sex: sex work

These two Halloween costumes in a mall display, snapped by Deeky (here and here, via Shakesville), make a joke of women working in masculine occupations by suggesting that they’re, essentially, sex workers.

Captain Layover:

captlayover

Free Rides:

taxi

See our other Halloween-related posts: two extra-special costumes (the Anna Rexia costume and the Sexy Scholar), Max Weber jack o’lantern (by yours truly), Obama mask sold as terrorist mask, a Sarah Palin effigy, handling sex offenders on trick-o’-treat day, and costume catalog analyses (here and here).

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Michelle Braun allegedly runs a very large prostitution ring and may be making a deal with the authorities in which she reveals her clients.  The clip from KTLA news below reveals our bizarre, confused relationship with sexuality.  In the clip, reporters suggest that her celebrity clients are likely “shaking in their boots” and “sweating bullets,” have a sort of gleeful disapproval of the whole thing, and yet can’t stop making suggestive remarks: it’s a “juicy” story, Braun is “cozying up to feds,” has a “naughty list” that may be “exposed,” she’s going to tell “all of her dirty little secrets” (that one is used twice).  Of course, you could also just measure the hypocrisy by the on-site reporter’s self-satisfied laugh.

Most of the good stuff is in the first 40 seconds, the remainder is just embarrassingly bad reporting:

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Laura A., of Border Thinking on Migration, Trafficking and Commercial Sex, has an interesting post about the film Zinda LaashBollywood’s Norms for Dhandewalis that explores portrayals of sex workers in some Indian films.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Animals Awake, a Dutch organization for animals akin to PETA in the U.S., “takes a page from [their] playbook,” according to David at Adfreak.   This commercial, in which a stripper is brutally murdered in front of a live audience, is so shocking that my first I thought was that it was a parody. It’s not.

Major major major trigger warning:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/5323112[/vimeo]

The critique, of course, is that Animals Awake is contributing to an atmosphere in which violence against women is ubiquitous (see Jezebel, for example).  But I actually think that this commercial works in that we are (I hope) genuinely horrified by the murder at the end.  I don’t think it normalizes violence against women like so many other ads/media/products do (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for examples).

BUT it does normalize the connection between violence and sex.  There is absolutely no reason why the person murdered in this ad had to a stripper.  There is no reason to spend the first half of the commercial titillating us, only to have it suddenly turned into a horror show.  There’s absolutely no connection.  But because sex and violence are so frequently linked in the American imagination, it actually took me a few minutes of thinking about it to remember that.  And I’m kind of horrified that, in my mind, sex and violence go together like peas and carrots.  This ad only reinforces that connection.

Sorry I made you watch it.

More images of sexualized violence here, here, here, here, here, here, here here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Here’s another PSA, this one from the U.K., with exactly the same idea.

UPDATE: In the comments, jeffliveshere points out that the commercial is based on a pun:

I agree that the sex and violence connection is unnecessary–but, to be clear, there is wordplay involved–“stripping fish” is apparently a technical term for removing the guts of fish…

Okay, so maybe there isn’t “absolutely no connection.” Even so?

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.


Nadya L. sent in a video, embedded below, produced by a Christian anti-pornography initiative. It uses the logic that all women involved in sex work are “somebody’s daughter” and, thus, men should not consume pornography.

Ross Rosenberg at Coilhouse points out that the video erases the possibility that participating in the production of porn does not, inherently, ruin women foreverandever (and, thus, dads and moms should not necessarily be disappointed when their daughter participates in sex work). More provocatively, he asks:

[Why is] the idea of that the object of ones lustful desires is ‘somebody’s daughter’… a functional deterrent…[?]… Really, what is this video talking about here? Is it a serenade to the sanctity of our children’s innocence; the preciousness of their safety or merely the thinking that, if someone masturbates to images of my daughter, she has embarrassed me. If this was your daughter, what shame would it bring down upon you, her father? [Why would it] …be terrible for you and your family if it was discovered that your daughter was a pornstar or a stripper?

In my Power and Sexuality course, I discuss sex work and empowerment. Instead of essentializing both femininity and sex work and arguing that all sex work is inherently oppressive to women, I suggest that social conditions (such as patriarchy) and institutional features (such as pro- versus anti-unionization measures) shape the work environment of sex workers in positive and negative ways. Instead of asking: “Is sex work oppressive to women?” I ask: “What makes sex work more and less oppressive to women?” I think the latter leads to a much more interesting conversation.

For more posts trying to think through the topic of sex work, see here, here, here, here, and here.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Laura W. sent us a link to a review of sex education in the U.K. that featured a three minute video. The video is a clip from a 1917 film, called “Whatsoever a Man Soweth,” encouraging Canadian soldiers to refrain from having sex with prostitutes. It was important for states to keep their soldiers from hiring prostitutes because soldiers filled up the sick bay with sexually transmitted infections that, during World War I, were not easily cured with antibiotics. Watch it here.

Also in soldiers and STIs: “Bad” women as disease vectors.

Toban B. sent in a link to UkraineDate, a website that lets men find hot Ukrainian women. Two images:

picture-12

picture-2

Of course, the site could be targeting men in any part of the world. However, it seems likely that it aims at men in wealthier nations in the West, particularly western Europe, the U.S., and Canada. Incidentally, these are the same regions that are the source of the vast majority of male sex tourists. Immigration from the Ukraine to the U.S. has also increased in the past decade; Ukraine is now in the top 10 nations of origin for immigrants to the U.S., with nearly 23,000 immigrants in 2005. And here in Vegas, the number of women from the Ukraine and Russia found to have been trafficked into the country and forced into prostitution (as well as those who came willingly to work in a range of jobs) is increasing. That’s a bit of rambling, but the point is, women from the former Soviet Union are marketed to men in the West in a number of ways.

As Toban points out, the dating site plays on the exotic qualities often attributed to Ukrainian and Russian women. Toban says, “the Ukranian women are presented as sex objects — and in accordance with certain standards of sex and beauty.” Certainly the site makes it clear that men aren’t supposed to to be interested in these women because of their intellect, personalities, or anything other than their beauty.

It’s a good example of the way that certain nationalities, races, ethnic groups, etc., are exoticized and portrayed as particularly attractive and sexual. In some cases, as with Asian women, part of the attraction is the stereotype that they are submissive and undemanding. I’m not certain, but I don’t think that particular stereotype is applied to Ukrainian and Russian women–in fact, I’ve seen them portrayed as high-maintenance and materialistic…but worth it because they’re hot.

Thanks, Toban!

NEW! Elizabeth C. let us know about a protest against sex tourism in Ukraine, which included slogans such as “Ukraine is not a brothel.”

12015-1

They did so, however, by adopting PETA’s infamous tactic of using scantily-clad women, which may or may not have helped make their point.

Laura Agustin, author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets, and the Rescue Industry, asks us to be critical consumers of stories about sex trafficking, the moving of girls and women across national borders in order to force them into prostitution.  Without denying that sex trafficking occurs or suggesting that it is unproblematic, Agustin wants us to avoid completely erasing the possibility of women’s autonomy and self-determination.

About one news story on sex trafficking, she writes:

…[the] ‘undercover investigation’, one with live images, fails to prove its point about sex trafficking… reporters filmed men and women in a field, sometimes running, sometimes walking, sometimes talking together.

…I’m willing to believe that we’re looking at prostitution, maybe in an informal outdoor brothel. But what we’re shown cannot be called sex trafficking unless we hear from the women themselves whether they opted into this situation on any level at all. They aren’t in chains and no guns are pointed at them, although they might be coerced, frightened, loaded with debt or wishing they were anywhere else. But we don’t hear from them. I’m not blaming the reporters or police involved for not rushing up to ask them, but the fact is that their voices are absent.

There are lots of things we might find out about the fields near San Diego… [but] we don’t see evidence for the sex-trafficking story. Feeling titillated or disgusted ourselves does not prove anything about what we are looking at or about how the people actually involved felt.

Regarding a news clip, Agustin writes:

…a reporter dressed like a tourist strolls past women lined up on Singapore streets, commenting on their many nationalities and that ‘they seem to be doing it willingly’. But since he sees pimps everywhere he asks how we know whether they are victims of trafficking or not? His investigation consists of interviewing a single woman who… articulates clearly how her debt to travel turned out to be too big to pay off without selling sex. Then an embassy official says numbers of trafficked victims have gone up, without explaining what he means by ‘trafficked’ or how the embassy keeps track…

So here again, there could be bad stories, but we are shown no evidence of them. The women themselves, with the exception of one, are left in the background and treated like objects.

To recap, what Agustin is urging us to do is to refrain from excluding the possibility of women’s agency by definition. Why might a woman choose a dangerous, stigmatized, and likely unpleasant job? Well, many women enter prostitution “voluntarily” because of social structural conditions (e.g., they need to feed their children and prostitution is the most economically-rewarding work they can get). Assuming all women are forced by mean people, however, makes the social structural forces invisible. We don’t need mean pimps to force women into prostitution, our own social institutions do a pretty good job of it.

And, of course, we must also acknowledge the possibility that some women choose prostitution because they like the work. You might say, “Okay, fine, there may be some high-end prostitutions who like the work, but who could possibly like having sex with random guys for $20 in dirty bushes?” Well, if we decide that the fact that their job is shitty means that they are “coerced” in some way, we need to also ask about those people that “choose” other potentially shitty jobs like migrant farmwork, being a cashier, filing, working behind the counter at an airline (seriously, that must suck), factory work, and being a maid or janitor. There are lots of shitty jobs in the U.S. and world economy. Agustin simply wants us to give women involved in prostitution the same subject status as women and men doing other work.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.