Sex and the City: Geographies of Prostitution in the Urban West

Geographies of Prostitution in the Urban West

Philip Hubbard

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351791304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2000: Prostitution has always played a crucial symbolic role in the definition of moral and sexual standards and, as such, the figure of the prostitute has been paradigmatic in the history of the sex and the city. Focusing on the geographies of female prostitution in Western societies, this book explores the nature of sites of sex work and the ways they shape the lives of prostitutes (and their clients). In so doing, the book aims not simply to present a static "mapping" of sex work, but seeks to highlight how these public and private ssites are struggled over, with prostitutes often resisting the strategies of social and legal control designed to regulate their working practices. The book consequently engages with a number of contemporary debates in social, cultural and gender geography surrounding the importance of public and private spaces in producing (and reproducing) gender, sex and bodily identities.

1 Prostitution, sex work and power

Popular understandings of prostitution derive from a variety of sources - films, literature, government reports, newspaper articles and so on - but apparently rarely from first-hand experience either as a prostitute or a client. For most, therefore, the prostitute is a mythical figure that is ‘known’ through the conjunction of a variety of media discourses which typically represent images of those selling sex as shadowy ‘outsiders’ in urban society. For example, representations of prostitution in films, from the romanticised banality of Pretty Woman to the gritty realism of Mona Lisa, centre on the figure of the prostitute as a symbol of criminality, disease and despondency, a figure occupying the seedy netherworld of the city of the night (Miller, 1986; Perkins, 1989). Ostensibly serious and dispassionate documentaries on prostitution also inevitably focus on the more titillating aspects of sex work, often conveying images of sex workers as drug-dependent, exploited and marginal figures who are prepared to sell their body (and their dignity). Such pervasive images serve to construct the identity of prostitutes in the social imagination, and certainly these images are not totally misleading, as many prostitutes do lead intensely dangerous lives. However, I want to argue in this chapter that these images of prostitution are only half-right. In fact, prostitution, like any other form of work, exists in a diversity of forms characterised by different working conditions, risks and rewards. As such, prostitution is a form of work imbricated with same sort of complex and contradictory power dynamics which face all people in their jobs; simultaneously empowering and exploitative, sex work can be a life-line for some, a life sentence for others.

This introductory chapter will thus provide a rationale for investigating the varied lifestyles, experiences and (particularly) geographies of prostitutes, focusing on the importance of both male and female sex work on a global scale. Having defined sex work as involving the exercise of sexual and labour power, the chapter will then explore arguments that identify prostitutes as marginalised, exploited and at constant risk of physical, psychological and sexual violence. Against this, the radical (feminist) argument that prostitution can be empowering, resistive and liberating will be explored. Adopting a geographical perspective, it will be stressed that the tension between these two views can only be understood by examining the spaces of prostitution, (re)asserting the salience of geography in understanding the way sexual and gender relations are played out through complex modalities of power. The relevance of such an approach will be illustrated with reference to the many international studies that demonstrate important differences in working conditions in different settings, whether on- or off-street. In reviewing these studies, I begin to outline my motivations for writing this book (i.e. to show how society and space shape, and are shaped by, heterosexual norms and practices) while simultaneously highlighting issues relating to the politics and ethics of research. Writing about prostitution can never be an unproblematic exercise, and in seeking to explore geographies of prostitution I am of course adding to the wealth of (often ill-informed) literature which concerns the ‘oldest profession’, constructing it as a distinctive and ‘deviant’ lifestyle. As I will subsequently describe, however, my intention here is to interrogate and destabilise the sense of difference which surrounds prostitution to show that the regulation of prostitution by the state and law implicitly determines what we are all able to do with our bodies (and with whom).

The global sex industry

Prostitution has been generally (and traditionally) defined as constituting an exchange of sexual services for money or other material remuneration (Pateman, 1988; Boyle, 1994; Jeffreys, 1995). However, with a number of academics and prostitutes recently seeking to re-imagine prostitution as part of a legitimate and widespread ‘sex industry’, there has been some attempt to problematise this definition. For example, O’Connell-Davidson (1998, 9) has recently borrowed from Marxist theory to argue that prostitution should be conceptualised as an institution which allows certain powers of command over one person’s body by another. In this way, she stresses that it is not sex or sexual services per se that is commodified in prostitution but that sex work entails an individual exercising a right of command over another person’s labour for a certain period of time in which they are expected to provide certain services. The fact that these services may involve the prostitute surrendering control of their ‘self (defined in terms of their body and mind) should not, therefore, be taken to imply that the prostitute is not working, for, as White (1990) argues, prostitution needs to be regarded as work for two important reasons. Firstly, and crucially, it is evident that most people who are working as prostitutes regard it as their livelihood, having the same aspirations and attitudes towards it as people have to other jobs; secondly, it is clear that prostitution requires the same forms of labour discipline as other activities, with financial rewards related to the ability to be a ‘good’ prostitute (for example, by satisfying client demands, spotting a niche in the market and extracting maximum financial reward for a minimum of effort). In short, as Shrage (1994, 122) asserts, although it is often regarded as illegitimate, commerce in sex is similar to other industries, being tied into the same types of social, economic and gendered power relations and informal codes of contract that govern all industries.

Although I think there are a number of good reasons for questioning the assertion that prostitution is just another form of work (given that it involves the colonisation and commodification of human sexuality), the term ‘sex worker’ is now widely preferred to ‘prostitute’ (or the more pejorative ‘whore’) by many engaged in or writing about the sex business. First coined by second-wave feminists in the 1970s (and now adopted by the World Health Organisation and other campaigning groups) this term acknowledges the social role of those engaged in sex industry as having the same claims to citizenship and rights as other workers (Kempadoo, 1998, 3). In this sense, it is important to note that sex work is a form of employment that currently employs a substantial (and perhaps massive) number of individuals in the urban West, though given the difficulty of defining clearly what constitutes sex work, the task of estimating exact numbers is obviously problematic. For example, while the definition of prostitution as a form of sex work captures the sense in which it involves a particular form of labour relation, it arguably fails to distinguish prostitution from other forms of erotic labour which may be deemed more socially ‘acceptable’. Zatz (1997), for instance, claims that the lines between prostitution, erotic dancing and posing for pornographic photographs are ‘extremely blurry’ (though this may also be one of the strengths of the term sex worker given that it is a label that potentially serves to unite a number of men and women who work in the sex industry in a more inclusive manner than does the term prostitute). Matthews (1997) similarly suggests that many people employed in the sex business do not identify as sex workers despite providing sexual services on a frequent basis; in many cases, they see it as a supplementary and occasional source of income (e.g. to help them through college or pay off debts). Equally, many people who do identify as sex workers do not offer any form of penetrative sex. In defining prostitution as a job that involves a client purchasing a prostitute’s time with a view to specific sexual acts being performed, it is therefore important not to restrict the definition of sexual acts to acts of intercourse (Pearl, 1987).

There are consequently a number of obvious problems in clarifying how many people are involved in forms of work that centre on the purchase of sexual services. Legally, this is further complicated by the fact that in some countries ‘clipping’ (where someone accepts money for sexual services but has no intention of providing those services) is also regarded as a form of prostitution. Moreover, it is only Australia where the vice laws (generally) apply equally to men and women, and in other nations the law refuses to recognise the possibility that men may be selling sex either to women or to other men (Edwards, 1997). Despite this, there are obviously large numbers of sex workers in Western nations catering to the needs and desires of bisexual, transsexual, homosexual and heterosexual men and women. In some contexts, such as in the pages of adult ‘contact’ magazines or in ‘openly’ erotic entertainment zones (such as that found in Amsterdam), the diversity of types of service provided by sex workers is graphically described, but in most contexts the prostitute remains a crepuscular figure whose working practices and predilections remain unknown to all apart from those who seek them out in sometimes anonymous and hidden corners of the urban landscape. Writing on gay male sex workers, Hutchinson (1997) suggests that the media too often focuses on those street hustlers who represent a visible (and marginalised) population on the streets of many Western cities, and ignores the large population of gay male prostitutes who work as escorts or masseurs. Davies and Feldman (1997) make a similar point in their overview of gay prostitution in South Wales when they claim that too many commentators have based their understandings of sex work solely on the experiences of young people living on the streets of London. They stress that street workers in fact constitute the visible tip of the iceberg in terms of those employed in the sex industry, and, for such reasons, suggest that any estimates of the extent of sex work are likely to be spurious at best, and misleading at worst.

Inevitably though, this has not stopped a number of commentators attempting to calculate numbers employed in the sex industry. Most usually, these estimates are based on police arrest figures, which only occasionally appear to be a reliable indicator of the numbers employed in selling sex. Using police data, Delacoste and Alexander (1987) have accordingly suggested that there may be as many as 100,000 arrests for prostitution in the United States each year. Invariably, as I will described in Chapter Four, arrest figures are probably a better indicator of police practices than of actual numbers of people working as prostitutes, including many people arrested more than once while omitting a substantial number who have never come into contact with the police. Nonetheless, based on their figures, Delacoste and Alexander (1987) infer that around one million people have worked as prostitutes in the United States at some time in their lifetime, with male prostitutes constituting around one-fifth of that total.

While it is difficult to accept the veracity of this figure, it has sometimes been possible to make more accurate estimates of prostitute numbers in individual cities based not only on police statistics but also counts of advertisements, surveys of massage parlours and so on. For example, the criminologist Roger Matthews (1997) employed both police records, surveys of newspaper advertisements and telephone survey methods to estimate that London had around 635 street prostitutes, 640 working from private premises, 2,200 working in massage parlours, 1,260 working for escort agencies and 500 working in hostess bars. Although only investigating female prostitution, he suggested that these estimates were indicative of a sex industry worth around ten million pounds per year. Yet even these figures appear rather unreliable as some working women operate both as masseurs and escorts, typically working one day a week in a massage parlour and for several other nights as an escort. Likewise, many prostitutes adopt assumed identities and names, meaning that it is virtually impossible to keep track of those who switch between different forms and sites of work. As such, even Matthews’ figures are probably an under-estimate of those employed in London’s sex industry.

If it is difficult to estimate the numbers of sex workers operating in Western cities, then the number of clients is even more shrouded in mystery. McKeganey and Barnard (1996) claim that this is largely a function of clients’ reluctance to talk about their behaviour in societies where buying sex is seen as a mark of failure - the refuge of the ‘perverted’ and those unable to sustain a ‘meaningful’ relationship. Their own experience of attempting to contact clients for interview is indicative of the problems generally encountered, and in most cases their interviews with the customers of sex workers in Glasgow were limited to anonymous telephone conversations. Consequently, they claim that it is impossible to make any sort of meaningful estimate of the number of people who may routinely or infrequently buy sexual services. In this regard, it is worth comparing Kinsey’s estimate that 70% of the male adult population will visit a prostitute at least once with the national British Sexual Attitudes Survey (Johnson et al, 1994) which suggested that 1.8% of men had paid for sex in the last five years (there appear to be no similar estimates for women). In between these two extremes, Kinnell (1989) estimated 8-22% of Birmingham’s adult male population were customers of prostitutes, but again this figure possibly means as few as one in twelve and as many as one in five. Dismissing the accuracy of most estimates, McKeganey and Barnard (1996) nonetheless acknowledge that there have been some useful surveys describing the general characteristics of clients in specific contexts, and suggest their finding that around fifty percent of clients were married is not atypical. Other surveys point to the broad range of social backgrounds from which male clients are drawn, with Faugier (1994) claiming that clients in her study of prostitution in Manchester (who tended to be white, married and with an average age of thirty-nine) were employed in a wide variety of manual and non-manual work. Drawing on data relating to 122 men cautioned for kerb-crawling in Hull, Sharpe (1998) reached similar conclusions, describing the average age of clients as 37.8 years, with the 86% who were in full-time employment drawn equally from working-class and middle-class origins. But while clients are (it seems) drawn from a wide variety of backgrounds, what seems consistent is that they are typically in a much more advantaged social position than the prostitutes they are buying sex from (O’Connell-Davidson, 1995).

This theme appears to be reiterated on a broader spatial scale, with sex tourism remaining a potent symbol of capitalist military oppression and dependency at a global level. As an exercise of power, the ability of Western businessmen, soldiers and sex tourists to purchase the ‘exotic sexuality’ of sex workers (who are inevitably ‘other’ relative to the ethnic status of their clients) with seeming impunity reveals much about the economic, political and cultural bases of global inequality (Kempadoo, 1998). Here, the exoticisation of the Third World, scripted in tropes of mysticism, primitiveness and feminine subservience, serves to legitimate white male dominance of the world economy. Political scientist Cynthia Enloe (1992, 24) thus writes of the importance of the 1,500 registered brothels around US air and naval bases in Olongapo (Philippines) as acting as sites where ‘male soldiers learn to behave like men’ (see also Law, 1997). With between 15,000 to 17,000 women registered to work in these brothels, and an estimated 55,000 prostitutes working in the Philippines alone, it is clear that this neo-colonial impulse to conquer the feminine ‘other’ has widespread impacts throughout the non-Western world. However, these impacts are not restricted to those cities like Bombay, Bangkok, Cebu City, Lima and Havana (amongst others) which are widely recognised as centres for global sex tourism (Rubin, 1975; Bell, 1994; Manderson and Jolly, 1997), and the ‘trafficking’ of women from the Third World to the First is known to be an increasing phenomenon (Shrage, 1994). Generally defined as referring to forced labour where people are lured or deceived into contemporary forms of slavery, trafficking is manifest in large numbers of Thai prostitutes working in Australia, Filipino prostitutes in London, Dominican prostitutes in the Netherlands, Czech prostitutes in Germany and so on (Barry, 1995). Although sex tourism and trafficking are not explicitly addressed in the remainder of this volume, it thus needs to be acknowledged that the sex industry is subject to the same globalising tendencies and attendant (gendered) inequalities as are all productive, distributive and leisure industries. The sex industry is, it seems, truly global, involving millions of men and women who may be caught up in global flows of money and power.

Setting aside the somewhat pedantic debates about the number of people employed in different sectors of the sex industry for one moment, it is nonetheless important to stress that all forms of prostitution have one thing in common, in that they are subject to widespread moral condemnation and disapproval. This ‘whore stigma’ (Pateman, 1989), where prostitute men and women are subject to public condemnation for their work, is crucial to the association of sex workers with other deviant behaviours and markers of ‘spoilt identity’ (Goffman, 1963). As later chapters will elaborate, this appears to be because prostitution represents an expression of sexuality which exists outside state-sanctioned assumptions that sexuality should only be expressed within a ‘loving’ heterosexual family relation. Admittedly, the strength of this condemnation has varied across time and space, with some societies (and nations) seemingly more tolerant of prostitution and manifestations of the sex industry. For example, the Netherlands is often epitomised as sexually liberal because of the widespread availability and visibility of prostitution and pornographic materials. In fact, while the Dutch government may have a more ‘functional’ attitude towards commercial sex than some other nations, in that it regards prostitution as a largely consensual commercial transaction, this does not imply that the Dutch government has given prostitution the stamp of approval. Consequently, in the Netherlands as elsewhere, prostitutes are identified as a distinct group whose lifestyle is different from that of the ‘moral majority’, and as an immoral group, they remain subject to forms of regulation and constraint which limit how, when and where they work (Golding, 1994).

While the sex industry involves both male and female prostitution, it has been noted that this moral approbation may be particularly vehement with regard to gay male prostitutes who are doubly marginalised in relation to the orthodoxies of heterosexuality (Davies and Simpson, 1990). However, the rest of this book focuses primarily on female prostitution, where women (whether heterosexually, bisexually or homosexually-identified) offer services to (mainly heterosexual) men. Certainly, even if this doesn’t constitute the dominant form of sex work in all Western cities, it is normally the most widely-discussed manifestation of the global sex industry with most cities having an array of sites where women are ‘available for hire’. Moreover, as will be outlined subsequently, there may be strong links between female prostitution in many cities and other aspects of the sex industry, such as the production and consumption of pornographic material, erotic dancing, stripping and cabaret.

As I will seek to demonstrate in the chapters that follow, a mapping of these sites frequently demarcates marginal, deprived and culturally-undervalued localities as the only places where prostitution can be practised (within limits). The concentration of prostitution in such locations is, I would argue, no historical accident or mere outcome of supply-and-demand economics. Rather, I think that these geographies of female sex work can only be understood in relation to wider moral judgements about the acceptability of sex work, with the ‘place’ of prostitution in the urban landscape serving to construct and reconstruct popular understandings of the limits of sexual citizenship. As such, female prostitution has a symbolic and real presence in Western cities that indicates how the moral contours of society are mapped on to (and out of) specific urban spaces. Above all, female prostitutes are figures whose place in the city exposes the limits of sexual identity; the places that they occupy are key sites of regulation and control by the state and law, fussed over, debated and contested in the midst of ‘moral panics’ about threats to nationhood. Admittedly, this argument could also be made with reference to male (homosexual) prostitution, which has its own geographies (Brown, 1995; Davies and Feldman, 1997), but, as many feminists have argued, it is the commodification and selling of female sexuality that particularly reveals the contradictions and complexities of a heterosexual system that ultimately constrains all human beings in their choice of sexual roles and identities (Rubin, 1975; Barry, 1995).

Female sex work, freedom and control

Prostitution is clearly a subject on which everyone has an opinion, and the academic literature emanating from feminism, anthropology, sociology, psychology, criminology, law and social policy contains many trenchant analyses of the significance of prostitution in contemporary society. Much of this literature supports the idea that prostitution is a degrading, dangerous and immoral pursuit that is indicative of the way that patriarchal and capitalist structures combine to marginalise women. For example, in her powerful and widely-cited analysis of women’s exploitation, Barry (1995) insists on the necessity of making interconnections between prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation (such as pornography, rape, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Prostitution, sex work and power
• 2 Sexuality and space: the moral geography of heterosex
• 3 Immoral geographies: the prostitute as an urban ‘other’
• 4 Space, law and public order: policing the spaces of prostitution
• 5 Community protest, citizenship and the paranoid public
• 6 Sites of sex work, spaces of resistance?
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index