Cultural studies and commercial sex: a form of liberation
Much of what is said about the sex industry revolves around a single question: Is it okay or not? This question can be phrased in many ways: Is it okay that prostitution exists? Can street hooking ever be a real job? Is everyone who sells sex exploited or free? To address this question, most people talk about their own experience or that of the people they know personally or did research with, after which they extrapolate to a bigger group. But in the end it’s a question with different answers for different people in different places and moments in their lives.
Although it is appealing to imagine that we could definitively settle the question once and for all, decades of repetitive debate, particularly amongst different sorts of feminists, teach us that the end is not in sight. I (cheerfully) imagine this debate to be eternal, because it addresses key questions about individual autonomy and the extent to which more disadvantaged people have it. In academic circles, students are supposed to work within a discipline, such as sociology, or law. They may pursue interdisciplinarity or some kind of Area Studies but are still meant to use and rely on some specific theoretical framework, such as symbolic interactionism, or feminism, or a specific theorist, such as Foucault.
When I began formally studying (12 years ago), I wandered all over the place, intellectually, trying to figure out where I needed to be. In the early years I ran into academics who derided my ideas because they did not fit into a proper framework - or a proper politics – and the two intersected.
At some point I realised that the great majority of useful research studies were presented defensively: researchers who showed, for their subjects, that it was okay to sell sex felt they had to acknowledge that it is not okay for some other people, and so on. This seemed to me to be a lot of extraneous static.
During the time I was doing all this reading and reflecting, ideas about trafficking in human beings became a major social concern, and rhetoric began to predominate heavily over research studies. All sorts of social actors felt compelled to comment on the connexion between migration and the sex industry, and, despite the complexity of the topic, discussion quickly turned into a version of Is it okay or not? When I gave talks in academic and NGO settings about my various findings, I was often impatiently challenged to provide a solution to the ambiguities – right now! From the beginning, there was a drive to pass laws on trafficking, when really, it was obvious to me, very little was understood about informal migration, the main issue at hand.
In the interests of what might be called pure knowledge, but also in order to provide information on which less clueless rhetoric and ineffective laws might be based, I proposed a new framework for research to be called the cultural study of commercial sex. Cultural studies in the British tradition are concerned with revealing the practices of everyday life: how people do things and how they think about and describe the meanings of what they do. I said in the first article I wrote about it, in 2005
Little work exists in a sex-industry framework, but if we agree that it refers to all commercial goods and services of an erotic and sexual kind, then a rich field of human activities is involved. And every one of these activities operates in a complex socio-cultural context in which the meaning of buying and selling sex is not always the same.
That’s the main point: selling sex isn’t a single thing for all people; it isn’t even a single thing for any one person. Instead, like sex without the commercial aspect, its meaning shifts according to where we are in our lives, where we were before, where we wish we could be. So, logically, the answer to Is it okay? will continurally change.
Some people find my unwillingness to ascribe a fixed meaning to the sale of sex unacceptably relativistic. I decided early on that I could best explore matters of sex and sexuality, and carry out long-term participant observation, by adopting a traditional anthropological stance known as cultural relativism. But having lived in so many different cultures during my life, I already looked at the world that way, and nothing I have discovered during that time or after has changed my mind. Which does not mean that I have no moral feelings myself.
The fact that meanings shift means it won’t be easy to pass effective laws to regulate commercial-sex activities, because there are too many things going on. Too many different experiences are involved, lots of which feel ordinary and everyday to the people involved. When laws try to prohibit or regulate such diversity, people resist. They resist, elude and disobey laws and rhetoric that ignore a myriad of experiences, many of which they know to be okay. We need to know a lot more about all sorts of commercial-sex phenomena before passing more laws about them. I don’t mean we should do nothing but that we can muddle along for the time being with the hotch-potch of laws we’ve already got, while we learn more about what’s going on.
I edited aspecial issue of Sexualities on the cultural study of commercial sex in 2007, and I was careful to make sure that no article in that volume asks or answers the question Is it okay to sell sex? And at Border Thinking I publish all sorts of material that adds to our growing store of information on sex markets. Consider such titles as
- Migrant clients, table and taxi dances and sex work in New York
- Enjo kosai: compensated dating (or child prostitution) in Japan
- Signs with SEX on a New Zealand street: escorts and schools
- Webcam girls, virtual sex, sex tourism and the tax man
- Karaoke: Developments in entertainment, associations with the sex industry
- Host bars and Gender Equality: Men who serve women
The full list of titles makes fascinating reading. I also collect photos, specially those that show how commercial sex sits in the middle of everyday life. The other day I put up some showing European brothels in the daylight. The sex-industry photo collection currently lives at facebook, but you don’t have to be a facebook member to see it.
Best wishes,
Laura Agustín
Is it OK?
I think that my biggest objection to the question is this:
Why is this even a legitimate question to ask about sex work but not other work?
What if we were asking these questions of writers?
Do we ask if it's ok for writers to write ad-copy, and wouldn't they rather be doctors or lawyers? After all, aren't writers of advertisements just renting themselves to the highest bidder?
Do we ask if ad copy writers really like what they do? Is it ok for them to do it, if that's the only writing gig they have available to them at the moment? Is it ok to write ad-copy in order to fund a college education?
The questions would be condescending and ridiculous to any other profession, so why are they legitimate questions to ask about sex work?
Baby Biologist, just trying to make the world a better place.
I wonder if maybe there's
I wonder if maybe there's some kind of corporate element going on here. Since at least the mid 20th century and possibly longer, it seems like that the big corporations do a lot to define what counts as legitimate "work". Granted, even if that were the case it wouldn't be the whole story, but it's something to think about. Here are a few examples of what I mean:
Marijuana. It's no worse than tobacco or alcohol, and even has legitimate medical uses. Yet it's illegal in almost every industrialized nation. A common theory is that this is in part because cannabis is a weed, one which anyone could grow dirt cheap without needing any special care or processing. Because only a very small amount of the plant is used at a time, a single plant can provide for several casual users (which is nearly everyone who uses it) per year. If marijuana ever became legal, the big corporations wouldn't be able to compete with the "street growers" (at least not without a lot of subsidies or a lot of additional regulation), and it might cut a bit into their profits as some people turn away from other recreational drugs (and perhaps even occasionally over-the-counter drugs) in favor of cannabis. Whether such concern would be legit or not, in theory they do have a good motive for keeping it illegal...
The "beyond organic" movement. There are some farms in the US (not sure about elsewhere) which are pioneering techniques that are far more sustainable than those used to produce so-called "organic" foods (which are really mostly factory farms with one hand tied behind their backs), build topsoil rather than eroding it, are significantly cheaper (prices are comparable to organic yet use no crop subsidies), and are possibly a bit healthier... and yet they can't legally advertise it as organic or "better than organic". They also often run afoul of regulations meant for factory farms, forcing them to do things which are impractical or even counterproductive, in order to be able to sell anywhere other than farmer's markets and the like. There's a war slowly brewing, unseen by most people. It's between the beyond organic farmers, who are trying to legitimize their practices, and the corporations which supply factory farms, who see them as a threat... because if the factory-farm organics go, they'll be replaced by people who don't need much of any special supplies at all.
Now for sex work... I don't know much about the economics of sex work, but I have noticed that ever since the invention of the corporation, very few* have been involved in it. Certainly no major ones. Not even in the times and places where it is/was legal. I'm wondering if it's not profitable enough or doesn't scale up well enough to interest them. Otherwise, you'd think there'd be a lot of powerful corporate interests "donating" tens of millions in hopes of convincing politicians that maybe it's not such a bad idea after all... but since they're not, people can look at the situation and say, "regardless of what I think about it on the moral level, no legit business will touch it, so it's probably not real work."
*I'm not counting strip clubs or adult stores or the like, which seem to be more of a form of entertainment than anything else. By "sex work" I am referring to more "hands-on" things like prostitution or erotic massages, a definition which some here might not agree with. But I can't think of a more specific term to distinguish that.
Cultural relativism, sex, and law
Laura, I think your unwillingness to ascribe a fixed meaning to the sale of sex is to be applauded, and makes much more sense than trying to force such a wide range of expeirences into one box. Though every society and every culture or subculture has it's ways of regulating sex, at the individual level our experience of sex and the meanings we attach to sex are influenced by many things.
Laws can never be broad enough to encompass everyone's experience even in a relatively homogeneous culture (let alone a very pluralistic one like the US), but laws that recognize complexity are not impossible. Decriminalizing the actual exchange of money for sex but then applying labor laws to regulate wages/hours and workplace safety standards appropriately as they are applied to other businesses is one way to do that.
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
Is it just me, or are the
Is it just me, or are the people who want to severly regulate/criminalize sex workers and reproduction and 'non standard' sex, the same people who want to de-regulate everything else?
Strange bedfellows
But then there are the conservative deregulation libertarian types who don't want to regulate sex at all, and the liberal "marriage for everyone, sex work for none" types who want to regulate anything a little too explicitly strategic or not quite "loving" enough about sex. I remember first learning about the radical feminists aligning themselves with the Christian right on anti-porn legislation. ::Shudders:: Sexual politics makes for strange bedfellows.
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
I'm not so sure about pure
I'm not so sure about pure 'decriminalisation' as a goal. In the abstract, in theory, yes, but without proposals for regulation of various kinds I can't see it succeeding. Which is why I want there to be more information available of the many sorts of sex for sale. Decriminalisation appears to apply to 'prostitution', and what's that? I don't mean this lightly, don't misunderstand. It all seems logical when you concentrate on clearly identifiable activities like street prostitution or brothel work. It gets slippery with much other sex-industry business.
Laura
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