Sex for Sale~Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry (4 page)

Why would self-esteem be high or increase among those working in the upper echelons? Psychological well-being is associated with a range of structural factors, including education, income, control over working conditions, relations with third parties, and client base. Income is a major source of self-esteem among call girls. While middle range call girls earn $200–$500 an hour, top-tier workers charge between $1000–$6000 an hour (or a session) and they are also lavished with fringe benefits, such as expensive gifts and paid travel to meet clients.57 Escort agency, brothel, and massage parlor employees make considerably less because a large share (30–50%) goes to the agency.

Another reason for an increase in job satisfaction is revealed by indoor workers who describe “feeling ‘sexy,’ ‘beautiful,’ and ‘powerful’ only after they had begun to engage in sexual labor and were receiving consistent praise from their clients.”58 In other words, in addition to the material rewards of high-end sex work, positive reinforcement and other good experiences may help enhance workers’ self-images.

At the same time, prostitutes of all types experience stigma from the wider society, as shown by opinion polls and by public condemnation during sex scandals involving public figures. This disapproval compels sex workers to engage in various normalization strategies, including: compartmentalizing their deviant work persona from their “real identity”; concealing their work
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SEX WORK: PARADIGMS AND POLICIES

from family and friends; distancing themselves from clients; using neutral or professional terms to describe their jobs (“working woman,” “provider”); and viewing their work as a valuable service (providing pleasure or sex therapy, comforting lonely men, keeping marriages intact).

The studies reviewed here and by other scholars provide strong evidence contradicting some popular myths and the central tenets of the oppression paradigm.59 While certain experiences are generic to prostitution (coping with stigma, managing client behavior, avoiding risks), the literature indicates that other work-related experiences, as well as the harms typically associated with prostitution, vary greatly. The prostitution market is
segmented
between the indoor and street sectors—marked by major differences in working conditions, risk of victimization, and job satisfaction and self-esteem.

Other Types of Sex Work

Some sex workers specialize in one type of work, but others transition between different sectors or work in two arenas simultaneously. Examples include strippers who meet clients outside the club for sex; porn stars who tour strip clubs where they are the “featured” entertainer and command much higher prices than local talent; dancers and porn stars, male and female, who advertise online for personal sexual encounters with their fans; and, as mentioned earlier, prostitutes who work in more than one venue.

The variation characteristic of prostitution is no less true in other types of sex work. Strip clubs and their dancers have been studied fairly thoroughly, largely because of easy access to the clubs.60 One finding is that club structure and norms are a strong predictor of workers’ job satisfaction and experiences with both customers and managers, with some clubs being highly exploitative and disempowering for dancers and others affording them substantial control over their working conditions. In other words, the social organization of a club shapes the degree to which workers are exploited by managers, DJs, bartenders, and bouncers, as well as the routine experiences they have with customers. One study distinguished three types of clubs—“hustle clubs” where dancers get little protection from management and have fairly stressful relations with other dancers (because of intense competition) and with customers (because managers instructed dancers to mislead and “hustle”

the men to extract money from them); “social clubs” that resemble the sociability of neighborhood bars and are marked by supportive relationships between the workers and friendships with many of the patrons; and “show clubs” that are more upscale, highly regulated by management, where a premium is placed on putting on a “good show,” and where dancers are taught
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to personify a “goddess” seeking adoration from and exercising power over male customers.61

Clubs vary in the amount of customer violations of dancers’ personal boundaries (such as uninvited touching and kissing, pulling off clothes), insults, and rejection. Over time, the accumulation of such experiences can deflate one’s self-esteem and result in job burnout.62 On the positive side, many dancers find the work exciting, validating, empowering, and lucrative.

Customers may lavish them with compliments, tips, and gifts, and dancers develop a genuine liking for at least some of their regulars.63 In terms of empowerment, one study reported that dancers “derive a sense of satisfaction at the power they felt they had over men” including manipulating men’s fantasies and the “thrill of the chase” in the pursuit of money when they engage in “strategic flirting” and perhaps lap dancing with individual audience members.64 At the same time, and like other sex workers, dancers often attempt to normalize their work by trumpeting stripping’s “therapeutic” and

“educational” effects on the audience.65

Few studies compare male and female strip clubs, but those that do suggest that female audiences tend to be more aggressive toward male dancers than male audiences in female strip clubs,66 and that female patrons attended clubs in groups as a bonding ritual or as part of a celebratory gathering, whereas male patrons are more likely to seek an individualized experience and are much more likely to be repeat customers.67 It also appears that male strippers experience less stigma than their female counterparts.68 Relations between customers and dancers in same-sex clubs have their own distinctive patterns, as indicated by a study of gay male clubs69 and by Katherine Frank and Michelle Carnes (Chapter 5) in their analysis of clubs featuring African-American female dancers and customers, where the atmosphere is one not only of sexual performance but also cultural bonding between the black women involved. Of course, in both gay and straight clubs alike, power struggles over personal boundaries are evident.70

Much of the literature on pornography is psychological, confined to laboratory experiments in which (usually male) subjects are exposed to images and then tested to see if exposure affects their attitudes toward women. Most of these studies find that the key variable is violent content, not sexual content, in increasing the viewer’s negative views of or aggressive disposition toward women. Nonviolent pornography, like other nonviolent images, either does not have such effects on viewers or has a weaker effect—depending on the study.71 The main pitfall of such experimental studies is their problematic external validity—that is, whether the findings in a lab are meaningful and can be extrapolated to the real world. Laboratory experiments are highly
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artificial conditions within which to watch and react to pornography; they are radically different from the private settings where viewers typically view porn; and the experimental subjects are typically male college students who may be unrepresentative of the larger population of real-life porn consumers. In light of these serious problems, it is surprising that so many lab experiments on pornography have been conducted.

Parallel studies examine whether pornography has effects on the real-world treatment of women. Such research examines (1) whether places with high availability of pornography (magazines, adult theaters, video rentals) have higher rates of sex crime than places where pornography is less available or (2) whether increased availability over time in one state or nation increases rates of sexual offenses. A comprehensive review of the literature concluded that macro-level associations between pornography and sexual aggression were dubious:

■

These studies are bedeviled by their inability to control for all potentially relevant influences on male behavior.

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Some studies find that an apparent correlation between pornography and sex crime disappears after other variables are included in the model.

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Other studies report that increased availability of pornography coincided with a
decline
in sexual offenses, precisely the opposite of what the oppression hypothesis predicts. And some countries with an abundance of porn, such as Japan, have low rates of victimization of women.72

Part of the explanation for these findings may be the fact that most pornography in videos and magazines is nonviolent, as documented in several content analyses.73 One study found that the most sexually explicit or hardcore videos contained the least violence and the most reciprocal, egalitarian behavior between the actors.74 If violence is rare in porn, it is unlikely to promote sexual violence: “In the absence of any actual element of coercion, viewers would not have any messages about sexual coercion to process and would not be expected to change any of their attitudes in this area.”75

The abundance of narrow, statistical “effects” studies skews the literature in one direction. Few researchers have investigated the deeper meanings of pornography in the real world—to men and women, consumers and nonconsumers. The neglect of actual consumers (as opposed to lab subjects) is remarkable in light of the sweeping claims that are often made about pornography’s impact on viewers. Still, a handful of studies have shown that both men and women decode and use sexually explicit materials in a wide variety of ways. Some women dislike the portrayal of women’s bodies in porn
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RONALD WEITZER

and fear that men might compare them unfavorably to porn models,76 whereas other women find pornography to be educational, entertaining, or stimulating.77 Some women who have little familiarity with pornography nevertheless hold very negative views of it.78 Likewise, men interpret porn in multiple ways: exposure reinforces callous or sexist views of women for some men, while others interpret it quite differently. A study of 150 men by David Loftus found that most of them experienced porn as being about fun, beauty, women’s pleasure, and female assertiveness and power. They did not like depictions of domination or aggression against women on “the rare occasions they see it in pornography, and most haven’t even seen any.”79 It is “important to male viewers that the women really do seem to be enjoying themselves, that they are utterly involved in the sex for their own pleasure too, and not just serving the interests of the male actors and onlookers.”80 They also recognized porn as a fantasy world quite different from the real world in terms of people’s behavior and appearance.81 Men with this orientation, who distinguish the fantasy world of porn from the real world, seem to contradict some popular assumptions about such men as well as laboratory studies that hypothesize a unilinear, stimulus–response pattern when one is exposed to pornography.

Surprisingly, in-depth research on the porn industry and its workers is almost nonexistent. This gap is partly filled by two unique chapters in this book, both of which go behind the scenes with ethnographic studies of actors and producers. Sharon Abbott (Chapter 2) interviewed male and female actors in heterosexual films, documenting both positive and negative aspects of their work experiences, their views of their work and their audiences, and how they manage stigma. Jill Bakehorn (Chapter 4) had inside access to another sector of the industry—pornography made by women for women. She finds that female producers are often motivated by loftier goals than their counterparts in the mainstream porn industry. Instead of just seeking to make money, many of these female artists are motivated by feminist objectives, sex worker activism, and a desire to create materials that are an alternative to conventional representations of heterosexual sexual relations. This sector of the industry is ignored by writers who view pornography as inherently objectifying and demeaning toward women, and Bakehorn shows how this genre challenges simplistic and monolithic characterizations of pornography.

Studies of male sex workers are growing, but much more research is needed.82 These studies point to some important differences in the ways male and female sex workers experience their work, but few of these studies are truly comparative—examining male and female workers in the same work tier and asking them identical questions. Juline Koken, David Bimbi, and Jeffrey Parsons’ study (Chapter 9) helps to fill this gap. Not only does it compare male
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and female workers but it also sheds additional light on the work experiences of independent escorts. Similarly, little is known about gay male pornography.83 Joe Thomas (Chapter 3) examines how gay male video porn has changed over time. Thomas also draws contrasts between gay male and straight pornography, specifically the radically different meanings of porn in gay and straight cultures. Pornography holds a fair amount of
esteem
within the gay community, but carries substantial
stigma
in the straight world.

Finally, little is known about telephone sex agencies and their employees.84

Kathleen Guidroz and Grant Rich (Chapter 6) show that telephone sex workers hold a mix of negative and positive impressions of their work. They are troubled by callers who appear to be misogynists or pedophiles but they also feel that the calls can be therapeutic, as in other lines of sex work. The operators believe that they educate male callers about female sexuality and that they help to deter those with perverse or violent tastes from acting on those fantasies; the workers see this as providing a valuable “community service.”

P O L I C I E S A N D C O N F L I C T S

Strip Clubs and Pornography

Strip clubs and adult video stores are governed by local ordinances in America, which means that what is permitted varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and over time. Some places have ordinances restricting the location of such establishments, stipulating where videos can be displayed in a store, or regulating strippers’ attire and contact with customers. Many cities and counties restrict sexually oriented businesses to nonresidential areas or prohibit them from being near schools, parks, churches, and residences.