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336 Feminism & Psychology 11(3) Extract 21 Rachel: Extract 22 Toni: but the man’s coming (.) paying (.) pardon the pun he’s coming for a service he’s paying so he’s the victim (..) so he’s the loser that can’t get sex so he has to go to the person that’s providing it ’cause I think if you’re a good worker and you’ve got your head screwed on you always remember that you’re the one in control (Anna: right right) and they’re the one that are paying for it In Extracts 23–26 the accounts of workers as being free agents in the transaction of sex for money are made persuasive by specific examples of rulemaking or refusing services to clients. Extract 23 Rose: Extract 24 Kelly: Extract 25 Sophie: Extract 26 Samantha: and he wanted extras and I said no I don’t do them and that was really empowering (Anna: yeah) to just every now and then say fuck you yeah I’d always felt comfortable enough to refuse (.) that was my right um basically I have rules (.) once I am in the bedroom area with the man um I let them know (.) I don’t sit there and sternly tell them I let them know that we don’t kiss ok um I’m very strict on that if they come near my lips they get a warning um kissing is just out (.) this business of sticking their fingers inside your mick was a no no as well In many of the descriptions that constructed workers as having power and being in control there was a tension. That tension was that there seemed to be a simultaneous acknowledgement of the possibility of objectification while being in control but a denial of that being personally significant. Here, the central theme of the Marxist position surfaces, where the entrance into the market exchange simultaneously is making you vulnerable to exploitation. Extract 27 is one example of how the construction of sex worker as a service provider functions, in part, to resist the possibility of their being constructed in less autonomous ways. Extract 27 Rachel: I don’t believe that the sex worker’s the victim just for the fact that she tells the client what to do (..) he is coming to her and he is paying her for a service and she has limits and boundaries (.) so how can she be the victim
WEATHERALL and PRIESTLEY: A Feminist Discourse Analysis of Sex ‘Work’ 337 The tension also exists in Extract 28 where Kelly invokes a kind of radical feminist argument when she suggests that ‘all women’ are ‘victims’. In contrast, Kelly as a sex worker has control. Extract 28 Kelly: well you know (..) I think to me all women in all walks of life are victims in one way or another you know throughout their lifestyles (Anna: yeah) whatever but ultimately (.) um being a sex worker I’ve never felt like a victim I’ve felt more in control of my life than I ever did before CONCLUDING COMMENTS One of the aims of this study was to examine whether the discourses used to account for sex work supported or contested the gendered status quo. The explanations offered by our participants mostly depended on the explicit or implicit assumption of male sexuality as a kind of drive or urge that needs to be released. So, servicing male sexuality was widely invoked as a reason for the industry. The male sex drive discourse was also used to explain the lack of women clients because it was assumed that there would be men willing to have sex with them for free. Thus the male sex drive discourse, identified in previous feminist analyses of sex and sexuality in heterosexual encounters, was used in this case to justify and rationalize the gendered and sexual hierarchy of sex work. The issue of female sexuality was referred to rarely in the interviews and only as one kind of response to the question of why there aren’t more women clients. A construction of female sexuality as being a desire for intimacy and for commitment functioned as a practical ideology to justify why there is no demand for servicing women’s sexual desires. One of the few explanations that addressed the existence of women clients involved the convenience aspect of buying sex services. One participant suggested that corporate women may benefit from the trouble-free aspect of sex purchased from a sex worker. The assumptions about sexuality used to rationalize the sex industry justify the radical feminist concern that sex work is about the sexual subordination of women. A further explanation of sex work that didn’t seem to rely so heavily on the assumption of an active male sexuality and a passive female one was the construction of the sex industry as an opportunity for sexual exploration. Participants in our study only alluded to men who used sex workers in this way. However, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to imagine that women may desire a safe context to explore aspects of their sexuality. Indeed, one of the characters in Ensler’s (1998) The Vagina Monologues was a sex worker who had a lucrative and fulfilling career helping women get in touch with their vaginas (also see Braun, 1999). The idea of using the sex industry as a sexual adventure playground has some parallels with the permissive discourse of sexual practice that promotes a nonmonogamous celebration of sexuality (Hollway, 1984; 1989).
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