Men Who Sell Sex

Global Perspectives

Peter Aggleton, Richard Parker, Peter Aggleton, Richard Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317935292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Sexual Health & Sexuality

All over the world, men as well as women exchange sex for money and other forms of reward, sometimes with other men and sometimes with women. In contrast to female prostitution, however, relatively little is known about male sex work, leaving questions unanswered about the individuals involved: their identities and self-understandings, the practices concerned, and the contexts in which they take place.

This book updates the ground-breaking 1998 volume of the same name with an entirely new selection of chapters exploring health, social, political, economic and human rights issues in relation to men who sell sex. Looking at Europe, North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the Asia-Pacific, each chapter explores questions such as:

• What is known about the different ways in which men exchange sex for money or other forms of reward?
• What are the major contexts in which sexual exchange takes place?
• What meanings do such practices carry for the different partners involved?
• What are the health and other implications of contemporary forms of male sex work?

Men Who Sell Sex seeks to push the boundaries both of current personal and social understandings and the practices to which these give rise. It is an important reference work for academics and researchers interested in sex work and men's health including those working in public health, sociology, social work, anthropology, human geography and development studies.

1

MALE SEX WORK

Current characteristics and recent transformations

Peter Aggleton and Richard Parker

Fifteen years have passed since the publication of the previous edition of the book Men Who Sell Sex (Aggleton, 1999). It is worth remembering that the time when that book first appeared was a period that might rightly be characterised as the height of the global AIDS epidemic. A new UN agency, UNAIDS, had just been created and was trying to bring new order and coordination into the relative chaos that seemed to reign in the global policy response to the epidemic. The first real scientific success in response to the epidemic was beginning to be recognised in the form of combination anti-retroviral treatments, yet no country had really been able to make these medications available to all who needed them. It was within this context that much of the earliest research and writing on male sex work was justified and carried out, and that the contents of that previous edition of Men Who Sell Sex took shape, published as part of a major series of books on the Social Aspects of AIDS, and bearing the subtitle of International Perspectives on Male Prostitution and AIDS.

Of course, we do not want to suggest that no important research had been conducted on male sex work prior to the emergence of the HIV epidemic. On the contrary, there was of course a small body of work that examined these issues, especially in North America and Western Europe, which we will refer to below. But it is nonetheless important to remember this historical context in order to call attention both to how much the world has changed, and how much some things have stayed the same. On the one hand, we have witnessed remarkable progress in the response to the global HIV epidemic. We have seen a massive scale-up in relation to both HIV treatment and prevention in a wide range of countries around the world (Kenworthy and Parker, 2014). Although we are not nearly as close to the end of AIDS as some might suggest, in the places where treatment access has been guaranteed, we have seen HIV infection transformed from a virtual death sentence to a manageable chronic condition (Colvin, 2011). Yet in spite of these important developments, stigma and discrimination related to HIV and AIDS have continued to be all too common, and our understanding concerning many of the most vulnerable communities and populations affected by the epidemic has remained partial and superficial at best.

While the sense of urgency concerning the need to respond to the epidemic as a global emergency seems perhaps to have passed, as the international response has evolved over a number of decades, it has nonetheless helped to bring about a range of closely related new developments, including a remarkable expansion of interest in and research on diverse sexual practices and identities. We have seen a veritable boom in the field of sex research around the world, as evidenced in the creation of new journals and research centres focusing on issues related to sexuality, and an exponential increase in the publication of articles and books focusing on different aspects of sexual experience. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, this significant increase in research attention focusing on diverse sexual practices and communities seems to have largely by-passed the study of male sex work and the lives of men who sell sex. While there have certainly been a number of very important publications on these issues, including studies by many of the authors of chapters in this book, research on male sex work and sex workers has tended to lag behind investigation on most other issues in sexuality studies, and has only gradually begun to liberate itself from the point of view provided by the lenses that focused on these issues in relation to social deviance beforehand (Bimbi, 2007) and HIV and AIDS in more recent times.

In this new edition of Men Who Sell Sex, our goal is to take stock of the ways in which research on male sex work has evolved over the course of the past 15 years and, in particular, to provide an overview from an international perspective that will go beyond a focus on the countries of the global North. The chapters that we have brought together offer key insights into the range of issues that make research attention on male sex work an important priority and include key case studies of the situation in different countries and regions, providing an important foundation for comparative cross-cultural and cross-national analysis. Taken together, they provide a much deeper understanding of the ways in which a range of complex social, cultural, economic and political transformations taking place globally in the early twenty-first century are shaping the experience of men who sell sex in a highly diverse range of settings – changing the ways in which male sex work is organised and opening up new possibilities as well as new challenges for the men involved.

These broad contextual transformations also provide an important backdrop for an understanding of continuity and change in the ways in which male sex work reflects existing structures in the social organisation of both gender and sexuality, while at the same time creating opportunities for men to push the limits of these structures in their own lives. They offer key insights into the ways in which men who sell sex can sometimes invent new gendered identities and sexual subjectivities as part of an on-going process of self-creation and negotiation with the normative structures of the different worlds that they inhabit. In this chapter, as a way of signalling for the reader what to expect, we will try to briefly summarise what we see as some of the most important trends that run across the field, and to highlight some of the key issues that research on men who sell sex may be able to clarify.

Changing approaches to research on male sex work

The historical development of research on male sex work in the social sciences, and in related fields such as public health or social work, has been characterised by a range of different approaches, as well as by a number of quite distinct paradigms and conceptual frameworks that have evolved over time. The limited space available here makes it impossible to provide a detailed review of this literature (for an overview of some of the most important publications, see Bimbi, 2007), but it is important to briefly discuss some of the most important trends and tensions in work to date to contextualise chapters in this book in relation to these different approaches. In particular, we want to call attention to an important distinction between much early research which tended to focus on male sex work as a kind of psychological pathology or a form of social deviance, and more recent work which has increasingly sought instead to develop a fuller understanding of the social forces that shape male sex work as a form of lived experience – a shift that we might describe as moving from viewing male sex work as a ‘social problem’ in need of intervention to a social phenomenon in need of understanding. A second tendency, which has perhaps intersected with the first as this field of research has developed over time, is from a more narrow focus on male sex work in a relatively limited number of predominantly Anglo-American (or at most Western European and North American) settings, to the growing attention that has come to be focused on international research, with increasing (though still probably insufficient) attention being given to male sex work in most Southern contexts and developing world settings.

As a number of reviews have pointed out (see, for example, Bimbi, 2007; Minichiello and Scott, 2014; Scott, 2003), much early research on men who sell sex tended to dehumanise and stigmatise the individuals concerned – treating them as mentally ill, socially deviant, and as vectors of sexually-transmitted infections. Beginning as early as the late 1940s and continuing through the late 1980s and early 1990s, and unfortunately even into the present, the study of male sex work was typically framed in relation to psychopathology and social deviance. During a time in which homosexuality was itself considered to be a form of mental illness, it is perhaps not surprising that much research focused on male sex work as pathological or deviant, and sought to understand the social and psychological roots of such highly stigmatised behaviour (see, for example, Butts, 1947; Freyhan, 1947). Studies sought to uncover the causes of such pathological practices, and the pathways that led to social deviance, examining the ways in which childhood experiences and family structures contributed to and influenced deviant behaviours – as well as the ways in which sex work and the exchange of money for sexual services allowed some men to deny their own same-sex sexual attraction and preserve or protect a heterosexual identity (see, for example, Earls and Helene, 1989; Ginsberg, 1967; Reiss, 1961). Research on the settings in which male sex work frequently takes place – and especially in relation to street hustling – also often tended to locate the roots of pathology in the dangerous and unstable environments which male sex workers were typically thought to inhabit (Earls and David, 1989; Simon et al., 1992). Male sex work, like all sex work, was thus seen as a deviant set of practices, stigmatised not only by society at large, but by the researchers who carried out this work, leading to an unfortunate reproduction of stigma and discrimination cloaked in the legitimacy claimed by science (and even social science).

Many of these tendencies were reproduced and aggravated further still as a result of the emerging HIV epidemic, which quickly saw male sex workers – like female sex workers – become the focus for scientific investigation because they were perceived to be the vectors of infectious disease (Bimbi, 2007). If much of the early social science research on male sex work carried out prior to the emergence of the HIV epidemic had focused on what was perceived as deviant behaviour and had approached the topic as a criminal or a social welfare issue, as attention began to focus on HIV and AIDS in the 1980s, the study of male sex work began to be reconceptualised within a public health framework. Special concern began to focus on the ways in which men who sell sex might be located in relation to the epidemiology of HIV infection (Coutinho et al., 1988; Elifson et al., 1988). In part because male sex workers were perceived as inhabiting marginal social spaces associated with drug use and other criminal practices, and in part because they were thought to resist adopting a gay or homosexual identity, and to often also have sex and maintain regular sexual partnerships with women, they quickly became the focus of concern about a supposed bridge that might facilitate the transmission of HIV from ‘high risk’ populations such as injecting drug users or gay male clients to their unsuspecting female partners. As one early study put it:

Because of their propensity towards risk-taking behaviours, including substance abuse, unsafe sexual behaviours, and prostitution, male prostitutes are likely to serve as a recipient of infection and an important epidemiological bridge of transfusion of HIV infection from high-risk populations (such as homosexual/bisexual males and intravenous substance users) to the heterosexual population, their wives, partners and families.

(Morse et al., 1991: 535)

These epidemiological concerns, in turn, unleashed a new wave of behavioural studies aimed at collecting detailed data on the sexual and drug using practices of men who sell sex, as well as their adoption of condom use and other risk reduction strategies (see, for example, Estep et al., 1992; Pleak and Meyer-Bahlburg, 1990; Simon et al., 1992, 1993; Waldorf and Murphy, 1990).

While this research activity focusing on epidemiological and behavioural issues in relation to male sex work and HIV began to take shape relatively early in the history of the epidemic, during the late 1980s and the early 1990s, it has also continued to be an ongoing focus of attention in a range of studies carried out up to the present (see Belza et al., 2001; Marshall et al., 2010; Minichiello et al., 2001; Williams et al., 2003). Equally important, it has perhaps been the major avenue for the expansion of research attention to male sex work from a primary geographic focus in North America and Western Europe to a much broader range of settings in the global South where the HIV epidemic has been pronounced (see Beyrer et al., 2011). It also seems to have undergone a quite recent boom, perhaps as a result of growing interest in the importance of HIV epidemics concentrated among men who have sex with men (MSM) in many countries, and a concern that men who sell sex may be an especially important sub-group within this broader epidemiological category (see, for example, Cai et al., 2010; Geibel et al., 2012; Konda et al., 2013; Shaw et al., 2011; Vu et al., 2012).

If a focus on male sex work as a kind of social problem to be addressed through public health and social welfare programmes has tended to dominate much of the research that has been carried out, it is also important to highlight the gradual development of an alternative approach to the study of male sex work, emerging in the 1980s and developing gradually over the course of the 1990s and the 2000s. This alternative approach has focused less on investigating men selling sex as a social problem than on seeking to understand more fully male sex work as a complex social phenomenon. Drawing heavily on theoretical perspectives that have been described as the social construction (or, in some versions, the social production) of sexuality, this approach has drawn heavily on the disciplinary frameworks provided by anthropology and sociology, as well as social history and social psychology, and has sought to provide an alternative to more biomedical and behavioural understandings of sexuality (see Aggleton and Parker, 2010; Parker and Aggleton, 2007; Weeks, 2003). Research on male sex work developed along these lines has been significantly less concerned with seeking to explain causality or identifying possible modes of intervention in relation to what is perceived as a social or public health problem than with developing thick descriptions of the ways in which male sex work is socially organised, and of the cultural meanings that it articulates. Special attention has been given to the sexual identities and sexual subjectivities of male sex workers and their clients, the social networks that they construct and in which they operate, the systems of power and domination that structure these social fields, and the ways in which these practices have developed and changed over time (Browne and Minichiello, 1995, 1996; Padilla, 2007).

Research within this tradition, focusing on the social production and organisation of male sex work, has examined a range of different issues. Among other things, studies have sought to map out the social universe in which male sex work takes place, and to describe the diverse categories and classifications that organise it within specific s...