money

Some sources say the recession is good for the sex industry (people always need sex, or it’s a distraction from problems or release from stress), while other sources say businesses are suffering. Mostly such stories are speculative and anecdotal. The reporter of a story about Malaysia has relied on just a few sources, too, but one is a guy who gives more details about money than usual. Note the ambiguity about declaring income and paying tax, or not. These are excerpts from the story. NB: Conversion: 1 RM = .20 euro

The New Straits Times, Singapore

Malaysia: Sex sector does not need economic stiumulus

25 May 2009
By David Yeow

. . . solicited sex in Malaysia is going through a boom. Sources in the local prostitution scene say they raked in more than RM3.2 billion last year. And that’s just the earnings of sex workers, not including the income of pimps and other spin-offs.

. . . a prostitute usually works a seven-day week, charging RM150 an hour. “Serving an average of eight clients a day, she ends up making RM1,200 daily and possibly RM36,000 a month”

. . . the syndicates that run the brothels usually have up to 100 girls under them. This could mean that a syndicate could rake in about RM120,000 a day and a whopping RM3.6 million a month. . . Malaysia has hundreds of such syndicates, each operating several brothels in their designated areas.

Many brothels in Malaysia double as “health centres” offering massage services. . . clients are willing to pay from RM60 to RM100 for an hour of massage, followed by an additional RM150 for sex. “Prostitutes who double as massage ladies also get a fee from their handlers for massage services, usually about RM20 per customer.” . . .  eight out of 10 customers will have intercourse with their masseuse, the remaining two might opt for lesser services such as foreplay.

So, in addition to as much as RM36,000 monthly from sex alone, a prostitute can add on another RM9,000 for offering “half services”, bringing her monthly untaxed income to a whopping RM45,000 (RM540,000 per annum).

. . .  “RM200 a day wages for massaging an average of 10 customers . . . a legitimate RM5,200 a month or RM62,400 a year. They can choose to pay tax on that, but most don’t.” Pimps . . .  usually collect about RM3,000 a month from each sex worker they manage.

Another recent story claimed the opposite, however: ‘Brothels and pimps in Kuala Lumpur are marketing prostitutes as “rent a wife” packages for 6 to 24 hours, says a local tabloid.’

It’s pretty much impossible to know the facts about money made in the grey economy.

I’m interested in the great variety of sex-money exchanges all over the world, and Japan is home to many. These cards advertising sexy dating and talking services are pasted all over public telephone kiosks there.

The Japanese term enjo kôsai (援助交際, subsidized companionship) describes women who meet male strangers for dates that may involve sex in exchange for money or gifts. Some campaigners simply call it child prostitution, since nowadays the term mostly signifies teenage girls who go out with older men, often, in Laura Miller’s words, to

a karaoke box for several hours and are paid for their time. They essentially replace the much more expensive bar hostess, who likewise puts up with fumbled gropes and juvenile utterances but for a much higher price. What the media finds most irritating about the phenomenon is that the young women involved feel no shame or remorse at all. According to a 1996 police report on more than 5,000 girls involved in subsidized dating, 39 percent gave “monetary gain” and 34 percent offered “curiosity” as their motivations (Iwao 1997:45). The young women themselves often express disdain, pity, or contempt for the men they see themselves as exploiting, rather than the other way around. [The girls] like to have sex with boyfriends their own age, but if they have sex as part of enjo kõsai, they say that they “lie there like a fish” (maguro ni naru, literally ‘become a tuna’).

The subsidized dating trend is supported by several related industries, including terekura “telephone clubs”). These clubs provide a space for men who have paid a fee to sit and wait for phone calls from girls who want to arrange dates. Because the girls are able to call at no charge, this is the most common way that enjo kôsai operates. *

Rey Elbo notes that websites now allow men to contact many offering enjo kosai, as all a man has to do ‘is to put up an ad that he’s willing to spend 40,000 yen for dinner and sex.’ [295 euros]

You can read one rather detailed account of enjo kosai behaviour here. One kind of karaoke connexion is discussed here.  

* ‘Those Naughty Teenage Girls: Japanese Kogals, Slang, and Media Assessments.’ Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 14, Issue 2, 2004, p. 225-47.

Chinese Girl 250
Hong Kong Girl 250
Malay Girl 200
Philippine Girl 200
Russian Girl 590

Following up on whiteness and diversity in New Zealand’s sex industry, here’s a reminder of the variability of the ‘exotic’ and its consequent pricing. In another post, I reproduced a punter’s report on how much various sorts of karaoke services run. On the Hong Kong brothel sign to the left, the bits in English show that prices differ by nationality or geography. Now thanks to Leon Rocha, here’s a translation of the Chinese showing others advertised traits.

Many researchers and rights advocates would like to ignore the way colour and phenotype influence business practices, preferences and stigma, but I think it’s better to look them squarely in the face. Perceptions of more and less attractive are central to the sex industry.

Yellow panel, from left to right, top to bottom
1st row: Pageants from many countries
2nd: Many beauties like clouds [i.e. countless numbers]
3rd: The best service
4th: Pick/choose anything you like
5th: Welcome
Red panel
1st: Gentle Girls from Up North
2nd: Incredibly Hot Local Girl
3rd: White and Clean Malay
4th: Passionate Filipinos
5th: Blonde Foreign Girl
Orange panel
1st: Innocent virgins
2nd: Office Ladies [OL] with long legs
3rd: Beer Babes
4th: [snippet] probably something to do with Karaoke

So we see how the marketing manager for the brothel not only highlights country-names but also innocence, passion, cleanliness, long legs, a liking for beer and associations with offices. Note that the presumably less exotic local girl makes up for it through hotness, and the white person is Malaysian. Chinese girls from the north are advertised as gentle. And although the blonde Russian commands the highest price in this place at this time, she won’t be perceived as more than twice as desirable everywhere she goes.

This Korean newspaper report might be the first I’ve ever seen that explicitly treats men and trans as victims of sex trafficking. I’ve seen them added in as an afterthought but never the main characters in the story. I guess it’s a sort of gender equality, but, as usual, while exploitative practices seem to be present, the sex workers involved want to travel (to Japan, see last paragraph). Also note that the fact of someone’s paying facilitators of travel or employment does not by itself signify anything sinister: research with undocumented migrants the world over demonstrates their willingness to pay to get where they want to go (apart from academic research, see media reports here, here and here). Neither does the involvement of organised crime signify that the activity being described is by definition specially exploitative. We’d need more information to know what’s actually going on here.

Thanks to Roger Tatoud for bringing this to my attention, and note that his own blog discusses women as clients today.

Joong Ang Daily, Seoul

Gay sex worker traffickers arrested  

By Jang Joo-young and Kim Mi-ju, 10 March 2009

Police yesterday arrested a group of traffickers who allegedly recruited Korean men and transgenders and illegally transported them to Japan to work in the sex industry there.

After discovering that the suspects have maintained close ties with the Japanese Mafia - the Yakuza - in running their business, police asked Japanese law enforcement to join in a joint investigation. Police are also looking for the remaining suspects in connection with the case.

The two arrested traffickers, identified as Park and Lim, are being questioned along with 14 male and transgender sex workers, according to investigators in charge of the case at Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency. Park has been detained for questioning as of yesterday. Lim and the recruited sex workers are being questioned without detention.

Investigators have found that Park and Lim had sent over 30 male and transgender sex workers to Japan to work in brothels in Yokohama’s red light district since January 2007, charging them fees ranging from 10 million won ($6,443) to 15 million won.

Police said Park has amassed a total of 500 million won for offering such jobs. Some of the people he transported to Japan told police they were sometimes forced to have sex with Park, despite the fact that he knows he is HIV-positive, police said.

Those brought to work in the Japanese port city worked at Yakuza-operated brothels and were forced to pay an extra 80,000 yen ($811) per month to the Yakuza in “protection fees.” They received between 15,000 yen and 20,000 yen for having sex with clients.

An investigator in charge of the case said most of those booked for participating in the sex trade told police they went Japan to “earn a large amount of money in a short period of time to get a sex change operation.”

Not long ago I wrote about advertisements for sex-industry jobs in UK government-funded (un)employment offices called Jobcentre Plus. The other day, a government consultation on their presence came to an end.

Patrons were not forced to take the jobs or even look at the listings, and presumably some job-seekers were grateful to come upon them. One would think otherwise, however, by protestors’ language at a demonstration held against these adverts. Sometimes I think their vision of Woman’s Place looks more like this: 

Jobcentre picketed by anti-sex industry protestors

Louisa Peacock, 27 March 2009. This article first appeared in Personnel Today magazine

Anti-sex industry campaigners have branded Jobcentre Plus ‘Pimpcentre Plus’ for continuing to advertise jobs in the adult entertainment industry.

As the government’s consultation ‘Accepting and advertising employer vacancies from within the adult entertainment industry by Jobcentre Plus’ draws to a close today, human rights organisations and women’s rights campaigners have urged the government to stamp out any escort or masseuse services as those jobs are “euphemisms for prostitution”.

Members ofthe campaign group Object and the Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution stood outside Brixton Jobcentre with ‘Pimpcentre Plus’ placards in protest.

Anna van Heeswijk, grassroots co-ordinator at Object, said: “It is not acceptable for a government agency to be promoting jobs to women which often involve violence and abuse and which send out the message that women are sexual objects to be bought and sold.”

The Department for Work and Pensions began to advertise jobs in the adult entertainment industry after a 2003 legal ruling that Ann Summers should be allowed to advertise through Jobcentre Plus.

But van Heeswijk said: “It is nonsensical for the government to extend a decision applicable to retail premises to virtually the entire sex industry. It is well known that ‘escort’ and ‘masseuse’ are euphemisms for prostitution. Working in Ann Summers is very different from providing direct sexual services in prostitution or lap dancing.”

The DWP consultation, which aims to investigate whether more can be done to strengthen the safeguards in place for the safety of jobseekers, ends today, 27 March.

Karaoke is an entertainment activity some people hate and some love. It takes different forms, and one seems to belong in the sex industry. This is KTV  – karaoke television – where groups of friends hire small rooms and the services of women to drink and sing with them. These places can look quite grand outside and in the lobbies.

Who can explain what all the little objects are in this picture of a karaoke customer? Is it a boutique or a museum? For more about KTV in general go here.

Activity inside the rooms looks and sounds like this:

Apart from the singing and drinking, there are possibilities for flirting, snogging and making assignations. Host and hostess clubs offer the same sort of opportunities. But there is an element that links these sites more closely to the sex industry: the use of line-ups like in many brothels.

I have not read research about these places; tell me if you know of any. The following are comments from one ktv fan forum:

A room for four guys:

Minimum room charge: Average - 1000rmb
Bottles of Whisky: 600rmb
Beer: 40rmb
Food dishes: 30rmb

Normal girls: 300rmb
Models: 500rmb (not really models, just tall)
“Special” girls: 500rmb (These are the ones that will supposedly go home with you for an extra charge.)
Dancing girls: 500rmb (These are basically strippers)
Mama-san: The same price as the girls.
Waitress: 200rmb

I realise that some people may find the above list distasteful, but if we want to understand what’s going on in sex work we have to face all the realities. I also just uploaded a photo to my sex industry album on facebook (open to non-members, too), which demonstrates price-differentials according to social prestige of phenotypes or perceived ethnicities:

This kind of prestige is relative. A ‘Russian’ will not always command such a price, and so on.

Here are excerpts from a report published by the Institute of Race Relations in the UK. You could say it is a catalogue of proper applications of the law in cases where people knowingly infringe it. But are these sorts of draconian raids and labour-intensive, costly efforts to catch small-time infringers really worth it? People are beginning to realise just how much public money they require. Granted that there might be some connexions between illegal migration and state security, is an overall policy to conduct searches for undocumented workers like high-risk terrorist operations justified? I think we all know it is not. Targeting ethnic restaurants  - their owners, workers and clientele - is an easy way for immigration personnel to demonstrate that the government is Taking Things Seriously. When undocumented migrants manage, as in the cases described below, to find a way to work for low wages and begin to integrate marginally into society, why come down on them so bloody hard?

Because the Law is the Law? But what of all the white-collar infringements that are not handled like these operations, which resemble cop- and spook-style raids on terrorists and gangsters? No such stormings are seen on office buildings and other (white)’ sites. Do people imagine there are no undocumented workers there?

For details, more examples and documentary notes, see the report itself.

Crusade against the undocumented
By Frances Webber, 5 February 2009

Every day, somewhere in the UK, immigration officers, often with police, frequently wearing stab-proof vests, surround High Street restaurants, takeaways and convenience stores, seal exits and storm in. . .. . . generally at the busiest time, to demand that workers prove their right to be working there. Sometimes they carry hand-held fingerprint terminals to perform instant identity checks on those they find working there.  .  .

. . . The raids frequently involve large numbers of police and immigration officials and sometimes resemble military operations. 

The article gives examples:

Seventeen UKBA officers and three police officers descended on Makbros, a cash and carry warehouse in Stanmore, Middlesex, and detained and questioned five men, all of whom turned out to be lawfully employed. An eye-witness said that it was ‘quite scary with all these people running up’.[2]

Thirteen immigration officers raided the Unique Spice restaurant in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, to arrest two Bangladeshi men.[3]

A convoy of five vehicles descended on the Waverley Hotel, Yarmouth in a raid in which two Mauritian men and a Brazilian woman were arrested.[4]

Shabul Muhth’s two restaurants in Kent were raided by around eighteen uniformed officers and the restaurants closed at around 6.30pm on Friday and Saturday nights, the peak time for his business. No arrests were made. ‘Come in like gentlemen’, he said. ‘We’re not drug dealing, we’re selling curry.’[5]

A full-scale search with dogs and a police helicopter were deployed to hunt for two men who ran out of the kitchen at Thariks Indian restaurant in Paignton during a raid. An immigration officer fell through the roofof a building in the chase, in which the two men got away.[6] Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a sex business with one traditional feature and one I hadn’t run into before. The company, Big Sister, provides you the opportunity to watch other people having sex, either live or filmed. Nothing new about that. What’s different is the sex scenes are filmed at a brothel where 

none of the attending guests (males or couples) to the club have to pay to have their desires fulfilled. Instead, they have to agree to consent to be televised and grant all the marketing rights to Big Sister Media for distribution across all media channels. . . Our current library consists of over 18.000 exclusive scenes to date.

The shows have been called  reality sex tv. Those who want to watch pay monthly subscription fees (said to be 29.95 euros a year ago). The website claims to get 10,000 to 15,000 hits a day.

As with other kinds of reality television, traditional entertainment models - professional performers on one side, audience on the other - are blurred. The customer (or exhibitionist) becomes the performer for other customers (voyeurs). At the same time, professional sex workers are employed in a traditional sense. Here are some excerpts from coverage by Bloomberg.com about the brothel itself:

Free Sex at Prague Brothel Tests Taboo as Reality Romps Hit Web

By Douglas Lytle and Yon Pulkrabek, 10 Jan 2008

The 36-year-old bank-security technician drove eight hours from his home in Metz, France, to Big Sister, a Prague brothel where customers peruse a touch-screen menu of blondes, brunettes and redheads available for free. The catch is clients have to let their exploits be filmed and posted on the Internet. . .

Visitors to Big Sister start at the electronic menu, which provides each woman’s age, height, working name and the languages she speaks. After a customer makes his selection, a manager makes sure the client signs broadcast release forms, and then the intimate details are arranged with the partner for the evening. . .

Big Sister is based in a renovated apartment building just outside the narrow, winding streets of Prague’s Old Town.  .  .

At the brothel, the Alpine Room is decorated like the backdrop to The Sound of Music with fake Styrofoam rocks and a forest. Other rooms include Heaven, decked out in white, and Hell, which resembles a dungeon. A giant stuffed polar bear watches over proceedings in the Igloo Room. . .

Big Sister has a staff of 25 to 45 women, depending on the season, and 45 workers behind the scenes. Three-quarters of the prostitutes come from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and they make 3,000 to 5,000 euros a month . . . Average wages in the Czech Republic are about 800 euros a month. .

Because the prostitution controversy is about women who sell sex to men, most of male sex work passes unnoticed. And people who do talk about it often slip into the assumption that it’s a phenomenon happening between men, whether you call them gay or MSM. Consider host bars, which welcome female clients to be treated as men are in Japan’s numerous hostess bars.

The basic work is providing company whilst customers sit in the venue: good conversation, graceful flirting, lighting cigarettes and making sure drinks are correctly poured and always full. The relationship takes place in public but has an intimate quality. Venues differ, and sometimes employees are obliged to meet customers outside the clubs. Wages are low, and employees depend on the commissions they earn on promoting the sale of drinks, whose prices can be very high indeed.

I have read good research about Japanese hostess clubs but not about  host clubs. You can find a lot of media reports that all say the same thing about how they work. They say that even professional Japanese women are supposed to be passive and submissive. They correlate the rise of  host clubs with such women’s desires to have a place where they can be assertive and uninhibited. It is often said that a lot of the customers at host bars are hostesses who arrive after their own wearing shifts.

I’ve been studying the sex industry for 15 years, and I understand that the conflict about prostitution - and therefore about trafficking - derives from the belief that biological women are innately vulnerable to sexual violence. Therefore, information about men who sell sex (or are exploited) is usually marginalised, unless the men are technically boys.

But what about women who buy sex from men? Evidence about that is usually dismissed, too, by those who want to abolish commercial sex. When it’s not dismissed, the women are denounced as ‘acting like men’ - exploitative, objectifying, dominating, selfish. This critique comes up most in treatments of middle-class women tourists in poorer countries, where it’s common for local men to act as guides, advisers, drivers, cultural mediators and lovers. More everyday situations of women paying men are said to be few and exceptional, except for cheerful accounts of places like Chippendales.

Sex in America: Can the Conversation Change was published 13 Feburary in the Huffington Post by Cory Silverberg. The framing of the topic, the idea that a national mindset might change, suggests that we don’t have to be stuck forever in the same rut. One of the sub-topics he would like to see change concerns Sex and Money:

We desperately need more critical, and less politically charged, conversations about the intersection of sex and money in America. Ironically (I think it’s irony) individuals who have the most grassroots experience of this, those who pay for sex and those who get paid for sex, tend to have the least amount of influence on public discourse about sex and money. That’s changing, thanks in part to sex worker run projects like Bound, Not Gagged, writers like Audacia Ray and academics like Laura Agustin. But there’s still a ways to go.

They are holding an event you might want to participate in if you’re in New York:

Cory Silverberg will join Esther Perel, Amy Sohn, Leonore Tiefer and Ian Kerner for a conversation called “Sex in America: Can The Conversation Change?” The symposium is co-sponsored by the Huffington Post and Open Center and will take place in New York City on Friday, February 20th. Click here to register.

I’m not an academic, by the way, in the sense of being employed by any academic institution.  I just do and write academic things amongst others. But one of those has been to question the assumption that the presence of money ruins sexual relationships, rendering them always exploitative and bad quality - which leads to the mindless conclusion that all those who sell sex are victims. The nexus of sex and money as evil is the sexual and cultural conversation that one hopes to change - and not only in the USA. I call this the Cultural Study of Commercial Sex, and include everyone involved in sex-oriented businesses, the whole sex industry, not just those who buy and those who sell sex.  To change the conversation, whether on a personal or national level, we have to be able to tell what we feel and do, without worrying that some outside authority will condemn us as immoral or amoral. There are many moralities, as there are many sexualities.