(Sub)Urban Sexscapes

Geographies and Regulation of the Sex Industry

Paul Maginn, Christine Steinmetz, Paul Maginn, Christine Steinmetz, Paul J. Maginn, Christine Steinmetz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135008321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

(Sub)Urban Sexscapes brings together a collection of theoretically-informed and empirically rich case studies from internationally renowned and emerging scholars highlighting the contemporary and historical geographies and regulation of the commercial sex industry. Contributions in this edited volume examine the spatial and regulatory contours of the sex industry from a range of disciplinary perspectives—urban planning, urban geography, urban sociology, and, cultural and media studies—and geographical contexts—Australia, the UK, US and North Africa.

In overall terms, (Sub)urban Sexscapes highlights the mainstreaming of commercial sex premises—sex shops, brothels, strip clubs and queer spaces—and products—sex toys, erotic literature and pornography—now being commonplace in night time economy spaces, the high street, suburban shopping centres and the home. In addition, the aesthetics of commercial and alternative sexual practices—BDSM and pornography—permeate the (sub)urban landscape via billboards, newspapers and magazines, television, music videos and the Internet.

The role of sex, sexuality and commercialized sex, in contributing to the general character of our cities cannot be ignored. In short, there is a need for policy-makers to be realistic about the historical, contemporary and future presence of the sex industry. Ultimately, the regulation of the sex industry should be informed by evidence as opposed to moral panics.

*** Winner of the Planning Institute of Australia (WA) 2015 Award for Excellence in Cutting Edge Research and Teaching ***

1 Spatial and regulatory contours of the (sub)urban sexscape

Paul J. Maginn and Christine Steinmetz

DOI: 10.4324/9780203737569-1

Introduction

This book presents a series of insights into the complex and dynamic spatial and regulatory contours surrounding the sex industry. Illustrated through a mix of case studies drawn from the UK, US, Australia and North Africa, it focuses largely on legal or compliant sex industry activities such as adult retailing, strip clubs, queer spaces, pornography and BDSM (bondage/domination, sadism and masochism) venues. Sex work/prostitution is, of course, also examined as this activity is one of the most common aspects of the sex industry; it provokes considerable controversy and often occupies an ambiguous legal standing in many countries. The contributors to this volume are urban geographers, planners and sociologists whose interests lie in making sense of the spatialities, mobilities and regulation of sex, sexuality and/or commercialized sex. The primary title of this book – (Sub)Urban Sexscapes – seeks to capture the idea that the geographies of the ‘sex industry’ are firmly located within the three spatial domains that define the city:

• the urban;
• the suburban; and
• the sub-urban.

Within each of the domains, commercial sex occupies and cuts across discrete private, public and virtual spaces and invariably provokes an array of regulatory responses. To this end, in this chapter we paint a broad overview of some of the key characteristics of different aspects of the sex industry and the spatial and regulatory contours that surround them. We begin with the most common form of commercialized sex, pornography.

It should be noted that issues such as human trafficking, child pornography, sex with a minor, sexual assault/rape and bestiality are outside the scope of the book. However, it is acknowledged that these illegal practices may be bound up in parts of those areas of the sex industry discussed at the heart of this book. Child pornography, for example, is known to be widely available via the Internet. However, because of the illegality of this type of material it tends to be found more on the ‘dark net’ and shared via text messages and peer-to-peer file-sharing platforms (Wortley and Smallbone 2006; Jenkins 2001). And, in the case of sex work/prostitution, there can be no doubt that some people, mainly women, may have been coerced and trafficked for the purposes of sexual exploitation, and any such acts are reprehensible. However, the claim that all women engaged in sex work/prostitution have been coerced and trafficked demonstrates empirical naivety and ideological myopia (Weitzer 2012, 2007; Agustin 2008).

It's all about the porn

At the end of 2013 one of the world’s largest pornography sites, Pornhub, reported that it had 14.7 billion visitors that year; this equates to 40.32 million visitors per day or 1.68 million visitors per hour (www.pornhub.com/insights). Furthermore, the data from Pornhub showed how people were accessing pornography: 51 per cent of viewers used a desktop computer, 40 per cent used a mobile phone and 9 per cent accessed via a tablet. Presumably, those who accessed pornography via desktop computers were doing so from the comfort of their home and/or workplace. Either way, what these data point towards is that pornography cuts across the long-imagined socio-spatial and gendered divide between ‘the city’ (i.e. the office workplace) and ‘the suburbs’ (i.e. the residential home). The same might also be true for those who use their mobile phones or tablet devices, but since such electronic hardware are highly portable they effectively allow people to access pornography from almost anywhere – the street, on public transport, at the shopping centre, in a bar or cafe, at university, in a public toilet, and even in the school playground – provided there is telecommunication infrastructure. Put simply, Internet sites such as Pornhub and other major free-at-the-point of access pornography websites such as Redtube, You Porn and Porntube appear to have no geographical boundaries in western liberal democracies such as Australia, the UK and the US.

In general terms, the spatial and consumption patterns of pornography have moved in several ways:

• from being largely the preserve of ‘dirty old men’ to a wider public;
• from print form to being mainly digitized (Internet or DVD); and
• from being stocked in a physical space of ‘deviance, immorality and vice’ (Coulmont and Hubbard 2010: 191) – the sex shop (often located in the ‘zone on transition’ within the city) – to now being hosted on a series of servers housed in anonymous air-conditioned buildings dotted throughout the world.

For some commentators, notably ‘anti-sex radical feminists’, pornography represents a major threat to society, especially in terms of violence towards women and children (Dines 2010; Jeffreys 2008; Dworkin 1998). These claims are succinctly captured by Tankard Reist and Bray, who argue:

[The] largely unregulated pornography industry has colonised private and public spaces at a rate that presents significant challenges to women’s and children’s rights. The mainstreaming of pornography is transforming the sexual politics of intimate and public life, popularising new forms of anti-women attitudes and behaviours and contributing to the sexualisation of children. The pornification of culture is leading to a form of hypersexism that entails an increase in physical, sexual, mental, economic and emotional cruelty towards women and children.

(Tankard Reist and Bray 2011: xiv; emphasis added)

In this interpretation, it could be concluded that pornography for anti-sex radical feminists represents the epitome of heteronormative capitalism and patriarchy. An industry dominated by men who produce sexually explicit material, firstly, for their own financial benefit; next, to satisfy the insatiable sexual (and perverted) desires of other heterosexual men; and, finally, to reinforce the secondary position of women by reducing them to commodified sexual objects. As such, those who are opposed to pornography want to see it much more heavily regulated. As a capitalist enterprise, the porn industry, like all industrial sectors, is constantly seeking new ways to maximize its profits via the creation of ‘new’ products or genres (e.g. gonzo, kink and parody), pushing the technological frontier so that video streaming can be more efficient and cost effective, and offering free content (loss leaders) in order to increase website traffic in the hope of luring visitors to pay a one-off fee or take out a monthly subscription.

Interestingly, this hyper-negative portrayal of the porn industry and claims that porn is a male-centric enterprise has been challenged with the emergence of ‘feminist porn’, a sub-genre and movement that commenced in the 1980s and now comprises heterosexual and lesbian female porn directors and female scholars who take a pragmatic and/or ‘pro-sex’ view of pornography. The Feminist Porn Book (Taormino et al. 2013) is a case in point in that it claims to represent the ‘first collection to bring together writings by feminist porn producers and feminist porn scholars to engage, challenge, and re-imagine pornography’ (ibid.: 9). Moreover, this edited volume pushes back against anti-sex radical feminist arguments that have ‘cast pornography as a monolithic medium and industry and make sweeping generalizations about its production, its workers, its consumers, and it effects on society’ (ibid.: 9). The efforts of feminist pornographers and scholars appear to be ultimately about ‘the democratisation of desire’ (McNair 2002: 166).

The ubiquity of pornography in the twenty-first century serves to highlight the dynamic spatial contours of not just the porn industry but the wider sex industry. As illustrated throughout this volume, the sex industry and sexuality are deeply woven into the physical, economic, social and cultural fabric of the city and (sub)urban experience. That said, concerns about the accessibility of pornography, its potential negative impacts on children and women as it becomes mainstreamed and normalized have raised questions about the nature and effectiveness of the regulatory contours surrounding pornography and the wider sex industry. There has been a call from certain quarters that more stringent regulations are needed in order to ‘stop porn culture’ (Dines 2011, 2010) and end prostitution (Jeffreys 2008).

Sexing the suburbs

It is not only pornography that has become increasingly commonplace, especially within urban areas, so too have other forms of commercial sex, adult entertainment, and subcultural sexual practices. Sex industry activities invariably manifest within physical (most typically produced and consumed within the city) and virtual spaces. However, in the last two decades, it would appear that all manner of commercialized and commodified forms of sex can be found in various public and private spaces within (sub)urban, regional and rural locations.

The marital bedroom in a heteronormative coupled household, for example, has tended to be framed as a space of and for reproductive sex more so than a space of and for sexual pleasure; this is especially true in societies grounded in particular religious beliefs (Hubbard 2011). Yet commercialized forms of sex in the guise of sex toys, fetish clothing and apparel, and pornographic magazines and films have transgressed this most private and heteronormative of spaces. The prevalence of sex toys and pornography in the bedroom, hidden in the bottom drawer or in a suitcase under the bed, would seem to suggest a more relaxed attitude towards sex and sexuality among men and women. Indeed, in relation to gendered sexual attitudes, McKee et al.’s 2008 study of Australians’ consumption of pornography found that 17 per cent of consumers were women, up from 10 per cent based on an earlier survey by Potter (1996). As McKee et al. (2008: 28) have noted, ‘you can find porn users everywhere in Australia’.

Similarly, there has a been a feminization of the adult retail sector with the emergence of erotic or sensuality boutiques that tend to be owned by women, staffed by women, oriented towards female customers and underpinned by a feminine philosophy. These types of adult retail outlets have sought to evade being labelled sex shops and as such they have managed to move into the high street and suburban shopping centres. Ann Summers, for example, a British-based sex shop chain that began in 1970, has arguably been at the forefront of the spatial mainstreaming of adult retailing (Kent and Brown 2006) – there are now over 140 stores throughout the UK and Ireland. Interestingly, some of these female-oriented sex shops, and in particular, Ann Summers, have managed to directly infiltrate the suburbs by adopting the same sales technique – party planning – initially used by Tupperware in the 1950s (Smith 2007). The Ann Summers company website claims that ‘There are over 2,500 parties held each week by over 5,000 dedicated ambassadors across the UK’. These ambassadors are almost exclusively female and their parties take place in people’s homes where the customers are also predominantly women. This is an international trend; Jackman (2010: 14) comments about the booming erotic retail market in Australia:

Once, sex toys and erotic apparel could only be bought in dingy stores hidden down lanes and in industrial estates. But that was when men bought them. Now, as women around the world are seduced by a marketing push that takes vibrators out of the back alley and into the shopping mall, positioning them as just another must-have fashion accessory for the gal who has everything, the ground has shifted once again. Forget Saturday nights at home waiting for a man to call – or your husband to come home from the pub. Today, the modern woman is just as likely to be found at a ‘toy party’, discussing the relative virtues of a Rabbit versus a Lelo, erotic fiction versus film…

In addition to, and complementing the spatial mainstreaming of commercialized forms of sex, there also appears to be an ongoing cultural and commercial mainstreaming of sex and sexuality if sales of E. L. James’s (2011a, 2011b, 2012) Fifty Shades book trilogy are any measure of things. The ‘Fifty Shades effect’ has been credited with advancing women’s sexual liberation and exploration. This echoes the earlier cultural and commercial impacts of Candace Bushnell’s best seller Sex and the City (Johnston and Longhurst 2010), which exemplified the notion that global cities, such as New York, are the epicentres of urban cosmopolitanism. Relatedly, the lifestyle and sexual escapades of the four female protagonists were emblematic of an ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ (Urry 1995) and ‘cosmo-sexuality’ (see Chapter 2 of this volume). The television series of Sex and the City also lays claim to being responsible for a dramatic increase in th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Spatial and regulatory contours of the (sub)urban sexscape
• Part I Geographies of the sex industry
• Part II Regulation of the sex industry
• Index