sex tourism

Working in the European Sex Industry: Migrant Possibilities

Laura Agustín

Translated from the original Trabajar en la industria del sexo, in OFRIM/Suplementos, June 2000. If you read Spanish, read the original, it’s better.

Lautrec’s The Brothel Laundryman

Background to the article

When early in 2000 the editor of a Madrid publication asked me to write an article about migrants who sell sex, she stipulated that she wanted it to be free of moralising. I agreed without for a moment imagining the enormous conflict that would arise when I turned in what to me seemed to be an innocuous, purely descriptive piece. The drama began when a well-known Madrid feminist-bureaucrat found out about the piece and intervened, demanding it be removed – in other words, overt censorship. The editor refused. Delays ensued. The conflict rose in the social-services hierarchy until it reached the councillor at the top, who passed my article to her advisers, who gave it the okay. Several months late, the issue appeared with my piece in it. The censoring femocrat was scandalised and I became famous, or notorious, depending on your point of view. Here it is.

Working in the European Sex Industry: Migrant Possibilities 

Migrants who come to work in the European sex industry are of every class, colour, age, ethnicity and nationality, and they are not only women but men and transgender people as well. [1] They arrive via uncountable routes—alone, with friends, in couples or in accompanied groups. Some have money to spend, others arrive indebted. Their documentation may be true or false; some arrive with tourist visas. Many of these people have planned their trips personally over a long time, while others have been presented with an opportunity with little time for planning. Some of these potential travellers had already worked in prostitution in their own country. The great majority, agree sources from all over the world, have understood that their future work will either be prostitution directly or will have a sexual aspect. That is, they have opted for doing sex work.

Before going on I would like to point out that the subject of this essay is not to try to explain why prostitution exists, looking for its causes; nor is it define or judge it within any theoretical framework such as feminism, postmodernism etc. Nor am I going to identify which groups or individuals are found more in this industry and how the involved migratory networks function. Above all I will not be dealing with the question of whether any human being can really ‘choose’ how he works, whether in prostitution or anything else.

I begin with the fact that many migrants doing sexual jobs do not describe themselves as ‘forced’ or without other options in life. They may have fewer options or fewer agreeable options than other people, but they have them. It is also important to point out that among those who suffer from poverty, bad marriages and the entire array of possible causing factors, not all opt for sex work, as not all opt to migrate. No type of determinism can explain completely the human phenomenon of choice. Every choice is intervened by questions of class, gender, ethnicity, economic level and the social conditions at the moment in their country (war, dictatorship, famine, violence, unemployment etc.

Migrants act inside these geopolitical and economic structures and dynamics. The ‘underdeveloped’ countries suffer from the well-known policy of ‘structural adjustment’ imposed by the International Monetary Fund. The feminisation of poverty and migrations exists. Moreover, opportunities seem to be diminishing all the time, even for people with university degrees. However, within all this, migrants take actions and decisions motivated by the desire to live better. These are life-decisions they take when they uproot themselves from their homes, considering themselves brave and adventuresome, including when the future implies sex work.

While the majority of sex workers is female, increasingly they are men, transgenders and boy and girl children. Sexual services are desire also by women and transgenders, and not only by men. In an industry characterised by its ambiguities, it is better not to perpetuate the classical assumption of woman-prostitute/man-client. I will speak in neutral terms whenever possible.

Migrants more than once

These migrants play a transnational role within globalisation processes. Studies of migrations between, for example, the Caribbean and the ‘first world’ describe the powerful mentality of transnational migrants: the conviction of a Jamaican of the 1950s that London was his ‘capital’’ the effort that migrants from Nevis make to conserve the island as their ‘country’ though they live in Brooklyn; the great capacity to exist in two places at once of ‘dominican yorks’ (Hall, Fog Olwig, Guarnizo and others). Businesses engaged in charter flights, messenger services, long-distance phone calls, Internet and electronic transfers of money have much to tell us about these phenomena.

The fact of having a job in the sex industry does not take his transnational role away from a migrant. Moreover, migrant prostitutes are a special phenomenon: It is normal for them not to settle in one place to live. They continue migrating, or, rather, they continue travelling. The sex worker you encounter today in Madrid you may find tomorrow in Paris, next month in Amsterdam and a year later in Spain again. And this is not solely the result of efforts to avoid police controls; there exists a culture in which people want to get to know Europe and which people have their preferred places. Although they are often poor and illegal, many travel in a cosmopolitan fashion.

The European press almost always presents the subject of these trips in terms of deceived victims. In this essay the subject is those who have chosen, inside their possibilities, por a trip ‘arranged’ for a Some have chosen arranged jobs also; they have actively searched for opportunities in their home countries. There are those who have searched for them as well, to sell them trips and jobs in Europe: in this group are agents (known by a variety of names, from empresarios and travel agents to coyotes, snakeheads, and tourist boy- and girl-friends who have met them during their vacations, as well as family members and friends. When these travellers feel deceived, it is usual for them to complain of the labour conditions they have to accept at their destination. Frequently they have signed a contract without understanding the extensive surveillance and little liberty that it implies. That is, someone who is familiar with a few kinds of prostitution in his own country (for example, dancing with clients in a bar and having sex with two or three in one night cannot know beforehand how he is going to feel standing nude in a window in Amsterdam for twelve or fourteen hours a day, or standing next to a road in the Casa de Campo in Madrid). These are forms of prostitution which can be described as ‘industrial’. [2]

We are already talking of prostitution as work.[3] What does this work consist of? First it is necessary to ask: Which? Read the rest of this entry »