sex work

Modern Day Asian Sex Slavery: The Musical (2/18/11)

brittany — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Long Beach, California

Each year CSULB has Sex Positive Week, presented by various feminist and queer student groups. Mariko Passion, activist, artist, and out and proud sex worker, kicked off the week of festivities with her one-woman show, Modern Day Asian Sex Slavery: The Musical.

Passion is a champion of what she refers to as the Whore Revolution, a phrase coined by fellow activist Emi Koyama. According to Koyama, the Whore Revolution begins with the acknowledgment that not all sex work is voluntary or safe and it aspires to create a world in which they are. After getting to know Passion a bit and attending an event thrown by the Sex Workers Outreach Program in Los Angeles (SWOP-LA), it has been brought to my attention that there is an entire generation of young women who do not feel victimized by their work. There are literally thousands of women who are not ashamed of how they make their money. These are women who are passionate, empowered, intelligent, and fighting for the most basic of human rights. As Jessie Nicole, director or SWOP-LA told me at an event earlier this month, sex workers see their work as just that—work. The average person doesn’t have to worry about being beaten, raped, or robbed while at the office and sex workers don’t want to have to worry about these things either.

Passion began her one woman show explaining to the audience that she starts each session with a massage. Straddling a pink Hello Kitty body pillow, Passion described how she uses her small hands to rub and coax her client into a safe, submissive state. This quiet before the storm also assists her in preparing to be intimate. According to Passion, eighty-five percent of the time she is not sexually attracted to the men she services and her sensual, slow massage enables her to “establish a genuine connection” while getting in the mood.

Her show was off to a strong start but was interrupted by various technical glitches and a few awkward on-stage costume changes that resulted in the audience getting a glimpse of Passion’s goods. It was obvious that Passion, who is Chinese and Japanese, hoped to tell the story of the plight of the Asian sex worker and the many ridiculous sound bits and pop culture tidbits she’s been reduced to. As a matter of fact, one of the most compelling moments of Passion’s show was when it appeared as if she broke away from the script, cursing, saying how much the infamous scene from Full Metal Jacket fucked with her childhood, how often she heard, “Me so horny, me love you long time.” As a virginal child completely unaware of sex work, it proved a rude introduction to the stereotypes Asian women must deal with.

Using old news clips and radio broadcasts, music, slides, and songs, it was an admiral attempt to cover decade’s worth of racism and sexual politics stemming from the Vietnam War, but it simply seemed like Passion didn’t have enough time to tell the story that was in her heart. Though entertaining and containing flashes of genius (traipsing around stage using a pink dildo as a mic and singing a dirty version of “I Enjoy Being a Girl"), we’ll have to call this a precocious work in progress with a lot of potential.

Photo courtesy of Stefan Agregado, photographer and photo editor at The Daily 49er.

Written by: Tina Vasquez, February 28th 2011

Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry

mandy — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Siobhan Brooks

SUNY Press

Racial inequality in the workforce seems sadly obvious, but something I had never before thought of was racial inequality in sex work. Logically, it makes sense that this brand of inequity would carry through to the sex industry, but it feels wrong somehow that anyone would be vying for a better position in sex work. As a feminist, empowerment in sex work has always fascinated me. Although the typical debates of this issue play a very limited role in Unequal Desires, the book creates the space for a new conversation about sex work and race.

Unequal Desires highlights race’s role in stripping—specifically, the stripper’s erotic capital. (Erotic capital is the value given to a body based on socially and culturally crafted visions of ideal beauty that are accepted by the majority of people in a given society.) Adapted from Brooks’ dissertation, her book reads like an ethnographic study. Her interpretation of interviewees quotes are very limited and the majority of the book contains her uncontaminated observations. The purity of her research gives it enormous academic credibility in my eyes, but may become tiresome reading for someone outside of academia.

What I found most interesting was Brooks’ choice of interviewing strip club staff as her primary source, and not dancers. This appeared to coalesce in the process of her research, as the dancers were less accessible at the three clubs at which she conducted her study: two straight clubs in New York City and one lesbian club in San Francisco. Hearing directly from bouncers, waiters, custodians, club managers, and a few dancers was incredible. It is nearly impossible to hear these voices unfiltered through media and academic sources, so Brooks’ fieldwork is invaluable in that sense; however, her choice to maintain an academic frame in her publication may limit the scope of individuals these voices reach.

Using stripping as a window makes racial discrimination in the workplace a new issue. Even among jobs that many find undesirable, racism persists and reminds the world that we are not in a “post-racial” state; in fact, it is quite the opposite.

Written by: Nicole Levitz, January 22nd 2011

Strip Club: Gender, Power and Sex Work

gwen — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Kim Price-Glynn

New York University Press

In Strip Club: Gender, Power and Sex Work, sociologist Kim Price-Glynn analyzes the organizational structure of a strip club to explore whose interests strip clubs serve and how. To gain an insider’s perspective, Price-Glynn spent fourteen months working as a cocktail waitress in a strip club. During this time, she observed, analyzed, and interviewed strippers, employees, and patrons.

Price-Glynn seeks to demonstrate that the strip club she researched, like the majority of others in the U.S., is organized in a way that benefits male employees and patrons while socially and economically marginalizing strippers. She weaves her research with sociological and organizational theory, along with other scholarship on sex work, such as Wendy Chapkis’ Live Sex Acts and Katherine Frank’s G-Strings and Sympathy. In an attempt to situate sex work as an occupation that entails intense emotional labor, Price-Glynn also draws heavily on the works of Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild.

Price-Glynn argues that the strip club perpetuates gender inequalities. She distinguishes, however, from a generalized argument that stripping and sex work inherently contribute to gender inequality and posits instead that strippers were marginalized by the organizational structure of the strip club. She notes that there were no women in positions of authority and that employees, who were explicitly told to always supervise the strippers, believed that strippers were never to be trusted, had low self-esteem, and used drugs excessively. In a fascinating portion of the book, Price-Glynn highlights the differences in how strippers and other club employees receive their wages. Employees have fixed wages while strippers receive money solely from tips; they also pay the strip club for their use of the club and are required to tip other employees, like the deejay. This system decreases their profits and creates a paradigm where the strippers appear to depend on the club (even if the club profits solely because they feature strippers).

Price-Glynn highlights the ways in which strippers’ safety is compromised by an intense culture of masculinity, a lack of physical boundaries between strippers and patrons, and the fact that a club’s revenue is often boosted if patrons think they can have physical access to strippers. She recounts stories, told to her by strippers during interviews, of being digitally raped on stage, of being expected to perform oral sex, and of club employees looking the other way when patrons touched strippers. Building on past scholarship, she also focuses on the intense emotional labor, such as flirting, that strippers are expected to perform. Private dances, she argues, are not prized for their extended dance, but because of the (false) intimacy it creates.

Price-Glynn’s work is an important reminder of the dangers of sex work. At times, however, I questioned whether she excessively focused on the negative aspects of stripping. A section devoted to the women’s rituals when they returned home (one bathed in bleach) and the effects of stripping on outside relationships (such as an inability to enjoy sex) was profoundly sad. It also implies that none of the strippers were able to disengage themselves from their work and that they were all negatively affected, even “damaged,” by stripping. When strippers said they enjoyed stripping or found it empowering, Price-Glynn hints that this is simply a mask or coping mechanism. This is, of course, plausible, but diverges from other scholarship on sex work and comes close to supporting arguments that stripping categorically harms women.

Strip Club offers important insight for those strippers and advocates of sex worker rights who want to improve the environment of the strip club and increase opportunities for women to be empowered within sex work. Price-Glynn’s choice to use organizational theory allows the reader to find concrete examples, such as wage reform, that could have very immediate and positive results. This method also distinguishes her book from other recent scholarship on sex work and stripping. I recommend the book, therefore, for those interested in learning more about the culture of the strip club or to sociology students interested in a unique application of organizational theory.

Written by: Shannon Hill, December 19th 2010

The Truth about Me: A Hijra Life Story

andrea — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Tamil by V. Geetha, A. Revathi

Penguin

What is it about the form of the life story—the autobiography—that makes it so seductive and so deeply discomfiting at the same time? I think it’s how the boundaries between private and public, someone else’s life and your own, blur in your reading. The relationship you forge is rich and colorful and insightful, but it’s also dark and violent and difficult to come to terms with.

The Truth about Me: A Hijra Life Story is the autobiography of Revathi. Revathi’s ‘truth’ is the first of such to be published in English: at once an illuminating, and a scarring read, that leaves you changed. Hijras are a community of people who are born men, but feel they are women, and so live as such. What differentiates them from eunuchs, or other trangendered/transsexual people is their culture: to be a hijra is to live in a community with other hijras, where you have a mother figure (a guru), sisters and daughters, and a tight set of rules within which you relate with them, what work you can do, how you look and behave.

The book is rich in detail and pulls you determinedly into the whirlpool of Revathi’s experiences—sometimes exciting and joyous, but more often sad and violent, physically, and emotionally abusive—a life of alienation and extreme frustration.

In The Truth about Me, Revathi leads us through her discovery of a community, experiences castration (nirvaanam—this makes her a ‘woman’—‘I felt like a flower that had just blossomed’), learns to dance and sing, becomes a beggar, performs sex work, works as an activist for a nonprofit, is stripped naked and tortured in police custody, falls in love, and more.

What is fascinating about Revathi’s way of telling, and almost painfully illuminating for the reader, is how she sets her own life – her familial relationships, her acceptance of her identity, the journey of becoming a hijra – parallel to the structures that she lives within. We see the demands and injustices that patriarchy inflicts, and its discomfort with her transgression; but on the other hand we also see the norms of the hijra community, which must be followed to be accepted into its fold. The sense one gets is of the (marginalised) self constantly struggling with something—both the mainstream and the alternatives available. She says, ‘A man sometimes has to struggle to live; but for people like me, to live was to struggle and fight…The world looks askance at me.’

While the book validates the necessity and power of a distinct hijra culture and community for a people pushed to the margins, as a slightly distanced onlooker, I felt that it falls silent on how unrelenting and inflexible this culture often seems. When Revathi interacts in the world with her hijra identity, but outside of the confines of the community, the fissures between her numerous worlds are too deep to see, the loneliness almost too cruel to read about: ‘Everyday my feelings died only to be reborn and to die again.’

Written by: Disha Mullick, November 2nd 2010

A Call Girl (Slovenian Girl)

brittany — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 02:00:00 +0000

Directed by Damjan Kozole

Film Movement

“Life is just one big disappointment after another,” laments the main character Alexandra in Damjan Kozole’s award-winning film about a Slovenian college student who delves into prostitution. Unfortunately for Alexandra and for viewers, the tone of A Call Girl never ascends much higher that that sentiment.

To her small town father, Alexandra seems like a bright, if moody, college student working on her English skills in Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana. Her family and friends question some of her tendencies—buying an expensive apartment and owning two cell phones—but by the time the audience meets Alexandra, she’s already very skilled at living her double life, whipping out excuses and fake illnesses to cover her tracks.

But Alexandra’s venture into prostitution unveils scarier and scarier problems for her—the constant threat of violent pimps and disturbing blackmail from friends who find out her secret, on top of the stress of school and mortgage payments. The sex worker lifestyle doesn’t reward Alexandra well, and her story is a fine example of why sex workers who are in the trade by choice or coercion should have legal protections. Thankfully, some feminist groups are leading the charge to offer sex workers just that.

A Call Girl is certainly a dark and pensive film, but it’s not completely without hope. The settings are artfully gritty. The opening and closing shots in particular are compelling because of the patience Kozole exercises to zero in on his main character’s expressions. But those scenes would be lost without the lead actress’ charisma. The role of Alexandra is shockingly Nina Ivanisin’s debut, and she rightfully earned kudos for her performance at the Valencia Festival of Mediterranean Cinema.

This film’s themes about prostitution are pretty clear cut. It’s not a ringing endorsement of the industry, but rather a reflection of its workers’ vulnerability to abuse. Ultimately, the responsibility for violence and coercion of women, including sex workers, has to fall squarely on the perpetrators of that abuse.

Written by: Hannah Moulton Belec, September 12th 2010

Surviving the Witch-Hunt: Battle Notes from Portland’s 82nd Avenue, 2007-2010

admin — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Emi Koyama

Confluere Publications

Surviving the Witch-Hunt is collection of artifacts and commentary from 2007 to the present and catalogues the community forces that emerged after the City of Portland removed its controversial Prostitution Free Zones (PFZ). These zones had allowed the police to issue exclusion orders for those who had been arrested for sex work, even if they had never been charged. For ninety days, anyone arrested for prostitution in the designated area was not allowed to return without submitting an appeal, segregating public space and criminalizing behavior without actual legal indictment.

The uproar from community figures after the removal of the PFZs demonstrated the discriminatory sentiments of many of those living in the 82nd Avenue neighborhood. Those who opposed the end of the PFZs claimed that there was an increase in crime and a correlating decrease in their property value, and they united to fight the “problem” of sex work in their communities. Emi Koyama collected documents that demonstrate their anger toward sex workers and bolsters these artifacts with some social justice commentary, raising arguments that protect the rights of all women and advance a more holistic view of community development. This booklet uses the 82nd Avenue case study as an example of how multifaceted problems cannot be solved via law enforcement but through broader advances in social and economic justice.

Countering the arguments of outraged neighbors near 82nd Avenue, Koyama’s documents describe the harm PFZs do to women who work in the sex industry. The fliers in the collection address the underlying causes of sex work, and explain that improved access to housing, employment, and treatment services are a better response than criminalization. The documents also catalogue the efforts of anti-prostitution advocates who focus on educating men about the social dangers of purchasing sex. This was the most interesting part of the compilation to me, since many anti-prostitution feminists are pushing educational programs as a way to end sex work. Koyama’s work shows that decreasing the demand for sex work, while a seemingly laudable goal, actually harms women. Decreasing demand also reduces the price for services, so sex workers have to do more acts for less money, and it pushes sex work to more remote areas, causing potential dangers for workers. Also, johns who are rational regarding risk taking will be taken out of the pool, leaving a group of riskier men purchasing the services of sex workers. These men are more likely to act violently towards sex workers and are less likely to take safe precautions during sex.

As someone who recognizes that the problems associated with sex work have no simple solutions, I am thankful that Koyama lays out these rebuttals to anti-prostitution groups. Criminalizing and even reducing the amount of sex work will do little to address the more serious problems in our communities. Sadly, the deeply rooted social, racial, and gendered inequities that necessitate sex work too often go unnoticed by policymakers, concerned citizens, and others trying to improve their communities.

As a human rights lawyer, I am personally outraged at the discriminatory attitudes of too many in the 82nd Avenue community regarding the end of PFZs, and I am somewhat embarrassed that I had not known about these events before reading this collection. Many local stories of civil rights conflict, of discrimination, and of survival often don’t reach further than the affected community. By effectively curating a compilation of documents from the 82nd Avenue community, Koyama demonstrates the importance of capturing a historical moment in the trajectory towards justice. The fliers, newspaper articles, notices about community meetings, and email messages Koyama collected were probably designed to be temporary, but in this small archive they combine to tell a powerful story of the strength of community activism.

Written by: Andrea Gittleman, August 18th 2010

Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives

admin — Tue, 18 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Eleanor Ty

University Of Minnesota Press

In a similar vein as Caroline Rody’s The Interethnic Imagination and Rocío Davis' Begin Here, the monograph Unfastened has been a treat to read for the simple fact that author Eleanor Ty forefronts a wide range of readings that demonstrate the continued evidence of the heterogeneity that embodies the field of Asian North American literature. Ty’s book is called unfastened, precisely because it is a descriptive that designates the continuing complexity that has been emerging with the textual terrains around concepts of mobility, displacement, and diaspora that make fastening Asian North American literature to any one place practically impossible.

In the primary texts that Ty so elegantly analyzes, multiple nations, multiple local spaces, and multiple subjectivities are always imagined, such that her readings flow contextually, specific to particular aesthetic forms and contexts, but always linked by the notion of “globality.” Ty is careful about her terminology. She purposefully does not use the term Asian American precisely because she carves out a specific place for Asian Canadian cultural production in her work, which has had a long history of being too reductively classified within Asian American more broadly.

She also distinguishes globality from the globalization, rendering globality the more salient feature of her critical reading practice precisely because it is more connected to issues of economic differentials and power inequities that arise as bodies, cultures, ideas, technologies, etc. migrate to new locations and establish new spatial configurations. As Ty clarifies, “Issues of globality include concern for earth and our environment, health and the spread of disease across national borders, the globalization of markets, and the production of goods.”

The wide range of primary text readings are truly astonishing and we see what a fan of Asian North American narrative Ty is as she meticulously crafts her analyses to continually point to the ways that Asian North American writers are thinking about globality and routing that issue directly within their textual terrains. Taken together, Ty concentrates on Brian Roley’s American Son, Han Ong’s Fixer Chao, Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child, Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices, Sunil Kuruvilla’s Rice Boy, and Lydia Kwa’s This Place Called Absence, among others. Many of these authors are ones that have received very little critical attention, even though their works present such rich terrains upon which to consider the complexities of globalization.

While all the chapters provide sprightly interpretative readings in which texts cannot be fastened within one context or sociocultural moment, some standouts include chapter two’s “Recuperating Wretched Lives: Asian Sex Workers and the Underside of Nation Building” and chapter five’s “Shape-shifters and Disciplined Bodies: Feminist Tactics, Science Fiction, and Fantasy.” Given the astonishing range of writings being produced, Ty’s conclusion offers a corrective to the concept of Asian American literature, offering that the rubric of “global novelist and global writing are more accurate for terms and for works,” especially with respect to the increasingly non-domestic contexts of many narratives.

Ty leaves us then with the concept of the “Asian global,” conceptualized in part because such narratives “arise out of and are contingent upon globalization—the movement of people, capital, and production across the north and south—and because they are no longer located just in North America or Britain.” In ending this brief review, it would seem the possibility that Ty is pushing for a potentially new field rubric in which Asian global texts written in English appear front and center. In this way, the move to diasporic and transnational critiques which typically and traditionally have not shifted beyond a two-country paradigm can be supplanted with this Asian global literary studies model that pushes scholars to contextualize texts from multi-focal spatial axes.

Cross-posted at Asian American Literature Fans

Written by: Stephen Hong Sohn, May 17th 2010

The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore

admin — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Jean-Luc Hennig, translated by Ariana Reines

Semiotext(e)

Writing a review for a book like The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal is not a simple task by any means. On the one hand, I want to be as straightforward as possible and simply give my impressions of this one particular piece of writing without going into the issue of prostitution and whether or not it degrades women. On the other hand, it seems impossible not to when taking into account the fact that Réal was a world-famous and revolutionary “whore” and writer who argued that prostitution was not only a choice, but a free-will decision. In my opinion, all sweeping generalizations ever do is discount legions of women whose experiences don’t fall in line with a particular argument; it’s as if they’re being told they don’t exist. So I stay out of it the best I can, though I am supportive of sex workers—no matter the circumstances or choices that led them to their line of work.

For such a fascinating title, The Little Black Book doesn’t pack much of a punch. The book is basically a series of interviews between Réal and journalist Jean-Luc Hennig, as translated by Ariana Reines. Réal’s “whoring” is discussed in great detail, though none of her anarchist activities are. She mentions writing papers and being politically active quite casually several times, though it’s usually only in reference to one of her clients asking about papers she has posted on her bedroom walls. The last portion of the book is quite literally Réal’s little black book, in which she’s written down the names of all her customers, what they’re into sexually, what they look like, and how much they pay her.

Nothing that Réal says in the interviews is politically charged in any way; there are no arguments about prostitution, no defending of her life’s work. For the most part, it’s just account after account of client after client. Did you know that many men secretly like getting a finger up their ass when receiving oral sex? Did you know that men need to be pampered and mothered and showed affection when seeing a prostitute? Yes, no? Don’t care? Me either. I was hoping to get a feel for this woman, the famous Grisélidis Réal who was a survivor and took to prostitution in order to support her children; who earned her living on her back until she was in her sixties.

But you never really get a sense of her; just hints of her personality. I would have liked to learn more about her opinions on her work and her life and less about her depressing decades long relationship with a severely abusive man and the boring sex she endured for years with men who Réal believed simply needed to fulfill their sexual desires—because apparently sex with a woman is a God-given right, and men will be damned if they go without.

In several interviews, Réal contends that the men that come to see her have something wrong with them; that normal men do not go to see prostitutes. She says that prostitution is lonely, heartbreaking work. She says that “fundamentally what [men] want isn’t to hurt you or kill you or bore you; what they want is for you to be nice” so in turn the women “must be totally amorphous, emptied of their substance, emptied of all their strength…” I don’t know why a women would defend and even champion a line of work and lifestyle that requires that of women, but then, prostitution is a complicated issue. After reading The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal, I can say—mysterious anarchism aside—that Réal was a complicated woman.

Written by: Tina Vasquez, March 4th 2010

Briarpatch Magazine: The Gender & Sexuality Issue (March/April 2009)

admin — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:41:00 +0000

Edited by Dave Mitchell

At first glance, Canada's Briarpatch Magazine reminded me of American feminist magazine Bitch; the content is similar, the overall message is similar, and, hell, even the font in the logo seems similar. What I love about Bitch is that although it’s an American magazine, it covers issues from all over the world, so I can keep up on feminist issues all over just by checking in one place. Briarpatch does not cover such a distance, as it seems to be primarily a Canadian-focused magazine; however, I still learned a lot about some of Canada’s different subcultures.

This issue was billed as “the gender and sexuality issue,” so the topics covered were about polyamory, sex working and transsexual issues. First, I learned about Canada’s health care system in relation to transsexuals undergoing or wanting to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Unlike the United States, Canada has a government-funded health care system. It is apparently extremely difficult to get coverage for something such as this type of surgery. This was an interesting, in depth look at one man’s personal journey through this ordeal. It was inspiring, yet also sad with the hoops he had to jump through in order to become the gender he felt comfortable with.

Briarpatch also educated me about sex workers in Canada through an interview with Kara Gillies, co-founder of both the Canadian Guild for Erotic Labour and the former Toronto Migrant Sex Workers Advocacy Group. Gillies also does work for Maggie’s, an organization run by sex workers. Maggie’s includes all aspects of sex work in their attempts to advocate for these workers’ rights, such as individuals involved in pornography, phone sex workers, and dominatrixes, to name a few. It is Gillies' work with Maggie’s that is the primary focus of the article.

The most interesting thing I learned from this was that in Canada, the act of prostitution itself is actually not illegal and never was. What is illegal is negotiating for services in a public place or even somewhere that’s open to public viewing such as parked or moving cars or bars. So it’s fine to go and do the deed elsewhere but not to discuss anything such as protection, payment, or even specific services beforehand if it’s in a public area. But you also can’t technically go anywhere because your work site, if used for this purpose, could be classified as a ‘bawdy house’ and under the bawdy house law, that’s illegal too. In addition, if you participate in someone else’s activities, it falls under the procurement law. This means that you can’t do such things as advertise someone else’s services or even offer to protect them personally. But, again, the actual act of prostitution is totally legal!

This, too, was an inspiring although frustrating piece because while some of the facts were new to me, unfortunately, the overall story and public perception seems to be the same all over. On the whole, I enjoyed getting an in-depth look on another country’s struggles with the same issues as are faced in the United States, and Briarpatch was a very enjoyable read.

Written by: Jen Klee, September 6th 2009

Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China

admin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:56:00 +0000

By Tiantian Zheng

University Of Minnesota Press

On one occasion, gangsters walked into the bar, grabbed me by the arm, and started dragging me up the stairs toward a private room intended for hostesses’ sexual encounters with clients. The women were also sometimes raped there by gangsters. I quickly realized what was going on—that I was in real danger... Whereas safety was a major issue, hygiene was another. Living in a filthy karaoke bar room without bathing facilities, I had lice in my hair and over my whole body. However, by living and working closely with hostesses in the bar, I gained their recognition and friendship.

Ethnographers always get their man (or woman... or both) even if they have to use their bodies as instruments of data collection and analysis. Ethnographers usually become participant-observers during fieldwork to facilitate rapport and to capture what people actually do as opposed merely to what they say they do, but as these snippets suggest, such can lead to squeamish feelings and harrowing experiences. Zheng participated in activities that male ethnographers could only have observed. Her analysis of sexual networking is consequently first-rate because she moves easily and persuasively from person to state, capital to labor, ideology to practice.

Red Lights is a beautifully written account of the emergence of new femininities and masculinities in post-socialist People’s Republic of China. Zheng analyzes the growth, structure, registration and functions of the karaoke bars now dotting the landscape and in which are played out the social and economic contradictions of class, heterosexuality, ethnicity and gender. In often grim detail, she shows how Communist Party bureaucrats, gangsters, and small business owners (literally) patronize young, unmarried females. In so doing, the former make money, express obeisance to their own social superiors, and get back at Mao Zedong for allegedly having sapped their masculinity during the Cultural Revolution. Women escape poverty (sort of), find boyfriends (ditto), manipulate men as best they can, and experience female solidarity. Her male informants freely express their disturbing misogyny while also confessing their sexual anxieties and class resentment. Confucianism, capitalism and communism each but differently punish women for alleged sexual promiscuity while rewarding men for theirs.

Many tens of thousands of Chinese women have migrated from economically and socially stagnating rural areas to the strip clubs and karaoke bars, back rooms, and guest houses of urban centers such as Dalian, where they “choose” forms of employment that entail grotesque subservience, daily humiliation, squalid working conditions, and social leprosy. Dalian was long ago hailed as an oasis of economic development during the period of Occupation by the Japanese military in the 1930s and 1940s. Its morally unsavory status today as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah—but whose economic function is central to post-socialist China—reveals the social and economic contradictions of Confucianism, patriarchy, communism, Western media forms and capitalism. “In Dalian,” Zheng writes, “taxes paid by the entertainment industry are the largest source of local revenue.”

Red Lights opens with Zheng’s painful personal stories of growing up a filial daughter in a sex-negative and patriarchal Chinese household. It continues with her painful humiliation in a U.S. college classroom regarding her views of gender relations. It proceeds to detail the humiliation of Chinese women. Her extremely sorrowful Afterword, entitled “From Entertainer to Prostitute,” shows the inexorable logic of patriarchy and capitalism and gives the lie to pro-sex work activist positions that can neglect or ignore specifically gendered humiliation in sex work. Her Acknowledgments section deeply moved me in recounting the joys and pains of scholarly work. It exemplifies the beauty and honor of academic collaborations that break through barriers of geography, language, culture, theory and gender but that are nevertheless mindful of them.

Red Lights would make a fine addition to graduate-level courses in social theory and fieldwork, but could be used in upper-division courses in gender studies and ethnography, too. It is a major contribution to ethnographic explorations of gender, sexuality, and prostitution, and to Asian Studies, too, which has enabled too few participant observation-style studies of sexual networking.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., August 7th 2009

The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality, and Relationships

admin — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:02:00 +0000

Directed by Chyng Sun, Miguel Picker

Open Lens Media

The advancement of gender equality and feminisms are arguably difficult to measure. One of the greatest successes, however, is the growing level of complexity with which we view previously black and white issues. In other words, we as a society are more capable to recognize the grey in controversial issues. As the face of feminism becomes more of a collage than one iconic portrait, as the proverbial intersection of race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, religion, and other forms of identity receives more thoughtful traffic, documentary films such as The Price of Pleasure emerge. This film boasts a unique approach to exploring the contentious world of pornography.

Abandoning the tired and often cyclical rhetoric on whether pornography is “right or wrong,” The Price of Pleasure investigates the collision of pornography, sexuality, and relationships. Instead of wagging a finger at the billion dollar industry from an academic pulpit, this film features a diverse group of college students, professionals, media makers, distributors, consumers, and adult performers to expose a panoramic and dizzying look at how pornography affects our lives and relationships. Instead of making statements that legitimize or demonize the porn industry, the film asks questions, and then allows people talk for themselves.

Equally compelling as it is disturbing, The Price of Pleasure spans the pornography business with several different lenses: race/gender roles and power, economic and capitalistic trends, political and corporate involvement, and sexualized violence against women and children. The weight of these issues is undoubtedly distressing. The film takes a bold approach to examining the stunning financial profits of the industry and the connection to our human needs and insecurities. The Price of Pleasure presents an unapologetic inquiry into the blurring line between the pornographic world and real world. That line is the primary battleground of the film.

The Price of Pleasure is loaded with explicit and violent imagery, vulgar language, and disturbing commentary, which may upset an unsuspecting viewer or trigger a survivor of sexual assault. Educators should exercise acute judgment when using this film for discussion and note that the DVD contains an option to view an edited or unedited version. Even with the most seasoned of facilitators, audience members should be appropriately prepped and forewarned.

The Price of Pleasure holds immense possibility for transformative dialogue. The questions raised are almost too difficult to hear, but once they are voiced they are too impossible to ignore.

Written by: Lisa Factora-Borchers, July 24th 2009

I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex

admin — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:10:00 +0000

By Summer Brenner

PM Press

Sexual slavery is a serious problem in the world. While the numbers vary between agencies, the most commonly reported statistics are from the U.S. State Department’s 2005 report on trafficked persons, which estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 people are illegally trafficked across international borders, with 14,500 to 17,500 trafficked to the U.S. These numbers include all forms of forced labor, but sexual slavery has the highest percentage, affecting both women and children. Women are lured with the promise of jobs in other countries, but are subjected to sexual servitude. Summer Brenner’s novel I-5 follows the story of Anya, a young woman from Russia, who is stuck in prostitution in the U.S., unable to get out.

Anya’s story is gritty, and not for the weak of heart. Brenner delves deep into the character, creating a realistic narrative. Because of the subject material, there are scenes that are explicit, but it only strengthens the story. Brenner takes a powerful stance in telling Anya’s story. Anya is not shown as a victim; rather, she is a strong woman who has taken her situation and used it in an attempt to secure her freedom. While Anya tells the reader that she enjoys sex and is good at it, she does not like being ordered to service strange men, and desperately wants her freedom.

As the story progresses, Brenner includes flashbacks to Anya’s childhood, and Anya further explains how she ended up in the U.S. as a sexual slave. Besides describing Anya’s story, Brenner also goes into detail about the men who control the “market.” This gives a deeper insight into how women are drawn in, and taken to foreign countries for sex work. In addition, it sadly shows how women who try to retaliate are broken into submission. Brenner does an excellent job portraying this dark world to a chilling degree.

Written by: Elizabeth Stannard Gromisch, June 29th 2009

Utopia and Epitaph

admin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:54:00 +0000

Directed by Moslem Mansouri

Underground Cinema

Utopia and Epitaph aren’t quite what documentaries are supposed to be, but, surprisingly, that’s a very good thing. In most documentaries, there’s narration and context, exposition and editorializing. The filmmaker boxes the viewer in with a comfy explanation of why “this” matters, and guides him or her on the sort of journey of other people’s lives that allows the interested, yet uninvolved, tourist’s view of the world. In the end, the way documentaries are “supposed” to be offers us an opportunity to improve ourselves, enrich ourselves, or do some other wonderfully important thing for, to, or about ourselves. In Utopia and _Epitaph, _Moslem Mansouri makes that all-important distance impossible and we and our “selves” are lost. There is only the subject—the people for whom these films are supposed to speak.

In Utopia, we meet Iran’s internal refugees who fled their homes due to what is simply referred to as “this war,”—the war between Iran and Iraq—and took up residence in the abandoned homes of those who had fled the country altogether. We know this small bit of context, the identity of the war to which the film refers and the source of the suffering we are to witness, only through a brief snippet of white words on a black screen at the beginning of the film. The same sort of opening introduces Epitaph, which examines the world of prostitution in a country where a woman can be stoned to death for sexual offenses, but self-declared holy men have no compunction against making use of their services.

From the first human face on screen to the last, both films are comprised solely of the voices of the desperate, their words often horrific and at times, astoundingly poetic. The same refrains echo through both films, despite the very different experiences of the two groups. Whether prostitute or refugee, adult or child, each person reveals the monster created by the twisted nightmare imposed by the Ayatollah and his henchman.

Over and over again, they speak of the crimes and offenses they have committed, or would commit, or imagine they must commit just to survive. They pray for death, or simply for never having existed in the first place. They mourn the potential within them that has been stripped away by law and circumstance, even if that circumstance is just being female in a world where children get married and educated women turn to prostitution rather than be some cleric’s cheap mistress. They curse their country’s political and “moral” leaders and the oppressive rules about gender and sex that diminish men, women and life itself. They dare to proclaim what they wish they could say to them, or what they have, in a few cases, had the courage to say to them about the failures, the hypocrisy and the lies. “If this is religion they are practicing,” they say, one after another. If this is religion, we want no part in it.

Neither film offers the viewer an out. There is no phone number to call, no foundation to contact, no address for donations. There is nothing to help us feel better for having done something, just the knowledge of suffering a world away. Watch them anyway.

Written by: Melinda Barton, June 9th 2009

Sex Work and the City: The Social Geography of Health and Safety in Tijuana, Mexico

admin — Sun, 31 May 2009 23:27:00 +0000

By Yasmina Katsulis

University of Texas Press

Most studies of prostitution still focus on the supply side: the women and girls, the boys and men, and the transgender and transsexual people who toil sexually to survive, meet temporary needs, and thrive. An increasing number of studies focus on the demand side: the direct consumers and the globalizing forces that bring them together. Carved down from what was probably a fine Ph.D. dissertation, and founded upon eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork that she conducted in Tijuana, Mexico, Yasmina Katsulis’s lively and accessible Sex Work and the City does one better. In only eight chapters and 174 pages, interspersed with field-note entries and arresting photos—for example, a family united in picnic but separated by a fence—she also explores the physicians who under- and over-diagnose STDs, the policemen who extort sexual favors, and the many agents who facilitate and profit from the sexual labor of others.

Ethnographic, archival, and other data show that Tijuana’s sex industry is fed by gringo and Mexican male migrant laborers who come and go—the causes and symptoms of staggering degrees of human migration and mobility. I appreciate her caveat about the necessity of squarely confronting centuries-old stigmas of prostitution. Throughout the book, she opposes an epidemiology and popular culture that systematically misrepresents by underestimating the HIV and STD transmissive risks of sex in, or on the way to, marriage. Katsulis demonstrates not just why, but literally how, prostitution’s labor forms and venues structure health and social risks.

She also explores the motivations for entering into, and the various outcomes of sexual labor by contrasting legal, registered sex work with that which is informal and illegal. Her analysis of the Tijuana Regulatory Model of policing and health inspection of The Body Prostitute highlights police extortion and the health and social hierarchies of strip clubs, brothels, alleyways, massage parlors, beaches, and forlorn places. The social and economic contradictions in Tijuana of skin color, gender identity, language, socioeconomic class, and ethnicity produce differing degrees of health, social, and legal hazard.

Apart from a few minor quibbles (her use of the illogical term “HIV/AIDS infection,” the sometimes interchangeable use of “sex workers” and “prostitutes”), Katsulis neglects to point out that pimping is the world’s oldest profession, not prostitution. Some of her claims—for example, regarding the general absence of pimping in Tijuana—are insufficiently grounded in historical, sociological, and ethnographic studies by Schifter, Wardlow, Kulick, Schoepf, Leonard, White, and me. I enjoyed her remarks about sexual praxis, but there was surprisingly little discussion of the tensions between sexual positionality and sexual and gender identity. Her take on “the prostitution debates” in feminism is only three pages in length. She devotes one sentence to what she takes to be one side of the ledger—“Some feminists argue that legalization of sex work serves to normalize and institutionalize the sexual exploitation of women”—which really irked me. The ensuing discussion morphs quickly into yet another Straw Woman argument about “western White feminists.” Katsulis offered her key informants free HIVab tests, but fails to mention IRB concerns and the availability of trained counselors, confirmatory assays, and antiretroviral or other therapies. Finally, the absence of a discussion of religion beyond cultural codes of macho and marianismo precludes her from analyzing a profoundly good example of a marriage:prostitution dialectic par excellence.

These criticisms aside, Katsulis has contributed a polished, well-written, vibrant, and much-needed book. I hope the university press issues a cheaper paperback edition (lower than the $50 hardcover price) so that it may be used in courses in anthropology, gender studies, and public health.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., May 31st 2009

The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It

admin — Mon, 18 May 2009 23:23:00 +0000

By Victor Malarek

Arcade Publishing

It’s impossible to study, be in, write about, or fight against _______ (you fill in the blank) sex work, prostitution, and sexual trafficking without getting some or all of it wrong. I’m not the only straight white guy to write about prostituted women, but without always acknowledging my privilege and standpoints reflexively. Like his 2003 book, The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade, which looked at post-Soviet European bloc countries, Victor Malarek’s new work, The Johns, again demonstrates the ubiquity of sexual commerce and the obvious and banal evils that perpetuate it, but focuses this time on the demand and not the supply side.

Malarek is such a decorated writer, journalist, and television host that a film was made in 1998 about his career. He joins a long list of straight white males such as William Sanger, Geraldo Rivera, Nicholas Kristof, William Vollman, and Chris Hansen in claiming to care about sexual exploitation. Their back-patting is sometimes well deserved, and their usual contempt for heterosexual males involved in sexual commerce who are portly of body, doughy of complexion, and misogynous in their outlook is fully intact here.

And herein lies the irony. In seventeen chapters and 310 pages, johns are shown to be privileged qua heterosexual males, but so is the stealth journalist Malarek as he cruises Costa Rican bars and attends john reeducation camps. Serving up more platitudes and anecdotes than hard data, and more celebrity court cases than sociological insights, Malarek’s database consists of 16 interviews with johns (none explained), consultation of fifty-plus websites (none listed) and thousands of Internet chat room postings (ditto). He capably skewers the exaggeratedly masculine nature of such posters and postings, but that’s too easy. More difficult would be interviewing those long-haul truckers, policemen, clergy and U.N. “peacekeepers,” but that would require an accounting of his own privilege and standpoint.

I enjoyed the breakneck pace of Malarek’s narrative and appreciated that he interviewed so many anti-prostitution activists and researchers about the legalization question. Mentions of famous and infamous johns ranging from Hugh Grant, Hans Christian Anderson, and Eliot Spitzer to Charlie Sheen, Jimmy Swaggart and Clark Gable, and their easy rehabilitations will likely engage lots of non-academic readers. The chapter regarding johns arrested and diverted to First Offender Prostitution Programs started in San Francisco by the recently deceased Norma Hotaling, to whom Malarek dedicated the book, was a high point of the book.

Nevertheless, Malarek’s preference for sweeping generalizations is wearing, and the research he presents and references intratextually could fit on a plate. It flattens even the most obvious differences in prostitution’s many different labor forms and their different psychic costs, health risks, developmental precursors and economic motivators. His flat dismissals of the efforts of sex worker rights organizations rankled me, but the argument he makes for the criminalization only of buying sex and its facilitation is compelling, and I greatly appreciated his discussions of the Swedish, Australian, German and other country-wide experiments with legalization and decriminalization.

The Johns was designed to enable us to connect the dots, but Malarek leaves too many unaccounted for. It’s okay to sneer at the chubby, grubby bar patrons who are molesting pliant, brown-skinned girls and young women, but what if they’re thinking the same thing about him?

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., May 18th 2009