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1Speaking about sex for sale historically, spatially and politically
May-Len Skilbrei and Marlene Spanger
The aim of the book
Social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern argued that (1992: 2), âYou can tell a culture by what it can and cannot bring togetherâ. In this book we are interested in how definitions of and unease with prostitution, sex work or sex for sale1 bring together sex and money. To us Strathernâs expression encapsulates the value of looking for the meanings and moralities that are applied to commercial sex. Debaters and others often take for granted what prostitution, sex work or sex for sale are, often taking as their point of departure the definition in criminal law on paper, the types of acts towards which policies are directed and definitions in encyclopedias. Furthermore, they often take for granted that prostitution is a problem and a particular type of problem, even though prostitution, sex work or sex for sale take on different forms, consist of different acts and are regulated differently in different settings and times, and are thus contingent on our historical, spatial, temporal and political positions. Money and sexuality are related in many different ways, but some ways of combining them create an uneasiness that others do not. In a previous publication (Spanger and Skilbrei 2017) we explore epistemological and ethical issues in the production of knowledge about sex for sale. In this book we elaborate on some of the questions raised in that book about the contingency of how we understand sex for sale.
What prostitution is is often not problematised but is rather produced by political priorities at the time and taken for granted (Phoenix 1999: 5). In this book the aim is to confuse this picture or to tease out the ontologies on prostitution that are in circulation. We do this by focusing on the relationship between sexuality and money from the basic assumption that unease with and attraction to prostitution are related to cultural notions about what the relations between sex and money should be. Ideas about prostitution and the consequences of these are central topics in the literature on prostitution, sex work or sex for sale. But the question of what prostitution is taken to be in a particular context is often addressed in an indirect way. Deriving from different disciplines, empirical contexts and perspectives the chapters in this book taken together scrutinise and make visible that entanglements of sex and money and definitions that appear to be natural or taken for granted are indeed contested and contestable. In some way or another these chapters deal with how prostitution, sex work or sex for sale are defined, delineated, contested, understood and carry meaning. Either from the point of view of the law and policy makers, by police and social workers or by sellers or buyers that are speaking from experience about sex for sale. Some of the contributions add more explicitly to our understanding of how prostitution, sex work or sex for sale are defined, delineated, contested and carry meaning, while other contributions propose more explicitly analytical tools to understand how prostitution, sex work or sex for sale carry meaning. Thus, the chapters in this book analyse the meanings that are ascribed to prostitution in a variety of empirical settings. Looking at how prostitution is defined and problematised at different times and in different places is a way to reveal the logics and discourses that influences what is taken for granted. Moreover, paying attention to problematisations of prostitution, sex work or sex for sale the chapters also illuminate what kind of consequences such problematisations results in when it comes to the everyday life of the involved actors and to how norms on sex and sexuality are produced. Below we present what we see as main contributions to the types of discussions this book addresses.
Developing the scholarly field of prostitution through the nexus of sex and money
Comprehensive ethnographic studies have taught us that prostitution looks, feels and is understood differently in different settings. The British sociologist Graham Scambler (1997) argues that prostitution is often represented via the most visible or spectacular examples, and that what is lacking is representations of the mundane life of prostitution. However, a branch of ethnographic studies (see e.g. Prieur 1987; Hart 1998; Nencel 2001; Cheng 2010; Brents et al. 2010; Shah 2014) demonstrate how people selling sex ascribe rather different meanings to their sale and how these activities become an integrated part of their complex mundane life. Such studies challenge predominant understandings of prostitution. For instance, the Dutch-American anthropologist Lorraine Nencel (2001) emphasises that the sex-money exchange is understood as a practice rather than forming an identity or a profession for Peruvian women who sell sex. In her fieldwork in Peru, she experienced that the women do not verbalise their sex for sale as âprostitutionâ or âsex workâ. Rather, the women understand the sale of sex as an activity â a way to earn money. Through her analysis of sexual labour in the Dominican Republic, the U.S. anthropologist Denise Brennan (2004) explicates that sex work may be what creates the prospect of independence and a way out of poverty.
In planning for this book we have been particularly interested in finding contributions that present empirical contexts which are different from those often represented in research. Even within national contexts, how prostitution is experienced and even defined may vary greatly (Pheterson 1996). Different market segments do not only entail that prices and veneer differ, but also that the sex is framed differently and that what is sold caters to different desires (Bernstein 2007). In her book Temporarily Yours (2007) about prostitution markets in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Stockholm, the American anthropologist Elizabeth Bernstein describes class divisions within sex work that have an impact not only on the level of safety and the clientsâ experiences, but also on the subjectivities of sex workers. Top-end indoor prostitution is indeed presented and experienced by clients to be very different from the life in street prostitution and in drug dependency described by Susan Dewey (2011) or Lisa Maher (2000). However, the question is whether sex work in different sectors is also experienced differently by the sellers. While some (Chapkis 1997; Sanders 2005; Koken 2010) argue that the sector and working conditions make all the difference, others claim that the harm caused by prostitution is the same, or even worse, in indoor prostitution than on the street because of expectations to deliver a more authentic performance (HøigĂĽrd and Finstad 1992). Whether one is dedicated to evaluating what is worse or not, paying attention to differences is important for researchers in this field. And in this endeavour we, and several of the authors in this book, take inspiration from Bernsteinâs (2007) ideas about authenticity and ways of interpreting and practising the combination of sex-money in sex work as related to broader societal developments and social hierarchies.
What prostitution, sex work or sex for sale is interpreted to be is important for why and how policy makers aim to regulate it. The French historian Alain Corbin (1990) demonstrates that for France, prostitution was repressed in response to prostitution as one, but not the only, form of dangerous female sexuality. It was not the economic exchange per se that was policed as prostitution; it was rather sexuality out of wedlock that was seen as threatening to the fabric of society. The British historian Judith Walkowitz (1980, 1992) has demonstrated the emergence and application of the category of âthe prostituteâ historically and how this has been used to control women and reinforce inequalities relating to gender and class (see also McLeod 1982; Smart 1984).
While there are differences in how prostitution is delineated, experienced and regulated, there are some characteristics in how a woman involved in prostitution, âthe whoreâ, is met by society, argues U.S. born social psychologist and activist Gail Pheterson (1996) in her book The Prostitution Prism. Here she describes how âthe whore stigmaâ is one that befalls not only women who sell sex, but also women who in other ways are not included in normative femininity. Thus, the association with prostitution and the fear of being stigmatised as âa whoreâ regulate behaviours and thus contribute to establishing and maintaining gendered expectations.
Gendered aspects of prostitution are particularly central to both scholarship and political debate. These are also relevant to what is deemed to be prostitution and non-prostitution at various times and in different places. Prostitution has been considered a âSocial Evilâ since the 1850s, and the female sex seller was in such a framing presented both as a problem and as someone who needed to be rescued (Walkowitz 1980: 32). Sexual promiscuity, rather than the exchange of money for sex, was both the source of the problem they constituted for society and the reason why they needed to be rescued, and this points towards how sexuality associated with the public sphere is central to what makes prostitution per se a problem. Sexuality is understood as belonging to the private sphere and is associated with money in the public sphere (Zatz 1997: 294). But sexuality is not necessarily wholly interpreted as private. Sexuality is present in the public sphere all the time (see e.g. Brewis and Linstead 2000). So why is the sex-money exchange in prostitution a problem? Whether acts and relations are associated with labour or love, and whether they are deemed to belong in the public or the private sphere, is contingent on the gendered interpretations of these (Borchgrevink and Holter 1995). While it is debatable whether or not prostitution can be interpreted as an expression of the sexuality of the seller of sex, prostitution is often associated more with female sellers than with their (male) clients. Also, male prostitution disappears out of view as the female sex workers become the epitome of prostitution. Maybe male sexuality, and therefore also sexuality that explicitly links money and sex, can be accepted in the public sphere in a way female sexuality cannot?
The very existence of the institution of prostitution is also by some scholars analysed as a result and expression of gendered power relations in society. In her book The Sexual Contract (1988), the U.S. political scientist Carole Pateman argues that sexual difference is political difference under modern patriarchy whereby a naturalised gendered order is established. When not explicitly addressing gender, but instead debating as if social relations are gender neutral, feminists only perpetuate this naturalisation. So when investigating social phenomena, a gender analysis is necessary in order to identify how power operates and therefore how it can be resisted. This is why the focus on sexual contracts and gender neutrality is problematic, argues Pateman, as this presupposes equal parties. This is a central argument also in some feminist analyses of prostitution as a form of gendered violence, and not as an agreement between two consensual adults (e.g. Barry 1979). This thinking reflects the conflict between feminist abolitionist perspectives and the sex workersâ rights movement, which advocates for the same right as that held by others to enter into contracts, seeing sexual exchange as a an exchange that can be contractual (Jenness 1993).2
There are other fault lines within this field than conflicts over the prospects of agency on the part of the female sex seller. A central argument in the critique of feminist abolitionism is that it universialises the phenomenon of prostitution and thus undermines how the phenomenon of prostitution is classed and racialised, and how various policies affect different groups of sex workers differently (see e.g. Doezema 2000; Kempadoo 2005; AgustĂn 2007). Women are condemned for sexual transgressions whether they charge money for them or not, argues Pheterson (1996: 24), but what counts as transgressions varies historically and across classed, racial and ethnic boundaries.
Feminist abolitionism takes female prostitution as a starting point and does not engage with issues of gender and power related to prostitution involving male sellers. While the application of a gender and power lens is self-evident in much of the literature on women, men who sell sex are often interpreted with a different lens, emphasising more cultural or individualistic interpretations (Siring 2008; Kaye 2010). Male clients have historically often been interpreted as acting on biological urges or on the basis of their patriarchal right. The power over women awarded to men in many periods and places constitutes an important part of what makes prostitution possible and buying sex desirable. However, the British sociologist Julia OâConnell Davidson (1998: 207) urges us to acknowledge how clients operate and interpret their own actions in the frameworks of wider discourses about sexuality and gender.
Studies relating prostitution to other social relations
When we emphasise that prostitution, sex work or sex for sale are not fixed phenomena, we should also study whether it is easier to delineate this from other relations and situations at some times and in some places compared to others. The American sociologists Barbara Brents and Kathryn Hausbeck (2010) argue that processes similar to those in the sex industry are increasingly being mainstreamed, such as the commodification of relations, the sexualisation of culture, the increased importance of service work and the organisation of relations along the lines of global capitalism. Whether or not this is more common now than previously, several scholars point to the need to understand sex for sale in its broader context and suggest investigating links with, rather than assuming a contrast to, other relations and situations (see e.g. McLeod 1982; AgustĂn 2005). Insisting that prostitution is not fixed but rather is in continuity with other relations and situations does not entail that there is no continuity or core in what is termed prostitution. Rather, the point is to understand what is counted as prostitution in a broader context.
Some literature deals with the question of what is actually for sale in the prostitution exchange and how this relates to other relations and exchanges. The American sociologist Viviana Zelizer (2005) includes sexuality in her analysis of what happens when intimacy is connected to economic activities. In her description of the social science literature that analyses the relationship between intimacy and money, Zelizer (2005: 29â32) points out three traps contributions often fall into: being âeconomically reductionistâ, âculturally reductionistâ or âpolitically reductionistâ. Economic analyses often consider intimate relations as belonging to a sphere of economic rationality in which humans in all relations give in order to receive. Culturalist explanations represent intimacy as regulated by ideology and scripts, not taking into consideration material realities. Opposite, while a political interpretation of intimate relations makes it possible to identify how these are imbued...
