sexwork

Sex at the Margins has now been reviewed 17 times in academic journals! And those journals focus on many different fields: sociology, anthropology, migration, feminism, gender, geography - here’s a full list. I marvel especially when someone I admire admires my book. Dan Allman, who wrote M is for mutual, A is for acts, has published a review of Sex at the Margins for the journal Sexualities. To be compared to Clifford Geertz means being understood, and what is better than that? And how about a comparison with Camille Paglia? Here’s Dan’s review.

Laura María Agustín, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London and New York: Zed Books, 2007.

Some books about prostitution and sex trafficking can make for challenging reading. Not because of the subject matter necessarily, but because of the ways contemporary politics and voice give rise to a kind of morally-charged discourse.

What makes Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry so enlightening, is that while it is very much a book about prostitution and sex trafficking and the ways in which societies have evolved to culturally construct the regulation of sex work within free labour market practices, on another level it is a book about how history, modern migration patterns and the marginality of the ‘other’, and the rise of the social have come together to shape European and global sex markets.

For the book’s author, Laura María Agustín, much earlier writings evade ‘experiences and points of view that do not fit, silencing difference and producing unease in those who do not see themselves as included’ (p. 9).

The observations that ground Agustín’s study of sex at the margins began during the 1990s while she worked along the US/Mexican border with those seeking asylum in the USA. Such experiences are supplemented with work to document NGO activities in the Caribbean, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Spain – all of which provide rich loam for Agustín’s analytic replanting of tourism, migration and how women within different sectors of the labour market are routinely conceptualized by a variety of helping social sectors.

Throughout her journeys, Agustín’s ‘position in the field was a mix of insider, outsider, stakeholder, political actor and researcher’ which ‘shifted according to the conditions of the moment’ (p. 141).

In the book, such multifaceted positioning is complimented by an approach to fieldwork which is anthropological in theory and methodology. This is primarily because of the ability of this disciplinary lens to avoid the moralizing frameworks and the labelling of the buying and selling of sex as ‘deviance, victimisation or violence’ (p. 137).

Embracing an ambiguity somewhere between participant, observer and informant such as that promoted by Clifford Geertz as at the heart of successful anthropological research, Agustín describes and justifies her shifting roles and the perspectives they allow as a form of multi-sited ethnography. Part of the work’s success is due to the author’s ability to weave both first and third person narratives in such a way as to maintain the reader’s interest without diverging from the intrinsically academic nature of an argument which positions social programming aimed at helping migrants as a form of social control.

The book succeeds also in its contribution of an outstandingly detailed and researched history of prostitution, which is used to lay the groundwork for a nod to the governmentality school of Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose, and an emphasis on how the helping professions have developed beyond charitable foundations to a form of bonded solidarity, and in the process have come to label and marginalize the very women they seek to help.

At its core, Agustín’s work takes on the polemic of prostitution and contextualizes it relative to three kinds of professions: domestic work, caring activities and sex services. It then applies changing theories of tourism and migration to help explain how sex work has come to be uniquely positioned at the margins. It describes how rescue industries’ tactics and practices reproduce a prostitute discourse, essentially perpetuating the divide between the morally-sound helpers and the morally-corrupt helped, suggesting that ‘if the definition of the “prostitute” was to change to describe only suffering victims, perhaps the conflict over terms could be resolved’ (p. 181).

While Sex at the Margins is not politically neutral, it does pay homage to its politic through evidence, analysis and canny interpretation. This is in large part why the book manages to triumph over the intelligent but often-lacking literature which has preceded it.

As one might say of the scholarly writings of Geertz or Goffman, were Agustín’s new book to be expanded or elaborated at all, it could well be through further detail of the successes and also challenges of combining a historian’s reading with an objectivist’s ethnography and a participant’s observation.

Yet at the same time, it is through an attention to multiple perspectives and diverse sources that makes Agustín a scholarly storyteller of the best kind. Well travelled, observant, erudite and extremely knowledgeable, she reminds one of Camille Paglia at her most formidable – only dare say sexier, and a touch more caustic.

Sure to be interrogated for her perspective while respected for her scholarship, Agustín and her new work promise to contribute new thoughts to the contentious debates between the growing minority who see migrant sex work as a contextually viable migrant labour practice, and the steadfast majority who declare that prostitution is always, in all situations, the antithesis of love.

Dan Allman
The University of Edinburgh, UK and University of Toronto, Canada

I published Forget Victimisation in 2003, but the more migration is discussed in the mainstream, the more we see two reductionist visions: one that blames migrants as grasping criminals, the other that sees them as sad victims. Unfortunately many people with leftist sympathies and visions fall into the trap of victimisation.

Once, after I’d given a talk, an academic became very upset while trying to get me to admit that the poor of this world are victims objectively, by definition because of ‘global structural inequalities’. I replied that I understood how she, coming from her subject position of white, middle-class woman identifying as socialist, produced poor people this way. I went on to say, ‘But if you move over to the poor person’s place and ask them how they see their situation, they may well not produce such an image of themselves.’ I thought the woman was going to go through the roof with outrage at my inability to see her point.

Of course I believe that the world is rife with terrible differences between the poor and the rich and that men almost always have more power and money. It’s not fair. But given the unfairness, I prefer to listen to how people describe their own realities rather than create static, generalised categories like Exploited Victims. I also don’t agree that poor people only leave their countries because they are forced to, with no possibility for their desires and abilities to think and weigh risks. The same goes for people who get into prostitution or sex work - I prefer to give the heaviest weight to what they say they are doing! Here’s the longer version, and it applies to all migrants, whatever jobs they do.

Forget Victimisation: Granting Agency to Migrants

Development, 46.3, 30-36 (2003)

Laura Agustín

There is a growing tendency to victimise poor people, weak people, uneducated people and migrant people. The trend, which began as a way of drawing attention to specific forms of violence committed against women, has now become a way of describing everyone on the lower rungs of power. Routinely, supporters position them as victims in order to claim rights for them, but this move also turns them into victims, and victims need help, need saving—which gives a primary role to supporters. Much rhetoric about migration has fallen into this pattern: migrants, it turns out, are not only vulnerable to exploitation, a patent truth, but they are ‘victims’.

The other choice, according to sensationalist media treatments, is criminal. Since news on migrants is reported only when disasters befall them, or when they are caught in something ‘illegal’, they can only be positioned in one of these two ways: as past victims of poverty or conflict in their home states and present victims of criminal bands, or as criminals who take advantage of such victims. The victims need to be saved, and the criminals to be punished. This reductionism encourages the idea that there is something inherently dangerous about being a migrant. Since migrants are usually seen as people from the third world, the positioning of so many of them as victims—of economic restructuring if not of criminal agents—harks back unsettlingly to the old category of the ‘native’. And since migrants nowadays are so often women, these natives are constituted as backward, developmentally less than first-world women. This is most overt, of course, in ‘trafficking’ discourses (for example, in Barry, 1979) but can now be heard in general talk about ‘illegal’ migrants.

Ratna Kapur shows how this victimising tendency began in the early 1990s with the project to reveal the widespread, routine nature of violence against women:

In the context of law and human rights, it is invariably the abject victim subject who seeks rights, primarily because she is the one who has had the worst happen to her. The victim subject has allowed women to speak out about abuses that have remained hidden or invisible in human rights discourse (Kapur, 2001: 5).

This strategy has led to many benefits for women. The problem is that the person designated a victim tends to take on an identity as victim that reduces her to being seen as a passive receptacle and ‘encourages some feminists in the international arena to propose strategies which are reminiscent of imperial interventions in the lives of the native subject’ (Kapur, 2001: 6).

The category ‘migrant’, awkward and ambiguous to begin with, becomes more so when it is victimised. In this article, I want to look at what we think we mean when we call someone a migrant, and then suggest that there are both class and postcolonial analyses to be made of this constructed identity and the passivity assigned to it. To do this, I will call on my own research with migrating people in various parts of the world. What I recount is widely known, but not often included in formal studies of migrations.

Conventional travellers

On the surface, there seem to be patently different kinds of travellers: tourists, people whose work involves travel, refugees and migrants. Tourists are generally defined as people with time and money to spend on leisure activities who take a trip somewhere to do it: they are ‘travelling for pleasure’. Tourism is defined by an absence (work), and tourists are believed to have left their jobs behind to indulge consciously in not working. In the literature, the tourist is someone from the North (the tourism of Southerners is invisible). Some people oppose a status of ‘traveller’ to that of tourist, saying their trips are unplanned, open-ended, longer and more appreciative of the ‘real culture’ of a place. ‘Interacting with the culture’ is the goal for many of these, and this interaction most likely comes about through getting a job. ‘Working’ does not exclude pleasure, then, for first-world subjects.

People who travel in the course of carrying out their jobs are at first glance also clearly identifiable. Whether sent on trips by companies or undertaking them on their own, business travellers are obliged to be on the road. Their trips may be long or short, involve familiarity with the culture visited and the local language or not and require sociability or not, but they have in common that this is not supposed to be ‘leisure time’. But is this true? Many businesspeople also engage in tourism during their trips, using their ‘expense accounts’ to entertain clients, much of this money going to sites where tourists also go (theatres, cabarets, sex or gambling clubs, restaurants, bars, boat trips, sports events). The trips taken to attend conferences, do field work or provide consultations by academics, ‘development’ and technical consultants, missionaries and social-sector personnel also feature tourism. Sports professionals, singers, musicians, actors, salespeople, sailors, soldiers, airline and train personnel, commercial fishermen, farm-workers, long-distance truck drivers and a variety of others travel as part of their professions. Modern explorers search for oil, minerals, endangered species of animals and plants and ‘lost’ archaeological artefacts. Many of these people spend a long time away from home, and their work life is punctuated by leisure and tourist activities. Some of these people have homes or ‘home bases’ in more than one place. Students who take years abroad or travel to do field work are combining tourism and work. The main goal of a voyage for religious pilgrims is not work, but they may work and engage in tourist activities on the way to and from the pilgrimage. And then there are nomads whose traditional way of gaining a livelihood includes mobility.

The dichotomy working traveller/work-free traveller is misleading, and many forms of travel have aspects of both. So what makes a ‘migrant’ different?

This other kind of traveller

Some people distinguish between all the above types and ‘migrants’, on the grounds that the latter ‘settle’. According to this distinction, migrants move from their home to make another one in someone else’s country. They are not positioned as travellers or tourists, since they are looking not only to spend money but earn it. The word migrant is nearly always used about the working class, not about middle-class professionals and not about people from the first-world, even if they also have left home and moved to another country. Instead, the word rings of a subaltern status. Read the rest of this entry »

What an old-fashioned term Vice Squad sounds. I imagined, foolishly, that any contemporary police force would look for a blander, more politically correct term: Orderly Cities, or Safe Streets. But no, right there in Cape Town, South Africa, they are setting up a Vice Squad to get rid of prostitution, on the grounds that it attracts other crimes like money laundering. The vices that Vice Squads address involve drugs, alcohol, commercial sex including pornography and gambling. Even the word vice sounds dated to me.

Many people new to sex-industry debates don’t know what anti-prostitution laws actually mean for sex workers: what police do to stop their activities. I posted a video showing street round-ups in Spain not long ago. Here are tactics summarised by a Cape Town police official, relating only to street prostitution. These plans go directly against a court order obtained by SWEAT (Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce) preventing police and the city’s officers from detaining prostitutes without proceeding to prosecution. That’s another story; here I’ve included only excerpts from an article by Murray Williams in the Cape Argus, 28 September 2009. Note: 500 Rand = 44.6 euros.

        ‘The City of Cape Town has launched a vice squad to crack down on prostitutes working the streets of the city’s suburbs – and their clients can also expect harsher treatment. As part of the city’s new strategy, it also plans to arrest the sex workers’ clients, instead of just giving them spot fines as is the current practice. . . These officers would be specially trained to carry out surveillance on prostitutes, to arrest them and ensure their successful prosecution.

• 18 prostitutes were arrested along the main road through Bellville, Goodwood and Parow on Friday night.
• This week the squad plans to focus on the city’s other notorious red light areas. . .
  Smith said the police . . . would specifically aim to prosecute.
• “we are going to document these cases very carefully,” Smith explained. “In the past, [prostitutes] have lied about the details. So during the 12 hours that we are allowed to detain them, we will be checking up on their addresses, to ensure that we can compel them to pay their fines.” The fines were R500 for a first offence, R1000 for a second offence and R1500 for a third offence.
• the city would be photographing the prostitutes on their arrest, to enable officers to charge them accordingly for repeat offences.
• . . . the city would also be increasing the fines. . . [to] R1000 for a first offence, R2500 for a second offence and a “non-admission-of-guilt” charge for a third offence, meaning they would not have the option of paying a fine but would have to appear in court..

. . . “We want to find out why these cases are being thrown out, and what evidentiary chain is necessary. We will then train these staffers to get the evidence, so can successfully get convictions” . . .  Prosecution of prostitutes is governed by both the national Sexual Offences Act and the city’s bylaws preventing “nuisances in the streets and public places”.’

In campaigns protesting raids and other drastic actions against prostitutes and sex workers, Christianity is often slagged off. That’s not fair; it’s how people interpret their duty as Christians that can lead to abuse. Here’s an example of Christian outreach, carried out in the same sort of way that civilian harm-reduction projects are done. Note that this helper ‘won’t apply for federal funds because she doesn’t want anything to interfere with “preaching the Word,”’and doesn’t see her role as trying to get women out of the industry  Excerpts only - click on the title for the complete story.

Jesus & strippers

Emily Belz, WorldMag.com

Los Angeles. Near midnight. Industrial buildings. Empty streets. Full parking lot. Men wander into a nondescript building, “Fantasy Castle.” Bouncers stand at the door. Inside, on stage. women dance to earn their rent. Men watch in the dark. Booze, perfume, and loneliness.

A group of young women with fistfuls of flamingo pink gift bags approach the bouncer and offer him cookies—yes, cookies. This is the second strip club they have visited, pulling up in a church minibus: They have five more on their list as they canvass neighborhoods north of Long Beach, south of Compton. The bouncer takes the cookies and lets them inside to the bar, the customers, and the dancers, who are all lined up on the stage.

“I hated lining up—like a cattle call,” remarks Harmony Dust outside the club. Dust, a former stripper, started slipping notes on the windshields of dancers six years ago telling them “you are loved”—and her ministry, I Am a Treasure, was born. Along with other women including former strippers, she lavishes love on women in the sex industry and teaches that Jesus loves them too. On this night, several of the dancers turn away from customers to give the gift-baggers bear hugs and tell them their real names.

Treasures—that’s what most people call the ministry—has a simple recipe: Bring gifts of lip gloss, jewelry, and handwritten cards into dressing rooms in strip clubs. Wait for phone calls, texts, or emails from the women that often come in just hours after the visit. “This is largely a seed-sowing ministry,” said Dust—and when sprouts appear, volunteers help with childcare and rides to church. They listen, talk, mentor, wait, and hope.

. . .  70 percent of Christians admitted to struggling with porn in their daily lives. Another poll by Rick Warren’s pastors.com in 2002 showed 54 percent of pastors had viewed pornography within the last year. . . . Dust started stripping under the name Monique at a club by the airport and managed to complete her undergraduate degree even while she was working in the sex industry at night. . . .

In 2003, while driving to the airport to pick John up, she drove by the same club where she used to strip—but she couldn’t pass it by. Filled with emotion and conviction, she pulled into the parking lot, and the security guard let her put notes on the women’s windshields telling them that they are loved. Then she couldn’t pass by clubs anymore, and she and others who joined her work began building relationships with dancers. She saw women eagerly reach for that same love she found in Jesus.

Dust doesn’t see her role as trying to get women out of the industry or tell them that their jobs are sinful. No one needs to tell them, she said—anyone in the industry feels a certain sickness in her soul. What they need is someone to extend the gospel through love. But she’s quick to say that Treasures volunteers don’t see themselves as strippers’ “saviors.” “I have nothing—I have lip gloss,” Dust said, laughing. “And I probably only have that because of Jesus.” The organization functions off a skeleton of a budget—under $100,000 a year—and Dust won’t apply for federal funds because she doesn’t want anything to interfere with “preaching the Word.”

This report comes in China Labour Bulletin, a publication interested in work: jobs. The tone supposes that selling sex is not desirable but does not make a big thing of it. Instead, the unprotected status of workers as workers is highlighted. Abuses are committed by clients, police and employers, but there is no rhetoric about sex work as violence per se or about trafficking. The women discussed are migrants; the best job they could find upon arriving in the city was selling sex. But the research shows that after three years, all but a few had moved on to another job. That means that sex work was a stepping-stone to other things they had no access to immediately on arrival., which is the normal situation for migrants of all kinds. The report says they worked ‘irregular hours’, which is often interpreted to mean something negative, but which many people prefer. Note: 1000 yuan = 100 euros

Sex workers in Wuhan vulnerable and exploited

China Labour Bulletin, 23 September 2009

Young, poorly educated sex workers in the central Chinese city of Wuhan are routinely abused by clients but have little or no recourse to justice. Most do not trust the police and the vast majority (about 80 percent) have no knowledge of their legal or civil rights, according to a recently published survey

Researchers from Wuhan University interviewed 300 low-end sex workers, mainly employed in small-scale hair salons and saunas in the city’s red light district, and found that around half had been the victims of crime, with clients usually stealing money or mobile phones. Most “leisure” (休闲) establishments in Wuhan had a “pay first” policy but, nevertheless, 37 percent of the interviewees said they had been cheated by their clients. Over half the respondents said they had been verbally abused by clients, while 20 percent had been beaten or physically abused, and small number were even raped or abducted while working.

For the majority of sex workers, their only recourse in these situations was to go to their boss or their boyfriend for help, but in the majority of cases there was little the boss could do. Only 26 percent of respondents said they would definitely report an abusive client to the police, 37 percent said they would not go to the police, while the remaining 37 percent were ambivalent. Two thirds (64 percent) of the respondents said they’d never had any dealings with the police, and over half thought the police were of no help, while 16 percent considered the police to be a hindrance. Only one third (31 percent) thought the police could provide any help.

The majority (56 percent) of the 300 interviewees were aged between 18 and 25 years, 12 percent were younger than 18-years-old, while 15 percent were over 30 years of age. Most (62 percent) only had a middle school education at best, 21 percent had been to high school, and 16 percent had attended technical high school, while only one interviewee had been to university.

The survey indicated that many sex workers were driven by poverty in rural areas in Hubei and neighbouring provinces to come to Wuhan in search of work. However, their lack of education meant they could not find any better jobs in the city. About half (51.8 percent) had been working the sex industry for less than a year, and the vast majority regularly moved from salon to salon in search of better conditions. Only three percent of those interviewed had been in the industry for more than three years.

The vast majority worked irregular hours, between eight and ten hours a day, and earned up to 3,000 yuan a month. Nearly half (44 percent) earned less than 1,000 yuan a month, while only 16 percent could earn more than 3,000 yuan. The plight of Wuhan’s sex workers is largely representative of China as a whole, and is indicative of the many dangers that young women from the countryside face when they travel to the city in search of work.

Tanta bulla sobre el uso de la calle. Durante los 15 años que he seguido el conflicto sobre la industria del sexo en España, el tema se ha debatido una y otra vez en el congreso nacional, con múltiples invitaciones a una gama de ‘expertos’ para hablar del significativo de la prostitución. Nunca se llega a ninguna conclusión, pero siempre se dice que hay que hacer algo. Los periodistas también vuelven repetidamente al mismo tema. Esta vez sale en El Mundo un nuevo intento de darles voz a algunas de las prostitutas-trabajadoras del sexo en Madrid (siempre dejan fuera a los hombres trabajadores). Siguen extractos de un artículo escogidos por que proporcionan información sobre el trabajo de calle, no solo opiniones. Como verán, existen motivos razonables que gente de fuera parecen incapaz de entender.

Después viene el testimonio de una latina que conocí por primera vez hace muchos años. Se trata de un video cuyo título lo dice todo: ‘Trabajo en la prostitución porque yo lo he elegido’

Y las prostitutas, ¿qué opinan sobre la polémica?

Raquel Quílez, El Mundo. 10 septiembre 2009

[extractos]

. . . Ana -nombre ficticio- mira tímida con unos enormes ojos verdes mientras permanece sentada en el bordillo de un portal próximo a la Gran Vía. . . . Ana esboza a continuación una teoría que sostendrán después la mayoría de las mujeres a las que se pregunta en la zona Centro de Madrid: prefieren trabajar en la calle. ¿Sus motivos? “Si estás en un club tienes que dar parte del dinero al dueño y además tienes que trabajar las horas que te diga y coger los servicios porque si no, no puedes volver al día siguiente. En la calle, sin embargo, nosotras decidimos las horas que estamos y con quién nos vamos. Nos sentimos más libres”. Y eso a pesar de que el precio de sus servicios cae cuando se ofrece al aire libre.

. . . Las prostitutas han saltado al centro del debate público después de las denuncias por las prácticas en plena calle en Barcelona. La mayoría de las preguntadas en Madrid ni siquiera conoce la polémica. “Pero, ¿cómo en la calle? ¿En mitad de la gente, con todos pasando?”, pregunta sorprendida Laura -nombre ficticio-. Ronda los 50, es española y viste un llamativo mono de leopardo. Está sentada en un taburete en una esquina de la calle Ballesta, el sitio que ocupa desde hace ya varios años. “Eso aquí no pasa. Contactamos con los clientes en la calle pero luego nos vamos a pisos alquilados o a los hostales, donde pagamos cinco euros por la habitación”. También ella reivindica el trabajo en la calle. “Yo prefiero estar aquí, me siento más segura”, repite, como sus compañeras. Pero irte con un desconocido a un hostal no es muy seguro… “Ya, pero en los hostales hay personas que trabajan para protegernos”, contesta. ¿Quién contrata a esas personas? Silencio. Laura tiene cuatro hijos y un nieto a los que mantener porque nadie más trabaja en su familia.

. . . A dos calles de Laura trabaja María -una vez más el nombre es ficticio. . . . Tiene 28 años, habla un inglés perfecto y cursó hasta 3º de Comercio Exterior en su país natal, Rumanía, del que llegó hace tres años. Ha probado todo lo que tenía a su alcance para salir adelante. Ha sido empleada del hogar y camarera, con la mala suerte de caer en casas y locales en los que después se negaron a pagarle. También se ha prostituido en clubs y al final ha optado por echarse a la calle. “Es en el único sitio en el que sólo dependo de mí”, dice. María está sobradamente cualificada, pero se ve obligada a trabajar con su cuerpo. Ella sí reclama que se regularice la situación. “Por lo menos podría tener seguridad social y no ahora que llevo tres años trabajando y no ha servido para nada”, dice. En el último mes, María vuelve a casa con entre 60 y 100 euros en el bolso. “Se nota la crisis -cuenta- antes podía ganar hasta 400 al día. Los mejores son los turistas ingleses”.

. . . “Lo ideal sería que se regulase y que tengamos los mismo derechos que cualquier otro trabajador. Creo que la calle no es un lugar seguro para nadie, ni para un vendedor de cupones”. . . .

‘Trabajo en la prostitución porque yo lo he elegido’: Video

Viajó desde Ecuador a Europa en vacaciones y terminó trabajando como prostituta en Madrid. Un hombre se le acercó en un bar, le ofreció dinero a cambio de sexo y le abrió las puertas a un mundo que a ella se le antojó el mejor salvoconducto económico para su vida. Y lleva ya 12 años en ello

Carolina Hernández trabaja en la calle por decisión propia y comparte sus problemas con su familia, sus amigos y su pareja. En esta entrevista ofrece una visión de la profesión alejada del mito y los lugares comunes. Cuenta que quiere tener un hijo, colabora con la organización Hetaria, desde la que pide la regulación de la prostitución, y asegura que es feliz.

Mientras los políticos debaten su profesión en el Congreso, ella pide que se termine con la hipocresía: “No vivamos en una sociedad retrógrada y machista”, reclama como principal anhelo.

I just gave a talk about irregular migration and informal-sector jobs, including in the sex industry, at a conference in Copenhagen. The talk was well-received, but as always most people say they have not heard my point of view before. So to make sure everyone realises that my ideas are not the result of an ideology about prostitution, I run this photo again of a poster prepared by migrant sex workers (self-identified so) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at the EMPOWER centre.

See for yourself the list of reasons migrant sex workers at Barn Su Funn Brothel gave for opposing raids and rescue operations intended to liberate them, whether rescuers are police officers, ngo employees or charity workers:

• We lose our savings and our belongings.
• We are locked up.
• We are interrogated by many people.
• They force us to be witnesses.
• We are held until the court case.
• We are held till deportation.
• We are forced re-training.
• We are not given compensation by anybody.
• Our family must borrow money to survive while we wait.
• Our family is in a panic.
• We are anxious for our family.
• Strangers visit our village telling people about us.
• The village and the soldiers cause our family problems.
• Our family has to pay ‘fines’ or bribes to the soldiers.
• We are sent home.
• Military abuses and no work continues at home.
• My family has a debt.
• We must find a way back to Thailand to start again.

The poster brings us close to a situation many people doubt: that poorer migrants selling sex often prefer to continue what they’re doing to being forcibly rescued by people on anti-trafficking crusades. This is not to cast doubt on all rescuers’ good intentions, but it shows how they obviously haven’t consulted the prostitutes they want to save first, to find out whether they want to be helped and, if they do, what kind of help would actually be helpful!  The poster makes it clear that cutting migrant women off from their source of income has terrible consequences both for themselves and their families.

This does not mean that they or I deny the existence of abusive practices inflicted during smuggling and trafficking operations. It means that an ideological stance that claims all migrants doing sex work have been victims of such practices is wrong.

During my 15 years of researching this subject, I have met migrants of all nationalities, in many countries, in bars, brothels, shelters, ngo offices, streets and houses. Some had had bad experiences, some had not recovered from them, some were getting on with the next stage of their lives, some enjoyed doing sex work, many had adapted to it as the best option of the moment. For those who want to read more about it, my book Sex at the Margins has extensive interesting information!

Thanks once more to the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers for sending this photo.

Japan standbar

Recently I appreciated a comment made on a post about hostesses at the Harlot’s Parlour. I wrote to the commenter and asked if he’d like to see his words in a post here, and Richard Jeffrey Newman said yes. The sex industry brims with stories like these, but they rarely reach the public’s eyes or ears. The sex industry’s confusions and ambiguities are well represented here: a commercial sex site where real people have real feelings for each other, both kindly and cruel, despite apparent roles of sex worker and client.

        Your post brings back memories of the 15 months or so that I spent as an English teacher in South Korea between 1988 and 1989, especially Ms. Park, the hostess in the standbar (karaoke) near where I lived that I and some of my fellow teachers went to regularly. We always sat at Ms. Park’s station and then, after I started going sometimes by myself, partly because I enjoyed spending time with her and partly because they let me jam with the band and making music made me happy, she and I became friends to the degree that we were able, given the language barrier and the fact that we only saw each other at her place of work for a few hours once or twice a week.

Once, she asked if she could come to my apartment when she was finished working, and I was happy to say yes. It meant a lot to me that she had asked, because it meant that she wanted whatever would happen between us when she got to my place to be something other than the commercial exchange that took place when I paid for the beer and plate of food she brought me a price that was set to include the slow dancing and flirting and surreptitious and not-so-surreptitious touching that was part of her job as a hostess. I knew that part of her job was also to have sex with men who paid her for it, but as the rules had been explained to me (and I suppose that if this explanation was wrong, then my whole comment is sort of meaningless) if a customer proposed sex to a hostess and she agreed, he had to pay for it; if she proposed sex to him, however, he did not.

I didn’t then, and I do not now, object to the buying and selling of sex per se, though I have never felt the desire to do either myself. Still, I have often wondered whether or not I would have paid if that had been the only way that Ms. Park and I could have been together. Because I wanted her as well. The fact that she asked me meant I didn’t have to find out, though as it happened she never came to my apartment either. And here, as far as I can tell is why: Ms. Park smiled at me when I said yes in a way that I will never forget; it was such a simple, happy smile. A few minutes later, however, an older Korean man walked over to us and struck up a conversation with me. He asked what I was doing in Korea, where I was teaching and made other small talk for a few minutes before he nodded in Ms. Park’s direction and asked if me if I liked her. I said yes. “She has beautiful labia, you know,” he continued, looking directly at her before turning his eyes again on me. I said something that politely let him know I was not interested in his company and turned back to Ms. Park who suddenly refused to look me in the eye. For the rest of the night, she refused to look me in the eye. I don’t know what the relationship was between Ms. Park and that man, other than the obvious, but what he said shamed her that night in a way that she was unable to recover from.

When I went back the next week, and the week after that, and after that, she was her usual self. Almost. She never brought up the question of her coming to my place again, and something told me not to ask, that if I did ask she would say yes, but that she would be saying yes not as the woman who stepped outside of the buying and selling of sex to tell me that she wanted me. Rather, she’d be saying yes as a sex worker for whom sex with me would be work, and that was something I had no desire to pay for.

I have, of course, no way of knowing if my sense of things was accurate, and perhaps I was/am romanticizing and/or rationalizing, but it was what I felt and your post made me think about it for the first time in a long time, and so I thought I’d share it here.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, September 2009

The terms massage parlour and sauna cover many sorts of businesses, some of which are brothels where the massage is probably not skilled or healthful, others of which employ people skilled in massage who also offer services variously known as full-body massage, body rubs and happy endings and some of which offer nothing sexual at all. Non-sexual massage businesses are granted licences in many cities. Inspections to make sure all these places are always sex-free would be an overwhelmingly expensive task for city councils, with the result that even some licenced places become known for providing sex for money. Many such businessplaces are located in ordinary commercial strips but appear rather blank, since no goods are displayed in the windows. There is a lot of variation if you look closely, however, so here are some more photos of the sex industry as part of everyday life. A growing collection can be viewed here, without being a member of facebook.

Daye Town (Huangshi CIty, Hubei, China

Vancouver, Canada 

Hamburg, Germany (Photo Claus Petersen)

Shrine inside Hamburg parlour (Photo Claus Petersen)

Could be anywhere

New Zealand

Ireland, a residential-looking building

Incidentally, how they came to enjoy the name parlour is a mystery to me.

How is it feminist, if the goal is improving society and achieving more equality amongst human beings, to focus on crime and punishment? Published in 2001, this article provoked horror in some sectors. Although I wouldn’t write it exactly the same way now, I stand by its ideas. If Gender Equality is one of feminism’s goals, how can we imagine it without reducing everything to black and white, perpetrator and victim, crime, crime, crime?

Sex workers and Violence Against Women: Utopic Visions or Battle of the Sexes?

Laura Mª Agustín

Development, 44.3, 107-110 (2001)

Sexual exploitation and prostitution

In the movement to construct a discourse of ‘violence against women’, and thus to raise consciousness about kinds of mistreatment which before were invisible, the stage has been reached where defining crime and achieving punishment appears to be the goal. While it is progressive to raise consciousness about violence and exploitation in an attempt to deter the commitment of crimes, I hope to show that the present emphasis on discipline is very far from a utopic vision and that we should now begin to move toward other suggestions for solutions.

The following argument uses the example of prostitution or ‘sexual exploitation’ as an instance of ‘violence against women’, but the approach can apply to any attempt to deal with not only definitions of gender and sexual violence but with proposals to deal with them. When applied to adult prostitution, the term ‘sexual exploitation’ attempts to change language to make ‘voluntary’ prostitution impossible. For those who wish to ‘abolish’ prostitution, therefore, this change in terms represents progress, for now language itself will not be complicit with the violence involved. For those who may or may not want to ‘abolish’ prostitution but who in the present put the priority on improving the everyday lot of prostitutes, this language change totalizes a variety of situations involving different levels of personal will and makes it more difficult to propose practical solutions. When applied to the prostitution of children, the term ‘sexual exploitation’ represents a project to change perceptions about childhood. For those who believe that the current western model of childhood as a time of innocence should become the ‘right’ of all children in the world, this term is very important.

Criminalization of clients

Efforts to change sexist, racist and other discriminatory forms of language have long been a focus of projects of social justice in western societies, and the push to define ‘violence against women’ clearly forms part of this movement. Along with this, we see a strong move to have actions that fall within these new definitions proclaimed as crimes and their perpetrators punished. If prostitution is globally redefined as sexual exploitation (by ‘globally’ I mean that no distinctions are made according to whether prostitutes say they ‘chose’ sex work to any extent), therefore, all those who purchase sexual services, called usually ‘clients’, become ‘exploiters’. Read the rest of this entry »