Sex for Sale~Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry (33 page)

Because the African-American prostitutes were more connected to both social service and family and friendship networks, AIDS presentations and distribution of condoms in welfare offices, city-funded health clinics, and drug detoxification units, as well as up to date information on new and existing services of other types, are effective ways of reaching them. In some cases the information might come to them indirectly, through providing information to their families, who often take the information and pass it on. Reaching the African-American car prostitutes in the park directly was difficult because they were watched by pimps. But workers can approach the women through their pimps with the information; unlike the male partners of the white women, the African-American pimps frequently sat in cars in an open park area where the women were soliciting. A mobile van providing condoms, AIDS information, and information on services for crack users may be another way of reaching these women and their pimps. Weiner has described a similar van-based strategy to reach sex workers in New York City.35

In the hotel area, a team of outreach workers who walk the streets can be extremely effective. The prostitutes worked on their own, had more freedom to interact, and also were a more consistent population than in the car stroll areas, and so they came to know and trust outreach workers more easily. Using the men in these hotels as gatekeepers was an important strategy in reaching this population. Street networks are particularly important in African-American neighborhoods, where they are strong and effective at disseminating information. We were assisted, for example, by men at the hotels in the distribution of fliers we created which listed various services the women might need. The male gatekeepers were not always cooperative. In one of the hotels the male manager sold the condoms we gave him and tried to keep the women away from us so we could not give them condoms for free.

Because the African-American prostitutes often mentioned their children and expressed concerns for them, addressing the needs of their children or providing drug rehabilitation services that include children may be an important strategy for behavior change in this population.

We do not know whether our findings can be generalized to other locales in Philadelphia or to other cities. However, even if specific contextual patterns differ, our research in Philadelphia suggests that street prostitution
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THE ECOLOGY OF STREET PROSTITUTION

is not uniform and that different services must target different groups of prostitutes. Street prostitution is often in flux. Women move into and out of the life or into different types of prostitution and may change the way they work to protect their safety (for instance, using pagers or cell phones to contact regular clients). Neighborhood pressure, in conjunction with police raids on drugs and prostitution, may prompt the women to disperse to other areas. This happened in the African-American hotel area after the research was completed; also, the area of white prostitution moved further away from the commercial area where it was located. Economic redevelopment in an area may cause relocation, and as the type and location of drug sales change, women may move to areas of easy access to their drug of choice. They also may change their style of prostitution, as occurred with the white sex workers in our study; after they started using crack, many began working on their own without male lookouts so they did not have to share to share their drug money

Thus, strategies for reaching these women must be flexible and sensitive to the constraints of the locale in which they are working. A large portion of the epidemiological research on street prostitutes is dependent on a survey research methodology, where questionnaire or interview data are collected from individual sex workers, and does not deal with the social context in which they operate or possible variations in that context. Sensitivity to social context not only adds to our understanding of street prostitution but also can enable the effective delivery of HIV-related education and other services to these women.

N OTE S

The authors would like to thank the staff of Congreso de Latinos Unidos for their encouragement and sponsorship, Robert Washington and Arthur Paris for their helpful suggestions, and the sex workers for confiding their concerns.

1. Barbara de Zalduondo, “Prostitution Viewed Cross-Culturally: Toward Recontextualizing Sex Work in AIDS Intervention Research,”
Journal of
Sex Research
28 (1991): 233–248.

2. Heather G. Miller, Charles F. Turner, and Lincoln E. Moses,
AIDS: The
Second Decade,
Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1990.

3. Judith Cohen, Priscilla Alexander, and Constance Wofsy, “Prostitutes and AIDS: Public Policy Issues,”
AIDS and Public Policy
3 (1988): 12–22.

4. Priscilla Alexander,
Patterns of Prostitution in North American and Europe
.

Oakland, CA: Prostitutes’ Education Project, n.d.

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JUDITH PORTER AND LOUIS BONILLA

5. Juhu Thukral and Melissa Ditmore,
Revolving Door: An Analysis of Street
Based Prostitution in New York City
, New York: Sex Workers’ Project, Urban Justice Center, 2003.

6. Thukral and Ditmore,
Revolving Door.

7. Michael Zausner,
The Streets: A Factual Portrait of Six Prostitutes as Told in
Their Own Words
, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986; Arlene Carmen and Howard Moody,
Working Women: The Subterranean World of Street
Prostitution
, New York: Harper & Row, 1985; Bernard Cohen,
Deviant
Street Networks: and Drugs
, Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1979.

8. Mitchell Ratner, ed.,
Crack Pipe as Pimp: An Ethnographic Investigation of
Sex for Crack Exchanges
, New York: Lexington Books, 1993; James Inciardi, Dorothy Lockwood, and Ann Pottgieter,
Women and Crack
Cocaine
, New York: Macmillan, 1993; Terry Williams,
Crackhouse,
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992; Mindy Fullilove, Elizabeth Lown, and Robert Fullilove, “Crack Hos and Skeezers: Traumatic Experiences of Women Crack Users,”
Journal of Sex Research
29 (1992): 257–287; Miller, Turner, and Moses,
AIDS.

9. Thukral and Ditmore,
Revolving Door.

10. Thukral and Ditmore,
Revolving Door.

11. Michelle Henry, Diana Levengood, and Jennifer Keith,
Analysis of Deaths
Among Philadelphia Women ages 15 through 60, 2002
–
2003, Including A
Review of Trends 1997
–
2003
, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Death Review Team, Dept. of Public Health, 2006.

12. Henry, Levengood, and Keith,
Analysis of Deaths.

13. Miller, Turner, and Moses,
AIDS.

14. Neil McKeganey and Marina Barnard, S
ex Work on the Streets: Prostitutes
and Their Clients
, Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1996.

15. Joyce Wallace, Allen Steinberg, and Adele Weiner, “Patterns of Condom Use, Crack Use, and Fellatio as Risk Behaviors for HIV Infection among Prostitutes,” paper presented at annual conference of the American Association of Public Health, Washington, DC, 1992; Carol A.

Campbell, “Prostitution, AIDS, and Preventive Health Behavior,”
Social
Science and Medicine
32 (1991): 1367–1378.

16. McKeganey and Barnard,
Sex Work
; Miller, Turner, and Moses,
AIDS
.

17. Wallace, Steinberg, and Weiner, “Patterns of Condom Use.”

18. Henry, Levengood, and Keith,
Analysis of Deaths.

19. Ratner,
Crack Pipe as Pimp
; Michelle Shedlin, “An Ethnographic Approach to Understanding HIV High Risk Behaviors: Prostitution and Drug Abuse,” in Carl Leukefeld, Robert Battjes, and Zili Amsel, eds.,
AIDS and Injection Drug Use: Future Directions for Community-Based
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THE ECOLOGY OF STREET PROSTITUTION

Prevention Research
, Washington, DC: National Institute of Drug Abuse, NIDA Research Monograph 93, 1990.

20. Ratner,
Crack Pipe as Pimp.

21. John Davidson,
The Stroll: Inner City Subcultures
, Toronto: New Canada Press, 1986; Zausner,
The Streets.

22. Inciardi, Lockwood, and Pottgieter,
Women and Crack Cocaine
; Shedlin,

“An Ethnographic Approach.”

23. Ratner,
Crack Pipe as Pimp
; Inciardi, Lockwood, and Pottgieter,
Women
and Crack Cocaine
; Fullilove, Lowen, and Fullilove, “Crack ‘Hos and Skeezers.”

24. Inciardi, Lockwood, and Pottgieter,
Women and Crack Cocaine
; Ratner,
Crack Pipe as Pimp
; Wallace, Steinberg, and Weiner, “Patterns of Condom Use.”

25. Joyce Wallace, Judith Porter, Adele Weiner, Allen Steinberg, “Oral Sex, Crack Smoking, and HIV Infection Among Female Sex Workers Who Do Not Inject Drugs,”
American Journal of Public Health
87 (1997): 470.

26. McKeganey and Barnard,
Sex Work.

27. Department of Public Health,
Vital Statistics Report
, Philadelphia: Department of Public Health, 1992.

28. McKeganey and Barnard,
Sex Work.

29. Cindy Thomas, Nina Mulia, and Jon Liebman, “HIV Seropositivity among Injection Drug Users Recruited from Street Settings in North Philadelphia,” Philadelphia Health Management Company, 1992.

30. Adele Weiner, “Understanding the Social Needs of Streetwalking Prostitutes,” Social Work 4 (1996): 97–105.

31. Fullilove, Lowen, and Fullilove, “Crack Hos and Skeezers.”

32. Weiner, “Understanding Social Needs.”

33. Shedlin, “An Ethnographic Approach.”

34. John Gwaltney,
Drylongso
, New York: Random House, 1980; Charles Valentine,
Culture and Poverty
, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980; Carol B. Stack,
All Our Kin
, New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

35. Weiner, “Understanding Social Needs.”

185

H A P T E

C

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8

CALL GIRLS AND STREET PROSTITUTES:

SELLING SEX AND INTIMACY

Janet Lever and Deanne Dolnick

The old fascination with prostitutes as purveyors of “sex without responsibility”1 neglects the reality that some prostitutes are also purveyors of intimacy without responsibility. The most recent explorations of sex work recognize the demand for the latter, which has been marketed as “the girlfriend experience” (GFE). Ads for escorts in print media and online now routinely feature offers of GFE, and it has become a standard feature on the

“menus” of brothels worldwide. For example, one Internet ad offers “a true girlfriend experience without the headache,” and another reads, “It’s less of a business transaction and more like a date with the woman of your dreams!”2

Recent research highlights the emotional nourishment that is provided in the GFE.3 A closer look at the actual content of prostitute–client interactions should yield a broader understanding of prostitutes’ occupational requirements, as well as highlight some clients’ motives that are rarely recognized.

Arlie Hochschild defined “emotional labor” as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display.”4 Although Hochschild doesn’t address sex work, we can say that when sex workers display or feign sexual arousal or sexual pleasure for their clients’ gratification, they are engaging in emotional labor.

The prostitute, by definition, sells sexual services. Intimacy—a close, affectionate, or loving personal relationship with another person—is not necessarily offered by the prostitute. The hypothesis we test here is that clients expect and receive more emotional services in the form of intimacy from call
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JANET LEVER AND DEANNE DOLNICK

girls (a term we use to refer to both call girls and escorts) than from street prostitutes.5 The basis for this hypothesis rests on the higher cost of call girls’

services, which restricts their clientele to fairly affluent men. Because the men seeing call girls can pay more, they get more time, as well as settings more conducive to extended displays of intimacy, such as caressing, kissing, conversation, and companionship.

There are, of course, other occupations where opportunities for personal disclosure or intimate touch are part of what the patron pays for, at least implicitly. Scholars refer to the receipt of these services as the commercialization of intimacy, citing the clear-cut cases of the psychotherapist and therapeutic masseuse.6 More broadly, we can think of feigned or real expressions of caring and interest as part of the “emotional labor” expected of those in the “listening occupations,” such as barber, hairstylist, and manicurist, as well as the fabled bartender who lends an ear while he or she pours a drink. A variable among these occupations is the degree to which a client may assume that the service provider is genuinely concerned about the client or the intimate revelations the client has unilaterally offered. Among the occupations mentioned, the psychotherapist is assumed to care the most, the barber, bartender, and nonsexual masseuse are expected to care the least, and the call girl’s caring probably lies in the middle ground.

Perhaps what many call girls and escorts are really selling is the
illusion
of intimacy. Hochschild states that, “Once an illusion is clearly defined as an illusion, it becomes a lie.”7 But part of the emotional labor performed by the call girl is to keep the illusion alive; she defines her behavior as a playful

“fantasy” rather than an illusion. As the buyer of fantasy, the client is absolved from any responsibility to reciprocate displays of intimacy to the call girl, although some clients do share their feelings and personal aspects of their lives.

The client understands that being intimate is part of the call girl’s work and that he is not her only client. Both client and call girl
agree to pretend
that her caring and sexual attraction for him are real. Of course, in at least some cases, the caring and attraction are genuine and mutual between the two parties.8