Many critics who consider exploitation and violence to be inherent in the sale of sex point to the figure of the ‘pimp’, traditionally a man who closely controls the movements of street workers, taking their money and threatening them physically in exchange for protection services. Although this classic figure does exist in some times and places, he is unknown to most workers, while other kinds of intermediaries may be conventional (and are often women). Workers who give money to friends or lovers, whether they provide protection or not, widely repudiate the term ‘pimp’, asking how their relationships differ from others in which one partner gives money to the other.69 Of course, some of these relationships would be called dysfunctional or abusive by some psychologists, but so would many ordinary marriage relationships. ‘Pimps’ are imagined to be inherent to street work, but coercive intermediaries can be found throughout the sex industry – inevitably, given the lack of regulation of businesses. With the growing presence of migrant workers in Europe, the figure of the ‘trafficker’ has come to replace the ‘pimp’, with similar suppositions made about relationships between migrants and those who facilitate their employment. Certainly there is evidence that some people force migrants to work and take their money, but the ‘trafficker’ label tends to be pinned on an array of intermediaries who form part of migrants’ own networks.
‘Different’ Identities: Gender, Age, Ethnicity
Not only women sell sex. Activists who condemn ‘prostitution’ as patriarchal violence focus on women (and children) and usually imply that men who sell sex are intrinsically different and few in number. Certainly, the stereotypes concern women, and women are those overtly stigmatised and targeted for rescue. However, male workers abound; researchers and outreach workers estimate they exceed women in some places and times; and men have been called more stigmatised because their presence is not even acknowledged.70 Those seeking women in ‘prostitute’ uniform in the streets walk straight past soliciting men without seeing them. Transsexual, transgender, transvestite and intergender people are also abundant in the industry, the most well-known being those labelled men at birth and who are changing to, or express, a more feminised state. Some of these identify as women and some as transsexuals; some have had their genitals modified through surgery; others maintain their genitals while modifying the rest of their appearance. In the sex industry, gender issues are extremely complex and subtle.
Outside commentators may be misled by notions of ‘sexual orientation’. In non-commercial relations, people seek partners to fulfil their own desires, but in commercial relations, they may offer services to anyone. Labelling causes more confusion than enlightenment, as when men who sell sex are called by ambiguous terms like ‘male prostitutes’ or ‘masculine transsexuals’. Women who sell to men may identify as lesbians in their private life; men who sell to men may identify as heterosexuals; female-appearing unoperated transgenders may identify as homosexuals; transvestites may identify as heterosexuals and so on. Outsiders who insist on imposing set categories forget that there is gender identity, but also gender play and experimentation.
According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), any person under eighteen years of age who works is engaged in ‘child labour’, which is prohibited. The ILO, finding it difficult to advocate total elimination of child labour in the face of economic and cultural realities around the world, focuses on what it calls the worst forms of child labour, one of which is selling sex. Many activists in this cause prefer to speak of the ‘sexual exploitation of children’.71 Philippe Ariès describes the development of the west’s current construction of childhood as a long, innocent period needing protection,72 but this development did not happen everywhere in the world. When advocates attempt to impose this notion on other cultures, they may come into conflict both with societies that distinguish between pre- and post-pubescent youth, allowing the latter to have sex, wed and assume responsibilities, and with societies that routinely put all able children to work. Europeans who decry the presence of young-looking migrants selling sex, who at sixteen or seventeen may be considered adults in their own home cultures, say that they cannot have consented to what they are doing (even if they say they have).
Those who attempt to speak up for the rights of children and adolescents in this matter tend to be stridently condemned, and for this reason nearly everyone states at the beginning of any discussion that they oppose children selling sex. Nevertheless, things get complicated when children speak about their own activities and desires. Heather Montgomery points out that forcing children to accept that they are ‘prostitutes’ (or ‘exploited’ or ‘abused’ sexually) denies ‘the skillful way that they use what very small amount of control that they have’.73
There are no colour or ethnicity barriers per se to getting any sex industry jobs, and people who have travelled from small towns on other continents can be found working in sophisticated venues. To arrive there, they need the right contacts and skills. Monthly incomes like C= 5,000 allow migrants to repay debts quickly, and while not everyone makes so much, everyone knows someone who does. Money and ethnicity – or simply a foreign appearance – are intertwined in different ways according to local conditions. A report in the Economist revealed:
• A Latvian woman who worked in Riga in the bar of a luxury hotel for US$200 per service, for an average of US$5,000 a month.
• ‘Gypsies’ or Ukrainians who worked with truck drivers on the highway between Prague and Berlin for US$10 a service.
• A London call girl who specialised in investment bankers for £1,000 a night.
• Dozens of workers who charged DM50 (C= 25) per service in an eros centre in Kiel, Germany.
• Women native to the Gulf States who could earn US$2,000 per service with ‘aristocratic’ Arabs. Europeans charged less; Thai and Philippine women even less. Given the preference, there were Moroccans learning the local Gulf dialect in order to try to ‘pass’ for natives, while Russian women with ‘Middle Eastern’ features were studying Arabic.74
This list illustrates how the values assigned to human types are not fixed but change according to context (which may stimulate migrations). Where the industry is uncontrolled, migrants who have no permission to work at anything may, paradoxically, be employed in any job at all. In the case of transgenders, having ambiguous bodies allows them a clientele sometimes seeking exactly that kind of difference.
The Argument for Labour Rights and the Problem of Migration
Traditional legal proposals associated with the sex industry are called ‘systems to control prostitution’: abolitionism, prohibitionism, regulation, decriminalisation, tolerance and legalisation. These regimes, which focus on ‘prostitution’ and no other forms of commercial sex, neither recognise the work nor consider workers’ demands. Today, rights activists propose that sex work be recognised as an occupation, with labour rights for those who wish to do the jobs and help to get out for those who don’t.75 In October 2005, 120 workers from twenty-six European countries endorsed a Sex Workers in Europe Manifesto that affirms sex work as a service in the market economy76 and demands labour rights and the right to organise. Beyond that basic tenet, ideas are diverse:
If the status of prostitutes were raised by repealing the archaic laws surrounding it, street walking would be eliminated and prostitution could take place in properly controlled establishments, as girls could work in the safety of their own place or flat, with police consent and protection in pleasant, discreet, hygienic conditions which would be better for both the prostitute and the client.77
All forms of sex work are equally valid, including dancing, stripping, street or indoor prostitution, escorting, phone sex or performing in pornography.78
I would like to work with more protection ... less hypocrisy. I would be happy, for example, working in a window, with some kind of security.79
Workers differ about how to achieve acceptance of their rationalising proposals. Here, I limit myself to noting some effects of these propo
sals for migrants (many of whom attended the 2005 conference). Organising for rights requires assuming, if only strategically, a professional identity (‘stripper’,‘prostitute’,‘sex worker’). Many people who dislike or despise selling sex, or who see it as a temporary means to pay off debts, are unwilling to claim such an identity. Some are afraid of coming out to families:
The greatest fear you have is that your family will find out ... That’s why we watch out for ourselves, we don’t trust anyone and avoid letting anyone from our country recognise us. There have been cases where they end up blackmailing you: ‘If you don’t pay – I’ll tell!’ (Latin American woman in Europe)80
I would never publicly support a political struggle for prostitutes’ rights. I wouldn’t do it because it would destroy my discretion. No one in my family knows that I work in this. (Colombian woman in Spain)81
Some workers feel they perform an art, a therapy or a rite and welcome calling themselves sex workers. Others feel selling sex is analogous to typing or running a machine and see benefits from being called sex workers. But many, including migrants, even when they do not want to stop selling sex, don’t think of themselves that way.
God has to understand that what I do is out of necessity. I know I am doing something bad and that makes me feel bad, but I need the money.82
European sex workers focused on normalising their own positions sometimes accuse migrants of lowering the value of services by charging less, behaving less professionally and muddling the claim that sex workers are upstanding and autonomous through their involvement in illegal activities, perhaps even ‘trafficking’. The interests of migrants who have no right to work and are concentrating on accumulating as much money as they can as quickly as possible may conflict with the interests of Europeans who want to legitimise the industry. Since the most important fact conditioning migrants’ lives is having or not having residence and work permits, they often feel that proposals about sex worker rights are irrelevant to themselves.
Laws in both Germany and the Netherlands, where some sex businesses are legal, prohibit the granting of work permits to non-EU citizens in this sector.83 Migrants who sell sex may well not have permission to work at any job, may be using false documents, may be working while on tourist visas or may have permission to work at a specific other job. Those who want to support migrants should not forget that most knew they would be travelling and earning money illegally, which neither calling them victims nor normalising sex work can overcome. Given their irregular status and vulnerability to police harassment and deportation, as well as the stigma attached to sex work, most are loath to draw attention to themselves. Many lead an itinerant lifestyle, do not join groups (in some countries they are forbidden from doing so) or feel no interest in politics. Associations of legal migrants, overwhelmingly dominated by men, have not been eager to espouse the cause of those who sell sex.
On the other hand, migrants who do regularise their situations may become interested in normalisation later on.
No one brought me or deceived me and I never had bad experiences ... I take care of myself, I have a private insurance policy and Social Security. My work life has been very tranquil, in flats ... I’m not proud of what I do but I do it as a job. It’s the fastest way to make money. (Colombian woman in Spain)84
It makes me laugh when they think that I am not an honest woman because I do this job. Of course, as a job it’s ugly, and I don’t understand why in Italy they don’t let us do it in organised places; I don’t understand what is bad about selling love for money ... With this job I have made it possible for all my brothers to study and I have supported my mother, so I am proud of being a prostitute. (Nigerian woman in Italy)85
I put an advert in the newspaper with my telephone, they call, I tell them the price ... I don’t have to share the money with anyone ... I have no schedule, I work when I want to. I work only in the daytime, at nine or ten at night I turn off the telephone ... because the night is for my son. (Colombian woman in Spain)86
We should work with the media so they don’t view this in such a drastic way. (migrant in Spain)87
The single in-depth, large-scale research carried out on the sex industry concluded that workers’ situations can only be improved if governments include businesses in their formal accounting systems.88 Under this plan, states would tax and license establishments, which would then be required to comply with normal workplace regulations and grant benefits and rights to employees. This proposal bypasses rhetorical and moralistic arguments about whether selling sex is work or exploitation and proceeds to a pragmatic solution.
I frame the three kinds of services considered in this chapter together – domestic, caring and sex – because they are the ones Europeans are willing to pay migrants to do in large numbers. I do not say they comprise a category of life or work or that they should be seen as somehow the same. Instead, I am interested in how the demand for people to do these jobs constitutes a real migratory ‘pull factor’ towards Europe, and how seemingly progressive European discourses fail to address adequately the European context of these migrations, in which families, gender relations, sexualities, consumer attitudes and ideas about acceptable work are changing.
The Demand for Services
Western societies have long employed people outside the family to help with housework and home nursing, and sex has been paid for outside the home as far back as historians can go. So why do these jobs continue in feudal conditions when progress toward rationalisation characterises other work? To understand this, I consider contemporary ideas about the family, sex and consumption.
In parts of Europe, middle- and upper-class families still prefer to hire live-in maids, to be available from morning to night to perform a wide range of tasks, some of them quite intimate. Sometimes, this is a holdover from the past, when a belief in social hierarchy was conventional, and families commonly decided to forgo intimacy in exchange for having constantly available servants.89 On the other hand, all societies in which both partners or spouses leave the house to work stimulate the bringing-in of outsiders to care for those left at home (unless states are able to provide unlimited services to their citizens). As extended families are reduced to their nuclei, extra aunts and grandmothers are no longer available to take on these tasks, and daughters now expect to educate themselves for work outside the home.
Gender politics is also changing the shape of the nuclear family or committed couple, with the movement toward equity seen most obviously in women’s entry into labour markets once closed to them. They used to be
in charge of children, elderly, and the ill; maintaining personal relationships; offering emotional support, personal attention, and listening; embodying (or so it was understood) sexuality ... As women move increasingly into the world of paid work, many of these traditional intimate tasks are being performed in relationships that include the explicit movement of money. Paid child care, nursing homes for the elderly, talk therapy and phone sex are just a few examples.90
Yet while women have moved into the so-called public sphere, men have moved much less into the private. So if demand remains steady for cleanliness and order inside the house, either women must do double labour or someone must be hired to come in. Equal gender relations between both parties in western couples therefore may rely on the employment of a third person.
Traditionally, the family was assumed to be the site of love and commitment, and sex to be properly located only there:
In the family history literature, family usually means a grouping of kinsfolk ... who should be living together inside of households. I want to argue that we need to focus on the ‘should’ ... to reveal a key structure crucial for the understanding of ideology ... Because people accept the meaningfulness of family, they enter into relations of production, reproduction, and consumption with one another ...91
Nowadays, more kinds of relationships are accepted as meaningful, or ‘familial’.92 Although these changes are not universal and vary by gener
ation, class and ethnicity, it is fair to say that in Europe many concepts of family now extend beyond the walls of houses (living together not required) and increasingly do not include blood or formalised relationships. Some feel that ‘communities’ acting through social movements have more symbolic meaning than families.93 Families are not impermeable, and loving a wife or husband does not impede having sex with, or loving, other people.94
The loosening up of important relationships may help explain some of the demand for sexual services. Anthony Giddens calls ‘pure’ those relationships claiming to be sexually and emotionally free and equal, supposedly formed without interests, characterised by a sexuality freed from reproduction and continuing only as long as both people involved feel satisfied.95 Discourses of gender equality and individuality encourage heterosexuals to look for relationships that suit their own personal emotional needs,96 and discourses of nonheterosexuality emphasise the right to form families and unions.Yet, for many people, the romantic ideal of finding the perfect mate has not been achieved, or is not sought, or has failed, but they still want intimacy and sex. In this context, paying for it occasionally looks less significant. Moreover, research reveals that commercial relationships usually considered superficial may involve warm emotions as well as fantasies and lies.97
The ideal of sexual and gender ‘liberation’ has been active in the west for four decades, evolving and proliferating to include women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, trans, the disabled, and so on. The liberation concept, originating with Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich and other theorists of the 1960s, follows the hydraulic model of drives and repressions that must be set free;98 accordingly, all persons have the right to discover themselves both physically and emotionally. The link made between personal identity and sex and the construction of a new concept, sexuality, was a central theme of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality.99 The paradoxes of the search for sexual identity – its possibilities for limiting as well as expanding personal potential – have been the subject of much theorising since then, but the attainment of self-knowledge continues to be highly valued. For R. W. Connell, the individual’s personal narrative makes the sexual persona.100 For Jeffrey Weeks,
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