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332 Feminism & Psychology 11(3) cipline’, ‘golden shower’ and ‘bareback’. Furthermore there was an established tariff that may be charged by time or by service. In the case of street work it was ‘$60 for a hand job, $80 for a blow job and $100 for full sex’. Competition in the industry was referred to as ‘undercutting’ and ‘hustling’. In addition there were terms for illicit activities; ‘rolling’ (stealing clients’ money) and ‘pinging’ (blackmailing). The linguistic elements just described show that the discourse of prostitution as ‘work’ is successful because of the similarities between the exchange of money for sex and other market exchanges. A feature of metaphors is that the mapping between the target domains (in this case sex work) and source domains (in this case a market exchange) necessarily highlights certain concepts while hiding others. The feature of sex work that the market exchange metaphor highlights is the payment of a fee in exchange for attending to another’s (sexual) desire. Underlying the market metaphor is an assumption that the exchange is entered into freely and willingly. That is, the worker is assumed to be an independent, active agent who chooses to enter into various contracts involving the exchange of sexual favours for money. The assumptions about autonomous individuals and free choice mean that strong parallels exist between the market exchange metaphor of sex work and liberal feminist understandings of it, which share assumptions of individual autonomy and choice. The aspects of sex work that are hidden by the market exchange metaphor include the broader economic and social influences shaping the significance and gendered structure of the industry. Thus issues around power and sexual practices are concealed. For example, an assumption of the market exchange metaphor is that the work contract is entered into freely, yet 16 of our 19 participants cited desperation for money as their primary reason for entering into sex work. Thus most of our sample, and all of the women, opted for sex work within a very limited context of choice. Only three participants (two men and one transgender) provided explanations of their involvement that implied ‘free’ choice – that is, they had other viable job options. In these latter cases a celebration and/or exploration of sexual identity was an important factor in that choice – an aspect of sex work that is promoted by the sex radical approach but hidden by the market exchange metaphor. The objectification, violence and exploitation experienced by many sex workers are other aspects of the industry that are not highlighted by the pervasive linguistic construction of sex work as a legitimate market exchange. An aspect of sex work that is veiled by the market metaphor is that it is paradigmatically straight women (but also lesbians, gay men and transgendered individuals) selling to mainly ‘straight’ men. Furthermore, the market exchange metaphor highlights sex work as being about money; however, it hides the fact that sex work, particularly parlour work, is not really a very lucrative form of employment. Simpson (1999) reported that levels of income for most sex workers have been estimated to be well below the average wage in New Zealand.
WEATHERALL and PRIESTLEY: A Feminist Discourse Analysis of Sex ‘Work’ 333 What Is for Sale? The market exchange metaphor promoted by liberal approaches to sex work begs the question of what exactly is for sale? Sex is the obvious answer. An interesting aspect of the market exchange metaphor was that it offered constructions of sex other than the dominant one of penile-vagina penetration. As mentioned in the introduction, considerable amounts of feminist research have examined how meanings of ‘having sex’ are socially constructed in ways that endorse heteropatriarchy. However, there has been relatively little published research on what sex means outside the normative context of heterosexual relationships. We would like to suggest that the sex industry is a valuable context for investigating how different meanings of sex are locally occasioned for different interactional purposes. The discursive construction of sex is not a focus of this article. Nevertheless, we would like to briefly mention the rich variety of constructions of sex that did emerge from the interviews. For example, some participants described how clients promoted constructions of sex that allowed them to excuse their infidelity. There was one report of a client who would only have intercourse standing up because ‘real’ sex was done lying down; thus he wasn’t being unfaithful to his wife. The participants themselves tended to construct ‘real’ sex as intimacy (for example, kissing, not using condoms). In this way they differentiated the ‘real’ sex they had with their romantic partners from the ‘pretend’ sex they had with their clients. Despite the various meanings of sex that were transparent from the interviews, the common-sense understanding of penile-vagina penetration as the ‘ultimate’ form of sex was reflected in, and recycled in, the pricing structure of street work. As noted in the previous section, ‘full’ sex costs the most. Power and Agency In the interviews participants were asked questions about safety concerns. A theme that emerged from their responses related to the issues of agency, power and control. Potential agents of power included the bosses/pimps, the customers/ johns and themselves. Two contradictory descriptions of power emerged from the responses. These paralleled the radical feminist and liberal feminist explanations of sex work. One set of accounts positioned the sex worker as passive and powerless in an arrangement that was predominantly controlled by clients and their pimps. In contrast, another set of accounts constructed the sex workers as agentic and in control of their choices. Note that these different accounts were not associated with different speakers but were sometimes used by the same speaker in response to different questions. Thus in an interview a participant could report, at different points, that sex work involved free choice and that it meant being passive and powerless. We found that when participants discussed feeling in control they did so by
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