Cities of Pleasure

Sex and the Urban Socialscape

Alan Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317998815
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book contains a collection of cutting-edge chapters that explore various connections between urban living, sexuality and sexual desire around the world. The key themes featured address a number of topical issues including:

• the controversies and debates raging around the evolution, defining patterns and appropriate regulation of commercial sex zones and markets in the urban landscape
• how gay public spaces, districts and 'gay villages' emerged and developed in various towns and cities around the world
• how changing attitudes to, and the usage of urban sexual spaces, as depicted in iconic television series such as Sex and the City and Queer as Folk, reflect the reality of working women's or gay men's changing life experiences.

With detailed case studies, and a strong interdisciplinary appeal, this book will be a valuable reference for postgraduates and advanced students in the fields of cultural studies as well as human, urban and social geography.

This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal Urban Studies.

Sexuality and Sexual Services in the Urban Economy and Socialscape: An Overview

Alan Collins

Introduction

Given that towns and cities are essentially spatial concentrations of large numbers of people, then it is this very population density that serves as a defining characteristic. Such high densities mean that a more diverse range of people may be found within these urban locations than beyond their margins. If people with particular personal preferences are looking for other people with particular characteristics then the very presence of such diversity is likely to help the search and matching process to take place more efficiently. Clearly, large towns and cities are also characterised by higher-order services than smaller settlements. Among these higher-order services will tend to feature a larger and more diverse range of leisure opportunities, the pursuit of which is often combined with mating opportunities and rituals. Consider the large packs of men and women who roam, in circuit drinking mode, the huge number of pubs and bars of Newcastle, England (and of course many other towns and cities around the world). They are not only engaged in socialising and drinking, but are also instinctively aware that opportunities for sexual contact can be acquired through this route (albeit with an uncertain probability of success on any given occasion). Further, the actual pursuit (or thrill of the chase) can also offer considerable enjoyment to many individuals. Cities are thus places that offer spaces containing an extensive range and number of pleasure-based outlets and these often have considerable sexual dimensions. These may be characterised by no actual physical contact, but merely comprise the sexual frisson from the physical proximity of potential partners or various sexual goods, services and spaces. They may also offer, of course, the real prospect or means to achieve actual sexual contact. Sexual desires can thus be viewed as important behavioural drivers that may push people to look frequently to urban locations for expending their pleasure time. Potentially, they may also tip the decisions of some determined seekers of sexual contact, such that they actually choose to reside in a large town or city, thus enabling them to make even more effective use of the greater sexual opportunities such locations present.

Why then can sexual desire be such an important influence on individual behaviour, such that it can strongly influence the intensity of use of urban leisure opportunities? From a medical perspective, participating in safe sexual activity may simply be contended to be generally conducive to mental and physical well-being and individuals generally prefer more sexual activity to less, albeit not necessarily with the same sexual partner. While there is increasing technological scope for the separation of recreational sexual activity, companionship and child production (reproduction), Baker (1999) contends that it is not the human psyche that is necessarily driving the exploitation of this separation, but rather natural selection. Humans are not the only species to seek sex far more often than is necessary to reproduce. From this standpoint, Baker suggests that advances in reproduction medicine and technology are merely contributing to an increasing existing trend towards single parenting becoming the norm. Further, he contends that such individuals may well want to share household overhead costs and enjoy the companionship and sexual opportunities of other single parents, in the same physical household, with samegender or multigender permutations. This means that partner seekers will increasingly be able to contemplate partnering decisions in terms of seeking a range of more readily available, specialised or individual options. The alternative is to expend potentially higher search costs looking for the elusive single individual who would have to demonstrate satisfactory to excellent matches, possibly across all of the relationship dimensions noted above. Stylised dramatic representations of these alternative perspectives might be discerned in the relationship preferences suggested in the characters of Samantha and Charlotte in the US Home Box Office television drama series Sex and the City, based on the Candace Bushnell (1996) novel of the same name.

In sociobiological terms, sexual desire may be viewed as a device helping attempts to dominate the gene pool (Wilson, 1975; Barash, 1979). Humans, like all other lifeforms, are instinctively driven to reproduce. Were it not so, the human species would have died out long ago. In the sociobiological terms of maximising the fitness of the gene pool, for the human male, the sub-conscious goal is to impregnate as many females as possible. To this end, the average ejaculate has many million sperms and little else. A sperm is merely a collection of genetic material and possesses no other cellular functions. The male ability to impregnate is quite durable and does not fully cease in later years. The human female must nurture the pregnancy and the resultant infant and thus typically devotes significant biological resources to the single egg produced each cycle. Typically, these will not become fertile again until the current offspring is older–i.e. stops breast feeding. Both the male and female are programmed to maximise the success of their contribution to the gene pool.

What then of the purpose of homosexual desire in this seemingly heterosexual vision of the continuing life-force of society? While Freudian psycho-analytical theory and neurohormonal theories (Ellis and Ames, 1987) offer alternative accounts for the genesis of homosexuality (and various degrees of bisexuality), these can be readily combined with sociobiological reasoning, as they are certainly not mutually exclusive bodies of thought. Only sociobiology, however, articulates an integrated sense of social and genetic purpose for homosexuality. Two key explanations emerge from Wilson (1975, 1978). First, he points to work suggesting that homosexual genes may possess superior fitness in heterozygous conditions, which can be maintained in evolution if they tend to survive into maturity better, produce more offspring, or both. The second and related theory pertains to ‘kin selection’ whereby it is argued that homosexuality developed normally, in a biological sense, through the course of various primitive societies. Its function was to assist close relatives, such as siblings. Accordingly, Wilson suggests that homosexuality has evolved as a distinctive beneficial behaviour that constitutes an important element in human social organisation. By this reasoning, homosexuals may be the genetic carriers of many of mankind's altruistic impulses.

Hence, sociobiologists would contend that all humans are genetically programmed to be reproductively successful. This translates into a desire to search actively for and mate with sexual partners. Yet society forms constraints on how this search process and mating are conducted, even though society ultimately wants the mating to take place (otherwise there is no society in the future). In a rural setting, cosy romanticised gemeinschaft notions of some close-knit village community providing more enduring and satisfying personal and sexual relationships does not necessarily sit comfortably with evolutionary biological objectives. Excessive rounds of mating within the village community will clearly not ensure gene pool fitness maximisation. Recognition of this simple fact has led rural communities throughout the ages to respond actively to these sociobiological imperatives. In so doing, rural societies have also recognised that the search costs of finding suitable sexual partners may be very high, as greater distances have to be traversed to find suitable mating prospects. Thus more sophisticated customs, routines and rituals to foster intervillage mating opportunities have been devised by rural societies around the world. Many of these have now fallen into disuse with changing demographic structure, rural depopulation and social change (see–for example, Sundt and Anderson, 1993; and Friedl, 1997). In essence, many deeply rural areas, particularly in developed economies, have evolved to become extremely thin physical markets for partner search. They effectively came to form ‘dating deserts’ prior to the partial mitigating effects of increasing private car ownership and the advent of Internet chat rooms and web dating sites. For similar reasoning, it is not surprising that arranged marriage transactions have also traditionally been more common in rural communities around the world.

As rural employment opportunities diminished, alongside rapid industrialisation and more liberal social change, urban living has emerged to form the dominant backdrop to the socialscape of people's lives in most developed economies. In this more gesellschaft context, both men and women have had to become more responsible for finding their own mating opportunities, although social customs in many societies might dictate less effort needing to be expended by younger age cohort women.

While the distance-generated search costs of suitable partner search, more typical of rural societies, may be less problematic in urban centres, the higher population density potentially raises the matching-sourced costs of suitable partner search. This relates to the likelihood that, in a city, far greater numbers of unsuitable partner prospects may have to be filtered out prior to finding an appropriate subset of suitable sexual partners. Such costs suggest the need for cheap screening mechanisms to eliminate quickly large numbers of people. Paradoxically, cheap screening devices may actually involve the use of expensive prices in clubs and other venues, in an attempt to contrive a ‘better’ search pool of potential partners. That said, many individuals may be more content to accept such matching-sourced search costs since for many people they are, to a significant degree, offset by a measure of in-search utility–i.e. the enjoyment and benefits derived from simply meeting and ‘evaluating’ (sexually or otherwise) new potential partners. Commercial ventures and enterprises, alongside public authorities, have emerged as significant players influencing the ease, or otherwise, with which individuals can match themselves up with suitable sexual partners in urban areas. These players exercise this influence through commodification of sexual services and opportunities, or via their ability to regulate sexual spaces and markets. Although following Christaller-type logic, a broader range of sex-based commercial premises is likely only to feature in higher-order towns and cities.

This Special Issue presents a collection of papers, from various disciplinary perspectives, which investigate the many ways these sexualities and urbanities connect and not just offering an exploration of how urban areas assist the process of partner search. Realisation of such connections is by no means new. Indeed, there has been significant early work in the 1920s, particularly in human geography, identifying the nature and role of sexual markets and sexual spaces in urban development and processes (see, for example, Park and Burgess, 1925/1984; see also the work reviewed in Heap, 2003). As the papers in this volume make evident, research on the broader reverse causal themes of how urbanism and urban spaces condition individual sexuality and sexual activities and vice versa have also generated a significant body of work in the social sciences. More recently, the potential and scope for embedding even more liberal sexual expression in urban life have also been recognised by policy-makers and researchers as a potential source of competitive advantage for some cities. This arises as many municipalities chase economic success by trying to affirm their cosmopolitan and progressive aspirations and credentials within their planning policies. In a parallel contemporary vein, many advanced economies have also witnessed a huge growth in the number of single-person households. This has arisen, in large part, as a consequence of the social acceptance of cohabitation (which offers relatively low partnership exit costs), delay in marriage and high divorce rates. While this has obvious urban physical manifestations in terms of boosting the demand for smaller dwelling units, it also has repercussions in terms of the urban socialscape. Higher numbers of partner-seekers generate greater demands for infrastructure in the urban economy to accommodate more time-diverting leisure and to provide more sexual partner search opportunities.

Clearly, the gravitational pull of larger numbers of single persons (of various sexual orientations) is a hallmark feature of cities which in itself may attract further waves of potential partner-seeking individuals. Since the pursuit of sexual contact can be a time-consuming activity and one that is often bundled together with other leisure activities to save time, this may influence individual residential choice decisions or, at the very least, the spatial extent of their travel-to-leisure ranges. Yet it is not only single people who are seeking sexual partners. Many individuals who are in existing relationships (straight or gay) may wish to make up for what they perceive are deficiencies in the amount and/or range of sexual activities in which they participate. Alternatively, they may simply wish to diversify their sexual consumption, to satisfy a demand for sexual variety (in partners or activities). This can more easily be camouflaged or hidden from existing partners when contained in the potentially more anonymous urban settings of large towns and cities. They may do this either through forming other relationships of varying degrees of commitment, furtiveness and durability, or via explicit commercial means, such as use of the prostitution services that are typically found in most large urban centres around the world. Yet physical proximity to such commercial sex markets has often presented for some city residents a significant source of urban land use conflict and negative externalities (see, for example, Hubbard, 1998). It has also presented local government with many challenges and opportunities in formulating urban policy. These are all contemporary themes explored by various contributors herein.

This collection of papers is thus a timely and useful device to bring together work from various research strands that currently feature in a diverse range of outlets. The papers are grouped around three overlapping themes: commercial sexual spaces, markets and community responses; the evolution and development of urban gay spaces; and, urban sexuality. In the next section, some theoretical exploration is offered of the boundaries and commonalities linking work in these areas, within a simple conceptual economic framework. The central themes and concerns in the three groupings of papers are then briefly considered. Concluding remarks are offered in the final section which also attempts to draw attention to various research gaps and areas that are not, fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Urban Studies Monographs
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Sexuality and Sexual Services in the Urban Economy and Socialscape: An Overview
• 2 Space, Risk and Opportunity: The Evolution of Paid Sex Markets
• 3 The Changing Nature of Adult Entertainment Districts: Between a Rock and a Hard Place or Going from Strength to Strength?
• 4 Cleansing the Metropolis: Sex Work and the Politics of Zero Tolerance
• 5 The Risks of Street Prostitution: Punters, Police and Protesters
• 6 Homosexuality and the City: An Historical Overview
• 7 Urban Space and Homosexuality: The Example of the Marais, Paris' ‘Gay Ghetto’
• 8 Where Love Dares (Not) Speak Its Name: The Expression of Homosexuality in Singapore
• 9 Sexual Dissidence, Enterprise and Assimilation: Bedfellows in Urban Regeneration
• 10 Authenticating Queer Space: Citizenship, Urbanism and Governance
• 11 Sex and Not the City? The Aspirations of the Thirty-something Working Woman
• 12 Queer as Folk: Producing the Real of Urban Space
• Index