The eyeball experiences pleasure on its own looking at these colours.

It seems to be more visceral than aesthetic. We see prostitutes here but we also just take in the red colours. The green just acts as a frame above and the blue below.

I wonder how many monogamous couples have red bedrooms?

Some people think swinging and polyamory have nothing to do with the sex industry and are offended to be associated with it. In my conception, swinging parties and sex clubs do form part of the industry, because money is exchanged for opportunities to have, watch, smell and listen to sex - one’s own and others. The managers of venues often provide possible partners for your pleasure - sex workers. And, on the other hand, many customers in sex-industry bars and clubs spend time and money without ever buying ’sex’ itself. The lines supposedly dividing these different entertainment enterprises are very blurred.

When people are offended by this inclusion, it means they think the sex industry is something negative. Since I don’t see it as negative, I’m not insulting anyone who’s associated with it. Rather, I’m engaged in figuring out how and why people think they can differentiate between commercial and non-commercial sex. As far as I can see, after studying it for many years, there’s no way to clearly separate them. Which is a result! It’s a result to find out that the separate categories they teach us about aren’t true, or are, at least, questionable. If you’re more interested in this, consider the cultural study of commercial sex, in its original conception and then later.

Morrissey’s original article moves from Ireland to Berlin and includes many entertaining details. Here I’ve excerpted only the bits most relevant to the sex industry.

More sex with strangers, The Independent (Ireland)

By Deirdre Morrissey, 30 August 2009

. . .  I asked Dominique how she came to open a sex club that hosts parties with titles such as Angel in Bondage, Saturday Night Fuck and Circus Bizarre. “Sex is one of the most interesting aspects of my life. I study it, I talk about it, I do it and I teach it,” said Dominique, in a very matter-of-fact tone. “In 1984, when I was 17,” she continued,

“I started working as a table dancer. Then later I began working as a dominatrix, and shortly afterwards I found out that my mother also worked as a dominatrix. So, the sex industry is in my blood. When I was 20, my mother wanted to retire. . . But she reluctantly agreed to manage my S&M studio and leave punishing the slaves up to me. It was hugely successful: 10 years later we had a thriving family business with 20 girls working full-time.

“Then, four years ago,” she says, “myself and my partner were . . .  at the most notorious sex resort in the world, Hedonism, in Jamaica. While lying in a hammock one day, we looked at each other and decided to open our own fantastic sex club back home in Berlin. . . where the primary focus would be on creating an environment where visitors, all driven by the same longings and desires, could meet to enact erotic fantasies and sexual dreams.”

. . . From the exterior, the club could be mistaken for somebody’s home except for the name Insomnia over the door. . . . Rory paid a cute brunette kitted out in provocative lingerie and high heels a cover charge of €20 for the two of us — very reasonable, given the nature of the club. . . . We went up a few steps and into this huge, red-lit ballroom with a ceiling that reached for the sky. A huge dance floor, with a bar down one side, was littered with deviants. Hardcore porn was being projected onto a massive, 40ft cinema screen overlooking the dance floor. Topless bartenders were shaking cocktails and above the bar was a mural of a giant, cartoonised, glammed-up orgy. . . .

The dance floor is where the foreplay takes place, but little adjoining rooms are where the real action is. A couple of scary girls had a big henchman stripped down to a red thong. The muscles on his arm bulged out either side of a thick metal armband and he wore a studded metal collar around his neck. He was bound in chains and while one of the girls was whipping him, the other tightened his leash each time he howled. . . . In the jacuzzi a couple were having fun while their respective partners watched.

A crowd was gathered around some action in a little side room. . . Some kind of operation was being performed on a girl who lay completely exposed and bound to a medical contraption of some sort. . . . a mezzanine level overlooking the dance floor. The entire area was taken up by several enormous tented beds occupied by couples, threesomes, foursomes and, in some cases, whole teams. . . .

Businesses and entertainment conceived as sexual (because of the parts of the body that get exposed) must be declared and submit to regulation: sex shops, peep shows, stripping, lap-dancing, pole-dancing, table dancing. Places that have these licences are referred to as Sex (Encounter) Establishments. Gentlemen’s clubs, strip pubs and other venues are included. Regulated activities may allow near nudity but prohibit dancers from standing closer than a metre/3 feet from customers. Regulations always prohibit touching.

Each local authority grants its own licences, which is what the following note from Camden, another borough of London, is about. When I was doing research, Camden had a large number of licensed premises offering sex entertainment. The current issue is whether the Council will include burlesque in the conception of entertainment that must be regulated as sexual.

Camden Council Statement on burlesque
Date: 29/7/09

Camden Council is not preventing burlesque performances in any premises in the borough, it embraces the diverse entertainment on offer in Camden.

Our concern is to ensure proper regulation of the premises proposing to offer licensable activity. Our focus is on the premises - not the performers. It is the responsibility of the venue’s licence holder to ensure they have the correct permission for the event they are hosting.

Burlesque performance in its widest form can include various art forms and this alone would not require a licence. The Council’s concern is with any performance which may involve nudity. The Council looks at each application on an individual basis to assess what type of licence is required.

The Council has met with the burlesque community in response to their concerns and agreed to seek a clearer understanding of what constitutes adult entertainment. This will help define what reasonable measures premises should put in place prior to adult entertainment being performed.

A further meeting between the Council and the Institute is scheduled to take place in September 2009.

More discussion at Save Burlesque in Camden

Recently I wrote about the New York School of Burlesque.

Japanese Cosplay and the Sex Industry 

M. Kiromi

Japanese Cosplay is about the person becoming a chosen character or idea. The person looks and acts exactly like the character they are portraying. You become a specified character in order to become a cosplayer. The sky is the limit, if you can dream it you can become it. Cosplaying is about having fun.

Japan and most other countries have participated in cross dressing as well as cosplay in the sex industry. This is an age old practice where costumes have been used for sexual practices, and dressing up is used for sexual play which is commonly known as a sexual fetishism.

In Japan as well as other countries there are special facilities where you can rent costumes for a night of ecstasy and passion. Specialized facilities like hotels or inns cater only for the sex industry. The costumes you can hire for the occasion range from school uniforms, nursing outfits, or whatever suits your fetish they will accommodate you with the outfit you request.

The Japanese cosplay industry has long been the home to professional cosplayers since the rise of Comiket the Tokyo Game Show, as well as other conventions, there is a misconception that cosplay is specific only to Japan. The term Cosplay is from Japanese origin but this flamboyant occupation is now supported by practicing fans globally.

Terms and conditions have been set by cosplay groups, that whatever character you have chosen to dress up as, you have to become the character, in words, action and nature. Japanese cosplay is not only dressing up and acting out, there are also a rich culture as well as tradition behind the character they have chosen to portray.

However there are costumes worn without any conviction by Japanese cosplayers that westerners would not consider wearing as it would be culturally not correct like a Nazi uniform or any other uniforms worn by dictators in the past. Japanese cosplay does not only cover specified role playing but covers all kinds of obsessive fandom.

If you live in New York, you’ve got the opportunity to attend Jo’s School of Burlesque and learn, among other things:

• the sexy shimmy
• the tantalizing glove peel
• the devastating bump n grind
• the dazzling tassel-twirl 

Burlesque has never stopped being popular, but for some reason commentators are always saying it’s ‘new’ or ‘under revival’. I often think that the ‘newness’ story is about our being able to know more about everything now that we’ve got the internet, youtube, facebook and so on. Anyway, here’s a CBS report from last year about Jo’s school:

Another ever-contentious element of talks about burlesque involve whether doing it is sex work or not; whether burlesque dancers and strippers are sex workers; whether there is a hierarchy in which some kinds of dance are lower and more sexual (lap dancing is named) while others are more artistic. Jo always says she loves them all.

By the way, when I left the Exotic World contest I was hoarse from cheering so much.

Le problème de la burqa n’est pas une problème religieux, c’est un problème de liberté, de dignité de la femme. Ce n’est pas un signe religieux, c’est un signe d’asservissement, d’abaissement. La burqa ne sera pas la bienvenue dans notre République française.

From the BBC story:

We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity. That is not the idea that the French republic has of women’s dignity.

Note the applause from politicians when he makes these statements.

Women wearing burkas are not welcome in France. That ‘Frenchness’ should depend on clothing I find very scary. That the idea of personal identity should be institutionalised by the French state I find even scarier. The original title of the following piece was Which migrants assimilate best? How do we know?, which editors changed to

What Not to Wear - if you want to be French

The Guardian, Comment is Free,  6 August 2008

Laura Agustín

A woman from Morocco who has lived in France for eight years with a French husband, has three French children and speaks fluent French, was refused citizenship recently on grounds of being insufficiently assimilated. The Conseil d’etat said Faiza Silmi’s way of life does not reflect “French values”, particularly the goal of gender equality. The judgment claims she lives in “total submission” to the men in her life because she wears the niqab, which covers all of the face except the eyes. The decision was approved by commentators from right, left and centre. Fadela Amara, the urban affairs minister, called Silmi’s clothing a “prison” and a “straitjacket”. Predictable debates about fundamentalism unfolded in the media, with Silmi appearing as a strange, distant object.

What does Silmi herself say? The website Jeuneafrique.com has just published her first interview with the French press, corroborating another in the New York Times. Silmi’s voice emerges clearly:

I am not submissive to the men in my family nor do I lead the life of a recluse and I go out when I want. When I drive my car, I wear my niqab. I alone decided to wear it, after reading some books. I respect the law and my husband respects my decisions.

While she talked, her husband served tea.

There is no universally accepted definition of gender equality. For some, the simple act of wearing a veil proves Silmi is oppressed. Others see her as having made choices, adapted, evolved. Silmi does not proselytise about religion or gender, but she does not like men staring at her in the street. While some observers interpret her adoption of more traditional clothes than she wore in Morocco as a sign of regression, Silmi demonstrates a typical migrant desire to validate the past while finding her way in a new life. This is a process and she may well change her style again in years to come.

Candidates on dating sites like Muslima.com reveal an array of headgear. Some describe themselves as modest, long considered a positive trait. Are we now meant to believe that bare arms, face, calves, midriffs and cleavage are not simply fashion but a progressive state of dress? Societies teem with differing ideas about what kinds of clothing denotes modesty, liberation, oppression, equality, sexiness and beauty. One wonders whether the social workers and judges in Silmi’s case believe no one influences their own clothing choices.

Western societies like to think they are at the forefront of a cultural timeline that applies in the same way to all cultures. A neocolonialist predisposition to see migrant women as oppressed and backward becomes inevitable but, logically, if Silmi is insufficiently evolved then many women born in Europe also do not deserve their citizenship: those who stay with violent partners, perhaps, or who fail to work outside the home.

Many countries require longtime foreign residents to pass language and culture tests before being allowed to naturalise. It would be nice to avoid judgments based on the most superficial and cliched of markers: how women look.

The Manhattan Institute has produced an assimilation index comparing the census data of different migrant groups with the established US population. The measures are economic (jobs, education, home ownership), cultural (language, marriage, childbearing) and civic (naturalisation, military service). Most groups do better by one measure than others. In this scheme, Silmi’s desire – and two attempts – to become French would count as indicating more assimilation.

Instead, she and her husband feel alienated and rejected. What exactly did France gain with that result?

The Local, 11 May 2009 

Is rape rampant in gender-equal Sweden?

Laura Agustín

from okejsex.nu

Rape is a complicated crime. A research project funded by the European Commission’s Daphne programme reveals that Sweden leads Europe in reports of rape. At 46.5 per 100,000 members of the population, Sweden far surpasses Iceland, which comes next with 36, and England and Wales after that with 26. At the same time, Sweden’s 10 percent conviction rate of rape suspects is one of Europe’s lowest.

The report’s comparative dimension should probably be ignored. Instead of assuming that there are four times as many rapes in Sweden as in neighbouring Denmark or Finland, as the figures suggest, to understand we would have to compare all the definitional and procedural differences between their legal systems. It is significant that Sweden counts every event between the same two people separately where other countries count them as one. Most of Sweden’s rapes involve people who know each other, in domestic settings.

The countries reporting highest rates of rape are northern European with histories of social programming to end violence against women. In Sweden, Gender Equality is taught in schools and reinforced in public-service announcements. Should we believe that such education has no effect, or, much worse, an opposite effect? Raging anti-feminist men think so, and raging anti-immigrant Swedes blame foreigners. Amnesty International says patriarchal norms are intransigent in Swedish family life. Everyone faults the criminal justice system.

In contemporary Sweden, women and girls are encouraged to speak up assertively about gender bias and demand their rights. Public discussions have revolved around how to achieve equal sex: Gender Equality in the bedroom. We can consult okejsex.nu, an official campaign whose homepage shows pedestrians obliviously passing buildings full of scenes of violence, suggesting it is ubiquitous behind closed doors. Okejsex defines rape as any situation where sex occurs after someone has said no.

In many countries, and in many people’s minds, rape means penetration, usually by a penis, into a mouth, vagina or anus. In Swedish rape law, the word can be used for acts called assault or bodily harm in other countries.

That may be progressive, but it’s also confusing. You don’t have to be sexist or racist to imagine the misunderstandings that may arise. If younger people (or older, for that matter) have been out drinking and dancing and end up in a flat relaxing late at night, we are not surprised that the possibility of sex is raised. The process of getting turned on – and being seduced – is often vague and strange, involving looks and feelings rather than clear intentions. It is easy to go along and actively enjoy this process until some point when it becomes unenjoyable. We resist, but feebly. Sometimes we give in against our true wishes.

Sweden is also proud of its generous policy towards asylum-seekers and other migrants who may not instantly comprehend what Gender Equality means here, or that not explicitly violent or penetrative sex acts are understood as rape. That doesn’t mean that non-Swedes are rapists but that a large area exists where crossed signals are likely, for instance, amongst people out on the town drinking.

Discussions of rape nowadays use examples of women who are asleep, or have taken drugs or drunk too much alcohol, in order to argue that they cannot properly consent to sex. If they feel taken advantage of the next day, they may call what happened rape. The Daphne project’s Sweden researchers propose that those accused of rape ought to have to ‘prove consent’, but attempts to legislate and document seduction and desire are unlikely to succeed.

What isn’t questioned, in most public discussions, is the idea that the problem must be addressed by more laws, ever more explicit and strict. Contemporary society insists that punishment is the way to stop sexual violence, despite evidence suggesting that criminal law has little impact on sexual behaviour.

We want to think that if laws were perfectly written and police, prosecutors and judges were perfectly fair, then rapes would decrease because a) all rapists would go to jail and b) all potential rapists would be deterred from committing crime. Unfortunately, little evidence corroborates this idea. Debates crystallise in black-and-white simplifications that supposedly pit politically correct arguments against the common sense of regular folk. Subtleties and complications are buried under masses of rhetoric, and commentaries turn cynical: ‘Nothing will change’, ‘the police are pigs’, immigrants are terrorists, girls are liars.

Is it realistic or kind to teach that life in Sweden can always be safe, comfortable and impervious to outside influences? That, in the sexual sphere, everything disagreeable should be called rape and abuse? Although the ‘right’ to Gender Equality exists, we cannot expect daily life to change overnight because it does.

Monday 4th May 2009, 1600

Session 2: Breathing New Life into Old Fears: Cultural Studies of Prostitution, Pornography and Bad Sex

This panel will explore continuing impulses to criminalise and prohibit forms of ‘bad’ sexual practice. The three papers examine continuities and transformations in recent regulatory impulses to ‘protect’ the ‘innocent’ and the public from individual instances of bad sexual conduct. We ask whether fixed ethical frameworks, with concomitant laws, are appropriate in an age where diversity, autonomy and agency are prime values.

The Evil is in Paying: Sex with ‘Trafficked Women’
Laura Agustin

Prominent politicians and feminists have come to maintain that paying for sex with a ‘victim of trafficking’ is a heinous crime equivalent to violent rape. All migrant workers in the sex industry are considered subject to ‘serial rape’ and ‘sexual slavery’. The movement purposely conflates all prostitution with ‘trafficking’ and attacks those who disagree as pimps and anti-feminists. The justification is Gender Equality, a utopic vision that defines good sex as symmetrical, mutual, personally close, loving and equitable. Resulting laws criminalise the buying of sex on the grounds that introducing money creates a power relationship antithetical to the right kind of sex. This paper posits a different ethical vision in which money is not granted defining status in sexual acts.

Going to Extremes: Understanding New Online Pornographies
Feona Attwood

Online pornographies increasingly provide a focus for debates about permissible and impermissible sexual practices and about good and bad representations of sex. They have also become the focus of broader concerns with ‘extreme’ images of the body, for example in the horror subgenre which has been dubbed ‘torture porn’, in images of real violence and conflict (sometimes referred to as ‘warporn’ or ‘atrocity porn’), and in the wider set of ‘shock’ images which proliferate online. This paper considers the significance of contemporary concerns about extreme online pornographies in a cultural context where norms of sexuality and notions of obscenity are fiercely contested and where the circulation of sexual imagery is more prevalent than ever before.

Five Dominatrices and a Thrashing: the Classifications of Sadomasochism
Clarissa Smith

During 2008 two of the UK’s most august institutions resounded to discussion of activities involving pain and sexual pleasure: the House of Lords debated the rights of British citizens to possess images of ‘extreme’ sexual practices and the High Court was regaled with tales of supposed Nazi orgies starring Max Mosley (Formula 1 President and son of British wartime fascist Sir Oswald Mosley) and five women he had paid to beat him. The rights and wrongs of sadomasochism, consensual violence and the commodification and commercialisation of sexual desire were thoroughly aired across the media. This paper will consider the multiple meanings of sadomasochism and other ‘extreme’ sexual practices in public discourse and the continuing failures of the legislature to understand such practices as anything other than evidence of deviant or irrational impulses.

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. .

Source Deutsches Bundesarchiv. Individual photo captions here, with the following caveat:

For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Factual corrections and alternative descriptions are encouraged separately from the original description. Additionally errors can be reported at this page to inform the Bundesarchiv.