Sex Work Now: What the Blurring of Boundaries around the Sex Industry Means for Sex Work, Research, and Activism

Barbara G. Brents and Kathryn Hausbeck

We have been doing research on the sex industry and the legal brothels in and around Las Vegas for the past ten years. We have watched Las Vegas become the fastest-growing city in the United States precisely because it is a global tourist destination for the consumption of vice — sex and gambling, but especially sex. As feminists we have struggled to understand this. It is tempting to see Las Vegas as unique, as the 'other' to 'normal' culture. However, the more we look, the more we see that Las Vegas is symbolic of broader cultural and economic shifts that have been transforming our sexual attitudes and the commercial context surrounding sex for the past fifty years. Understanding these broader changes is crucial for scholars, sex workers, and activists, as we struggle to make sense of sex work and the sex industry in the twenty-first century.

In this chapter we argue that the lines around the sex industry are blurring. The cultural and economic changes driven by global, late capitalism have created a consumption-driven, service-based economy that increasingly sells human interactions and emotional exchanges. The sale of personal service, leisure, spectacle, and tourism places more and more components of human relationships onto the market. This has contributed to two important trends. First, there has been a marked sexualization of culture where sexualized images are proliferating, and diverse sexualized practices, identities, and values are becoming more acceptable. The second trend is the mainstreaming of the sex industry. As the adult commercial sex industry expands, the more formal and upscale parts of the industry are increasingly organized and operated more like mainstream businesses. However, this mainstreaming often heightens the impact of social class inequalities.

The result of these two trends is that mainstream culture and the adult commercial sex industry are, in some important ways, converging. This is happening most clearly in venues with more resources and capital, but the trend is clear. This convergence has radical implications for sex workers, sex work researchers, and their allies, and it presents both opportunities and challenges. Here we examine the research identifying these trends. We then discuss the opportunities and challenges these trends present for scholarship, activism, and the practice of sex work.

The sexualization of culture

'Sex ... has become the Big Story,' said sociologist Kenneth Plummer in 1995 (Plummer, 1995). The British scholar Feona Attwood argues that scholars are paying more and more attention to dramatic changes in social norms surrounding sexuality since the mid 1990s. Culture has become sexualized, as marked by

a contemporary preoccupation with sexual values, practices and identities; the public shift to more permissive sexual attitudes; the proliferation of sexual texts; the emergence of new forms of sexual experience; the apparent breakdown of rules, categories and regulations designed to keep the obscene at bay; our fondness for scandals, controversies and panics around sex. (Attwood, 2006, p. 78)

This sexualization of culture is a central by-product of a large economic transformation that has occurred in recent years. Beginning in the years after World War II and accelerating in the 1970s, Western economies have changed from production-based (extracting raw materials and producing durable goods in rigidly organized large factories) to consumption-based (producing predominantly services, ideas, and cultural products by means of more independent workers in decentralized workplaces). Most recently, entertainment, leisure, and tourism comprise a large and growing share of the service economy Even non-tourist services are increasingly 'touristic' — that is, rather than selling products or services with specific outcomes, services sell experience, spectacle, fantasy, adventure, and escapism (Frank, 2002; Lash & Urry, 1994; Mandel, 1975;Rojek, 1994;Rojek & Urry, 1997; Urry, 2002).

Scholars argue that consumer economies have transformed culture, creating consumers driven to constantly create and re-create fragmented, flexible individualistic lifestyles (Gergen, 1991; Giddens, 1991; Harvey, 1989; Lash & Urry, 1994). In this context there has been an increasing commercialization of intimacy (Hausbeck & Brents, 2002; Hochschild, 1983, 2003; Illouz, 1997; Zelizer, 2005). Pleasure, sexuality, and the erotic have become central components of globalized late capitalist leisure culture (Bauman, 2003; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Giddens, 1992; Hawkes, 1996; Plummer, 2001; Plummer, 2003; Simon, 1996).

Several analysts of media culture argue that the increasing centrality of sexuality to consumer culture has created an ever-blurring line around what we used to consider 'obscene' (McNair, 2002; Plummer, 1995). Brian McNair argues that we have become a 'Striptease Culture', where sexual revelation, voyeurism, and sexualized looking are permitted and encouraged throughout the media and commercial culture. Others point to heightened public attention to scandals, controversies, and moral panics, which exemplifies a fascination with sexualized looking...