Nowadays we hear escort more often, but not that long ago call girl was the symbol of high-class prostitution and savvy sex workers. Here are some images and a video version of Butterfield 8 that pretends the protagonist was just a slut. The imagery dates from recent enough times, when sexual liberation was a term masking gender inequality and sexism. A typical device was to grant bad women agency– a ruse we now see through but in some ways preferable to current victim imagery. This is interesting if one likes thinking about all aspects of culture change in reference to commercial sex, not just politicians’ and feminists’ statements (which provide only a narrow understanding of what’s going on).
Elizabeth Taylor as Gloria in Butterfield 8
In John O’Hara’s original novel of Butterfield 8, there was no doubt that Gloria was a call girl.
In Yugoslavia they were not confused about the film, either – note the explanatory subtitle.
What do sex offenders and clients of sex workers have in common? To understand why my answer is a great deal, you need to look at how outsider sexualities are constructed so that some sex is deemed to be Good, everything else to be Bad and transgressors become monsters.
I read Roger Lancaster’s 1994 book Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua ten years ago when I was looking for ethnographic accounts of non-mainstream sexualities and gender identities. Lancaster has a new book, Sex Panic and the Punitive State, which I have not read, but I was struck by his ideas in the following essay about sex offenders. Men who buy sex occupy an increasingly similar social position nowadays: considered either monsters or perverts. This year’s TIP report and the End Demand campaign insist that these men’s desires and bodies are simply wrong. Clients are not yet placed on Sex Offender Registers, but schemes to name and shame them in the media approach that idea and I will not be surprised if calling them sex offenders is proposed.
And don’t imagine thatmen called sex offenders are really bad in a way that men who buy sex are not: it’s the process of demonisation you want to keep your eye on, and how society handles those demonised.
The essay is long, so I have cut it. About halfway through I highlight with bold techniques being used and suggestions being made for further stigmatisation of a wide range of people.
. . . most criminal justice advocates have been reluctant to talk about sex offender laws, much less reform them. The reluctance has deep roots. Sex crimes are seen as uniquely horrific. During the Colonial, antebellum and Jim Crow eras, white Americans were preoccupied with tales of sexual dangers to white women and children McCarthy-era paranoia, stories of Satanic ritual abuse and other sex panics stirred pervasive anxieties about lurking strangers. Sexual predators play a lead role in the production of a modern culture of fear.
. . . The most intense dread, fueled by shows like “America’s Most Wanted” and “To Catch a Predator,” is directed at the lurking stranger, the anonymous repeat offender. But most perpetrators of sexual abuse are family members, close relatives, or friends or acquaintances of the victim’s family. . .
. . .Advocates for laws to register, publicize and monitor sex offenders after their release from custody typically assert that those convicted of sex crimes pose a high risk of sex crime recidivism. But studies by the Justice Department and other organizations show that recidivism rates are significantly lower for convicted sex offenders than for burglars, robbers, thieves, drug offenders and other convicts. Only a tiny proportion of sex crimes are committed by repeat offenders, which suggests that current laws are misdirected and ineffective. . .
Contrary to the common belief that burgeoning registries provide lists of child molesters, the victim need not have been a child and the perpetrator need not have been an adult. Child abusers may be minors themselves. Statutory rapists – a loose category that includes some offenses involving neither coercion nor violence – are covered in some states. Some states require exhibitionists and “peeping Toms” to register; Louisiana compelled some prostitutes to do so. Two-thirds of the North Carolina registrants sampled in a 2007 study by Human Rights Watch had been convicted of the nonviolent crime of “indecent liberties with a minor,” which does not necessarily involve physical contact.
. . . Newer laws go even further. At last count, 44 states have passed or are considering laws that would require some sex offenders to be monitored for life with electronic bracelets and global positioning devices. A 2006 federal law, the Adam Walsh Act, named for a Florida boy who was abducted and killed, allows prosecutors to apply tougher registration rules retroactively. New civil commitment procedures allow for the indefinite detention of sex offenders after the completion of their sentences. Such procedures suggest a catch-22: the accused is deemed mentally fit for trial and sentencing, but mentally unfit for release. Laws in more than 20 states and hundreds of municipalities restrict where a sex offender can live, work or walk. California’s Proposition 83 prohibits all registered sex offenders (felony and misdemeanor alike) from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park, effectively evicting them from the state’s cities and scattering them to isolated rural areas.
Digital scarlet letters, electronic tethering and practices of banishment have relegated a growing number of people to the logic of “social death,” a term introduced by the sociologist Orlando Patterson, in the context of slavery, to describe permanent dishonor and exclusion from the wider moral community. The creation of a pariah class of unemployable, uprooted criminal outcasts has drawn attention from human rights activists . . . Several states currently publish online listings of methamphetamine offenders, and other states are considering public registries for assorted crimes. Mimicking Megan’s Law, Florida maintains a website that gives the personal details (including photo, name, age, address, offenses and periods of incarceration) of all prisoners released from custody. Some other states post similar public listings of paroled or recently released ex-convicts. It goes without saying that such procedures cut against rehabilitation and reintegration.
Our sex offender laws are expansive, costly and ineffective – guided by panic, not reason. It is time to change the conversation: to promote child welfare based on sound data rather than statistically anomalous horror stories, and in some cases to revisit outdated laws that do little to protect children. Little will have been gained if we trade a bloated prison system for sprawling forms of electronic surveillance that offload the costs of imprisonment onto offenders, their families and their communities.
This is the context in which End Demand campaigns are occurring. Writing on the wall.
On the panic point, I will be talking on a panel about sex scandals at the AAA in Montreal next month. Offenders, clients, scandals, panics: all related in ways I am trying to figure out.
What do Mrs Robinson, the Pope and Julian Assange have in common? They all got caught in sex scandals, which will be considered on a panel at the mega America Anthropological Association conference in Montreal in November.
Excerpt from the Abstract
. . . The papers do not look past sex scandals to ask what they are ‘really’ about. Instead, they take the scandals seriously as significant social and cultural events that have their own genesis, configuration, cadence and course. Anthropologists are well-placed to understand sex scandals because extended fieldwork and familiarity with different groups and with conflicts in society allows us to place the scandal in historical, political, and cultural context. . .
I am on this panel, giving a talk called Assange’s Sex in Sweden, because I was an expert witness for him in the UK earlier this year, having written about rape in Sweden a while ago. This is the sort of academic-industrial conference I have always avoided, but for various reasons I am going to this one. I can’t say how much I will be there apart from my own panel, though!
Organizer and Chair: Don Kulick, University of Chicago
10:15
On Julian Assange
Laura Maria Agustín (Independent scholar)
10:30
On Jacob Zuma
Bjarke Oxlund (University of Copenhagen)
10:45
On Silvio Berlusconi
Roberta Raffaetà (Università di Trento)
11:00
On Mrs. Robinson
Thomas Strong (National University of Ireland, Maynooth)
11:15
On Aussie Footballers
Lenore H Manderson (Monash University)
11:30
On Thai Monks
Peter A Jackson (Australian National University)
11:45
On the Holy See
Nancy Scheper-Hughes (University of California, Berkeley)
As everyone knows, I hate and oppose the current proliferation of images and narratives implying that women are weak, passive and vulnerable by nature. Not long ago I wrote about anatomical fundamentalism, illustrated with a nice anime of a spider woman who may not have a penis but she is certainly scary. Now as a mid-August doldrums celebration, I offer these images from a not-so-far-off past, not to say that man-eating is better but to remind us all that our present zeitgeist is only that and will pass. It’s proof that the idea that we are always progressing is wrong.
In the 1950s even girl children could be powerful!
None of these accuse women of deadliness on account of carrying disease – that collection is marvellous for different reasons.
Women doing things again, on their own Year beginning, low light and infantilising coverage of women combine to make me feel a bit lost for words but...
There is now a sex industry picture galleryon this website intended to informally illustrate the variety of commercial sex. Nothing x-rated in it, actually, but the gallery shows something of the diversity of activities and places encompassed in the idea of a sex industry, across time and geography. By no means encyclopedic or representative it also does not include every picture ever used on this website. The gallery is imported from facebook, where I have been keeping it for the past couple of years; I didn’t take the pictures myself but have given credit where I could. Contact me if an uncredited picture is yours and you want your name to appear or the photo removed or if you have more details about a picture (or comment directly on the picture’s page).
The collection is part of my effort to break down the monolithic term prostitution that exercises such a strong hold on the popular imagination. People say prostitution as though it were completely obvious what it means, as though we all knew – and then, quite often, as though we all were in agreement that it is bad and wrong. Nearly every media article reporting about the sex industry uses the same tired image of a woman in fishnet stockings and high heels or high boots leaning into a car window or standing in the street waiting for a car to stop. This stereotype is what sticks in everyone’s brain and is associated with the sex-money exchange that most bothers everyone: the one that neighbourhood leaders protest about, and police try to get rid of, and researchers show to be most violence-prone and where the classic pimp figure is most likely to be seen.
In this collection, people are often shown socialising, not just standing about being symbols. Some of what’s shown is undoubtedly not fair and not legal, but only if we understand what people are actually doing can we hope to improve the world overall. Included here are images of tourism and sex worker activism, both interesting facets of the industry in our times. Campaigning against the industry is not included – you can find those images all over the place.
Words are my own usual vehicle, as in my proposal for a Cultural Study of Commercial Sex, which I have written about several times. But images do something else. I look at pictures to process ideas differently, and I actually like that this gallery doesn’t classify in any way – there is no meaning to the order of the images, though facebook provides the date on which I happened to decide to upload the pictures to that website. The whole collection, which updates when I update at facebook, is a page on the menu at the top of this site.
Newsweek has released a report on Melissa Farley’s nasty new study on men who buy sex of all kinds, which was financed by the Hunt Alternatives Fund as part of their 10-year plan to End Demand for buying sex. Now the latest Trafficking in Persons Report reveals that End Demand is also part of US government policy, which means that some of the big spending – $109 million last year – on anti-trafficking programmes is going to anti-client projects. US Trafficking magnate Luis CdeBaca attended the Hunt planning meetings, so this development is hardly a big surprise. I recently wroteabout a World Gender Warin the form of campaigns against male sexuality: desire, penetration and the penis itself: an international trend, but money from a rich philanthropist certainly puts the US in charge.
The theory that if men stopped buying sex no one would offer it anymore is a breath-taking over-simplification of the many different services and desires involving money and sex and the multitude of social and cultural conditions involved. How people now selling sex as a livelihood would earn their living if clients disappear is never mentioned – which is disturbing. I appreciate that campaigners are talking long-term and utopically, but to never address economic and employment issues seriously? I hope they do not feel that preventing women from selling sex means saving them from a fate worse than death.
This notion of demand fails to square with some well-known client types, such as the one Thomas Rowlandson portrayed here around 1800, described by the Wellcome Library as A prostitute leading an old man into the bedroom and taking money from him, implying that her services will act like a tonic and preserve his state of health. I guess Farley didn’t manage to find any men like this to talk to.
Here is the End Demand statement from this year’s TIP, ridiculously called a Fact Sheet, when it is only a moral aside revealing the government’s wish that culture would change. Yes, they wrote the phrase new innovations.
Prevention : Fighting Sex Trafficking by Curbing Demand for Prostitution
A growing understanding of the nature of trafficking in persons has led to new innovations in addressing demand. Corporate standards for monitoring supply chains and government policies for eliminating trafficking from procurement practices are making new inroads in the fight against modern slavery. But the fact remains: if there were no demand for commercial sex, trafficking in persons for commercial sexual exploitation would not exist in the form it does today. This reality underscores the need for continued strong efforts to reduce demand for sex trafficking by enacting policies and promoting cultural attitudes that reject the idea of paying for sex.
Policies to Address Demand for Commercial Sex
Governments can lead both in practice and by example by implementing zero-tolerance policies for employees, uniformed servicemembers, and contractors paying for sex. If paying for sex is prohibited for those who work for, or do business with, a government, the ripple effects could be farreaching. Through their massive procurement, governments have an impact on a wide range of private-sector actors, and policies banning the purchase of sex could in turn reach a significant part of the private sector as well. At the same time, governments have the capacity to raise awareness of the subtle and brutal nature of this crime by requiring training of employees, contractors, and subcontractors about how individuals subjected to sex trafficking are victimized through coercion. Too often, trafficking victims are wrongly discounted as “consenting” adults. The use of violence to enslave trafficking victims is pervasive, but there are other more subtle forms of fraud and coercion that also prevent a person from escaping compelled servitude. A prostituted person may have initially consented, may believe that she or he is in love with her or his trafficker, may not self-identify as a victim, may not be operating in the vicinity of the pimp, or may have been away from the pimp’s physical control with what seemed to be ample opportunity to ask for help or flee. None of these factors, taken alone or in sum, means that she or he is not a victim of a severe form of trafficking. Ensuring that these facts are part of the required training for every government employee and everyone who does business with or on behalf of a government is an important step in shifting attitudes about commercial sex.
Moral Leadership in the Future of this Struggle
Strong policies are critical for ridding countries of all forms of modern slavery, but ultimately for encouraging a broader cultural shift in order to make meaningful progress in reducing demand for sex trafficking. This can only be achieved by rejecting long-held notions that regard commercial sex as a “boys will be boys” phenomenon, and instead sending the clear message that buying sex is wrong. Lawmakers have the power to craft effective antitrafficking legislation, but they also have a responsibility to represent values that do not tolerate abuses of commercial sex. Business leaders need to cultivate a corporate culture that leaves behind outdated thinking that turns a blind eye to the sex trade, including the adoption of codes of conduct that prohibit purchasing sex. And leaders in civil society – from teachers to parents to ministers – must foster the belief that it is everyone’s responsibility to reduce the demand for sex trafficking. It is especially important to reach young men with a strong message of demand reduction to help them understand the exploitation involved with commercial sex and combat the glamorization of pimp culture. It is every person’s individual responsibility to think about their contributions to trafficking. Laws and policies, partnerships and activism will continue to be critical to the struggle against modern slavery, but it will also be the day-to-day decisions of individual men and women that will bring an end to sex trafficking and carry forth a message of freedom for all.
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons
Washington DC June 2011
I feel like the veteran of a long, drawn-out war. I first knew it as the War Between the Sexes (back when I thought there were only two). 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 (the existence of other sexes or gender identities is routinely dismissed). In this war, masculinity is equated with patriarchy (a strategy of domination), the penis becomes a weapon of mass destruction and the vagina is an open, constantly violated wound.
Sexual acts involving women and men are the major battlefield of this war, outperforming unequal job opportunities and wages, unpaid housekeeping and caring labour, inadequate health care, sexist stigmas and poverty itself as crimes against women. For crusaders, the male body is the problem of patriarchy and sexual relationships over-riding concerns. Particular sexual relationships are said to be correct and a wide range of others, where power is defined as ‘unbalanced’, are the target of eradication campaigns, in Europe as well as the US. Pornography, prostitution and rape at the top of the list, but surrogate motherhood and transsexuality are not exempt.
Nowadays, the 1950s are dismissed as a Dark Age for women ejected from wartime jobs into neurotic house-cleaning, child-rearing and the vaginal orgasm. I remember that period and wouldn’t want to bring it back, but a lot of what I hear now is not better. 1960s women’s liberation was about women acknowledging and standing up for their desires and ambitions. Legislative and wider political proposals emerged, but the foundation was about individual women understanding their oppression and learning how to express their own selves, whatever those were. The initial stage was not about political correctness or ideology, and it felt liberating, all right.
For some of the 1970s, I lived in San Francisco, and I recall the day I noticed a shop had opened near my house at 22nd Street and Guerrero. The window displayed dark metallic objects I couldn’t identify, so I went through the door to a space no bigger than some closets where a woman explained the mysteries of antique vibrating objects. Although some now laugh at or dismiss the phrase sexual liberation (pace Foucault), it did not sound funny then. Learning about sex – the acts of sex – was important at a time when almost no information was available at all. The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm was a breakthrough essay, and then others said it wasn’t entirely a myth, and so it went, constant discoveries that every sort of sexual configuration and activity was feasible and satisfying for someone. What a deliverance: Now there would be no need to live up to anyone else’s idea of Good Sex.
The names Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon crop up these days as people struggle to understand the reductionist, unforgiving ideas associated with a particular version of feminism that claims itself to be the One True Faith. The first US Take Back the Night march, where Dworkin spoke, was held in San Francisco in 1978, but even though I was living in the city I didn’t know anyone who went. I wouldn’t have felt opposed but rather that my concerns were different, and I wouldn’t have understood why the march was going through red-light areas: the link between rape and the sex industry was not apparent to my own young feminist self.
I often meet women annoyed that the term radical feminist should go to mean-spirited, authoritarian and apparently sex-hating folk. I don’t blame them for wanting to reclaim radical, since a stream of thought that once proposed revolution now wants to make us obey a narrow set of sexual rules – like in the 1950s and other repressive eras. This is fundamentalist ideology, a claim that there is only one truth about sex and women. The opposite of grassroots politics, this fundamentalism is transmitted by an elite cadre of leaders who forbid differences of opinion. No cultural relativism or local history is permitted to interfere with simplistic, reductionist principles that are applied to all people despite what they feel themselves.
Dworkin famously likens the penis to an invading weapon in her book Intercourse. In this war zone, male sexuality is inherently violent, exploitative and imperialistic, reduced to the penis which is said to have to push past the vulva’s muscles. Male sexuality is described as a weapon of predation and violence that only criminal law and punishment can solve.This is anatomical fundamentalism, in which an erect penis is said to be capable of doing more harm than other body parts might do – a stiff tongue, hard nose, knee or finger. Vaginas are imagined as not doing anything but defencelessly wait to be invaded (amusing when one remembers the old idea of women’s dangerous, toothed vagina, not to mention spider women and other scary types). But this sort of anatomical determinism comes up in contexts far from Dworkin’s thinking; for example a recent report claimed that the way female rats curve their backs and raise their hips for sex means they are submissive. But neither physical traits nor bodily positions have inherent meanings, as any sane commentator knows.
Movements resisting sexual repression have to contend with difficult contradictions: that men tend to be physically stronger than women, that male arousal and orgasm are more evident than female and that violence against women and sexism are still ubiquitous. Who could have predicted that my way of thinking about migration and selling sex could end up being seen as a sign of collusion with the enemy? Women like myself who were alive in the 60s are viewed as particularly sinister traitors to the fundamentalist cause, because we ought to know how things should have turned out. When I nearly ran into MacKinnon recently at a Swiss university I could imagine the potential confusion felt by people hearing us both, because, despite our similar age, our mental universes seem spectacularly opposed.
The World Gender War is most evident nowadays in campaigns to criminalise men accused of causing prostitution and human trafficking through their willingness to buy sex. Ideological crusades assuming all women want the same things include the European Women’s Lobby’s Prostitution-free Europe to Hunt Alternatives’ End Demand and Ashton Kutcher’s Real Men Don’t Buy Sex. I am accused of being a pimp or pornographer because I don’t think male sexuality per se is the problem. Instead I believe we are all engaged in a slow process of working out how to get along sexually with different sorts of equipment, different desires and different ways of going about satisfying them.
In every one of these posters about the dangers of venereal diseases (now known as sexually transmitted diseases or infections), men are being warned about women. Women are the carriers of syphilis and gonorrhea- particular women, that is: available women, pickups, good-looking stylish women who are alone or women in groups. Not mothers, homebodies, wives, daughters. And since these come from a war era, dangerous women are likened to the enemy and to weapons capable of ruining the lives of innocent, clean young men. This gender stereotyping (or misogyny) is only 70 years away.
I’m pleased to say that the editors of this textbook included a chapter on migrant sex work and trafficking, and I wrote it. Imagine: undergraduate students actually learning how complicated these issues are, and in a general sexuality text. Boggles the mind. My bit is near the end.
Table of ContentsPart 1: Sex as a Social Fact 1. Theoretical Perspectives by Steve Seidman 2. The Social Construction of Sexuality interview with Jeffrey Weeks 3. Surverying Sex interview with Edward Laumann Part 2: Sexual Meanings 4. Popular Culture Constructs Sexuality interview with Joshua Gamson 5. Sexual Pleasure by Kelly James 6. Purity and Pollution: Sex as Moral Discourse by Nancy Fischer 7. Sex and Power by Kristen Barber 8. Sexual Politics in Intimate Relationships: Sexual Coercion and Harassment by Lisa K. Waldner 9. Gay and Straight Rites of Passage by Chet Meeks Part 3: Sexual Bodies and Behaviours 10. Medicine and the Making of a Sexual Body by Celia Roberts 11. The Body, Disability and Sexuality by Thomas Gerschick 12. Sexualizing Asian Male Bodies by Travis S. K. Kong 13. Sex and the Senior Woman by Meika Loe 14. Polishing the Pearl: Discoveries of the Clitoris by Lisa Jean Moore 15. Orgasm by Juliet Richters 16. Anal Sex: Phallic and Other Meanings by Simon Hardy 17. Sexual Intercourse by Kerwin Kaye 18. Viagra and the Coital Imperative by Nicola Gavey Part 4: Gender and Sexuality 19. Unruly Bodies: Intersex Variations of Sex Development by Sharon E. Preves 20. Transgendering: Challenging the ‘Normal’ by Kimberly Tauches 21. Transsexual, Transgender, and Queer interview with Viviane Namaste 22. Gender and Heterosexism in Rock-n-roll interview with Mimi Schippers 23. Adolescent Girls’ Sexuality: The More it Changes, the More it Stays the Same by Deborah L. Tolman 24. Not ‘Straight’, but Still a ‘Man’: Negotiating Non-heterosexual masculinities in Beirut by Ghassan Moussawi 25. How Not to Talk to Muslim Women: Patriarchy, Islam and the Sexual Regulation of Pakistani Women by Saadia Toor 26. ‘Guys are just Homophobic’: Rethinking Adolescent Homophobia and Heterosexuality by CJ Pascoe 27. Mis-conceptions about Unintended Pregnancy: Considering Context in Sexual and Reproductive Decision-making by Jennifer A. Reich Part 5: Intimacies 28. Romantic Love interview with Eva Illouz 29. Gender and the Organization of Heterosexual Intimacy by Daniel Santore 30. Shopping for Love: On-line Dating and the Making of a Cyber Culture of Romance by Sophia DeMasi 31. Covenant Marriage: Reflexivity and Retrenchment in the Politics of Intimacy by Dwight Fee 32. Interracial Romance: The Logic of Acceptance and Domination by Kumiko Nemoto 33. Lesbian and Gay Parents by Yvette Taylor 34. Parners of Transgender People by Carey Jean Sojka Part 6: Sexual Identities 35. Straight Men by James Dean 36. Sexual Narratives of ‘Straight’ Women by Nicole LaMarre 37. Lesbians interview with Tamsin Wilton 38. The Disappearance of the Homosexual interview with Henning Beck 39. Gay Men and Lesbians in the Netherlands by Gert Hekma and Jan Willem Duyvendak 40. The Bisexual Menace Revisited: or, Shaking up Social Categories is Hard to do by Kristen Esterberg 41. Bisexualities in America interview with Paula Rodriguez Rust 42. Multiple Identities: Race, Class, and Gender in Lesbian and Gay Affirming Protestant Congregations by Krista McQueeny Part 7: Sexual Institutions and Sexual Commerce 43. One is Not Born a Bride: How Weddings Regulate Heterosexuality by Chrys Ingraham 44. Change and Continuity in American Marriage by Erica Hunter 45. The Political Economy of Sexual Labor interview with Elizabeth Bernstein 46. Sex Sells, but What Else Does it Do? The American Porn Industry by Chris Pappas 47. Sex Workers Interview with Wendy Chapkis 48. Conflicts at the Tubs: Bathhouses and Gay Culture and Politics in the United States by Jason Hendrickson 49. Queering the Family by Mary Burke and Kristine Olsen 50. Pleasure for Sale: Feminist Sex Stores by Alison Better Part 8: Sexual Cultures 51. Sexual Liberation and the Creative Class in Israel by Dana Kaplan 52. Internet Sex: The Seductive Freedom To by Dennis Waskul 53. The Time of the Sadomaschoist: Hunting with(in) the ‘Tribus’ by Darren Langdridge 54. Secret Sex and the Down-lo Brotherhood by Justin Luc Hoy 55. Wait… Hip Hop Sexualities by Thomas F. DeFrantz 56. Gay Men Dancing: Circuit Parties by Russell WesthaverPart 9: Sexual Regulation and Inequality 57. Sexuality, State and Nation by Jyoti Puri 58. Iran’s Sexual Revolution by Pardis Mahdavi 59. Christianity and the Regulation of Seuxality in the United States by Joshua Grove 60. The Marriage Contract by Mary Bernstein 61. Healing Disorderly Desire: Medical-therapeutic Regulation of Sexuality by P. J. McGann 62. Schools and the Social Control of Sexuality by Melinda Miceli 63. Law and the Regulation of the Obscene by Phoebe Christina Godfrey Part 10: Sexual Politics 64. Gay Marriage: Why Now? Why At All? by Reese Kelly 65. The US Supreme Court and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Rights by Gregory Maddox 66. The Politics of AIDS: Sexual Pleasure and Danger by Jennifer Gunsaullus 67. The Pro-family Movement by Tina Fetner 68. Politics of Sex Education Interview with Janice M. Irvine 69. Gender and Sexual Politics: American Gay Rights and Feminist Movement by Megan Murphy 70. Sexual Dissent: A Post-identity Culture of Sexual Resistance in the Case of Lebanese Nonheterosexuals by Steven Seidman 71. War and the Politics of Sexual Violence by Margarita Palacios & Silvia PosoccoPart 11: Global and Transnational Sexualities 72. Condoms in the Global Economy by Peter Chua 73. Sexual Tourism Interview with Julia O’Connell Davidson 74. Migrant Sex Work and Trafficking by Laura Agustín 75. The Public and Hidden Sexualities of Filipina Women in Lebanon by Hayeon Lee 76. Mexican Immigrants, Hetersexual Sex and Loving Relationships in the United States Interview with Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez 77. Gender, Sexuality, and the Lebanese Diaspora: Global Identities and Transnational Practices by Dalia Abdelhady
All these places use the word club somewhere to describe themselves. Does club imply privacy, is that why? Or exclusivity? Or outside the law? Other keywords in the advertising: table dance, strip, spa, night, pussy, geisha, nude and swingers. There is one Spanish puticlub. In the case of the Cajun Sex Club at the end, transgression would seem to be promised. Nice series that, Adult Books for 95 cents, with dollars spilling around, tasteful sparkles and a real stud.
Pre-Internet sex game in the form of objectification of heads, not bodies. Perhaps this should be called commercial sexism rather than commercial sex, but I feel the creator was making as much sexist fun of males as females. It is not clear whether one could send in a photo for a custom head that would not talk back. Caveman need to dominate.
Sex is finding its way into games with or without help from big publishers or studios. Bonetown was made by a small group of college grads who decided that the open world gameplay of Grand Theft Auto could be used for a satiric rip, substituting sex missions for shootouts. We wanted people to play it and laugh at it and not just sit there alone and jerk off.
Other video games involving sex and fantasy without other human beings having to be there. Have sex with a pickup from a gay bar, create a self with ideal sexual attributes, promote safer sex with condoms or watch your own stripper strip.
Sex::Tech4th Annual Conference on New Media, Youth & Sexual Health, 1-2 April 2011
A two-day annual conference hosted by ISIS, Inc. that brings health and technology professionals together with youth, parents and community leaders to advance the sexual health of youth in the U.S. and abroad. Sex::Tech is the only conference event that showcases high-tech educational content (mobile, social media, Internet) developed by professionals, highlights national and local program successes, and puts youth leadership at the forefront.
Our project is concerned with the everyday uses of pornography, and how the people who use it feel it fits into their lives. Pornography is of course a highly topical issue, subject to many opposing views and ‘strong opinions’. And we are not saying that there are no moral or political issues. But we are saying that the voices of users and enjoyers have been swamped. In fact, there is very little research that engages with the users of pornography, asking how, when and why they turn to it.
The kiss from Notorious, said to be the most erotic kiss in movie history
Sex tourism, gays, western perversion – what is this story, and these arrests, actually about? No mention is made of any trafficking accusation in this report of a police raid on a brothel in Cambodia – just the cop’s satisfaction at having spent a month investigating a place where people pay for sex. The rather ridiculous salacious slant would have us believe that this brothel is different because gays, lesbians, old ladies and foreigners use it. Well! Presumably the most special customer is a non-young non-Cambodian woman who likes women? Is this a category the police are afraid of? Are we meant to read between the lines that anyone employed in this brothel must have been trafficked and forced (are old-fashioned heterosexist brothels better, then?
It is old news that the US imperialist Trafficking in Persons report has caused Cambodia to institute legislation that has police persecuting sex businesses on principle. This is merely an early stage of the movement that now has a new name: End Demand, which can be followed by several phrases: sometimes we hear End Demand for Sex Trafficking, and sometimes End Demand for Commercial Sex Exploitation, and then there is End Demand for Modern-Day Slavery. All are semantically strange, since the demand these campaigners don’t like is a demand to pay for sex. The demand isn’t for the process – traffiicking, slavery or exploitation. I wonder why the whiz-kid business consultants didn’t make sure the slogan was clearer.
Perhaps there was a special frisson in the fact that a guesthouse has become a brothel, although the report also doesn’t explain what the evidence for that is, either. Presence of sex workers in the building? Manager shows guests an album with pictures of possible escorts? Or is there something noteworthy in the fact that the business is the type associated with alternative-style travel, less luxe, more home-like, cheaper?
Note that all this surveillance for a whole month netted them 14 people, only 3 of whom can be charged with anything – the clients and workers they don’t know what to do with.
Buth Reaksmey Kongkea, 27 February 2011, Phnom Penh Post
Anti-human trafficking officials last week cracked down on a guesthouse in Phnom Penh’s Prampi Makara district that offered sexual services for a select clientele. Keo Thea, director of the municipal Anti-Human Trafficking and Juvenile Protection Office at the Ministry of Interior, said a raid of the guesthouse-turned-brothel in Veal Vong commune netted a total of 14 arrests, including the guesthouse owner, two accomplices and 11 sex workers, on Saturday. “We have been investigating this house for about a month before we took superb action in cracking down on it,” he said. Keo Thea added that the guesthouse offered specific sexual services.
This place is hidden and illegal and provides sexual services for [gay] men, lesbians, old ladies and foreign people in Phnom Penh.
He said police research had uncovered that the guesthouse had been a popular destination for people seeking its specific services for many years. The detained were being held at the Phnom Penh Municipal Police Department for questioning prior to being sent to provincial court today to face charges, Keo Thea said, though he expressed doubts about the fate of some of the people arrested during Saturday’s raid.
We are now waiting for the order from our superiors about what we should do with these 11 people, who are sexual service providers and those who had come for sex. But for the house owner and the two accomplices, we will send them to court for charges.
One major theme of my Taiwan posts here has been the very low fertility rate, for the main the standard combination of patriarchal cultural norms with the substantial emancipation of women. Another theme has been the sex ratio strongly biased towards men, producing a deficit of marriageable women. Just as in South Korea, this has led to substantial marriage-driven immigration to Taiwan . . . with women from mainland China and Southeast Asia–particularly but certainly not only Vietnamese women–contributing a notable, if declining number and proportion of newborns. . . Foreign brides mainly refer to women from mainland China and Southeast Asian countries who marry Taiwanese men. Taiwanese men used to be a priority husband target for women from Southeast Asian countries during the years of Taiwan’s economic prosperity. But their willingness to marry Taiwanese men has been undermined by Taiwan’s economic shrinkage in recent years.
The case itself revolves around 17-year-old escort Daiana Gomez — sent to accompany Kalimba and his entourage at the nightclub where they played the concert on Dec. 18. Gomez said in a TV interview that she and another escort aged 16 indeed were invited back to the hotel expecting a party. Back in the hotel, Gomez says she saw the fellow escort go into a room with three naked men and the door being closed. Kalimba then hit her, told her to shut up and raped her, she claims. In his own interview, Kalimba on the verge of tears said Gomez is lying. “I didn’t rape anyone. I didn’t abuse anyone. It was a small hotel. Someone would have heard if I attacked her. How come I have no marks on me?” he said. “I have many women in my family. I would never abuse women.” However, Kalimba did not confirm or deny whether he had sex with the underage girl. He also said that both girls went to see him off at the airport, remarking that would have been strange if Gomez had been raped. State prosecutor Francisco Alor took declarations from both Kalimba and Gomez and ruled there was enough evidence to file preliminary rape charges against the pop singer.
There exists a small but significant portion of the population that identifies as asexual. This, for those not up on their terminology, refers to those who don’t experience sexual attraction. But within that group, there are further subdivisions—notably, those who are romantically inclined and those who are not. There are heteroromantic, homoromantic, biromantic, and panromantic asexuals out there who experience non-sexual forms of attraction toward potential partners. The practical upshot of this distinction is that some asexuals, despite not feeling sexual attraction to their partners, nevertheless do want to have satisfying romantic relationships which function the same as anybody else’s . . . that is, everywhere but the bedroom.
I am asked – nay, challenged – to say what the issues I comment on here have in common. Not the obvious answer incapsulated in the blog’s title: migration, trafficking and sex, but what lies underneath those – or what the framing issue is above them all. What are you and I concerned about? What brings us together? What’s behind the immediate issues?
Leaving out regional tags the cloud to the right lists:
borders campaigns children clients colonialism culture dance demand development feminism gender equality helping hiv home informal economy laws media migration mobility money police porn power rescue research services sex tourism sexuality sexwork smuggling statistics sundaysex sweden trafficking transnationalism travel urban space violence
Which is not what I need, even if I add more such topics, like
rights, censorship, prison, law and order, fake economics, voodoo evidence, taboo, stigma, regulation, moralism, government repression, government intervention, sexism, misogyny, disrespect for women, disrespect for poorer women, neocolonialism, imperialism, sexual regulation and the list could obviously go on and on
None of these get to the nucleus of what we are worried, annoyed and protesting about. Recently several people – here on the blog, in emails and at live events – have said what we all know by now: that none of the debunking and deconstructing of the anti-trafficking movement’s messages has had much effect. Whatever has been mobilised with sex-slavery reductionism is impervious to reason and evidence. Therefore the question is, What would a counter-campaign look like? A positive message, not a negative one. One that doesn’t refer to organised political parties or broad schools of thought such as liberalism, humanism, libertarianism. Or to unfortunately over-used words like equality. And this is a non-academic question: no abstruse or long-winded replies allowed. Answers do not have to come in the form of a pithy Madison-Avenue message, either – not yet.
Sexual autonomy? My Body, My Self? Sexual Respect? Do those exclude anything really important?
Send ideas as a comment and let’s have a conversation, or talk to me via the contact form to the right.
Sex on Sunday: Call Girls, good and bad Nowadays we hear escort more often, but not that long ago call girl was the symbol of high-class prostitution and...
I sympathise with people who don’t want to subscribe to blogs, either via email or rss feeds. Occasionally I do a big emailing to those in my address book, and yesterday was one of those occasions. If you would like to be on my list for these very occasional mailings, write to me via the contact form (located to the right). One snag is that some systems, including a spam machine called Vade Retro and those controlling spam for mindspring, earthlink, wanadoo and ya, have put my own isp (nodo50) on a blacklist. Emails from me never get through to people with those addresses, so if you want to be on the list, give me an alternate address. Nodo50 have tried to get it fixed to no avail, and various tests people have done from their own individual ends are no use, and these tightening up of spam filters will always be changing. I don’t want to migrate my address book anywhere else, thank you – know that advice is coming.
On another communications front, you can be my facebook friend and subscribe to my blog via fb’s Networked Blog system. On fb I also post interesting Internet news, and sometimes quite good conversations come about as a result.
I don’t myself use twitter because I am told it only makes sense if one is willing to be attentive, original and responsive there, which I can’t be. Feel welcome to tweet anything useful from here to your heart’s delight.
At the time of the World Cup, a reporter asked me, a bit nervously, about the possibility that white football-fan tourists in South Africa might have plans or desire to have sex with black people. I think it’s quite possible, I replied. Silence. Is there anything wrong with that, do you mean? His continuing silence confirmed that yes, that was what he meant.
No, I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with that, I think everyone desires others for something we see or imagine we see in others, which can be their eyes, voice, hair, style, breasts, chest hair, skin colour and many other attributes. We may be imagining things behind this superficial trait, of course. We may imagine they are wilder or more interesting than people we usually meet, or that they are better at sex, or that we are safer with them or that it will be easier to tell them what we like. But whether our partners look like us or different, we are doing that imagining and desiring. I wrote about this for American Sexuality a few years ago.
Does this change completely because there is a money transaction between the partners? Why should it? If you say it does then you grant money a determining status you probably don’t grant it in any other sphere. I know the argument about control and domination backwards and forwards, the one that says that the person who pays has the power to command. I would put it differently: the person who pays has the power to say I want x and will pay for it and if you accept the money I expect you to do it. A notion that the ‘power relation’ will always be skewed towards the white person is too simplistic for me, both too racially oriented and too fetishising of money.
The idea that a richer person will always have more power than a poorer one grants money a singular status I refuse to give it. The idea that money trumps every other type of power crushes the idea of human agency, the space to negotiate other sorts of power. Of course I understand the critique of exoticisation. I understand Frantz Fanon and don’t doubt that poor colonies were in some sense the ‘brothels of Europe’. But such an analysis comes from today, from contemporary perspectives on imperialism and colonisation, and they omit to understand what particular people were doing within their own cultural logics at the time. Every instance of a lighter or richer person wanting to be with a darker or poorer one does not have the same meaning.
I wrote about prices and ethnicities in the sex industry here some time ago.
Young Muslim women are often forced to lead double lives in Europe. They have sex in public restrooms and stuff mobile phones in their bras to hide their secret existences from strict families. They are often forbidden from visiting gynecologists or receiving sex ed. In the worst cases, they undergo hymen reconstruction surgery, have late-term abortions or even commit suicide. . . For the girls, the worst thing is to be stigmatized as prostitutes, says Leila. “The entire family’s honor is dependent on the virginity of the daughters.” Sometimes girls call their fathers from her office at Papatya, only to hear shouted responses like: “Now you’re a whore.”
A French postcard of Arab prostitutes waiting for trade outside of their accommodation. Postcard dates from around 1910, with the original photograph probably being taken in Morocco. Old Picture Postcards
This girl is said to be Algerian. Maybe she is a sex worker.
These are said to be Bangladeshi girls. I don’t know whether they have sex and money on their minds or not.
Sex on Sunday: Call Girls, good and bad Nowadays we hear escort more often, but not that long ago call girl was the symbol of high-class prostitution and...
TheLeather Archives & Museum, a cultural center in Chicago devoted to preserving the history of alternative sexuality, wants your help documenting sexual practices that are not widely discussed. Do you enjoy giving or receiving a little pain during sex, such as spanking, biting, or scratching? Do you fantasize about being overpowered or overpowering your partner, including using ropes, handcuffs, or other restraints? Do you role-play during sex? We want to learn about your experiences through an interview. Contact Clarisse Thorn: clarisse [at] leatherarchives.org
In the span of two short years, the city known as one of the nation’s most livable has become a magnet for national media reporting on child sex trafficking. With cameras rolling on 82nd Avenue last year, Dan Rather dubbed the city “Pornland” in a documentary. “Nightline” declared Portland the “epicenter for child prostitution,” and “World News With Diane Sawyer” called the city a “hotbed of sex trafficking.” But as hundreds gather in Portland this weekend for the third-annual Northwest Conference Against Trafficking, with talks by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden and actress Daryl Hannah, an examination by The Oregonian reveals that no one really knows if the problem in Portland is any worse than anywhere else.
Nowadays we hear escort more often, but not that long ago call girl was the symbol of high-class prostitution and savvy sex workers. Here are some images and a video version of Butterfield 8 that pretends the protagonist was just a slut. The imagery dates from recent enough times, when sexual liberation was a term masking gender inequality and sexism. A typical device was to grant bad women agency – a ruse we now see through but in some ways preferable to current victim imagery. This is interesting if one likes thinking about all aspects of culture change in reference to commercial sex, not just politicians’ and feminists’ statements (which provide only a narrow understanding of what’s going on).
