Sex for Sale~Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry Read Free Page A

to drugs; experience routine violence from customers; labor under abysmal working conditions; and desperately want to exit the sex trade.31 These writers often use dramatic language to highlight the plight of workers (“sexual slavery,” “prostituted women,” “paid rape,” “survivors”).
    “Prostituted” clearly indicates that prostitution is something done to women, not something that can be chosen, and “survivor” implies someone who has escaped a harrowing ordeal. Customers are labeled as “prostitute users,”
    “batterers,” and “sexual predators.” As shown later, these labels are misnomers when applied to most customers and most sex workers.
    Violating a core canon of scientific research, the oppression paradigm describes only the worst examples of sex work and then treats them as representative. Anecdotes are generalized and presented as conclusive evidence, sampling is selective, and counterevidence is routinely ignored. Such
    “research” cannot help but produce tainted findings and spurious conclusions, and this entire body of work has been severely criticized.32 Unfortunately, the writings of oppression theorists are increasingly mirrored in media reports and in government policies in the United States and abroad.
    A diametrically opposed perspective is the empowerment paradigm . The focus is on the ways in which sexual services qualify as work, involve human agency, and may be potentially validating or empowering for workers.33 This 5

    RONALD WEITZER
    paradigm holds that there is nothing inherent in sex work that would prevent it from being organized for mutual gain to all parties—just as in other economic transactions. In other words, coercion and other unseemly practices are not viewed as intrinsic aspects of sex work. Analysts who adopt this perspective tend to accent the routine aspects of sex work, often drawing parallels to kindred types of service work (physical therapy, massage, psychotherapy) or otherwise normalizing sex for sale. Eileen McLeod argues that prostitution is quite similar to other “women’s work,” and that both sex workers and other women “barter sex for goods,” although the latter do so less conspicuously.34 Writers who adopt the empowerment perspective also argue that the tenets of the oppression paradigm reflect the way in which some sex work manifests itself when it is criminalized . Much less is known about prostitution in legal, regulated systems. It is important, therefore, to avoid essentialist conclusions based on only one mode of production.
    This kind of work may enhance a person’s socioeconomic status and provide greater control over one’s working conditions than many traditional jobs. It may have other benefits as well: “Many prostitutes emphasize that they engage in sex work not simply out of economic need but out of satisfaction with the control it gives them over their sexual interactions.”35 Some writers who adopt the empowerment paradigm go further and make bold claims that romanticize sex work. Shannon Bell describes her book, Whore Carnival , as “a recognition and commendation of the sexual and political power and knowledge of prostitutes,” which sounds rather celebratory.
    Both the oppression and empowerment perspectives are one-dimensional and essentialist. While exploitation and empowerment are certainly present in sex work, there is sufficient variation across time, place, and sector to demonstrate that sex work cannot be reduced to one or the other. An alternative perspective, what I call the polymorphous paradigm , holds that there is a constellation of occupational arrangements, power relations, and worker experiences. Unlike the other two perspectives, polymorphism is sensitive to complexities and to the structural conditions shaping the uneven distribution of agency, subordination, and workers’ control.36 Within academia, a growing number of scholars are researching various dimensions of the work, in different