Tag Archives: urban space

History from Below in Camden Walks

From Navvyman by Dick Sullivan via www.victorianweb.org

What do you think about when you hear the name Primrose Hill? Good pubs, celebrity-residents, the view over London? For me it’s a neighbourhood that looks as it does because of the building of the Regent’s Canal and the railways.

When the canal was being extended into the area, developers foresaw no obstacle to their plans for elegant houses like those along Regent’s Park: the digging was to be by hand, and the heaps of soil produced might be useful. But then they saw what building the railway did to nearby Camden Town – what Dickens in Dombey and Son called mud and ashes, frowzy fields, dunghills, dustheaps and ditches. When the soot thrown up turned to grime on the eastern edge of the new neighbourhood, all bets were off: Developers switched to building terraced houses.

Who did all the digging and throwing, who sweated and toiled to make the great engineering feats reality? They were called many names – Excavators, Cutters, Diggers, Bankers, Navigators – before Navvies was printed in a news item of 1830 and the name stuck. These itinerant workers became almost mythic figures, considered mysterious and fearsome because of how they lived: not in settled families, camping wherever the work decreed, swanning into streets and pubs in eye-catching dress.

To focus on folks like the navvies is why I became a guide: to tell histories of those often treated like props in the background on the stage of Big Events. This tradition is called History from Below, and it makes a great way to see with new eyes neighbourhoods you think you already know.

There are challenges, because whoever was recording events at the time almost always overlooked the labourers, whether they were scullery maids or navvies. But there are ways to find out, and tracking them down is my delight.

Walk the story of Primrose Hill and the Navvies on 2 March 2024.

My moniker the Naked Anthropologist dates from decades when I was a researcher and activist with undocumented women. The anthropological stance of observing people as part of their own culture with its own logic allowed me to do the work. Naked Anthropology means Plain Speaking on subjects often ignored or swept under the rug; History from Below tries to do the same thing.

Jesus Being Raised From the Dead by Hans Feibusch, Church of St Alban the Martyr, Holborn

Consider Holborn, that shrine of eminent legal institutions and insurance titans. Less grand histories lurk beneath that surface. One of them, the migration of Italians, is well recognised, but for anyone interested in migration the area is a prime example of how migrating peoples move in, live side-by-side and mix with other ethnic or national groups and then move on again.

The history of streets from the Fleet Ditch to Grays Inn Road and from High Holborn to north of the Clerkenwell Road can be told through migrations of people looking for ways to make new lives, using their skills when possible or taking whatever jobs were going. Poor Irish, freed slaves, Jewish diamond-cutters and migrants from the rest of England all lived in this area when it held no appeal for wealthy Londoners. Some migrants didn’t want to come and others did: All have left their marks.

Come along and walk Historic Workingclass Migrations to London on 17 March 2024.

Chalcot Crescent, Primrose Hill

See my other walks coming up, both in and out of Camden, on Eventbrite.

This article was first published in the Camden Guides newsletter of 17 February 2024.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex workers working with police: Sue Davis, Vancouver BC

We hear most about the big moments in sex workers’ rights movements – court decisions, parliamentary reports, conferences, public protests. But many groups engage in negotiations behind the scenes, with business managers, local politicians and sometimes with their local police.

The other day in a facebook conversation about whether to negotiate with municipal authorities and police, Sue Davis posted a timeline about sex workers’ efforts and achievements in Vancouver, British Columbia. She supplied links to the reports produced, and I’m reproducing her words here without interruption.

NB: The Downtown Eastside of Vancouver was a serial killer’s hunting-ground for victims during a long period when police egregiously neglected the area, not caring what was happening to disappearing women – poor women selling sex in the street. References here are to ‘Missing Women’.

In the words of Susan Naomi Davis:

In Vancouver it started with cooperative development: Cooperative Development Exploration Report
By Sue Davis and Raven Bowen
With Support of the BC Coalition of Experiential Women
February 2007

Then there was labor rights exploration:
SEX INDUSTRYSafety and Stabilization
Susan Davis and Raven Bowen
BC Coalition of Experiential Communities
2007

From there we did some strategic planning:
Leading the Way:Strategic Planning Toward Sex WorkerCooperative Development
January 2008

At this point we received a little funding to develop Occupational Health and Safety materials:
Trade SecretsOccupational Health and Safety Guidelines for Sex Industry Workers

Trade Secrets for sex industry workers

So then we worked to figure out how to implement the cooperative brothel and Occupational Health and Safety. That work resulted in:
Opening the Doors- Final Report
BC Coalition of Experiential Communities 2011

During this time we had also been working on issues related to exclusion by victims services etc and had been attending the Police Board as a delegation to ask for an amnesty to be able to open the coop brothel/safe work site, or, as it was lovingly called at the time, “the safe erection site”. We were invited to the Diversity Advisory Committee with the Vancouver Police Department (VPD), a committee working on issues related to policing in marginalized communities. There were lots of other groups represented there, but it became clear quickly that sex workers needed their own group, as our issues were taking over every meeting.

So the Sex Industry Worker Safety Action Group was created and included sex workers groups and the VPD working together to try to address issues of policing. that work resulted in the VPD lowest-level-of-enforcement policy:
Vancouver Police Department
SEX WORK ENFORCEMENT GUIDELINES
Adopted January 2013
With the assistance of:
WISH, PIVOT, BC Coalition of Experiential Communities, PEERS and PACE

At the same time the Missing Women’s Commissions was underway and had released it’s recommendation:
FORSAKEN – The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry
VOLUME III
Gone, but not Forgotten:
Building the Women’s Legacy of Safety Together
November 15, 2012

This report contained many of the recommendations submitted by the BCCEC based on work we had done under the leadership of Raven Bowen – a visionary – and included policing recommendations as well as City of Vancouver inspections and housing and other responses

A task force was struck and a policy similar to the VPD policy emerged and stated that sex work is explicitly NOT a by-law violation:
City of VancouverSex Work Response Guidelines
A balanced approach to safety, health and well-being for sex workers
and neighbourhoods impacted by sex work
September 2015

The point of all this is that we achieved the most change via local police and inspections agencies rather than trying to create change at the national level. Locally, after Canada’s worst serial killer. people were motivated by guilt for bad policies which had delivered sex workers into the hands of that animal – who we never name, fuck that guy – it is the legacy of the women who died. They were the reason that we were able to move things forward here. These relationships with city staff and police need constant care and oversight by sex workers. We have seen several incidents where city staff and police reverted to the practices of the past and have had to re-educate them about why the policies were created in the first place.

We continue to work with police and city staff in an ongoing way. There has not been a massage-parlor raid in years, no arrests of sex workers in years and no murders of sex workers as a result of their work in 11 years – (one sex worker stabbed another sex worker in an argument over a cigarette and she died). Overall I would say that it was well worth the blood, sweat and tears. I have been in yelling matches with police officers during these meetings – nose-to-nose screaming – to see the outcomes emerging in Vancouver.

Not all sex worker groups here agree with working with police and some refuse to work with them at all. Since sex workers have expressed to us that their number-one concern is arrest and enforcement, we continue to follow their direction and engage with police to ensure freedom from enforcement here.

We engaged with our local politicians and any entities whose work impacted the safety of community and continue to do so now. We have recently become organizational partners with the local community policing office and believe there is real potential to decentralize policing via the 9 community-policing offices in the city. Groups representing people who experience negative impacts of police action could join the boards of community policing centers, and we could see a venue for direct change in policing practices.

So i know this was long…but so was the journey to get here…it was not easy, it was emotional and exhausting… it is emotional and exhausting…. but now 45 police services and the e-division of the RCMP have all signed onto lowest-level-of-enforcement across our province. We hope that when the federal government finally review the current legal framework [anti-sexbuying law], the fact that police are not using these laws and do not support them will have some impact.

You can copy and share as you like and please feel free to use, share, critique… We love to hear what people think and to answer questions! You may write to susan dot 1968 at hotmail dot com.

§

About Sue Davis in 2009: Sex workers and researchers defend clients in Vancouver

Sue and I met in person in 2011: Sex at the Margins in Vancouver: sex trafficking, migrant sex work and rescue

And from me about Canada in the past:

All the scary things a little decriminalisation of prostitution might cause in Canada Nov 2010

Bedford v Canada: Report from the courtroom on prostitution law and sex work June 2011

Remembering Judge Himel: Bold assertions and inflammatory language not useful to the court June 2013

Judge dismisses academic claim to sex-trafficking expertise Sept 2013

§

–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

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

Sex work in fiction: Gorky Park, Moscow prostitution doesn’t exist

Militia detectives are at Kazansky Station in Komsomol Square, in Martin Cruz Smith’s novel Gorky Park. Cartier-Bresson’s 1954 photo shows the station at the left and surrounding traffic. Moscow prostitution may not have existed officially in 1977, when the story takes place, but sex work certainly did.

At 6 am entire Turkman families lay head to feet on benches. Babies with felt skullcaps nestled on soft bundles. Soldiers leaned slackly against the wall in a sleep so tangibly deep that the heroic mosaics of the ceiling overhead could have been their communal dream. Bronze fixtures glowed fully. At the one refreshment stand open, a girl in a rabbit-skin coat confided in Pasha Pavlovich…

A young soldier took Pasha’s place with the girl. She smiled through a rouge of vaseline and lipstick while the boy read the price chalked on the toe of her shoe; then, hand in hand, they walked out the station’s main door… Komsomol Square was blue before the dawn, the clicking candles of trams the only movement. The lovemakers slipped into a taxi. ‘Five rubles.’ Pasha watched the taxi pull out.

The driver would swing into the nearest side street and get out to watch for militia while the girl and boy went at it in the back seat. Of the five rubles the driver would get half and the chance to sell a congratulatory bottle of vodka to the soldier afterward; the vodka was a lot more expensive than the girl. The girl would get some sips, too. Then a return to the station, a tip to the washroom attendant for a fast douche, and overheated and giddy, she’d start all over. By definition prostitutes did not exist, because prostitution has been eliminated by the Revolution. Charges could be brought against them for spreading venereal disease, performing depraved acts or leading a nonproductive life, but by law there were no whores. – Gorky Park, 1981, p 151

Note there was no street uniform to indicate which women were selling sex: anyone in photos from the period could have been. The shoe marking was new to me. A website purporting to cover ‘sex in the Soviet Union‘ (before 1992) goes on about such identifying marks:

Prostitutes waited on the platforms of large suburban train stations. They sat with their legs stretched out and their prices written on the soles of their shoes, so that any passerby could check it out. There were two price levels for prostitutes in Moscow: either three or five rubles.

The girls usually could be found near the Prospect Mira subway station. They wore rings made of three-ruble or five-ruble bills. One was green, the other was blue, and it was easy to tell the price the girls were asking.

Prostitution politics are symbolic rather than functional: the laws as written do not ever reflect the presence, absence or predominance of commercial sex. This means looking at sex work’s mores (or habitus) can reveal much more. You learn more from good portrayals in fiction than from rote news items. Gorky Park is a perfect example of a book not about prostitution in which sex workers and clients express agency in the face of the law. Another way to think about this is what I call the Cultural Study of Commercial Sex. In this case, a culture of prohibition, secrecy and resistance through codes is shown: perfectly apt for Soviet times.

-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

Wearing slammerkins and dreaming: Sex work in fiction

64be395da850ff563440fc4da91994b8In Slammerkin, Mary is a street prostitute in mid-18th-century London. Thrown out of her dismal basement home by a mother absolute in condemnation of Mary’s pregnancy at 14, she meets a friendly whore, Doll, who initiates her into street trading. Mary is in love with nice clothing and comes to see there is no hard line between the Good Woman and the Bad.

2505937ea8c9c8e6aebb554012fa4295[Her mother] Susan Digot wouldn’t likely recognise her child-as-was, all gussied up in a flowered jacket-bodice and a worn silk skirt buoyed out by a pair of improvers. Mary looked like a woman of the town, these days. She smelled different, even, with the mouth-watering lemony reek of Hungary water.

What a fool Susan Digot had been, to think everyone in gold braid her better, and the wider the skirt, the higher the breeding! Mary had seen commoners walk as queens on the stage in Drury Lane. Doll was opening Mary’s eyes to all life’s shortcuts, back alleys, gaps in the walls. In these uncertain times, Mary was learning, a duchess was sometimes just a stroller who’d picked the right honourable cully.

Kitty Fisher by Joshua Reynolds

Kitty Fisher by Joshua Reynolds

In a four-story house in Golden Square lived a lady who’d once been known in the trade as Angel Arse. On the corner of Hyde Park was a new mansion the Duke of Kingston was building for Miss Chudleigh, who’d been his mistress for a dozen years already and he still hadn’t tired of her. The famous Kitty Fisher was said to be about to swap all her lordly lovers for a rich husband from the Lower House. A bit of loveliness, a bit of luck; that’s all a girl needed.

Richardson_pamela_1741On long bright evenings, Mary sat on the grass in Lamb’s Conduit Fields behind Holborn and watched the courting couples meander by. The air was full of the sounds of leisure: the archers’ arrows hitting the target, the click of balls on the bowling green, or the distant roars of a dogfight or wrestling match. She was reading again for the first time since school. She bought crack-backed romances and memorised all the long words, in case she’d ever need them. The History of Pamela Andrews was her favourite. The crafty wench, to fend off her master all those times, then squeeze a proposal of marriage out of him in the end! She’d swapped her maid’s apron for bridal satins and ended up as good a lady as any other, hadn’t she? It all went to show, Mary thought. If a girl had her wits about her, nowadays, she could rise as high as she wanted, as sure as cream through the milk. Anything was possible. – Slammerkin p247 (Emma Donoghue 2002)

About Mary’s interpretation of Pamela – well! Astute doesn’t begin to describe it. No wonder social blowhards began to condemn the reading of novels by gels.

The word for the loose gown, a slammerkin, came to be used for the women who wore them. On the word slammerkin, from one etymological dictionary:

There is a group of North Sea Germanic words in sl- that mean “sloppy,” and also “slovenly woman” and, less often, “slovenly man,” and that tend to evolve toward “woman of loose morals.” Compare slattern, also English dialectal slummock “a dirty, untidy, or slovenly person” (1861), variant of slammacks “slatternly woman,” said to be from slam “ill-shaped, shambling fellow.” Also slammakin (from 1756 as a type of loose gown; 1785 as “slovenly female,” 1727 as a character name in Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera”), with variants slamkin, slammerkin. Also possibly related are Middle Dutch slore “a sluttish woman,” Dutch slomp, German schlampe “a slattern.”

This knowledge came to me during regular posts/tweets entitled Today’s word for a Bad Woman. There are way way way too many of them, and almost any negative meaning deteriorates sooner or later into promiscuity and prostitution – beginning with sl- or not.

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

The girlfriend experience in Lawrence Block: Sex work in fiction

11473117_icon-realty-picks-up-elizabeth-street-tenement_b40882c2_mLawrence Block is a successful mainstream writer whose plotlines often include sex workers, in a normalising way (call girls, mostly). Matthew Scudder, the detective protagonist in one of Block’s series, has a long-term, friendly, sex-for-favours relationship with a call girl that eventually turns into marriage. The woman invests her money in property, allowing her to retire gracefully. Block doesn’t avoid portraying the dangers and problems inherent in the lives of women who sell sex, but he gives other sides of the picture, too, particularly refreshing given the usual police view of vice and prostitutes.

In Eight Million Ways to Die (1982) one New York call girl explains her lifestyle.

This is something different, she said. The johns who come here, they don’t think they’re johns. They think they’re friends of mine. They think I’m this spacey Village chick, which I am, and that they’re my friends, which they are. I mean, they come here to get laid, let’s face it, but they could get laid quicker and easier in a massage parlor, no muss no fuss no bother – dig? But they can come up here and take off their shoes and smoke a joint, and it’s a sort of a raunchy Village pad, I mean you have to climb three flights of stairs and then you roll around in a waterbed. I mean, I’m not a hooker. I’m a girlfriend. I don’t get paid. They give me money because I’ve got rent to pay and, you know, I’m a poor little Village chick who wants to make it as an actress and she’s never going to. Which I’m not, and I don’t care much, but I still take dancing lessons a couple mornings a week and I have an acting class every Thursday night, and I was in a showcase last May for three weekends. We did Ibsen, and do you believe that three of my johns came? (p 145)

4e52506f1b4d8702331483d23e7a2bb6I was living in New York the year this was published, and my friend Mona lived the same way Block’s character does. Mona also didn’t call herself a prostitute or anything else. Using a casual feminist analysis of the time, we thought she was doing what a lot of wives do, in a careful, selective way and without ceremony. In a context in which rents were sky-high and lots of people were trying to make it in demanding professions, Mona’s choice was sensible. She got to take her lessons and audition for parts, and, in the rare case that she got one, she was free to accept it. I don’t know whether she would have advertised GFE as a service had the term or the Internet been available, but that’s what she was offering.

Mona’s lifestyle illustrates how sex-for-money occurs in casual ways that are part of normal life in informal economies. If you recall the obsessive quality of hustling culture that John Rechy conveyed so well, this Village chick sounds serene (or spacey). But her way of looking at things is also common. In order to bring out more of these situations, I proposed a field called the cultural study of commercial sex. Scholarship without moralising. In my view, in fact, if you are moralising you are not a scholar.

Part of a series on sex work in fiction: scroll back a few days, then again, then again. [First published 19 January 2009]

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Hustling and cruising with John Rechy: Sex work in fiction

You know how it is when you are staying at someone’s house and you finish your own book and have to look around the alien shelves for something you’ll like? That’s how I wound up re-reading John Rechy’s City of Night, published in 1963. I first read it decades ago and had completely forgotten the intensity of his descriptions of cruising and hustling and the symbiosis of human relationships in one kind of sex work.

Here’s an example from the Los Angeles section:

This is clip street, hustle street – frenzied-nightactivity street: the moving back and forth against the walls; smoking, peering anxiously to spot the bulls before they spot you; the rushing in and out of Wally’s and Harry’s: long crowded malehustling bars.

And here too are the fairyqueens – the queens from Everywhere, America – the queenly exiles looking for new ‘husbands’ restlessly among the vagrant hustlers with no place to stay, and the hustlers will often clip the queens (if there is anything to clip), and the queens will go on looking for their own legendary permanent ‘Daddies’ among the older men who dig the queens’ special brand of gone sexplay, seldom finding those permanent connections, and living in Main and Spring Street holes: sometimes making it (employed and unemployed, taking their daddies and being taken by the hustlers) – sometimes, hardly, sometimes not at all.

And the malehustlers live with them off and on, making it from bar to lonesome room, bragging about the $50 score with the fruit from Bel Air who has two swimming pools, jack, and said he’d see you again (but if he didn’t show, you don’t say that), and you’re clinching a dime and a nickel for draft beer at Wally’s or Harry’s or the 1-2-3 or Ji-Ji’s so you can go inside and score early, and make it with one of the vagrant young girls to prove to yourself you’re still All Right.’

From p 100 of the Grove Press 1984 reprint.

There’s a good interview with Rechy in The Independent, in which he recounts what his life was like after City of Night was a success:

In the 1970s, when I was teaching at UCLA, I’d finish my evening classes, then change my clothes somewhat and go down to hustle on Santa Monica Boulevard. One night, a student saw me down there and said ‘Good evening, Professor Rechy. Are you out for an evening stroll?’.

It would be difficult to find a more appealing sex work story than that! But also see Rechy’s other books on his website.

And a final thanks to the friend with the bookshelf – he knows who he is.

[Post first published 11 November 2008]

Part of a series on sex work in fiction (scroll to a few days ago and a few days before that.)

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

James Lee Burke with French Quarter scam: Sex work in fiction

Bayou-Burger-Sports-Bar-features-balcony-dining-Bourbon-Street-New-Orleans-LAIn today’s shrill anti-trafficking culture any differences in forms of facilitating prostitution/ sex work are practically erased. I’m not talking about whether anything is fair or gender-equal or exploitative here but about the many ways humankind has evolved for making money through commercial sex. In James Lee Burke’s Cadillac Jukebox (1996) one swindle involving sex work in New Orleans is described: the Murphy scam.

Vice had identified the hooker as Brandy Grissum, a black twenty-five-year-old heroin addict who had done a one-bit in the St John the Baptist jail for sale and possession.

She worked with three or four pimps and Murphy artists out of the Quarter. The pimps were there for the long-term regular trade. The Murphy artists took down the tourists, particularly those who were drunk, married, respectable, in town on conventions, scared of cops and their employers.

It was an easy scam. Brandy would walk into a bar, well dressed, perhaps wearing a suit, sit at the end of the counter, or by herself in a booth, glance once into the john’s face, her eyes shy, her hands folded demurely in front of her, then wait quietly while her partner cut the deal.

This is the shuck: ‘My lady over there ain’t a reg’lar, know what I’m sayin’? Kind of like a schoolgirl just out on the town.’ Here he smiles. ‘She need somebody take her ’round the world, know what I’m saying’? I need sixty dollars to cover the room, we’ll all walk down to it, I ain’t goin’ nowhere on you. Then you want to give her a present or something, that’s between y’all.’ — p 24, Cadillac Jukebox

320px-Grits_Bar_Interior_New_Orleans_2The Murphy scam is robbery by a couple who lure a client to a room to have sex (in exchange for seemingly reasonable, non-professional fees). After client and woman are in bed the other partner rushes in posing as a jealous husband (or whatever). The client leaves in a hurry and the Murphy artists collect his belongings and money.

In Burke’s description Brandy works with several pimps as well as with Murphy artists, so even though she’s an addict she is not anyone’s slave. We aren’t told what proportion of the takings she gets, so we don’t know how bad a deal she has. The scam is interesting in offering a kind of commercial sex palatable to clients who cannot see themselves as clients and thus lend themselves to being scammed. A different kind of ‘demand’ – that now over-used, less-meaningful-than-ever term. A man who can be ‘lured’ – not much of a monster. More on different kinds of pimping in Nesbø’s Blood on Snow and in my own The Three-Headed Dog.

This is part of a series of posts about sex work in fiction. The other day it was Doris Lessing’s turn.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

The postwar London of Doris Lessing: Sex work in fiction

b9a907e1e2523f49ac6e82860572f05eThe Four-Gated City was published in 1969 by Doris Lessing. The passage quoted below describes a single young woman walking west on the Bayswater Road in 1950. The woman is Martha Quest, recently arrived in London from southern Africa, a migrant from colonies considered peripheral observing life in the presumed cosmopolitan centre. Her route takes her from a middle-class dinner held east of Marble Arch to a poor squat in Notting Hill. The photo above shows another part of London at the same period; the photo below the young Lessing.

29lessing-master675-1Note the absence of moral comment and that the job of the police is to make sure the marketplace functions peacefully.

Now she slowed, almost stopped in surprise at a cool hard getaway look from a young woman who stood with her back to a hedge. Of course, she had passed another invisible boundary. From here until Queensway, the pavements were lined with prostitutes, standing singly or in pairs, dozens of them, along the pavements. But Martha was freer here than she had been in that other territory she had only just left, whose boundary was simply a bisecting street. She was protected precisely by the line of girls for sale, who knew she wasn’t one of their trade union and because their hostile warning faces that said go away, you shouldn’t be here, kept her safe from being accosted. Three kinds of animal here. The women, standing with their backs to the hedges, on sale. The ordinary traffic of the pavement – but a slight traffic, mostly couples hurrying past the marketplace, keeping close under the lights, looking embarrassed, as if they were here by mistake, yet glancing furtively at the buying and bargaining.

NYC39209The customers, men of all ages, walking slowly past the women, or standing under the trees smoking, making choices. And across the street, policemen, spaced out with twenty or thirty yards between each couple, not looking directly at the haggling and dealing, but observing it sideways to make sure that it went on without incident. Martha walked more slowly than she had had to walk in the part of the street she had left. All the way down the street, by lit airy trees, they stood. Although it lightly drizzled, they wore summer dresses, bare necked, bare shouldered; and high thick sandals with bared insteps; and sometimes they held a jaunty umbrella. But there was no elegance here either. They weren’t well-dressed. They shared the national disposition towards gracelessness.

82867b7fe426e102857aaf9970f08b72There has been a war on. Suppose one of these men who was making up for the starvation of the war… approached one of the girls saying: I’d like you to wear … whatever was his fantasy, would she snap back: There’s been a war on, you know? Yes, very probably … Martha found herself imagining rooms where furniture, curtains, objects had charm, had flair, and a girl with charm, flair, undressed slowly to show off wittily charming underclothes – a man’s fantasy? Perhaps in all this city it was only these girls’ rooms where there was anything attractive, gay, rightly made? Well, not from the way they were dressed as they stood on the pavement.

–Laura Agustín, The Naked Anthropologist

The Three-Headed Dog: Sexwork and Migration Mystery

agustin-thethreeheadeddog-1400Despite how it might look to those who’ve known me only since Sex at the Margins, I’m not making a sudden switch to fiction. It’s one of the things I used to write before the Internet, before doing postgraduate degrees, before social media. I began this story, in my head and scribbled notes, not long after starting those degrees in the late 90s. This I now understand to show how quickly I grasped the limitations of academic work. There’s nothing left of that first version but the concept: a searcher for missing migrants in economic and social undergrounds, multicultural and hybrid settings, job markets that routinely include sex. In general such stories are not published unless the migrants are portrayed as passive victims needing rescue by much straighter and more comfortable characters.

michaelrougier
The Three-Headed Dog is about undocumented migrants in Spain and their smugglers. A lot of them work in different segments of the sex industry. The incidents portrayed would be labelled trafficking and the migrants victims by anti-prostitution and anti-migration campaigners. I don’t see things that way. Just as I strove to show in Sex at the Margins that many migrants don’t perceive themselves as inert objects of cruel fate and evil men, here a few of them act out their stories, trying to find ways to get ahead and stay out of trouble.

Fiction is not the opposite of fact; truth is glimpsed in different ways. The characters here are neither real nor unreal but created themselves in my imagination out of my long experience of travelling on my own and talking with people. I’ve seen everything that happens in this book. I’ve known people who thought and acted these ways. But all migrants don’t experience things the same way, and they may change how they feel over time. The fact they share is not having legal status to be and work where they are living (under constraints and duress). Falsehoods are fundamental. My intention is not to romanticise but pay attention to lives nearly always shoved out of sight.

10422545_10153240525334511_900316605402882336_nAbout genre labels 

To publish is to choose categories for databases. The Three-Headed Dog is a mystery, a crime story, a (hardboiled) detective novel short on gore and violence. A noir. Noir signifies a dark, morally complicated mood (the opposite of a clear struggle between good and evil). That doesn’t make it amoral (an accusation often thrown at me). The detective’s moral compass shifts as a result of introspection. Good is often tinged with bad, and attempts to do right go wrong. Exploitative characters can be sympathetic. It’s shadowy in noir; the lighting is low. But in low light you see things you don’t see in the bright.

The style is terse: that’s really me. Pithiness works to suggest meanings rather than lay them out. Mine is a rather anti-Enlightenment endeavour. You get glimpses of truths and they contradict each other.

402202_10150584228439511_1629372089_nSee what you make of The Three-Headed Dog. I published it on Amazon Kindle, but you don’t have to own a kindle device to read it. Links to free apps are right there. If you leave a few lines of review when you finish you make it likelier Amazon’s search machine will find and show the book to new readers.

I will be musing more about why and how I wrote this book. Leave questions here and I’ll try to answer them.

If you want to read more, subscribe to email notifications at the bottom of the right-hand column. If you were already subscribed, I’m sorry to say the earlier software broke and your address was lost, so take a few seconds to subscribe anew. The RSS feed is still A-okay.

-Laura Agustín, The Naked Anthropologist

What does the French prostitution law mean? Denial of consent

Borgen Season 3 Ep 25

At a conference on Sexual Citizenship and Human Rights the other week, I binned the talk I had prepared and instead gave a version of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. It turned out both the other speakers on the panel were to address trafficking, one as a straightforward Rescue-Industry member, and I’m not capable of watching an innocent audience listen to that stuff without speaking up.

My new talk was called Denial of Consent, because previously at this event consent was mentioned continuously as a key human-rights concept in European sexuality law. How telling, then, that European specialists declaim adolescents’ right to consent to have sex at the same time that other Europeans declaim ever more often that most adult women and trans who sell sex have not consented. In anti-trafficking campaigns the claim is very often that these victims cannot speak/have no voice giving an excuse for others to ‘speak for’ them.

In Prostitution Law and the Death of Whores I focussed on the mechanism by which Rescuers – feminists, social workers, politicians, police – discredit what adult women say about their experiences of selling sex, thus disqualifying them as subjects in a discussion about their own fates. What they say varies widely, of course, but rather than engage in seeking policy that would allow individual experiences to become central and rather than listening with interest to what sexworker activists say and finding migrants to talk to, they claim to Know Better how they should think and feel. The mainstream television series Borgen included a scene in which the non-sexworker experts on a Copenhagen panel discussion of prostitution interrupt and scoff at the sole sexworker participant, demonstrating how well-known the mechanism of disqualification has become (photo above from Season 3, Episode 25). Refusal to believe in the consent of women who sell sex also contradicts widespread anti-rape campaigning that puts consent at the core of sexual relationships.

The law to be voted in France’s Assemblée today (4 December 2013) is the product of years of process and politicking, not only in France but in certain feminist networks in Europe. In April 2011 I wrote Europe’s anti-prostitution initiatives multiply: EU itself and now France, linking developments to the European Women’s Lobby campaign for A Europe Free from Prostitution. Last month I wrote, with Thierry Schaffauser, about how the testimony of sexworker activists have been deliberately disqualified from consideration by politicians and certain feminists in France. This is accomplished by claiming these activists are a privileged elite selfishly putting their own interests above those victims of sex trafficking said to be ‘voiceless’ and requiring others to speak for them. Alice Schwarzer, currently campaigning against Germany’s law regulating prostitution, referred to them recently as ‘a few cheerful prostitutes’, of no consequence compared to the miserable 95%.

It’s now 20 years since I first wondered how this refusal to listen operates, at a time when I lived far from Europe amongst very poor women, many of whom were thinking about travelling to Europe. Some already sold sex at home, many were thinking of doing it abroad, others did not want to sell sex but work as live-in maids. This means that my first thoughts and feelings were attached to a specific real-life situation in which I had no axe to grind, no interest one way or the other. In terms of research on women who sell sex I even had what can be called a control group – women of the same cohort who didn’t sell sex. I was unaware a conflict existed within feminism on the topic, I hadn’t read books about prostitution. I was just as interested in what women said about being maids, and I still am. I’ve commented frequently on how my original research question, before I knew what research was, really, concerned the presumption by middle-class women that they Knew Better than sex workers what they should do with their lives. When I studied for a Master’s and then a doctoral degree my focus was never on migrants but on people wanting to rescue them, and after some six or seven years I felt I had answered my original question in several ways. Read Sex at the Margins for details.

I have followed events closely in Europe now for 15 years, living in several different countries and visiting many others, sometimes for extended stays. France is a country I have known since a first school trip from London to Calais, maybe in 1961, and since then I have spent a lot of time there. So i closely watched the action in France’s Assemblée last Friday – not the rhetoric, which I know by heart, but the tones and nuances of speech by the proponents of the law. The auditorium was nearly empty, but all politicking was over; what happened on the floor was not debate but the formal rhetoric of presenting a proposition. Any suggestion from the opposition that the law was sloppily conceived was rebutted with arch-seriousness about how long and carefully proponents had worked on it. The media were accused of missing the point, said to be not penalising clients but protecting women who sell sex.

I do understand what Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, France’s Minister for Women’s Rights, wants to do. I’ve studied in depth what this one kind of feminism wants to achieve, i see how marvellous it sounds – a world without prostitution, a France in which State Feminism takes a daring step towards Gender Equality. Vallaud-Belkacem herself is a very different face for abolitionism from the more embittered and older radical feminists we’ve become used to: Gunilla Eckberg, Melissa Farley, Janice Raymond, Alice Schwarzer and others in every country. She is younger, prettier and was born in a colony, Morocco. French campaigneers have not leant on anti-trafficking rhetoric but on the classic idea that prostitution is a patriarchal institution that must be abolished – the arguments I read when I first started my formal studies in the late 90s. Unfounded numbers of trafficking victims are thrown out, yes, but I read the French effort as being more serious than that. The thing is neither slapdash nor hysterical but part of a sober attempt to change the European panorama, to shift the gaze from small-population Nordic countries never seen as important European players to the continent, to France – to the heart of real Europe. I see this shift as game-changing.

On the other hand, the reason i wrote Sex at the Margins still holds; nothing has improved for sex workers or for people called trafficked or for undocumented migrants in Europe. The anti-trafficking movement has diverted attention and money into everything but benefiting the women pitied in the first place. Campaigners have yet to comprehend how migrants, and a lot of other women, feel about doing high-stigma, risky, better-paying jobs – especially when the other options are practically non-existent. Rescuers’ fundamental project insists on the need to force people into leading lives considered better. It would appear they are incapable of imagining that others are different from themselves, that migrants perceive their options on the basis of their own life experiences and goals. The question is much bigger than Do you like selling sex? rather it is how the range of an individual’s needs, from sleeping patterns to children’s school schedules and the desire for consumer goods may lead them to prefer selling sex to everything else Rescuers can offer. In fact they offer little, which victims and non-victims alike understand.

Few sex workers are attracted by ‘exit strategies’ or ‘diversion programmes’. They hate being low-paid, disparaged, disrespected cleaners, nannies and maids. They don’t want to return to their countries as failed migrants. They don’t want to be poorer again. The sex act may be something they adapt to, learn to enjoy or close their eyes and endure, but if doing it provides more freedom, autonomy, flexibility or hope then it can be preferred, whether people were born in France, China, Nigeria or Brazil. The majority have consented to sell sex, somehow or other, to some degree. Insisting that they leave the milieu when there is so little to offer them is the opposite of kind. In the Rescue Industry protagonists are those who appoint themselves to ‘accompany’ victims out of the life, not those being saved. The consent of adult women is denied en masse.

The French law, apart from the fine of 1500€ for clients arrested the first time, is all about Rescue. The frame is France does not welcome prostitution, meaning prostitution must cease to exist there. It’s estimated at least 80% of sex workers in France moved there from somewhere else, some with the right to remain and look for other jobs. Other migrants are offered 336€ a month for six months if they promise to stop selling sex; since this is far from enough to live on it’s obviously hoped they will leave more quickly, moving to someone else’s country, putting the proposition in the NIMBY tradition – Not in My Back Yard. Street soliciting, outlawed by Sarkozy in 2003 but for many years tolerated or enforced unevenly in different cities, would be permitted again. The law’s backers claim this to be a kind step, but street sex workers say clients will only insist on going to less accessible, more dangerous places to have sex. Besides, local ordinances against street soliciting can be and have been passed at the city level; Lyon is an example.

Logistically the law was informally voted on last Friday. Today is the formal vote. If it passes it is sent to the Sénat, where two scenarios are possible: It passes and goes into effect or it is rejected and sent back to the Assemblée with amendments. In the latter case, the Assemblée vote on a new version that goes back to the Sénat. If the Sénat reject that, a commission paritaire would be named, half from the Sénat, half from the l’Assemblée. The version produced by this commission would then be voted on by the Assemblée, who have the last word. (Thanks to Morgane Merteuil of STRASS for clarifying this process. See their website for other information).

I have loads of links to videos and articles I’ll try to put up soon.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

The prohibition of things: Deterrence, Punishment and Rescue

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

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

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

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

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

Slate says

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

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

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

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex boxes are not boxes: Regulation of prostitution in Zurich

A German sex box: passenger side provides space for escape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zurich ponders use of ‘sex boxes’ to control prostitution

by Marta Falconi, 3 September 2010, Swisster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

No crime associated with brothels in Sydney

Refreshing news from a Sydney think tank: No increase in crime or drop in property values are associated with the existence of brothels in urban areas. Specifically Urbis found:

  • There is not a definitive relationship between the opening and expansion of one of Sydney’s major brothels and any increase in crime.
  • There is no proven correlation between decreases in property value and the location of sex premises in an area.
  • There is no evidence that anti-social behaviour in inner city areas can be attributed to the clients or staff of sex premises.

In an article published 14 June entitled Brothels – like funeral parlours – are legitimate and permissible land uses when properly located, Urbis describe how applications for expanded premises from sex venues encounter opposition on moral grounds as well as the usual objections (environmental, for example).

Urbis admit that even in Sydney it is difficult to quantify sex premises but offer a figure showing some of the known approved brothels there.

Urbis conclude that

Sex industry premises, much like other contentious uses such as funeral parlours, can cause a level of discomfort for some members of the community. At the same time, the sex industry has a role to play in the social and economic vibrancy of cities and sex premises are a legal and legitimate land use. Sex industry premises need not be relegated to marginal areas of the city where they will be met with the least objection. The potential discomfort and amenity impacts caused by sex industry premises can be minimised and effectively managed through robust and well-implemented management strategies and adequate planning controls on the part of local governments.

This is an argument for rational regulation of sex businesses, which may look like Sydney’s long famous Touch of Class, pictured at the top (and now closed, I believe). Street prostitution is not included here.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Do you know whether or not you are a prostitute? asks a Shanghai sign

Rerun because I am on the road and because this is a favourite. Do you know whether or not you are a prostitute is the question raised by a sign seen at Zapata’s Mexican Cantina in Shanghai.Most of the heat in conversations about commercial sex goes to the idea of prostitution – whether it can ever be a normalised profession called sex work or whether it is by definition violence against women. Some people think marriage is prostitution; others think all paid work is. For myself, I wonder how people imagine there to be a clear line between commercial and non-commercial sexual transactions, since all of life seems saturated with both.

My curiosity was piqued when I saw the above photo from Zapata’s, a middle-class bar-restaurant located in Tongren Lu, a popular Shanghai nightlife area. It’s not the kind of place where I expected to see a sign about prostitution. Trying to figure this one out led me into the expat world, where only insiders— most of the vocal ones men—  understand what’s going on. I hung around Internet forums where this sign made the rounds and explanations ranged from it was the bar manager’s private joke to the place is filthy with prostitutes; decent girls won’t go there.

There are discussions of the many types of predatory women loose in the city. ISpyShanghai mentions entertainers,Tiger girls, bar girls, butterflies, hostesses, chickens, and those girls on Tongren Lu who will literally jump into the taxi with you if you don’t shut the door quickly enough.

Discussants at forums like Shanghaiexpat say too many pros (professionals) get past bar bouncers and warn each other about falling into the clutches of girls who try to get you inside talk-talk bars, where they will only flirt and promote your buying of drinks.

Some call such bars fronts for prostitution. Others make a class distinction between talk-talk bars and hostess bars, the latter being more upscale. There are also warnings about ladyboys, transvestites and other non-real women, who are even said to form the majority of female-looking customers in some places.

Could Zapata’s managers be trying to keep single women out? Certainly not; Ladies’ Nights are common in Shanghai, where each time the door opens, hundreds of eyes fix on the arriving guests, hoping that they have breasts.

So, what have we got? A commercial bar scene where men with money want females to be available to them for picking up, flirting, and perhaps going somewhere to have sex. Those women may accept gifts of drinks, food, taxis and flowers without losing their shine. In another popular, mainstream, local example, KTV (karaoke television) venues invite men to come in groups and hire the services of women to drink and sing with them in small private rooms.

The taint comes when women do exactly the same things with the addition of asking for cash.

It’s subtle and confusing, isn’t it? When is it legitimate for women to take money or accept drinks? What about the customers— why is there no distinction amongst them? They take out their wallets in all kinds of situations— and that’s considered fine— except when they position themselves as victims of predators. On the other hand, they discuss which KTV place has the hottest/most fun girls.

Zapata’s managers and bouncers are male, so maybe it makes sense that they would put up such a blunt, sexist sign telling prostitutes to keep out. But what does it mean to say If you are unsure whether or not you’re a prostitute, please ask one of our friendly security guards to sort it out for you?

Presumably a professional knows that the sign refers to her or him-self and has no need to consult anyone about it. Which leaves whom?

What if I go to Shanghai alone, get dressed up, and appear alone at Zapata’s bar? Is it okay as long as I don’t talk to any men or am seen to be paying for my own drinks? What happens if the barman brings me a parasol-decorated margarita on behalf of the guy across the bar, who’s already paid for it? Should I now feel worried about being bounced? In case anyone thinks this is unlikely, one of the expat discussions involved a woman who was asked to leave Zapata’s although she was there with girlfriends.

She was said to be Taiwanese. Some of the participants in expat forums specify that they are Chinese. Bouncers might or might not understand different kinds of regional Chinese languages. Someone said prostitutes don’t have to look Asian. Since ho-style is in fashion, clothes aren’t the key to this conundrum. I think I’m better off not going out, or sticking to an old-fashioned hotel bar where I’m allowed to accept a drink from a stranger— or offer one to someone else.

Originally published at Susie Bright’s Journal .

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Youth on the street, selling sex and End Demand

With all the End Demand rhetoric around, it’s hard to remember that the word demand actually means many things. Hunt Alternatives Fund and people like Melissa Farley have put most of their eggs into a basket that makes men who pay money for any kind of sex the single important cause for all injustices and unhappinesses associated with sex work, child prostitution and sexual exploitation.

The issue of young people on the street who have a home somewhere they don’t want to live in – runaways – is always charged because of a widespread refusal to accept that everyone has a sexuality – babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, old people. In a recent discussion about End Demand campaigns in the United States, Johannah Westmacott made an interesting comment about the whole idea of demand. I first met Johannah when we were interviewed for an NPR show in Nevada last year on the topic of child sex trafficking. She is Coordinator for Trafficked Minors at Safe Horizon Streetwork Project in New York.

There are real demands out there that are forcing people (of all ages and genders) into the sex trade and if these demands weren’t there the people would be free to make other choices, and studies show that many people in the commercial sex trade say that if not for these demands they would leave the sex trade tomorrow. The three biggest demands that coerce people unwillingly into trading sex are the demand for safe shelters, affordable housing, and living wage jobs. Also low-threshold and supportive substance abuse treatment, but I’m not aware of that one being included in studies. Almost everyone I know who has participated in any way in the commercial sex trade has listed at least one of these things as the force that pressured them into the sex trade. The whole men demanding sex thing seems like a red herring to me. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it certainly doesn’t happen at the same rate as poverty and homelessness. Why aren’t we trying to impact those demands since they have a much larger influence?

In example, in NYC there are approximately 4,000 unaccompanied homeless youth every single night. The city funds approximately 200 youth shelter beds. We are providing safe, age-appropriate shelter to less than 10% of the youth in our city who need it. When these young people have no safe way of sleeping indoors, and when they have already experienced violence from being on the streets, or when the weather outside is nasty, what choice do we give them for taking care of themselves and sleeping indoors? Maybe the young person is making a choice to go home with someone for the night, but until we actually offer them another option, we can’t judge them for making a forced choice. Decisions are really only as empowered as the options available.

If there were safe, low-threshold, voluntary youth shelters available on demand in NYC to everyone who requested them, without a waiting list involved, it would absolutely impact the number of youth involved in the commercial sex trade. I’m not saying that funding youth shelters would 100% eliminate youth involved in the commercial sex trade, but I am saying that it would be a game-changer. It would probably also be the most cost-effective and efficient way to impact the most number of youth either at-risk for coercion into the sex trade or who are already in the sex trade and want to exit or even take a break. Funding shelters would not only provide an alternative for youth currently in the commercial sex trade, it would also prevent a huge number of youth from feeling pressured to be involved in the first place. Again, I’m not saying 100%, but I really would guess that this impacts the majority of young people trading sex in NYC right now.

It may be noted also that a recent study in Massachusetts found a trend towards greater numbers of homeless among lgbtq youth. One sort of marginalised sexuality can contribute to another, unfortunately. Doesn’t the suggestion that shelters would make a huge difference make sense?

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist