Touching Encounters

Sex, Work, and Male-for-Male Internet Escorting

Kevin Walby

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780226870069
  9780226870052
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226870076
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Often depicted as deviant or pathological by public health researchers, psychoanalysts, and sexologists, male-with-male sex and sex work is, in fact, an increasingly mainstream pursuit. Based on a qualitative investigation of the practices involved in male-with-male—or m4m—Internet escorting, Touching Encounters is the first book to explicitly address how masculinity and sexuality shape male commercial sex in this era of Internet communications.

 

By looking closely at the sex and work of male escorts, Kevin Walby tries to reconcile the two extremes of m4m sex—the stereotypical idea of a quick cash transaction and the tendency toward friendship and mutuality. In doing so, Walby draws on the work of Foucault to make visible the play of power in these physical and commercial relations between men. At once a revelation to the sociology of work and a much-needed critical engagement with queer theory, Touching Encounters responds to calls from across the social sciences to connect Foucault with sociologies of sex, sexuality, and intimacy. Walby does this and more, retying this sexual practice back to society at large.

Chapter 1

Introduction

I remember meeting a very shy and awkward 30-ish guy for a date

over Christmas a few years ago.

He was a soldier in the army

and had recently returned from Afghanistan.

This guy clearly needed to be as far away from that conflict as possible.

He wanted some fun in the big city for the weekend

before going back up north to see family.

We met at his hotel. He was quiet and reserved.

In these situations, I let them take the lead.

I was somewhat uneasy with him at first.

After a few beers, we both relaxed and ended up just talking and

cuddling for hours watching TV with the sound off.

At some point he asked me about my fee.

We were going on three hours, but I told him one hour was fine.

I was enjoying our time together.

He asked me to stay over, which I did. I wouldn’t normally do that,

but I was drawn to him. He wanted me there by his side.

I don’t usually fall for geeky army-types!!

In the morning, he was distant again but looked me in the eye and

shook my hand to thank me.

I felt a strange connection to this stoic

young man who lived such a different life than mine.

I wanted to return the money, but I needed it for the holidays.

On my way out, he said to me (I’m paraphrasing): “isn’t it strange

that our government pays me to kill people and our society accepts it.

But if I pay you to make me feel better after I get home from that war,

like you did last night, we could both get arrested?”

Good point, I thought and smiled before leaving.

This is Conrad’s narrative about an encounter with a client. Conrad is 42 years old, but he advertises that he is closer to 30 on the website where his escort profile is posted. Conrad is one of 30 male-for-male Internet escorts whom I’ve spoken with about this work. Male-for-male Internet escorts arrange commercial sexual encounters with other men using email communications and websites rather than going through an agency or soliciting on the street, as has typically been the case in male sex work.

I asked these men to tell me about their work, their clients, and their lives. One trend emerged with these conversations: among the male-for-male Internet escorts I spoke with, their interactions with clients are often touching encounters. I use the term touching encounters because it suggests two meanings, both physical and affective. First, the interaction materializes through two or more bodies coming together, pressed up against one another in cuddling or pressed into one another in sex. Conrad’s narrative is suggestive in this regard. Conrad never explains why he smiled before leaving. Given the details, it seems that this encounter does not remain strictly economic. Conrad could be smiling because he enjoyed the sex as much as the soldier did. But we cannot tell if the encounter ever turned to sex. All we know is that the bodies of Conrad and the soldier were touching. As Conrad’s narrative suggests, however, the term touching encounters implies a second meaning—that is, a joint action in which people care and support one another through their bodies coming together. Certainly the soldier feels that Conrad brightened his mood. Conrad also describes being drawn in, feeling a bond. Conrad could have walked out the door with a smile because making the soldier “feel better” proved pleasing. Touching denotes bodies coming together, but it also connotes compassion—even if this compassion is curtailed by the commercial parameters of this encounter.¹

More common than Conrad’s touching narrative are depictions of men who have sex with men as deviants. Male-with-male sex is often represented according to the classifications conjured up by scientists of sex, such as sexologists and psychoanalysts. As Debra Boyer (1989:176) explains, “the image of the homosexual is one of distorted and exaggerated sexuality, of promiscuity and deviance. This image has unfortunately been reinforced with public discussion of homosexual lifestyles resulting from the AIDS epidemic.” If male-with-male sex is construed as dangerous and deviant, then men who sell sex to men are doubly castigated. As Aidan Wilcox and Kris Christmann (2008:119) remark, “the stereotypical image of a male sex worker remains one of a coerced psychopathological misfit who has been sexually abused as a child and is desperate for money.” This depiction of desperate men who sell sex to men is widespread in both social and health sciences.² Such depictions lead to misunderstandings of men who sell sex to men as risking violence, drug addiction, homelessness, and as lacking access to health care. Most academics I speak with about my research assume that I approach the topic from a criminological perspective, presupposing that sex work is best thought of as criminal. And when the public finds out about escorting, it is usually through sensational stories about sex and drugs, such as the high-profile case in the United States involving Mike Jones and the Reverend Ted Haggard.

The men I interviewed do not fit this deviant image. They are not desperate or on drugs. Over three quarters had attained or were in the process of attaining a college or university degree. Their average age was just under 35 years, with an average starting age of 28 and an average length of “career” at just over six years. I spoke with men in Montréal, Ottawa, and Toronto, in Houston and New York City, as well as in London. One man moved from Mexico to the Greater Toronto Area to work in the automotive industry before being laid off during the recession beginning in 2008, another moved to New York in the early 1990s after growing up in Brazil, and several lived elsewhere before heading to New York or London to find work. One lived with his parents outside Toronto and worked as a porn star on the side, whereas several others were putting themselves through post-secondary education or working as escorts to supplement their incomes.

In order to move beyond deviance studies and instead explore issues related to sex and work, I emphasize neither the identities of client or escort nor the financial aspects of exchange, but rather the relational and corporeal elements of clients and escorts coming together. My analysis of the creative or otherwise unintended elements of these encounters breaks from sexological and psychoanalytical accounts of gender inversion and prostitution. In this book, I suggest that a focus on touch can help reorient the literature referred to as “queer theory” away from abstract starting points toward a greater understanding of how discourses of sexuality are made sense of through processes involving concrete interactions and gestures.

Male-for-Male Internet Escorts and the Sociology of Sex Work

To provide a context for gaining insights into the sex and work of these men, I begin by surveying what kind of space has been provided for them in sociological understandings of sex work. How do scholars think of sex work? And how did this idea of “sex work” emerge?

Commercial sex is a divisive issue in social science, not least amongst feminist scholars. At least three discrete feminist arguments have emerged, which all shape the sociology of sex work. The first argument concerns sex workers’ rights, contending that men and women who sell sex should enjoy the protections that all other workers do. From this perspective, people selling sex are thought to be conducting work and providing a service.³ A second argument conceptualizes sex work as violence against women, an argument that I refer to as “prohibitionist.” Scholars such as Andrea Dworkin (1987) insist that performing sex for compensation exemplifies women’s commodification and sexual exploitation. The “prohibitionist” camp claims that commercial sex is gendered and predicated on exploitative violence.⁴ The third argument is sex radical, framing sex work as only one element of a broader movement of sexual politics. Many scholars and activists who have contributed to this sex radical argument are sex workers. For instance, Carol Leigh (1997), also known as Scarlot Harlot, coined the term “sex work” in conjunction with pro–sex work advocacy groups. This sex radical element of feminism contests the criminalization of commercial sex and the censorship of sexual expression.⁵ Carol Queen (1997) observes, however, that sex radicalism and feminism are not always in bed together; many feminists hold gender oppression to be the overriding issue, whereas sex radicals argue that sexual oppression is a form of domination not reducible to gender oppression.

Both sex workers’ rights feminists and sex radical feminists have initiated legal battles and constitutional challenges against laws that criminalize sex work. Sex workers’ rights feminists and sex radical feminists agree that sex work can be voluntary, although some sex workers’ rights feminists devote energy to organizing “exit” programs, a strategy that aligns with prohibitionist goals. These arguments, colloquially referred to as part of the “sex wars” (the 1980s “sex wars” included more debate on pornography and obscenity), are not new; rather, they emanate from debates about the so-called white slave trade in the late nineteenth century (see Walkowitz 1992).

In the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, the sociology of sex work has developed in unique ways. In the United States, Ronald Weitzer has long argued that state-based laws against commercial sex are applied differently to various commercial sex sectors, targeting female street-based prostitution.⁶ In Canada, contributions by Fran Shaver (1996) and Deborah Brock (1998) created space for scholars to apply sociological theories and methods and to understand how commercial sex becomes subject to moral regulation. Sex work in Canada is not illegal, but it is not decriminalized either. Though the sex act itself is not illegal, a number of associated activities remain criminal under the Criminal Code of Canada, including living off the avails of prostitution (s. 212) and communicating in public for the purpose of prostitution (s. 213). Mary Whowell (2010) points out that a legal limbo exists in the United Kingdom, too.

This book is not about the legal regulation of sex work, but rather on the touching elements of commercial sex between men. Most debates regarding commercial sex have focused on women, passing over the diversity of sexualities and masculinities represented in male sex work. Few researchers have focused on male-for-male Internet escorts, and those who have draw from criminology or public health rather than the sociology of sexuality and interactionist sociology. There is thus a need for empirical studies of various forms of male sex work, as well as a need to theorize the queer male sexualities and masculinities involved.

Historical research on male commercial sex provides an important starting point for making sense of male-for-male Internet escorting today. What is more, historical research on male commercial sex provides an account that is absent from feminist debates. John Scott (2003) suggests that, unlike female prostitution, “male prostitution was not regarded as a significant social problem throughout the nineteenth century, despite its close association with gender deviation and social disorder” (p. 179). Sexology discovered male prostitution around the same time it discovered homosexuality, in the nineteenth century. Young working-class men were involved in prostitution across North America and Europe, choosing sex work over the industrial factory’s dangerous labor conditions. Middle-class men’s fetishization of working-class bodies, led to the creation of specialized brothels; such late nineteenth-century London brothels (called “peg houses”), which offered young working-class men, were closed down as a result of moral hygiene campaigns.

After World War II, views on male sex work changed: “It became possible to speak not only of ‘male prostitutes,’ but also of specific ‘types’ of male prostitute” (Scott 2003:187). Sexologists and psychoanalysts started attributing psychopathologies to male hustlers. Sociologists of deviance portrayed “hustlers” as engaged in deviant careers. Novelists associated with the emergent gay rights movement painted similar scenes of young men selling sex on-street, as in John Rechy’s City of Night (1963). New York Hustlers, by Barry Reay (2010), and Strapped for Cash, by Mack Friedman (2003), capture this gritty world of hustling and muscling. Gay identity, however, was not yet fixed in the early twentieth century. It was not until the mid-century struggles for gay rights that the idea that there is one immutable identity we can refer to as gay was firmed up: “if the ideology of homosexuality brought difficult personal challenges for some hustlers, for others, the rise of gay liberation led toward an increasing acceptance of gay or bisexual self-identity” (Kaye 2003:32–33).⁷ While a preference for so-called “straight trade” dominated the hustling scene up to the 1960s, different services emerged in a celebration of gay identity: “the gay liberation era marked the first time that the majority of gay men began to buy sex from other gay men, rather than from straight outsiders who lived the bulk of their lives outside the gay world” (p. 34). Male commercial sex started to move off-street and “the new social meanings which were applied to male prostitution in the 1960s and 1970s derived from the progressive integration of prostitution into the gay cultural orbit” (p. 34). New sexual practices emerged out of this ascendance of gay identity.

Depictions of male sex workers changed again in the 1980s with HIV/AIDS. Scott (2003:193) holds that “prior to the appearance of HIV/AIDS, male prostitution was primarily understood as a criminal or welfare issue,” but in the late 1980s male prostitutes became objects of epidemiology and were said to be “reservoirs of disease and transmitters of infection from the gay population” (p. 194). The idea of sex workers as “risky” persists in public health agencies.⁸

The most recent development concerning male sex work has been the use of the Internet as part of the labor process. Internet escorts, like independent sex workers, are in some ways better able than on-street workers to determine cost of labor, select clientele, and consent to work activities. Escorts’ clients post reviews online and rate the sexual encounter, helping to determine the escort’s position in the hierarchy of commercial sex profiles and the escort’s ability to solicit future clients. Male Internet escorts do not work for agencies and are unlikely to hustle on-street or in bars. Whereas magazines and newspaper classifieds were once the key venues for advertisements, most advertising today occurs through profiles on specialty websites. Some sites charge escorts a fee for posting, while others are free (e.g., Men4rentnow.com internationally, Canadianmale.com in Canada). Many escorts’ bodies are advertised as physically fit. For instance, Victor Minichiello and colleagues (2008) claim that “the stereotypical image of an effeminate gay persona is challenged by the number of escorts . . . who display the body image of the hyper masculine body builder” (p. 166). I do not want to place too much emphasis on this image of muscling men, since my primary goal is to explode the “young, hung, dumb, and full of cum” stereotype used to demean these men and their work. The central issue is, rather, how to advance a complex understanding of male-for-male Internet escorting, one that does not reproduce existing stereotypes.

The recent influence of labor studies has been key as sex work scholars build on the sex workers’ rights movement to chart new directions in their research. Chris Bruckert and Colette Parent (2006:97) argue that focus on the labor side of sex work allows scholars “to step outside of the traditional criminological analysis of deviance to examine these jobs as jobs.” The point of such scholarship is to examine commercial sex as a form of nonstandard work.⁹ The trick here is not to go too far by suggesting that male escorting is like other kinds of service industry jobs. Some scholars such as Teela Sanders (2005) and Jan Browne and Minichiello (1995) suggest that selling sex requires the surface acting of emotional labor (that is, “putting on” a face to engineer a feeling for a customer), similar to what any customer service agent might do. However, Leslie Jeffrey and Gayle MacDonald (2006) question the conflation of service and sex work labor processes. Touching Encounters likewise tries to move beyond the limits of thinking about sex work in terms of surface acting or service provision. If commercial sex offers a way of earning income without participating in the minimum-wage service sector, then escorting may provide some sex workers with a way of maximizing control over their work.

There is theoretical and methodological room to maneuver in the sociology of sex work, as labor process analysis remains limited to the consideration of work tasks and client relations, not sexualities, masculinities, or bodies per se. In this book, I want to think outside the boundaries of how work and sex are conventionally conceived. Livy Visano (1987:24) defines commercial sex as “a semi-skilled occupation in which an actor sells or is hired to provide sexual services for financial gain.” While sex workers generally share this starting point, the labor process of sex work is diverse across the industry; some sex workers share little in common in terms of their labor processes (e.g., on-street work versus webcam work). Indeed, there remain many nuances to be explored concerning the labor processes—including the body, intimacy, and diverse sexualities—among men who have sex with men and sell sex to men.

Making Sense of Sex and Sexuality

In order to explore these nuances, I focus on the materiality and activity of sex. This focus involves connecting the sociology of sex work to the sociology of sexuality, fields which, for all they have to offer each other, have not communicated as much as one might expect.

At the hea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1: Introduction
• CHAPTER 2: Visions of Sexuality and Sex Work
• CHAPTER 3: Theorizing Encounters
• CHAPTER 4: A Note on Method and Storied Encounters
• CHAPTER 5: Interviews as Encounters: Sexuality, Reflexivity, and Men Interviewing Men about Commercial Same-Sex Relations
• CHAPTER 6: What Male-for-Male Internet Escorts Say about What They Do
• CHAPTER 7: Touching Encounters: Male-for-Male Internet Escorts and the Feigning of Intimacy
• CHAPTER 8: Aging and Escorting: Playing Young, Getting Old, and Overcoming the “Best By” Date
• CHAPTER 9: How Bodies Matter in Male-for-Male Internet Escorting: Body Work, Body Capital, and Body Trouble
• CHAPTER 10: Conclusion
• Appendix: Postscript On Methodological Issues
• Notes
• References
• Index