They would have their bottoms pinched by the mechanics, there would be photographers sat on the floor behind them, taking pictures of their bums, or up their skirts. They had to giggle and pretend that was OK. – broadcaster Beverley Turner

But grid girls protested.

Note the numbers for that tweet – and it wasn’t the only one, and Cooper wasn’t the only tweeter.

In the world of competitive darts, before this trend reports could say ‘stunning walk-on girls provide some much-needed glamour… The lovely ladies have the important job… to provide a key element to the festive entertainment.’

But now the Professional Darts Corporation announced it would end using walk-on girls who accompany players to the stage and hold up score cards. Announcing a protest in Birmingham, the owner of Dream Street Models and Events said, “If they’re banning us at F1 and darts, what’s next? Where’s it going to stop? Will it be boxing, Superbikes, the stands at NEC shows? Most of my models do promotional work, for some it’s a part-time job, but for others it’s their full-time living.”

The Women’s Sport Trust said: “We applaud the Professional Darts Corporation moving with the times and deciding to no longer use walk-on girls. Motor racing, boxing and cycling . . . your move.”

In parts of Asia beer girls (or promotion girls) are paid low wages to jolly male customers into ordering a particular brand of beer. Surviving from tips and working long into the night, they too have been named as improperly exploited by a funder.

The mostly young drink promoters are paid low wages — and work for tips, largely from groups of intoxicated men — to push certain beers in bars. Global Fund announced on Thursday in a statement that it was suspending its partnership with Heineken “based on recent reports of the company’s use of female beer promoters in ways that expose them to sexual exploitation and health risks”.

Exposed by hanging around drinking men and possibly having sex with them possibly for money that lifts them from survival-mode? A lot of women consider this a desirable job. Do you want to add ‘are forced to’ consider it desirable? Ok, but desire counts – don’t tell me you Know Better than they how they should feel and act.

Then there was MIPIM, an annual conference for property people that draws sex workers, an unremarkable fact that contributed to demands for more equality for female delegates at the conference.

Tamsie Thomson, the director of the London festival of architecture, said the Presidents Club scandal had “just scratched the surface of the discrimination and harassment that women and other minorities are routinely subjected to in our industry”. Thomson launched the “the elephant in the room” campaign to encourage women and others to challenge any inappropriate or uncomfortable behaviour and distributed pink elephant badges to raise awareness.

The event and sector are obviously mired in sexist practices, including holding events where only male delegates feel fully welcome. But there’s a disquieting tendency to imply that the fact sex workers might be there somewhere is evidence of Something Being Very Wrong. “What other industry on the face of the earth in 2018 needs to remind businessmen that they can’t bring prostitutes to an industry conference,” asked Jane, a 29-year-old delegate from Manchester. “That alone tells you how backward property is.” Do they imagine that getting rid of sex workers helps fix inequality problems? This leap to pointing at prostitution smacks of scapegoating.

As I lamented in The New Abolitionist Model, banning badly paid jobs because they are objectifying and sexist punishes women in contexts where they haven’t got many options.

Is the proposition still that being a servant for pennies and a scant private life is better because it is more dignified? Or is it superior simply because it is not sex work? Either way, to focus always on the moral aspects of sexual labor means forever sidelining projects to improve working conditions and legal protections.

Surely it’s obvious that more kinds of work for better pay need to exist before jobs women prefer are prohibited, even with the disadvantages they entail. There’s where this kind of feminist needs to put her energy, and that goes for richer and poorer countries alike.

Footnote: Nowadays the Santiago coffee bars are called cafés con piernas, cafes with legs, and (of course) are now named as sites of sex exploitation. The photo at the top shows one example.

And, in case anyone thought this phenomenon is always gender-specific, see this photo by Bill Kobrin of the Art Students League Dream Ball, New York, 1953. Yes – the 1950s.

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Victimisation of Mary Prince: Early Rescue-Industry history

I’m always on the lookout for guided walks where I’ll be shown sites and hear histories not in the Establishment’s textbooks. Black History Walks showed me this plaque located in Bloomsbury on a wall where passerbys are unlikely to notice it.

Mary Prince was a slave born in Bermuda about 1788. Sold to several masters on different islands, she was brought to England in 1828 and a few years later dictated her story for publication. She was a migrant woman. You can read about Prince on many websites, one of which marvellously refers to Mary Prince’s Journeys.

The original 1831 edition of The History of Mary Prince had what we’d now call a title page as cover, according to the British Library. Later editions used and continue to use images, however.

Victimising imagery is standard fare in anti-trafficking campaigning as it is in most Third-World ‘Aid’ advertising. The theory is that feeling their heart-strings tugged loosens viewers’ holds on their wallets. The most-used images show girls cowering, hiding their faces, chained in dark places, crying. I collected a lot of the more horrible ones in an album. The victimisation of migrating women was my earliest question and complaint about how the mainstream was talking about them, and I published Forget Victimisation in 2003. (If you go to this link note the photo I used there.)

There are no photos of Prince from her lifetime, so what are the pictures used on covers of later editions of the book?

Penguin Books presently use this: a recognisable icon of anti-slavery history – the original Abolitionism. Slave is made to equal pitiable helpless shackled person in a pleading position. Pleading for help, for someone outside herself to free her. It’s a particularly inappropriate image to use for Mary Prince, whose agency can be in no doubt. Penguin should stop using it.

It’s not as sensationalistic as the image below, but it gets the message across that white people were needed to save black slaves. That slaves were passively waiting for liberation, rather than resisting in myriad ways, subverting the status quo, helping each other. Just the way present-day Rescue Industry campaigns obliterate the agency of migrants who pay smugglers to travel and get into trouble and then try to get themselves out of it.

You’d never guess that enslaved women like Prince existed. You’d never guess she negotiated several families and masters, got married, travelled, campaigned, authored a book. But she did.

On the bright side, the Bloomsbury plaque doesn’t even use the word slave. Now if it could just be placed somewhere a bit more noticeable. . .

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Report from Macedonia: Balkan Noir

Last December I was in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, on the occasion of International Day To End Violence against Sex Workers. This is what the sex workers’ march looked like on a wintry day. (2 Photos Credit: МИА, see Star Sexwork for more).

Macedonia isn’t a member of the EU because Greece objects to the name: political men’s clubs, eh? For myself, when asked if I’d been to the Balkans before I had to say Does it count if it was in the 70s? Obviously it doesn’t in terms of knowing anything except what a few places looked like to a young hitchiker down the Yugoslav coast. Then I was on my way to Greece and Egypt and points further south and east, and now I did recognise traces of the Ottoman in Skopje.

The sex workers of STAR gave a red-light performance for hours on the evening of 16 December, and Vanco Dzambaski took four pages of gorgeous photos of the event. In this one I’m outside looking up in company of Slavco Dimitrov of the Coalition Sexual and Health Rights of Marginalized Communities, who invited me to Macedonia.

This kind of venue – window prostitution – has never been part of Macedonian culture, which for a long time had regulated brothels typical in European history. As the time passed I began to feel we were watching a performance of modernity – the message to passers-by See what our profession looks like farther north. STAR’s live-stream of the event can be watched.

The performance went on for hours with breaks, and I moved from inside to outside, including across the large street to get a faraway view. I’m in the long coat.

In between sessions in the rainy streets we repaired to a bar where this Balkan Noir shot was taken. Slavco and Stefan Bogeski at the centre, me in the back head in hand, Dragana, Simona and Virginia at the edges. Thanks to all who showed me around (including Marija from HOPS), occasionally translated an alphabet I’d mostly forgotten, waited outside while I visited churches and peered at things. Especially thanks to those who responded when I insisted I needed Real Tea by taking me to a (conventionally) men-only café in the old bazaar. A big high-ceilinged room, no decor on the walls, no food, no games, just two screens showing different football matches, tea and cigarettes for men at wooden tables. It was heaven and made me feel I had ‘been there’ before.

As for my own invited talk, it looked like this, though none of the shots show how many folks were there. They had to bring in extra chairs, quieten partying children and all because there I was, waving my hands around as usual in front of a well-chosen photo from my collections of Women In Motion. It was said to be the first time anyone had talked like that in Macedonia – in terms of the ‘trafficking’ narrative, I take that to mean. One questioner said he assumed I myself had been a ‘sex-slave worker’ which shows how the media have confused things.

Thanks to Irena the moderator and Anna in the simultaneous translation box in the back. Lots more pictures were sent me, thanks to everyone who helped. I’m looking forward to my next trip out of Europe and into the Balkans. My only complaint about the whole thing were border-shenanigans leaving and entering Schengen at Vienna airport: once was already too many times.

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

International Day To End Violence against Sex Workers

On the International Day to End Violence against Sex Workers, 17 December, I’ll be in Skopje, Macedonia, invited to speak and march by the Coalition ‘Sexual and Health Rights of Marginalized Communities’ in association with the Institute for Ethnology and Antropology at Saints Cyril and Methodius University.

My public talk Sex at the Margins will be held at Public Room, which describes itself like this:

PUBLIC ROOM – Centre for design and innovation: Mezze bar, music, free co–working space for freelancers, concept store, prototyping room, library, commercial bazaars, fine arts and photo exhibitions, professional presentations, workshops for children and adults, business meetings, seminars and celebrations. Public Room is urban, multifunctional place open for all companies, organizations and enthusiasts from all generations… It is a pure hybrid space that abounds with opportunities, creative potential, programme for all tastes and people with positive attitude. You are welcome to realize your ideas in Public Room.

Pure hybrid – sounds like my sort of space. Mixed use, open to all, I’m in favour.

Here’s the facebook post for the event, which will be held at 1800 at 50 Divizija 22, 1000 Skopje: map to Public Room:

On Saturday 16 December, STAR STAR, a sex workers organisation, will do a Red Light District performance in Skopje city centre at 1700-1900 and 2000-2200 (Boulevard St Kliment Ohridski).

On 17 December at noon there is a march on Macedonia Street to mark the Day to End Violence against Sex Workers. Many sex worker groups hold events around the world on this day, and I’m happy to be in Southeast Europe, perhaps even in some sunshine.

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

All that is trafficking is rape, and other emotional excesses

A combination of titillation and outrage characterise public rhetoric about commercial sex, along with a tone of moral indignation suited to crusaders. A policeman in Cornwall has just warned that paying for sex with an ‘unconsenting’ woman is rape. Poor dullard, as an agent of the law surely he knows that muddling legal terms isn’t good for his job? In UK law paying for sex with a ‘trafficked’ person is prohibited, not defined as ‘rape’. But then think how much easier everything will be when there’s no bothersome distinction to make between trafficking and rape. A single meme to denounce all.

Early on in my studies, when I first was invited to talk to groups, I learned quickly how the temperature went up although I wasn’t saying anything graphic or violent. I thought I was simply recounting how poorer women often decide to take risks to travel via smugglers to rich countries, some of them to work as maids, others to sell sex, many to try both. I thought I was telling good news about curious, determined, brave women.

But those reasonable stories, told in an ordinary tone, caused commotion. Some listeners seemed to feel I’d slapped them, asking Do you think everything is okay? What do you want us to do, not care, not try to help? So I saw there were two problems: First, my tone and emphasis seemed to accept the dire straits some women are in, and, second, my suggestion that trying to make women stay home did them no favours was highly unwelcome.

My tone is key to being able to study in a clear-headed way, plus it is genuinely how I feel. I wasn’t going to take up an indignant, judgmental stance. But I wanted to draw listeners in better, so I tried harder to put myself in the shoes of middle-class audiences, to understand their distress more. To frame my talks with something more familiar to them, some way for it not to sound as though acceptance of reality gets us all off the hook of giving a damn about other’s problems. I got a little better at it.

But I wouldn’t be able to continue commenting unless I felt a sort of calm about it all, a sense of belonging to the great stream of history. Not Progress but a long chain of events surrounding the exchange of sex for money.

In this context I was happy to receive the following email:

I wanted to tell you how much I liked your book The Three Headed Dog. It’s well written and honest. I enjoy your website and think you make a lot of sense.

I used to live in Holland and did from time to time have fun with a sex worker. The house was in a quiet suburb. The locals had no problem with the it. Indeed it was next door to a cafe where kids and adults would eat.

I got to know a few of the women who worked there. None were abused or forced into sex work. Some didn’t like the work, others did. They all were doing it for the money. Strong women not victims.

One lady became my regular. I would enter and be greeted by the Madam who would either ask for her or she would spot me and come over. I would play for her and then to a private room for an hour of fun.

So it’s not the world painted by some people. Thanks once again for your efforts.

The tone is cool and declarative: This is how it was. No rhetoric, few adjectives, no great claims. Just the experience a lot of people have when left alone out of the limelight where politicians and crusaders roar, sex workers and clients alike. Thanks to this anonymous client who wrote to me.

In The Three-Headed Dog, Félix’s partner Marcelo goes in for a bit of bombast about a migrant sex worker who’s started coming to the bar.

‘Yes I know other prostitutes drink at the Dog. But they aren’t coal-black Nigerians in white satin corsets and giant hairdos. They aren’t advertising it like she is.’

Leila finds Marcelo’s conformism intolerable, but I find him restful. A sort of psychological Rotarian who follows predictable lines of opinion, always quoting from the same sources in mainstream newspapers. He even once asked why I never got a job with the police so I could be a Good Guy going after the Bad. I pay no attention.

And I knew he was ashamed even before I replied, because he has limits. ‘Give over, Marcelo. Everyone can wear what they like here, it’s a neighbourhood tavern, not the opera house. She wears a coat over the corset, for God’s sake, but if she ever takes it off I’m not throwing her out, I’m telling you right now. Maybe I’ll wear my own corset here some day – it’s red.’

A drinker who was listening said, ‘Hey, I know which opera it is – La Traviata. You know, where the courtesan falls on the floor crying about her sin.’

The Three-Headed Dog is noir fiction, a novel set in Spain, with undocumented migrants as protagonists. Including sex workers who are coping – imagine that. The detective is a now-regularised migrant as well. It’s the first in a series, prepare for more non-scandalous treatment of underground lives. Readable on any device, no kindle required.

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Migrants sell sex in flats, or are they brothels?

Why does it matter where you sell sex? Although most photos attached to media stories show truncated women’s bodies standing in dark streets, the news often concerns indoors: flats where migrants live and sell sex for short periods, ordinary flats rented by someone and hired out to women who fly in and fly out, making money and then moving on. British media like to call them brothels, a stupidity based on laws that prohibit more than one person at a time selling sex in indoor venues (yes, even two friends watching out for each other). Now they’re even called pop-up brothels, a cuteness deserving no further comment.

The flats don’t conform to the widely-held idea of brothels as places where clients can drink and socialise at bars and choose amongst a number of available workers to have sex with. Brothels don’t look like residential apartments in anyone’s imagination, any more than they look like clinics, carwashes or hair salons – all disguises that have been used. In old Barcelona photos you see the term mueblé to signify a brothel somewhere inside a residential building. In the photo to the right there is a venue El Gato Negro, which may be a bar or may lead to the mueblé mentioned in the sign at the left, which could be only a room or could be a flat (gomas in the Gato sign refers to condoms). Contemporary buildings are used the same way, with or without signage (see caption in below photo).

It doesn’t take a business-genius to figure out how to rent a house or flat and then sub-rent the space out to sex workers. Independent women do it or they find out about someone else and sub-rent from them. Nor is it difficult to buy budget air tickets online, nor, in the case of Europe and Europeans, to cross borders without showing passports. Some workers even use Air B&B, leading to outrage when homeowners want to believe chaste ‘families’ are enjoying non-sexual tourism in their rentals.

No wonder freelance sex work is a widespread international occupation. But despite this obvious fact, moral crusaders, police and media writers throw up their hands in horror at the supposed ‘traffickers’ who are setting flats up and then luring – that favourite word – unaware women to work in them. The assumptions are spelled out by judges at criminal trials who inevitably refer to women as vulnerable – a present-day version of innocent. In fact it all feels like the performance of a 19th-century melodrama in modern dress. And when the women protest strenuously enough that they set things up on their own, they are deported (even when selling sex isn’t prohibited – there’s always an excuse to toss them out.)

In a story from Singapore a migrant said to a reporter: ‘We have many customers every day and have all sorts of services. But we will be leaving in two days’ time.’ They were there on ‘social visit passes’ or tourist visas, and they indicated other women would be arriving when they left. The photo intends to show the ordinariness of the environment, I suppose – these are public housing units.

In Barcelona a news item relates how police are aware of 20 flats where, ‘without any kind of licence rooms are rented by the hour for sexual encounters. According to sources close to the case it was the same Martínez Bordiu family who found out that the tenant to whom they had rented the flat was using it as a brothel’ (casa de citas is the old-fashioned term used).

In The Three-Headed Dog, the migrant character Marina is working in a flat in Torremolinos, on the southern coast of Spain. When a client collapses she calls Félix Vidal:

It was after midnight when I parked in front of one of the faceless white apartment blocks, near where a couple with a small child were unpacking their car. I buzzed the street door, and a voice said ‘Closed’, but then there was bumping and a clank, and the door buzzed open. The family joined me in the small lift, fiddling with bags and folding up a push-chair.

At the flat, Marina let me in quickly, her hair springing out around her face like a great black halo. She pulled me into a room and closed the door on four young women in shorts and T-shirts huddled together looking scared. It was a bedroom conceived for a child in the original plan, so the double-sized bed that had been installed took up most of the space. A skimpy whip hung next to a red heart on the wall. On the floor beside the bed lay a man. Marina said, ‘He had some kind of attack. He was still conscious when I called you.’ I checked: he was breathing faintly.

The anonymity and ordinariness of houses, flats, apartments is preferred by a lot of workers and clients alike: people who don’t want bars, socialising, dance floors or fancy atmosphere. To call them brothels is to really stretch the imagination of already tired spectators at the Sex Work Wars. Sex takes place in houses anyway, so what difference does it make if money changes hands?

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Incitement to paedophilia: It’s the zeitgeist

The headline reads Spanish brothel’s “back to school” party sparks outrage in Andalusia. El Bosque is a legal club de alterne where sex workers drink, dance and chat with customers with the option to retire to private rooms for paid sex. The party-poster was called an incitement to paedophilia.

Clubs like El Bosque, known colloquially in Spanish as puticlubs, are legal businesses in Spain; here you can see a typical for-sale advertisement. Activists describe sex work in Spain as alegal: neither expressly prohibited nor permitted by law.

The anti-prostitution movement has long deplored these clubs as sites of violence against women. But in the campaign here, a party-style tolerated for ten years became intolerable to non-campaigners on the ground of promoting paedophilia, despite the obvious age of women (and their clothing) in the poster. The club’s owner removed the posters and cancelled the party.

Why am I interested? To have a ‘field’ of study means keeping track of events over time. Now that I’ve been observing opposition to the sex industry for more than 20 years I clock details, small moments of change. Opposition to paedophilia is not new at all. Outrage about enjo kosai and other kinds of juvenile sex work is also now old. But opposition to commercial-sex parties where adult women wear mock schoolgirl outfits shows a shift in mores about what is offensive. The pictures caused distaste.

But do such parties actually promote sex with young girls? It’s a question impossible ever to answer, like the effect of watching porn or violent movies. For all the palaver about research, most of it carried out about social behaviour can only vaguely intimate effects on one group or another. The neighbours’ feeling offended is palpably real, though neighbours who don’t feel offended are omitted from the story.

My formal study of opposition to the sex industry began with women planning to migrate to Spain, where two paying options awaited them: live-in domestic work or various sex jobs. There’s a wide gamut of these.

The life of migrants who find work in clubs de alterne and other venues is the theme of The Three-Headed Dog, a noir novel set in Málaga and Madrid. One of the characters is a 16-year-old Dominican boy in process of getting into sex work. Eddy is not well-educated but no longer wants to be in school or live with his parents. The detective sent to find him has to choose whether to try to rescue him against his own will.

Read more about sex work and migration in fiction and the ethical dilemmas for those concerned about it.

The Three-Headed Dog can be read on any device, just press for the one you want.

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Nigerian migrant women as subjects: Sex work in fiction

Anti-trafficking campaigners often single out Nigerian women as the worst case of what they call sex trafficking. I first wrote about this years ago and note that, despite critiques and debunkings, the trend holds. In stories about Nigerian migrant women, ‘rituals’ are usually cited that are supposed to have bound them in a specially sinister way to smugglers. It’s straight-up racist colonialism, the inability and unwillingness to conceive of even the most superficial aspects of a non-western culture. Lurid conclusions are jumped to immediately according to which juju ceremonies are not comparable to Roman Catholic ones, for one example – though promises, petitions and talismans are found in both. As though one sort of prayer for help or success were inherently irrational and the other not.

That’s not to say that conditions are not pretty dire for many women and men in western Africa, politically, economically, on the gender front – which means people can be willing to take big risks and assume onerous debts when they travel to work abroad. Early in my studies I learned about how some migrants think about that in Lucciole neri – Le prostitute nigeriane si raccontano (Iyamu Kennedy and Pino Nicotri, editors, 1999), one of my sources of ethnographic research with migrants who sell sex in Europe, for what eventually became Sex at the Margins. These Nigerians were working in Italy. [NB: It’s never clear whether the label Nigerian actually means born in and identified with that country. In the world of migration national identities are shifty.]

On Black Sisters’ Street, by Chika Unigwe, came out in 2009. I was prompted to read it by This is Africa’s mention of it along with Sex at the Margins. It’s a novel telling the stories of four women’s migrations from Nigeria to Belgium where they work in windows in the red-light district. None of them has had an easy life and none of them sees herself as a victim, despite the presence of a powerful smuggler in Lagos and a controlling madam in Antwerp. They are, the author says, willing to play the trump card that God has wedged in between their legs. Unigwe has said:

If your parents can’t help you out and your government has failed you, these pimps and traffickers have at least given you a chance to leave and make a living. He’s your saviour. It takes someone outside the situation to see these pimps and traffickers as the bad guys.

At the end of the book we are told how three of the women fare in the future. After nine years in Antwerp, Efe became a madam herself.

It would take eighteen months to get her first of two girls whom she would indeed buy at an auction presided by a tall, good-looking Nigerian man in sunglasses and a beret. It would be in a house in Brussels, with lots to drink and soft music playing in the background. The women would enter the country with a musical band billed to perform at the Lokerenfeest. The man in the sunglasses was the manager of the band and as usual had, in addition to genuine members of the band, added the names of the women who had paid him to the list he submitted at the embassy in Abuja. The women would be called into the room one at a time for the buyers to see and admire. They would all have numbers, for names were not important. Their names would be chosen by whoever bought them. Names that would be easy for white clients to pronounce… Efe would buy numbers five and seven. Number five because she smiled easily. Number seven because she looked docile and eager to please, the sort of girl who was grateful for little. Like Madam, Efe would have some police officers on her payroll to ensure the security of her girls and of her business. She would do well in the business, buying more girls to add to her fleet. pp 278-9

Yes, this is an auction where employers bid on women who will sell sex, but beware glossing all nuances and calling it slave-trading. The women in question want to migrate and accept they’ll be selling sex and paying off a debt. Which doesn’t mean they know everything that may happen to them and how constrained life will be in another country. The Three-Headed Dog, my own recent novel, is about the same dynamics, with Latin Americans in Spain but also a strong Nigerian character – Promise.

I first published this post only slightly changed on 22 September 2011 and publish it again now as part of a series on sex work in fiction.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Paying for sex in Graham Greeneland: Sex work in fiction

womanblurLeiterThe other day I lightly said It’s a blokey thing to a young person who replied That’s a sexist thing to say! The next day another young person heard me use the word masculine and cried You’re a feminist! I take it ideas about sexism and feminism have extended their contradictory ways into small corners of ordinary life and think it funny I got accused of opposing sins on back-to-back days. Some of us don’t fit neatly into identity-categories, eh?

Couple-saying-goodbye-outside-the-Tube-station-entranceMost of the discourse about buying and selling sex focuses on the abstract question Is it Bad or Good? in one way or another. More interesting is anything that shows how diverse transactions are, how wide the field, how contradictory the possibilities, how unlikely the goal of an ethical bottom line. In the following vignette from Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951) a commercial transaction is deeply embedded in context: World War II London, Clapham, the narrator’s love for a married woman, his obsessive jealousy. They have an argument and he walks out. It is May 1940.

That evening I was still full of my hatred and distrust when I reached Piccadilly. More than anything in the world I wanted to hurt Sarah. I wanted to take a woman back with me and lie with her upon the same bed in which I made love to Sarah; it was as though I knew that the only way to hurt her was to hurt myself. It was dark and quiet by this time in the streets, though up in the moonless sky moved the blobs and beams of the searchlights. You couldn’t see faces where the women stood in doorways and at the entrances of the unused shelters. They had to signal with their torches like glow-worms. All the way up Sackville Street the little lights went on and off. I found myself wondering what Sarah was doing now. Had she gone home or was she waiting on the chance of my return?

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A woman flashed on her light and said, ‘Like to come home with me, dear?’ I shook my head and walked on. Further up the street a girl was talking to a man: as she lit up her face for him, I got a glimpse of something young, dark and happy and not yet spoiled: an animal that didn’t yet recognise her captivity. I passed and then came back up the road towards them; as I approached the man left her and I spoke. ‘Like a drink?’ I said.
‘Coming home with me afterwards?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll be glad of a quick one.’
We went into the pub at the top of the street and I ordered two whiskies, but as she drank I couldn’t see her face for Sarah’s. She was younger than Sarah, she couldn’t have been more than nineteen, more beautiful, one might even have said less spoiled, but only because there was so much less to spoil: I found I no more wanted her than I wanted the company of a dog or a cat. She was telling me that she had a nice flat on the top floor only a few houses down; she told me what rent she had to pay and what her age was and where she was born and how she had worked for a year in a café. She told me she didn’t go home with anybody who spoke to her, but she could see at once I was a gentleman. She said she had a canary called Jones named after the gentleman who had given it her. She began to talk of the difficulty of getting groundsel in London. I thought: if Sarah is still in my room I can ring up. . .
Looking at her over my whisky I thought how odd it was that I felt no desire for her at all. It was as if quite suddenly after all the promiscuous years I had grown up. My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust for ever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.
And yet surely it was not love that had brought me into this pub; I had told myself all the way from the Common that it was hate, as I tell myself still, writing this account of her, trying to get her out of my system for ever, for I have always told myself that if she died, I could forget her.
I went out of the pub, leaving the girl with her whisky to finish and a pound-note as a salve to her pride, and walked up New Burlington Street as far as a telephone-box. I had no torch with me and was forced to strike match after match before I could complete the dialling of my number. Then I heard the ringing tone and I could imagine the telephone where it stood on my desk and I knew exactly how many steps Sarah would have to take to reach it if she were sitting in a chair or lying on the bed. And yet I let it go on ringing in the empty room for half a minute. — The End of the Affair, pp 57-59

Now try to reduce the narrator’s interaction with a woman he picks up on the street to the question Is it Good or Bad?

This post is part of a series on sex work in fiction. Scroll backwards to May 2017 and see the Related Items appearing below this post. I’ve contributed to this production with The Three-Headed Dog, a noir novel about Latin American migrants in Spain.

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist