’FREE CHOICE’ PROSTITUTION
The Anatomy of ’Free Choice’
Prostitution
Julia O’Connell Davidson“
This paper draws on an ethnographic study of a self-employed prostitute, her receptionists
and her clients. It describes the prostitute’s business and her working life, and considers the
dynamics of power and control within the prostitute-client exchange. The paper argues that
issues of control and consent in prostitution are more complex than many current feminist
analyses suggest.
P rostitution has proved to be a divisive
issue amongst feminists (see McIntosh
1994).For those radical feminists who hold all
heterosexual intercourse to be an expression
of patriarchal power (for example, Dworkin
1987; MacKinnon 1984; Jeffreys 1990), prosti-
tution is perhaps the purest expression of
male domination. The client secures direct
control over the prostitute and such authors
further contend that ’Free prostitution does
not exist ... prostitution of women [is] always
by force ... it is a violation of human rights
and an outrage to the dignity of women‘
(Barry 1991 quoted in Van der Gaag 1994,
p. 6). Other academics and feminists, especi-
ally those involved in campaigns around
prostitution, find the radical feminist analysis
over-simplistic. They point out that prosti-
tution is not a unitary phenomenon - the
term encompasses an enormously diverse
range of activities performed under very dif-
ferent terms and conditions - and argue that
a firm distinction must be made between ’free
choice’ prostitution by adults and all forms of
forced, unfree and child prostitution (see
Brussa 1991; Delacoste and Alexander 1988;
Mr A. de Graaf Foundation 1994).Liberals in
this ‘sex work’ camp view ’free choice’
prostitution as a form of work like any other.
It is the ’mutually voluntary exchange of
sexual services for money or other con-
sideration’ (Coyote 1988, p. 290). Some even
claim that ’implicit in the demand that
women have control over their own bodies is
that they also have the right to sell their
sexual services’ and that because of her
financial and sexual autonomy, the ‘whore is
dangerously free’ (Roberts 1992, p. 355).
Freedom, however, ’like love and beauty,
is ... better experienced than defined‘
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1995,108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1 JF, UK and
238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
1
(Patterson 1991, p. l), and this paper is
concerned with the nature of the ‘free choice‘
prostitute’s freedom. Drawing on an ethno-
graphic study of a prostitute (who will be
referred to as Desiree), her receptionists and
her clients,’ it begins by examining the
problems which confront people who wish to
make a living as self-employed prostitutes,
then moves on to describe the dynamics of
power and control within the prostitute-client
exchange. The aim is to show that issues of
control and consent in prostitution are rather
more complex than either the radical feminist
or the liberal ‘sex work‘ model suggest.
The self-employed prostitute’s
business
Desiree is an extremely independent and able
businesswoman who reaps substantial finan-
cial rewards from self-employed prostitution,
regularly turning over between €1,000 and
€2,000 per week. After only four years in the
business full time, she has saved around
€30,000 in cash. She also now owns two
properties, a BMW and another small
business. Obviously, just as self-employment
in general is not a homogeneous phenom-
enon (Casey and Creigh 1988), neither is self-
employed prostitution, and Desiree is hardly
likely to be representative of all self-
employed prostitutes. However, her experi-
ence may be illuminating both theoretically
and empirically precisely because it is
atvuical. On the one hand, it would be unfair * Address fox
t d ;valuate the claim that prostitutes are
’dangerously free’ against empirical data on Julia
Department of sociology,
OConnell Davidson,
more vulnerable and less financially University of Leicester,
successful sex workers. On the other, an Leicester ~ E ~IR H UK. ,
Volume 2 Number 2 January 1995
2 GENDER, WORK A N D ORGANlZATlON
examination of how Desiree operates usefully
highlights the key problems that confront
the self-employed prostitute as a small
business-person, and shows how, if success is
measured purely in terms of avoiding prose-
cution and reaping financial rewards, they
can be resolved.
The legnl franzework
The legal framework regulating the sale of
sexual services differs from that which
governs the sale of other personal services
such as hair-dressing, chiropody or coun-
selling. In Britain, ’contracting to provide sex
for money is not in itself unlawful. The law is
invoked only to criminalize concomitant
activity’ (Kennedy 1993, p. 145). It is against
the law for a ’common prostitute’ to loiter or
solicit in the street, it is illegal to solicit
custom by advertisement, it is against the law
to run a ’house of ill-repute’ or to organize
the work of prostitutes and it is illegal to
financially or materially benefit from ’im-
moral earnings’.
For an individual to work as a self-
employed prostitute and simultaneously
avoid falling foul of the law therefore requires
some capital and a good deal of ingenuity.
Without any capital, an independent sex
worker will either have to engage in street
prostitution (and nearly 9,000 women were
convicted for loitering or soliciting in 1988,
see Lopez Jones, 1990, p. 659) or work from
rented premises and hope that the landlord,
who could be prosecuted for living off
immoral earnings, does not find out. A sex
worker attempting to work from a premises
privately owned by a friend or spouse would
be exposing them to the same risk. The law
thus serves to reinforce the vulnerability of
the already disadvantaged sex worker. It is
those who are not owner-occupiers that are
most likely to end up in court, where prosti-
tutes were fined some €500,000 in 1990
(Furedi 1992).More disturbing still, in Britain
as in the USA, the police and courts often take
possession of condoms as evidence that a
woman is loitering for prostitution (Furedi
1992; Lockett 1988), so that those who are
forced to work from the streets are actually at
greater risk of prosecution when they practice
safer sex. The owner-occupier prostitute has
no such disincentive to protect herself.
When Desiree first started working as a
prostitute, she did so from a flat which she
herself owned. In fact, it was because she was
experiencing problems meeting her mortgage
repayments that she decided to use prosti-
tution as a means of topping up her income
from her regular employment (extremely
Volume 2 Number 1 January 1995
monotonous clerical work). It proved so
lucrative financially that she was able to
sell her flat and buy a house in a residential
area of a Midlands town from which she
has developed what is, effectively, a small
business selling sexual services.
Marketing
Although sex workers like Desiree attract a
certain amount of custom by word of mouth,
they need to advertise their business in order
to attract custom. However, laws on soliciting
make marketing sexual services more diffi-
cult than marketing other personal services.
Again, money and/or credit helps the self-
employed sex worker to negotiate these legal
restrictions. Installing a telephone is abso-
lutely vital, and it is then best to advertise the
telephone number under ‘Massage’ in the
classified section of newspapers and in
‘contact magazines’ which can be purchased
in sex shops. A cheaper alternative is to leave
cards in phone boxes, but British Telecom (a
company whose righteous zeal is curiously
absent when it comes to making profit from
0898 sex lines such as ‘Bent over Sir’s Desk
and ‘Black Girl wants to be used for a quickie
then hang up on her’) has recently taken to
sending letters to prostitutes threatening to
block their incoming calls if they do not
remove their cards (Furedi 1992; Kennedy
1993).
Since sex workers are prevented by law
from stating the nature or price of the ser-
vices they offer, advertising this form of
prostitution does not and cannot centre on ex-
tending ’product’ awareness, but rests funda-
mentally on attracting the custom of men
with existing knowledge (if not experience) of
the service. To ensure a steady flow of
custom, it is also essential to advertise daily
Though the cost of this type of marketing
cannot be described as high, it is not insignifi-
cant. Money has to be put up front for the
advertising, and also, because of its efficacy in
terms of attracting interest, advertising in a
national tabloid makes it almost essential to
hire the services of a receptionist to deal with
the phone calls it generates-upwards of
seventy a day in Desiree’s case. Desiree
spends around €100 per week on advertising,
and it costs her a further €150 to pay her
receptionists.
Translating enquiries into business
transactions
A large proportion of the responses to
advertisements for sexual services are simply
0Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1995
‘FREE CHOICE’ PROSTITUTION
‘wank calls’. There are vast numbers of men
for whom the act of making a fictitious
appointment with a prostitute serves the
function of a masturbatory fantasy. This is a
problem for both heterosexual and homo-
sexual sex workers (see West 1992, p. 229).
Desiree estimates that of the enquires she
receives, less than 10% actually translate into
custom. This is not just because so many
phone calls are solely for masturbatory
purposes, but also because many men make
numerous preparatory calls. Perhaps arrang-
ing to visit a prostitute is a source of anxiety,
perhaps the preparation is itself a source of
sexual pleasure to Desiree’s clients just as
much as it is to those men who make use of
street prostitutes (see Hoigard and Finstad
1992), but either way, there are many men
who phone to enquire several times and book
two or three ‘definite’ appointments before
actually arriving on the door step. The fact
that so many appointments are broken makes
it extremely difficult to control and manage
the throughput of customers, and this prob-
lem is considered in the following section.
Dealing with telephone enquiries is also
complicated by legal constraints on prosti-
tution. It is illegal to openly state the nature of
the services that are on offer on the phone -
any mention of their sexual nature could be
construed as solicitation. The prostitute or
receptionist thus treads a difficult line
between attracting custom and attracting
unwanted legal attention. The way in which
an enquiry is dealt with on the phone is
probably the most critical factor affecting
whether or not a genuinely interested caller
ever actually arrives at the front door. But
even after a man has entered the building,
certain conditions need to be met in order to
ensure that a business transaction takes place.
He may simply leave if he does not care for
the look of the premises or of the prostitute,
or if he is kept waiting too long. This,
combined with the problems of controlling
the throughput of customers, presents the
prostitute with some very real organizational
difficulties.
Managing throughput
One of the most difficult aspects of the
prostitute’s business is that the flow of
custom (and therefore of cash) is so erratic.
Desiree has days when only one or two men
turn up and others when clients seemingly
arrive in droves. A great deal of her time is
spent sitting or pacing around in a state of
restless boredom. She can chat to the
receptionist, drink cups of coffee, endlessly
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1995
3
reapply her make-up, but she must keep
herself psychically prepared for work and
cannot settle to anything else, as a punter
might knock on the door at any moment.
The fact that around 90% of men break the
appointments they make further contributes
to this inability to control or reliably predict
demand. If a man phones and asks for a
4 o’clock appointment, Desiree can hardly
refuse on the grounds that someone else has
already booked in for that time since it is
highly likely that neither will arrive. Desiree
will therefore make appointments with any
number of men for the same time, on the
basis that the chances of them arriving
simultaneously are low, and this holds true as
a general rule. However, sometimes two or
three men (more on occasion) do turn up
during the same hour, and Desiree does not
want to lose their custom. Again, this
underlines the importance of employing a
receptionist. If Desiree is busy with a client,
the receptionist can answer the door and
invite the next customer in. She then tries to
keep him there until Desiree is ready to deal
with him by reassuring him that he will not
have to wait long, offering him coffee and
asking whether he would like to watch a
video while he waits.
Another approach to the problem of
controlling and predicting demand is to try to
build up a regular clientele. ’Regulars’
generally do keep the appointments they
make and they provide a more steady and
reliable stream of income. Desiree therefore
goes to some lengths to keep a regular’s
custom, investing in new outfits or equip-
ment and planning novel activities to sustain
their interest and loyalty. Her ideal would be
to service a small number of high paying
regulars each day, since this would obviate
the problems of managing throughput which
have just been outlined. This ambition is
probably unrealistic, but Desiree does man-
age to achieve some degree of control over
the nature and volume of demand through
her pricing system, skills and specialisms.
Pricing system and specialisms
Because Desiree wishes to run her business
legally, she cannot expand her income by
employing other sex workers. It is not
feasible, therefore, to pursue a low-price
high-volume strategy. There are physical
limits to the volume of demand she can hope
to accommodate by herself (though these are
more elastic than it might be assumed -
domination clients are sometimes left tied up
Volume 2 Number 1 Ianuary 1995
4 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION
whilst Desiree serLrices another client in
another room), and since it is her own sexual
labour rather than an employee’s which is
being exploited, she has an interest in
supplying as little of it as possible for as much
money as possible. Her pricing policy
represents a method of controlling both the
volume and nature of demand. Where local
street prostitutes charge between f20 and €25
for penetrative sex, and men using women
employed by massage parlours will pay
about f35 for the same service, Desiree’s rate
is f70. Prices for hand, breast and oral ’relief’
are also significantly higher from self-
employed prostitutes like Desiree.
It seems likely that the market for hetero-
sexual sexual services, like that for homo-
sexual prostitution (see West 1992) is
segmented, with street workers catering
primarily to men who want cheap ’quickies’
(perhaps also the excitement of doing some-
thing dangerous and seamy), and women like
Desiree catering to men who are better off
and/or more fearful and inexperienced, as
well as to men who have more diverse and
demanding requirements in terms of skill,
equipment and props. Though the latter
group is more demanding in terms of psychic
energy, such men are willing to pay high
prices (upwards of €80) and often ask for
services which afford Desiree some personal
satisfaction (to be beaten or verbally humil-
iated, for example). Desiree has a range of
specialist equipment and garments, has read
widely and devoted a great deal of thought to
developing her skills as a dominatrix, and
financially, this has proved a worthwhile
investment.
Coping nzedznnisn~s
Prostitution is extraordinarily stressful work.
As will be seen below, it calls for emotional
labour of a type and on a scale which is
probably unparalleled in any other job.
Because the flow of work is erratic and
unpredictable, the self-employed prostitute
must keep herself in a constant state of
readiness for tasks that are emotionally
demanding and intrusive, many of which she
personally will find repulsive. Furthermore,
prostitution carries with it a social stigma SO
great that a woman who makes her living in
this way is deemed unworthy even of proper
protection from murder, let alone rape,
physical violence or robbery. As Kennedy
(1993, p. 149) observes: ’So entrenched is the
idea that prostitutes have it coming to them
that, in order to allay speculations and
emphasise the seriousness of the risk to real
women, the police often feel obliged to
Volzrnzr 2 Nuinbrr 1 Imiuary 1995
stipulate that female victims are not pros-
titutes.‘
Hoigard and Finstad (1992, p. 64) elaborate
on the contention that prostitutes employ
defence mechanisms which are designed to
create ‘a clearly defined split between the
“private” and the ”public” self’. They outline
the defence strategies used by street-working
prostitutes and conclude that all serve the
same basic purpose ’non-participation, main-
tenance of distance, protection against the
invasion of the self’ (1992, p. 74). Desiree’s
coping strategies are likewise directed pri-
marily towards this end. She keeps her eyes
closed during penetrative sex, keeps towels,
sheets and everything used by clients
separate from her own personal belongings,
and does a certain amount of ritualistic house
cleaning. She has recently begun to advertise
more specifically as a dominatrix. This can
be seen as a defence strategy as well as a
business move, since, when domination
clients touch her in ways she particularly
dislikes, her role as Mistress allows her to hit
them and command them to stop. Desiree
does have other, less positive methods of
coping, neither of which are distinctive to
prostitutes. Like many people in stressful
jobs, she sometimes uses alcohol and/or
other stimulants and her consciousness of the
stigma attaching to her work leads her to
limit her social life. However, prostitution is
not the only form of work which has a
negative impact on workers’ social lives.
Above all else, Desiree relies upon humour
as a means of distancing herself from the
clients, the work and the stigma. When her
favourite receptionist is there, an almost
continual flow of extremely funny one liners
are exchanged between them, and their
jokes savagely ridicule the clients and the
hypocrisy of contemporary social attitudes
towards women, sex and prostitution. Desiree
also copes with boredom by playing practical
jokes over the telephone and by devising
comic schemes for money making or enter-
tainment. This defence mechanism is absent
from Hoigard and Finstad’s (1992) list,
perhaps because it is more difficult for street
workers to make use of such strategies.
Health and sufety issues
In terms of safety, it is probably the case that
a self-employed sex worker like Desiree is at
less risk than a street-working prostitute who
may have to get into the client’s vehicle or
provide services in a secluded, outside
location, which by definition gives her less
control over the situation. In West’s (1992)
study of male prostitutes, rent boys were
0Basil Blackwell I.td. 1995
‘FREE CHOICE’ PROSTlTUTION
more likely to report having suffered assault
than were self-employed masseurs. Esti-
mating the safety risks associated with prosti-
tution is difficult and there are certainly other
women workers who are equally if not more
vulnerable to assault, such as nurses and
police officers. One thing that is certain,
however, is that prostitutes cannot rely on
the protection of the law or law enforce-
ment agents to the same extent as women in
other occupations (see Alexander 1988;
Kennedy 1993). Desiree takes a number of
precautions to protect herself from assault
and robbery by clients. The presence of a
receptionist who is aware of the risks and
ready to intervene if necessary is one of them.
She tries to prevent theft by making sure that
waiting clients are not left alone downstairs,
and in the past four years, she has been
affected by nothing more serious than a few
scuffles and the theft of a couple of videos
and magazines.
In terms of the risk of sexually transmitted
disease, Desiree is probably less vulnerable
than either street workers or employed sex
workers, and certainly less vulnerable than
most women who are sexually active non-
commercially. Her own reading of the
literature on AIDS and on safer sex, as well as
advice sought from the Terrence Higgins
Trust has led her to take the following
precautions. With clients, she refuses to
receive anal penetration with or without a
condom, she refuses to fellate or to allow
vaginal penetration unless the man wears a
condom, she keeps a cap in permanently, she
wears protective gloves to perform anal
stimulation. Again, it should be reiterated
that her relative security is connected to her
relatively advantaged financial position.
Some clients offer huge sums of money for
unprotected sex. She earns enough to make it
easy to turn down such offers and she is not
at risk of being stopped, searched and
charged by the police because she takes steps
to protect herself.
Thus far it has been shown that, unlike a
majority of workers, Desiree has chosen,
designed and owns the physical environment
she works in. She plans and controls all
aspects of her business; where and how to
advertise, who to employ and what tasks to
assign to them, the pricing system, what
services are and are not on offer, the hours
and days of business. It has also been
observed that Desiree manages to secure sub-
stantial financial rewards from her work. On
top of this, as the following section shows,
Desiree exercises a great deal of control over
the details of transactions with individual
clients.
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1995
5
Power and control within the
prostitute-client exchange
It would be not only over-simplistic but
wrong to describe Desiree as powerless in
relation to the individual client. To begin
with, it is important to recognize that Desiree
has far more experience of prostitute-client
encounters than does the average punter.
Many clients are fearful and guilty about
visiting a prostitute. The man with very little
experience of buying sexual services is
diffident and uncertain when he phones to
book an appointment, and when he arrives,
he approaches the house with trepidation,
looking over his shoulder, keeping his head
down. He knocks on the front door, unsure
what to expect. As one client put it ‘You don’t
know the set up, you don’t know who’ll be
behind the door. It might be a con. You might
get robbed or anything’.
Providing Desiree is not already with a
client, she unchains and opens the door
herself, standing half hidden behind the door,
wearing a low cut shirt, a barely visible lycra
skirt, suspenders, stockings and very high
heeled shoes. As soon as the man steps over
the threshold, she shuts the door behind him,
beams at him ‘Hi, how are you? Would you
like to come up?’ and walks him up the stairs
to the massage room. The whole house has a
sterile feel to it. It is decorated entirely in pink
and grey, scrupulously clean and neat, like a
fashionable private dentist’s surgery, and
nowhere is this more the case than in the
massage room. This is a small room with a
tiled floor, a trolley that is suggestive of a
medical setting with its stock of oils, creams,
surgical gloves, tissues and condoms, and a
couch of black plastic and tubular steel,
covered by a paper sheet of the type used by
doctors and dentists. Here, Desiree tells the
client to take off or loosen his clothes and lie
down, whereupon she gives him a brief and
spurious massage. During this, the more
confident or experienced client will generally
tell her the kind of services he is interested in
(often in a somewhat coded form). But with
the inexperienced client, it is Desiree who has
to lead the conversation to discover whether
he wants hand relief or penetrative sex and so
on. If the client wants penetrative sex, Desiree
leads him from the massage room to another
room which is similarly impersonal in
ambience, but equipped with a double bed. A
range of uniforms and outfits hang in view of
the client, as do a selection of whips, crops,
restraints and chains, so that he can see what
is on offer and ask for any ’extras’he happens
to fancy. Many clients rely on Desiree to script
the encounter and she can get nervous and
Volume 2 Number 1 January 2995
6 GENDER, WORK A N D ORGANIZATION
inexperienced men in and out of the house in
fifteen minutes flat. But even when dealing
with punters who regularly visit prostitutes,
who are confident and who know exactly
what they want, Desiree’s far greater sexual
skill and knowledge allows her to exert
control over how much of her sexual labour
she provides in exchange for a set fee. She
knows, for example, that most clients become
extremely aroused by the site of her mastur-
bating with a vibrator, and they will come to
orgasm during penetrative sex far quicker
having watched her do so beforehand. She
also spends a great deal of time doing
exercises which strengthen her pelvic floor
muscles, so that she can, as she puts it ’milk’
the client. She knows the best position from
which to bring a man with erectile problems
to orgasm, she knows that many men come
more quickly if they can admire themselves
in the mirror as they perform their manly
feats.
In short, Desiree is highly skilled at getting
clients to come (and therefore to go) very
speedily. Though the receptionists tell
prospective customers over the phone that
the €70 fee for a ’full personal service’ entitles
them to an hour of her time, and though
many men fondly imagine themselves to be
such studs that an hour will not suffice, in
practice it is rare for any non-domination
client to stay more than half an hour, and that
includes time spent in the massage room,
showering and getting dressed.
Desiree also dictates the limits and terms of
the exchange. She will not perform acts that
she believes endanger her own health, she
will not agree to practices which she finds too
repulsive (like giving enemas), too intimate
(like kissing) or too hostile (like ejaculating in
her face). If, having asked for hand relief, the
client decides half way through that he would
also like penetrative sex, Desiree will charge
him for both. A client who asks for another go
after coming to orgasm very quickly will
either be turned down flat (if other punters
are waiting) or charged for two ‘full services’.
And while some clients may feel discon-
tented, even grumble, it is important to
recognize the fact that most clients actually
feel too uncertain and vulnerable to insist or
to refuse to pay. They do not know who else
is in the building and are often fearful of
blackmail or embarrassment.
Certainly, Desiree does not see herself as
powerless in relation to individual clients.
She even describes herself as ’exploiting‘ the
weaknesses and ’perversions’ of those clients
who wish to be dominated by her sexually,
and almost by definition, there is a level at
which such clients surrender themselves to
Volume 2 Number 2 /anus y 1995
Desiree’s control. One man recently arrived
asking to be bound and gagged, but no
sooner had Desiree trussed him up than
another punter arrived, and another, and
another. Desiree finally left the domination
client tied up in her bedroom for two hours
whilst she consecutively serviced four other
men in another room. In another sense, how-
ever, domination clients could be said to exer-
cise control by relinquishing it (see Stoller
1991), and they certainly seem to exact more
for their money than do straight clients.
Indeed, it is when we turn to the question of
what exactly is being purchased by the client
and thus at what exactly is being commodi-
fied by the prostitute, that issues of power
and control begin to look rather different.
What do clients buy?
Since radical feminists tend to assume that all
heterosexual activity is an expression of
patriarchal domination, they argue that in
buying the use of woman’s body, men secure
an opportunity to exercise their patriarchal
rights of access to women and so to positively
affirm their masculine identity. Any sexual
pleasure they may derive from the encounter
is dismissed as irrelevant or secondary to this
end. The demand for masochistic pleasures
deriving from ‘bondage and discipline’ ob-
viously generates problems for feminists
who insist that male sexuality necessarily
involves mastery of a subordinate woman,
and Pateman attempts to get around this
problem by denying that the commercial acts
of a dominatrix can ’appropriately be called
prostitution’ (Patemen 1988, p. 199). The
client’s desire for sensual pleasure should not
be dismissed so lightly, and to define prosti-
tution as involving only those activities
which constitute or are associated with ‘the
sex act’ in order to sustain the argument that
’the institution or prostitution ensures that
men can buy ‘the sex act‘ and so exercise their
patriarchal right’ (Patemen 1988, p. 199) is so
transparently tautological as to be dis-
ingenuous. However, having insisted that
clients are typically paying for some kind of
sexual pleasure that results from the
prostitute’s physical labour (in whatever
form), it is important to recognize that this is
not all that they are paying for.
The client also pays to step outside the
complex web of rules, meanings, obligations
and conventions which govern non-
commercial sexuality. No punter is too old or
too ugly, no punter’s penis is too small or too
flaccid. No desire is too ’perverse’, too
insulting or too disgusting to be confessed to
0Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1995
‘FREE CHOICE’ PROSTlTUTlON
a prostitute (although, of course, some re-
quests are refused). In this sense, clients are
often better described as escaping from the
constraints and contradictions of masculinity
and/or the social conventions governing
sexuality than characterized as affirming
‘contemporary expressions of masculine
sexuality’ (Pateman 1988, p. 199).
Clearly, escape will mean different things
to different men. Sex with a prostitute is sex
without commitment, but it does not follow
from this that prostitutes simply provide
’a hole to fuck’, to use Dworkin’s terminol-
ogy. Though some men desire uncommitted
sexual encounters that are nasty, brutish and
short, others have very different fantasies.
The common thread is that Desiree must
become whatever the client wants her to be -
variously nothing but a cunt, their own
beloved paramour, the firm Mistress waiting
to discipline them, the ’working girl’ who
has never been fucked by a real man before,
even their lesbian lover. Indeed, the pros-
titute’s skill and art lies in her ability to
completely conceal all genuine feelings,
beliefs, desires, preferences and personality
(in short, her self) and appear as nothing
more than a living embodiment of the client’s
fantasies. As Desiree puts it, ’I’m just a role, a
fantasy for them. I don’t exist for them as a
person’.
The client’s money buys him access to a
sort of twilight sexual realm wherein a man
can have sex with a real, live, flesh and blood
person and yet side-step all the social obli-
gations that go along with sexual relations
between real, live people. For some clients,
this represents freedom from the obligation to
engage in what they consider to be ’normal’
sex. Many of Desiree’s domination and
transvestite clients tell her that they are
married (as a large proportion of prostitutes’
clients appear to be - see McLeod 1982;
Kinnell 1989), but would not dream of telling
their wives or indulging their tastes with
any ’respectable’ woman. One unmarried
domination client told me:
You couldn’t, on your honeymoon, ask
your wife ‘Do you do S&M?’. She‘d think
’What am I marrying?’... If I ever meet a
girl and settle down and marry, I don’t
think I would want her to be that way. I
can’t really imagine that. It’s not the sort of
thing you could do with your wife then say
’Shall we have a cuppa?’. I don’t think it
would work.
Clients who pay for ‘straight’ sex often
want both physical and psychic pleasures
which they would not permit themselves in
non-commercial sexual encounters - to
0Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1995
7
perform cunnilingus, to wear nipple clamps,
to have objects inserted in their anuses, to
have Desiree dressed as a school girl, to call
her a ’bitch’ or a ‘whore’ as they approach
climax. Others actually want to simulate a
romantic attachment. They go to elaborate
lengths to conceal the commercial aspect of
the transaction, hide the cash payments, send
valentine cards, bring chocolate and flowers,
and generally enjoy the pleasures of a
‘romance’ without any real threat of intimacy.
In short, the client feels able to transgress the
rules which he believes apply to sexual
relationships (whether they be to give flowers
or ’respect’, long-term financial or emotional
support, or whatever). He is freed from the
confines of masculinity, whether that be the
’burden’ of machismo or the ’burden’ of
being a protector. He is liberated from the
codes and conventions which tyrannize non-
commercial sexual encounters. The client
purchases ’time out’ of those facets of gender
and sexual ideologies which he finds oppres-
sive. Because dull economic compulsion
drives so many women to prostitution and
because so many men have the financial
power to buy sexual services, it is possible for
them to have their cake and eat it. Money
buys a temporary release from the constraints
imposed by contemporary myths about male
sexuality (see Segal 1990, pp. 207-17) and an
opportunity to indulge in the pleasures of
transgression.
As well as paying for the sexual pleasure,
physical labour and/or the making available
of body parts, the client is effectively paying
the prostitute to be a person who is not a
person. The prostitute is what Patterson
(1982) might term ’socially dead’ for the
duration of the transaction, that is, a person
without power, natality or honour. Patterson
holds that the slave is not distinguished by
the fact that others exercise property rights
over him or her (since these are also exercised
over people who are not enslaved -
husbands, wives and children, for example),
but by the fact s/he cannot exercise claims,
rights and powers over things or other
persons. Likewise, the prostitute cannot be
distinguished from other sexual partners by
the fact that clients make claims over her or
demands within the sexual encounter (people
do this in non-commercial relationships as
well), but only by the fact that she is not
entitled to make claims over or demands of
the client. The prostitute is without natality in
the sense that her real identity and personal
history is invariably concealed from the
client, who has no real interest in it, and she
is without honour in the sense that the
degraded status of the ‘whore‘ dissolves
Volume 2 Number 1 Joniiary 1995
8 GENDER, WORK A N D ORGANIZATION
her entitlement to the protection and respect
accorded to non-prostitute women.
What is it that leads the self-employed
prostitute to embrace these transitory but
serial experiences of social death? No man
(client or pimp) exerts direct, personalistic
power over a woman like Desiree. The client,
like all individuals in capitalist societies,
’carries his social power, as also his connec-
tion with society, in his pocket’ (Marx 1973,
p. 94), and not in his Y fronts.’ But accept-
ing that clients’ power over prostitutes is
primarily economic, not sexual, does not
require us to join ranks with liberals in the
‘sex work’ camp and view prostitution as a
voluntarv, mutual exchange.
’Free choice’ prostitution and ’free’
wage labour
I n alienating her ‘services’ in exchange for
cash, Desiree renders herself temporarily
unfree in relation to her own body. She can
impose limits on which parts of it can be used
and how, just as certain groups of waged
workers can set constraints on how and how
much of their labour power an employer can
use. But unless Desiree allows clients to
exploit some part of her body as a resource
for their own ends, whether that be her
vagina, her hands, her breasts, or whatever,
the deal is off. The essence of the deal is that
the client obtains certain rights and claims
over her body. It makes no sense to say that
she is not contracting out her body, only her
’services’, because these services, like human
labour power, are embedded in and cannot be
detached from the body (Pateman makes this
point very clearly, 1988, pp. 202-3). The
‘freedom’ to alienate property in the person
(whether labour power or sexual services) is
thus only a freedom to surrender certain
freedoms.
One obvious difference between a self-
employed prostitute like Desiree and a wage
worker is that the self-employed prostitute
does not enter into a relationship with one
employer. She is not dependent upon any
individual client, and does not make her
living by transferring rights of command over
her person to anyone or any firm in
particular. Does the fact that the prostitute
’hires out’ her ‘services’ to numerous
different clients make her more free than the
wage worker who ’hires out’ her ‘labour’ to
one employer? The answer is surely no. In
order to make a living from prostitution, it is
actually imperative that Desiree sees clients
not as a series of separate individuals, but as
one unified, collective body. Desiree cannot
Volirme 2 Nirniber 2 lnniinry 1995
use her own desire as a criterion for entering
into transactions, volunteering only to engage
in acts which bring her pleasure or only to
entertain those clients she finds attractive. If
she did, her income would plummet to next
to nothing. She would no longer be making
a living from selling her ’sexual services’,
but merely indulging a personal taste for
anonymous sexual encounters involving the
exchange of cash. To actually make a living
from prostitution, it is necessary to surrender
control over who to have sex with and how
and when, just as it is necessary to surrender
control over who directs your labour power
and to what ends when you enter employ-
ment. The prostitute-client exchange is thus
’voluntary’ only in the extremely limited,
abstract and theoretical sense that the capitalist
employment relation is a ’voluntary’ one.
Mutual or unequal exchange?
Is the exchange between prostitute and client
an equal one? If emotional labour is taken to
be ’the management of feeling to create a
publicly observable facial and bodily display’
(Hochschild 1983, p. 7), then the intensity
of the prostitute’s emotional labour is quite
phenomenal. Furthermore, like most self-
employed workers (see Rainbird 1991)
Desiree works extremely long hours - a
ten hour day, six days a week - in order
to earn the kind of money which makes such
work tolerable. The social, psychological
and health costs of such work are immense.
The proposition that clients pay enough
to cover the cost of reproducing the emo-
tional, psychic and physical inputs that the
prostitute parts with, as well as to compen-
sate for the risk of prosecution and the social
stigma that goes with the prostitute’s work,
seems improbable. Moreover, the prostitute
exchanges across a market something that is
not fully or universally commodified in this
society and hence has no meaningful or
measurable exchange-value. Sayer (1991,
pp. 25-6) observes that, for Marx:
In the process of exchange ... all commod-
ities are routinely compared and equated to
one another: they have in addition to a use
value, an exchange value ... The exchange
value of all commodities, relative to one
another, are expressed in quantities of a
single equivalent, money. The price-tag on
a given commodity tells us in what propor-
tions it can exchange for every other com-
modity: how many units of commodity x
would have to be sold in order to purchase
commodity y or z.
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1995
‘FREE CHOICE’ PROSTITUTION
The concept of value presupposes ex-
change, and sexual services, unlike human
labour power, are not generally exchanged in
this society. In capitalist societies, it is the
norm to sell labour power and people are not
dishonoured by temporarily ’contracting out’
this form of ‘property’ in their person. But
sexual acts are not typically viewed as
commodities, and sexuality is not regulated
by the ideology of the market. Instead, a
complex set of pre-capitalist and non-market
ideas - including honour, shame, love,
pleasure, loyalty - generally govern people’s
sexual interaction. Prostitutes and clients
alike are socialized in a world where
particular meanings are attached to human
sexuality (meanings which underpin the
codes and conventions governing sexual
interaction), a world in which it is widely
held that the only legitimate sex is between
men and women who love each other and
that ’money can’t buy you love’. In buying
access to the ’sexual property’ that a
prostitute has in her person, the client thus
draws the prostitute into a marginal social
world where ’sexual services’ are assumed to
have an exchange value and where the
’normal’ codes and conventions regulating
the interaction between sexual partners do
not apply. The working life of the prostitute
thus takes place in a space between two
worlds, incompletely dominated by the
ideology of the free market and yet detached
from pre-market values and codes.
The client exchanges money (the universal
medium for the expression of the exchange
values of commodities) for something which
is riot universally recognized as a commodity.
Unlike other parties to commodity exchange
in capitalist societies (see Sayer 1991,
pp. 58-9), then, prostitute and client are not
socially equated as equals through their
transaction. The client parts with something
that is alienable, permeated by his will, a
mere commodity. The prostitute parts with
something that is socially constructed as an
integral part of her identity, her honour, her
position in society. She is not posited and
confirmed as the client’s equal through the
exchange, but stigmatized as his, and
everyone else’s, social inferior. To a majority
of people, often even the woman herself, the
prostitute, unlike the wage labourer, is
genuinely and irrevocably dishonoured
through the contracts she enters into with
clients. Even substantial sums of money will
not necessarily buy a woman an escape from
this stigma and its social and psychological
consequences.
Those in the ’sex work’ camp insist that de-
stigmatizing ’the whore’ is an urgent political
9
priority. Roberts (1992, p. 357), for example,
observes that ‘no woman can ever be free in a
society which perpetuates the division of all
women into whores and madonnas’. Of
course, it is vital to campaign for prostitutes
to be accorded full civil rights and of course
we should campaign to reveal the hypocrisy
and misogyny behind the whore stigma. But
what would de-stigmatization alone mean
for prostitutes? To begin with, if it is right to
suggest that the demand for prostitute’s ser-
vices stems in large part from the contra-
dictory and repressive ideologies which
surround human sexuality, then, paradoxi-
cally, the prostitute’s livelihood actually
depends on the maintenance of the very ide-
ology which degrades her and makes her into
a social outcast. Her liminal status as a person
who is not a person is simultaneously the
source of her stigma and her subsistence.
But even if the demand for prostitute’s
services did persist, there are other grounds
for questioning the idea that prostitution
would be empowering if only it were de-
stigmatized. Few people would suggest that
women who work as auxiliary nurses on
geriatric wards are somehow liberated
because they are changing the incontinence
pads of strangers in return for cash rather
than performing this task for their own
relatives out of a sense of duty, and though it
might be objected that some prostitutes enjoy
their work, the number of women who
actually derive any great personal satisfaction
or fulfilment from spending day after day
sticking vibrators up strange men’s bottoms,
feigning orgiastic delight as they sit on limp
penises and so on, is probably insignificant.
How would the de-stigmatized prostitute’s
situation differ from that of women working
in other menial ’caring’jobs?
People only elect to ’hire out’ any kind of
’property’ in their person in the absence of
any better alternative means of subsisting.
The ’freedom’ involved in ‘free choice’
prostitution could only ever have the same
abstract and ephemeral character as the wage
worker’s ‘freedom’. At present, inequalities
structured along lines of class, gender and
‘racialized’ identities mean that the people for
whom prostitution becomes a rational
economic ‘choice’are predominantly working-
class women and within this, disproportion-
ately women of colour.3There is no reason to
suppose that de-stigmatization would signifi-
cantly change this pattern, and the idea
that women could ever be empowered by
entering an industry that is gendered
and ’racialized’ to the extent that the sex in-
dustry is, therefore seems more than a little
dubious.
I0
Notes
I . The research has been in progress for over a
vex, and has employed a number of tech-
niques; interviews and informal conversations
with Desiree, her receptionists and clients,
obsenrations of clients arriving, leaving and
waiting at her premises, tape recordings of
Desirec’s sessions with clients, questionnaires
on client requirements completed by Desiree
after clients leave, and participant observation
as a receptionist. The ethical and methodologi-
cal problems and issues posed by the research
are discussed at some length in O’Connell
Davidson and Layder (1993).
2. Of course, his greater economic power is not
unconnected to what he has in his Y fronts, but
tor reasons of political strategy, as well as
others, i t is important to avoid making an over
simplistic equation between male economic
m d social power and male sexual dominance
as well as to recognize that male sexuality is not
‘irredeemably violent, coercive or connected
with emotions of domination’ (Scgal 1990,
p. 216).
3. I n the USA, it is estimated that approximately
4O”b ot street prostitutes are women of colour
(Alcxander 1988, p. 197), and in Amsterdam‘s
red light district, the Mr A. d e Graaf Institute, a
rescarcti organization which campaigns for the
decriminalization of prostitution, estimates that
over 50”%of prostitutes are of African, Latino
and South East Asian descent. My own
preliminary analysis of British contact maga-
rines suggest that women of African-Caribbean
descent are hugely over-represented in this
form o t work, constituting around 18% of
prostitutes using this advertising medium.
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