Prostitution, Power and Freedom

Julia O'Connell Davidson

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745668093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Discriminación y relaciones raciales

Prostitution is still the subject of intense controversy among feminists but theoretical and political analyses are often only loosely grounded in empirical research. This book offers new perspectives on prostitution based on wide-ranging research in nine countries and extensive work with prostitute users.

PART I

DIMENSIONS OF DIVERSITY

1

Power, Consent and Freedom

What kind of power do clients and third parties exercise over prostitutes? Can human beings freely consent to their own prostitution? For some feminists these questions are relatively clear cut. Carole Pateman (1988), for example, holds that the prostitution contract establishes a relationship within which the prostitute is unambiguously subject to the client’s command. The client exercises powers of mastery over her. There is equally little room for ambiguity in Kathleen Barry’s treatment of prostitution. Sexual exploitation violates human rights to dignity, she argues, and there can therefore be no ‘right to prostitute’ and no distinction between ‘free’ and ‘forced’ prostitution. People cannot give meaningful consent to the violation of their human rights (Barry, 1995, pp. 304–6).

This kind of analysis rests on certain assumptions about the essential properties of prostitution (that it necessarily subordinates the prostitute to the client’s will, that it necessarily involves inhuman and degrading treatment) and, more importantly for the purposes of this chapter, on an undifferentiated view of power. There is nothing in the account provided by Barry, for example, which would allow us to distinguish between the kind of powers that are exercised over a debt-bonded child prostitute and those exercised over an adult who prostitutes independently or voluntarily enters into an employment contract with a third party, and it is this which so infuriates those feminists who campaign for legal rights and better working conditions for ‘sex workers’. Barry, and the US-based Coalition Against Trafficking of Women with which she has been heavily involved, stands accused of pursuing an underlying moral agenda of ‘abolishing prostitution . . . by linking all forms of the sex trade with an emphasis on emotive words like “trafficking, slaves, and child prostitution”’ (Perkins, 1995). For most prostitutes’ rights activists, it is the laws that criminalize prostitution, rather than anything inherent in the prostitution exchange, which make prostitutes so vulnerable to coercion, abuse and exploitation. Prostitution should therefore be recognized as a form of work that can be actively chosen and prostitutes accorded the rights and protection that is given to other groups of wage workers.

Although ‘abolitionist’ and ‘pro-sex worker’ feminists clearly hold divergent moral and political understandings of prostitution, it seems to me that the view of power implicit in both lines of analysis is equally unidimensional. The former offers a zero-sum view of power as a ‘commodity’ possessed by the client (and/or third-party controller of prostitution) and exercised over prostitutes, the latter treats the legal apparatuses of the state as the central source of a repressive power that subjugates prostitutes. Part I of this book aims to show that the power relations involved in prostitution are far more complicated than either of these positions suggest. I want to start this chapter with some general remarks about power relations in prostitution, and then move on to explore the operation of power within formally organized, third-party controlled prostitution.

The faces of power

The social relations of prostitution vary. To begin with, we can note a distinction between independent, self-employed prostitutes and those who are controlled by a third party. So far as the latter group are concerned, we can further distinguish between those who are subject to what Truong (1990, p. 184) terms ‘relations of confinement’ (wherein third parties use physical force and/or debt to prevent individuals from exiting from prostitution, even in the event of an alternative means of subsisting becoming available to them) and those who are subject to ‘enterprise labour relations’ (which involve individuals who are, in a formal sense, free to exit from prostitution and which take a form similar to direct or indirect ‘employment relations’ in other capitalist enterprises). This means that there is a continuum within third-party controlled prostitution in terms of the formal freedoms that prostitutes exercise over their own persons and also that there is variability within prostitution in terms of the extent and degree to which prostitutes are subject to the personalistic power of third parties. Some prostitutes are directly forced into particular kinds of transactions and a given work rate by one or more individuals. Others are not.

While the formal social relationship between prostitutes and third party has an important bearing upon the type and degree of compulsion to which prostitutes are subject, it is not the only external constraint operating on them. Prostitutes are also subject to materialistic forms of domination; that is to say, economic pressures operate as another form of compulsion upon them. This is not simply true of those who prostitute independently. Prostitutes who are employed and even those who are enslaved are typically subject to both materialistic and personalistic forms of power. The degree of economic compulsion operating on prostitutes also affects the degree of control they exercise over whether, when, how often and on what terms they prostitute. The contractual form of the prostitute–client exchange also impacts on the degree of power that can be legitimately exercised over the prostitute by the client. Where the contract is tightly drawn and resembles a straightforward commodity exchange – for x sum of money the client has a right to exercise x specific powers of command over the person of the prostitute – there are clear boundaries to the formal powers which clients can exercise over prostitutes. Often, however, the contract takes a form more like that of a contract of indenture – for x sum of money the client can command the prostitute for x period of time – and it may be very difficult for the prostitute to impose limits on the nature or extent of the client’s powers over her within that set time period.

Next we should note that the relationship between prostitute and third party, as well as that between prostitute and client, takes place in a specific legal, institutional, social, political and ideological context, and that this represents another set of external constraints upon those relationships. In many cases, for example, prostitution is legally regulated in ways which so heavily penalize independent prostitution that law/law enforcement effectively operates as a pressure on prostitutes to enter and remain in third-party controlled prostitution no matter how exploitative the third party may be. Equally significant in shaping the relative powers enjoyed by prostitutes and third parties are broader ideological and political factors. In contexts where certain social groups (for instance, women, children, migrants or particular ‘castes’) are generally devalued, and/or constructed as objects rather than subjects of property, and/or denied full juridical subjecthood and/or denied independent access to welfare support, their vulnerability to prostitution and to third-party exploitation and abuse within it is increased.

In short, there is no single, unitary source of power within prostitution that can be seized and wielded by third party, client or prostitute. Rather, prostitution as a social practice is embedded in a particular set of social relations which produce a series of variable and interlocking constraints upon action. Finally, we should note that, as Layder (1997, p. 147) puts it, ‘power spans both the objective and subjective aspects of social life’, and this too has implications for the degree of unfreedom experienced by prostitutes. People come to prostitution as individuals with particular personal histories and subjective beliefs, and some people’s psychobio-graphies and attitudes leave them far more open to abuse and exploitation than others. I want to flesh these points out by looking at some examples of different types of brothel prostitution in the contemporary world.

Brothels as business enterprises

Prostitution involves the transfer of certain powers of command over the persons of prostitutes in exchange for money and/or other material benefits, but the actual prostitute–client exchange is necessarily surrounded by various other activities, such as soliciting custom, negotiating contracts, providing a setting for executing those contracts, managing the throughput of customers, and so on. In brothel prostitution all or some of these functions are undertaken by a third party – the brothel owner or her/his agents. The dictionary definition of ‘brothel’ is ‘a house of prostitutes’, and we might add to this that a brothel constitutes premises at which clients can view, select, arrange and execute a transaction with prostitutes. In many countries of the world the laws surrounding prostitution make, or have historically made, the operation of a brothel illegal, and brothel owners often adjust to such constraints by running their businesses behind the ‘front’ of another legally permitted enterprise, such as a massage parlour, sauna, hotel, night-club, bar, restaurant or barber’s shop.

Legal restrictions on operating brothels (as well as the overheads associated with providing on-site facilities for executing transactions) encourage some third parties to run what might be described as ‘take-out’ brothels. In these, facilities are provided for clients to view, select and arrange a transaction with prostitutes, but not to execute the actual transaction. A variant of the ‘take-out’ brothel is to be found in escort agencies, which do not usually provide facilities to view prostitutes (at least not in the flesh; sometimes customers can select a prostitute from a catalogue of photographs) or to execute transactions, but instead send prostitutes out to clients in their hotel rooms, rented accommodation or homes.

Whether it does so overtly or covertly, the brothel is an organization which facilitates numerous prostitute–client exchanges and through which some or all of the activities that surround those exchanges are brought under the central co-ordination of a third party. Brothel owners do not bring together a supply of prostitutes and a stream of custom out of an altruistic wish to further the interests of prostitutes and clients any more than factory owners bring labour and capital together simply out of a desire to facilitate the manufacture of useful products. Instead, they take it upon themselves to orchestrate prostitute–client exchanges out of economic self-interest, and it is therefore important to consider how, exactly, the brothel owner can make a profit from these exchanges.

One way in which political economists have examined social and production relations in various different class societies (slave, feudal and capitalist) is by asking how, under different modes of production, an economic surplus is produced, appropriated and used once appropriated (Dixon, 1988). The idea is that economic activity can be disaggregated (conceptually if not practically) into that which is necessary for reproduction – either of a given society or mode of production, or of the individual worker – and that which is surplus to reproduction. At a macro-level the economic surplus is defined as ‘the difference between what a society produces and the costs of producing it’ (Baran and Sweezy, 1966, p. 23), and at a micro-level we are talking about the disparity between any particular group of workers’ output and the costs of maintaining their output at that given level.

The same basic concepts of ‘necessary’ and ‘surplus’ economic activity can be applied to prostitution. Assume that, in a given country, the minimum ‘rate’ for a trick is x and the cost of an individual’s daily subsistence is 4x. In order to live, and so reproduce herself and her capacity to continue working each day, a prostitute must therefore enter into four client transactions daily. If she enters into more than four transactions, and/or manages to get clients to pay more than the minimum rate, she will generate an economic surplus. We can also argue that, just as the capitalist labour process is designed to facilitate the production and appropriation of surplus value, so the social relations and organization of third-party controlled prostitution are fundamentally geared towards this same end, for it is only if third parties can get prostitutes to generate a surplus and surrender that surplus to them that they can hope to profit from the prostitution of others.¹ Third parties therefore need to make ‘their’ prostitutes enter into more client transactions than are necessary to the individual prostitute’s daily subsistence (let us say eight, rather than four) and to devise ways of creaming off some or all of the surplus (in this case, some or all of the surplus 4x) that each prostitute generates.

As the examples provided below will show, brothel owners typically manage to siphon off a profit from prostitution by inserting themselves as intermediaries in the prostitute–client exchange and demanding payment from either the client or the prostitute, or both, for ‘facilitating’ each exchange. This means that third parties need somehow to exercise control over either a supply of prostitutes or a stream of demand from clients, or both,² and it also means that third parties have an economic incentive to a) maximize the absolute number of prostitute–client exchanges that take place and b) ensure that individual prostitutes retain as little as possible of the surplus they generate by entering into large numbers of client transactions. It is towards these ends that brothel owners’ organizational and control strategies are directed.

Identifying the essential goals or ‘objective interests’ of brothel owners does not immediately reveal to us necessary features of brothel organization or facts about the types of power to which prostitutes must inevitably be subject, however. To begin with, brothel keepers, as much as owners of any other capitalist enterprise, have to adjust the organization of their businesses (including their ‘employment’ practices) to fit the particular market conditions in which they operate. Where there is a consistently high volume of demand, for example, brothel owners have an incentive to devise organizational forms which compel prostitutes to accept a high throughput of custom. Where demand is low and/or fluctuating, they have an interest in organizational forms which force prostitutes to shoulder the cost of running the brothel and to keep trade ticking over. Equally, there are senses in which the social organization of brothels can be viewed as a response to conditions in the prostitution ‘labour market’. According to whether this market is slack or tight, different types of ‘employment relation’ may be more or less economically attractive to the brothel owner.

Yet any explanation of the very different forms of formally organized, third-party controlled prostitution in the contemporary world which focused exclusively, or even primarily, on market conditions would be inadequate for two sets of reasons. The first is that these market conditions are not natural or given. Instead, both customer demand and the supply of prostitutes are critically shaped by a range of economic, social, geographical, ideological, legal and political factors. The second is that the third party’s response to any given set of market conditions has to be understood in relation to these same structural factors. As the remainder of this chapter shows, depending upon the broader structural context in which brothel prostitution is set, the brothel owner’s essential goals can be pursued in different ways and can imply different configurations of power between brothel owners, prostitutes and clients.

Massage parlours in England

Under the law of England and Wales, ‘prostitution itself is not a criminal offence, but public manifestations of prostitution: soliciting, advertising, making agreements with clients, brothel-keeping, and living on the earnings of prostitution are illegal’ (Bindman, 1997, p. 14). The law further stipulates that it is an offence ‘for men and women to exercise control over prostitutes . . . and for men and women to procure’ (Edwards, 1993, p. 115), and thus it formally proscribes all forms of brothel prostitution. In England, then, brothels are typically operated behind the front of another business that offers legitimate services/facilities – most commonly massage or saunas. This makes it possible for the owner to contract women legitimately as masseuses, and to argue that ‘these legitimate and licit activities comprise the “core” of parlour work. Any prostitution exchange that may take place is extra to this contract; it is negotiated privately between the worker and the client’ (Phoenix, 1995, pp. 72–3).

I will describe the social organization of prostitution in ‘Stephanie’s’, a massage parlour in a midlands town in England, since it is fairly typical of this form of brothel. The physical environment of Stephanie’s consists of a reception area, a small sauna and a sunbed, and rooms upstairs where transactions are executed. Between four and six prostitutes work in the parlour at any one time, and the owner also employs a receptionist. The prostitutes are not waged employees, but are offered shift work more or less on an ‘as and when’ they turn up basis. Clients are attracted by advertisements in the local press, which are perfectly legal providing that parlour owners advertise their legitimate business (in this case, massage services), and, since Stephanie’s is located in a known red-light district, it attracts some passing trade as well as regular custom.

On arrival, the client pays the receptionist a ‘massage fee’ of £10. As Phoenix (1995, p. 73) notes, this kind of set fee ‘typically acts as protection for the management from charges of brothel running’. The receptionist takes the client upstairs and tells him to get undressed and wait for the ‘masseuse’, who then negotiates the details of the transaction with him. The prices are, in theory, fixed by the parlour owner, who involves herself in the details of prostitute–client transactions to the extent that she sets prices for oral sex, penetrative sex, hand relief and ‘topless’ hand relief, and specifies that, for these prices, the client may spend thirty minutes with the prostitute. The owner takes a fee not only from clients but also from the prostitutes in her (indirect) employ. Prostitutes working at Stephanie’s have to pay a ‘shift fee’ of £20 for the privilege of working there at all, and they are then charged a ‘punter fee’ of £5 for each client that they see. As well as this, they are expected to pay £25 per shift, supposedly for the receptionist’s services. In short, they cover the expenses of running the parlour, and by the time they see their first client they will have incurred ‘expenses’ of £50 (£10 more than the rate for penetrative sex set by the owner).

On a good day, a prostitute at Stephanie’s sees seven clients during a shift. If every client pays the full price for the most expensive ‘service’ – penetrative sex – then the prostitute will end up with £200 at the end of her shift, while the owner will pocket £125. If the prostitute sees fewer clients, say five, and if they negotiate for cheaper services or to pay lower rates, say £25, then she will walk away from the shift with a mere £55. However, since the owner does not vary the punter fee or the shift fee, she will still pocket £95. On days when there is very little custom it is possible for prostitutes to end up owing money to the parlour owner.

Though there may be individual cases in which massage-parlour owners in England imprison women and/or children and brutalize them into prostitution, force is not routinely used by owners to secure a supply of prostitutes. Instead, prostitutes are typically recruited by word of mouth and/or by advertising. It should be clear from the above, however, that recruits are not enticed by an attractive employment package. The deal they are offered is transparently exploitative. It forces the prostitute to surrender a large proportion of the surplus generated by her prostitution, to carry the costs of running the parlour and to shoulder all the financial risk associated with downturns in demand; it provides her with no employment continuity, rights or benefits. What is it, then, that assures parlour owners a steady supply of ‘employees’?

To begin with, employment opportunities for unskilled women in England are limited, and those which do exist ar...