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Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UKGWAOGender Work and Organization0968-6673Blackwell Publishing Ltd 20052005 July124Articles‘IT’S JUST ACTING’GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION 

Gender, Work and Organization. Vol. 12 No. 4 July 2005 

‘It’s Just Acting’: Sex Workers’ 

Strategies for Capitalizing on 

Sexuality 

Teela Sanders* 

This article reports on an ethnographic study of female sex workers in 

Britain who work in the indoor prostitution markets. The empirical findings 

contribute to the sex-as-labour debate and add to the sociological literature 

regarding the gendered and sexualized nature of employment, 

particularly the aesthetic and emotional labour of service work. Grounding 

the empirical findings in the theory of identity management and emotional 

labour and work, the article reviews some of the existing examples 

of how sex workers create emotion management strategies and describes 

an additional strategy, that of the ‘manufactured identity’. I argue that sex 

workers create a manufactured identity specifically for the workplace as a 

self-protection mechanism to manage the stresses of selling sex as well as 

crafting the work image as a business strategy to attract and maintain clientele. 

Drawing on comparisons between sex work and other feminized 

service occupations, I argue that sex workers who are involved in prostitution 

under certain conditions are able to capitalize on their own sexuality 

through the construction of a manufactured identity. The process of conforming 

to heterosexualized images in prostitution is conceptualized as 

not simply accepting dominant discourses but as a calculated response 

made by sex workers to manipulate the erotic expectations and the cultural 

ideals of the male client. 

Keywords: prostitution, sex work, identity management, emotional labour, 

service work 

Sex work as a service industry? 

t has been established that in mainstream employment women are part of 

I 

a work culture where female sexualization is an integral expectation of 

Address for correspondence: *Teela Sanders, Department of Sociology and Social Policy, 

University of Leeds, Leeds, UK, LS2 9JT, e-mail: t.l.m.sanders@leeds.ac.uk 

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 

and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

320 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION 

work-based relations. Bradley (1989) describes the historical sex-typing of 

jobs and Stanko (1988) introduces the argument that women’s occupations are 

routinely sexualized, while Gherardi (1995) explains how conventional feminized 

jobs demand sexual skills and labour. 1 An astute example of this is Lisa 

Adkins’ (1995) work on the hotel and leisure industry, where female attractiveness 

is written into the job description and the fetishization of uniforms 

and appearance is an intrinsic part of job recruitment, selection and continued 

employment (see also Cockburn [1991] who reports similar findings in a retail 

company). Other studies in various official labour markets have identified a 

similar process of the exploitation of female sexuality for profit through the 

sexualization of dress and appearance and the expected behaviour of women. 

This has been particularly noticeable in jobs that are naturalized as ‘women’s 

work’, such as secretaries (Benet, 1972; Pringle, 1988), waitresses (Crang, 1994; 

Fine, 1996; Hall, 1993; Spradley and Mann, 1975), beauty therapists (Sharma 

and Black, 2002), massage therapists (Oerton and Phoenix, 2001; O’Toole, 

2003), hairdressers (Furman, 1997; Gimblin, 1996), air hostesses (Hochschild, 

1983; Tyler and Abbott, 1998), newsreaders and booksellers (Woolf, 1990), 

nursing and other ‘caring’ professions (James, 1989; O’Brien, 1994; Treweek, 

1996), and female professionals (McDowell, 1997; Rees, 1992). These empirical 

studies identify how the commodification of the female body is reproduced 

through workplace relations, especially in the service economy where the 

body is integral to the product on offer. In all these studies, there is evidence 

of both emotion work and emotional labour performed by the female worker 

as a method for managing sexual dynamics and worker expectations as well 

as their own identities in the workplace. 

In relation to the extensive research on the gendered nature of service 

work in the late capitalist economy, there has been much controversy over the 

question of whether women who work in prostitution are engaging in a form 

of sexual and physical labour or are victims of a patriarchal, capitalist system 

that allows male domination to exploit the bodies of women (for a review, see 

Brewis and Linstead, 2000b; Chapkis, 1997; Gulcur and Ilkkaracan, 2002). 

Some scholars have argued that selling sex for money is always oppressive 

for the agents involved (Barry, 1995; Jarvinen, 1993; Jeffreys, 1997). 

This abolitionist perspective concentrates on the suffering and victimization 

of women, leading to some scholars arguing that a woman can never be 

a ‘sex worker’ because she is turned into a ‘sex object’ by unequal power relations 

between men and women (Dworkin, 1996; Mackinnon, 1982; Pateman, 

1988). Others, by contrast, have argued that selling sex should be considered 

as legitimate work (Boynton, 2002; Brewis and Linstead, 2000c; Perkins et al., 

1991). Chapkis (1997, p. 67), for instance, explains how some women make an 

informed ‘rational choice’ to work in prostitution, rather than a ‘free choice’, 

which is available to few individuals in a society that is structured hierarchically 

by race, sex and class. The prostitution rights movement regards the 

selling of sex for money as employment and contends that those who work 

Volume 12 Number 4 July 2005 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005

‘IT’S JUST ACTING’ 321 

as prostitutes should receive the same status, protection and rights as those 

bestowed on other employees (Mathieu, 2003; Weitzer, 1996; West, 2000). 

Other scholars have argued that the debate cannot be so clear cut: the issues 

of control and consent in prostitution mean that neither the radical explanation 

or the work model adequately explain the real relationship between a 

female prostitute and a male client, and that sexual services should be understood 

on a continuum of types of work (see O’Connell Davidson, 1995, 1998). 

All camps would agree, nevertheless, that the conditions through which 

women experience prostitution expose the ‘profession’ to violations and vulnerabilities. 

The ever-present occupational risks in prostitution such as violence, 

exposure to health-related concerns, criminalization, marginalization, 

exclusion from civil and labour rights and ostracism from local communities 

(see Sanders [2004a] for a review) place sex work on an unequal footing in 

relation to the economic, social and cultural practices of the mainstream 

labour market. Therefore, in the wider debates surrounding the notion of sex 

work as a form of labour, prostitution cannot simply be analysed through an 

economic lens, because of the global moral condemnation to which women 

who sell sex are subject (Davis, 1936, p. 751). In addition to the moral question, 

the general location of prostitution outside the law leaves sex work, and 

those who participate in it, at a quasi-legal and semi-tolerated position. 

The stark differences between sex work and other gender-defined occupations 

does not, however, rule out the possibility of drawing similarities 

between the processes in official labour markets and the sex industry, as the 

opening paragraph of this article indicates. The last two decades have seen a 

significant shift in the analysis of workplace dynamics and gendered discourses 

in which sexuality is exemplified as a defining aspect of work relations 

and structures. Theories and empirical studies expose how the place of 

the female worker, in patriarchal and capitalist systems, is shaped by specific 

notions of sexual personhood (Adkins, 1995; Gherardi, 1995; Pringle, 1988; 

Walby, 1990). This is most easily noticed through dress code regulations. 

While these are not applicable to female staff only, uniforms are highly significant 

in controlling the image and appearance of women in the service 

industries (for examples, see Van Maanen [1991] on Disneyland; Adkins 

[1995] on the hotel and leisure industry and Crang [1994] on a restaurant 

chain). In the context of late capitalism, where personal relationships have 

been restructured in terms of emotional needs (Giddens, 1992), the fusion 

between the personal and the economic shapes modern gender relations. 

Sexuality is defined as a cultural product and practice that is intrinsically 

linked to the structure of economic relations in official modes of production 

and, I would add, also to illicit enterprises where sexuality is the mode of 

exchange. 

Any analysis of sex work as labour that potentially reflects mainstream 

occupations must therefore centralize sexuality as a defining feature of the 

economic, political and social relations that determine the organization of 

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 Volume 12 Number 4 July 2005


prostitution. Adkins (1995, p. 158) notes there are similar material conditions 

between the situation of women in the sex industry and wage labourers in 

official employment because the ‘sexual servicing of men may not be specific 

to the “sex industry” but rather is a common feature of women’s wage work’. 

I hope to move this debate forward by establishing both the parallels and the 

distinct differences between sex workers and wage labourers’ experience of 

sexualization at work. Generalizations made regarding the exploitation of 

female sex workers can be problematized because there is evidence that some 

women involved in prostitution manipulate their own sexuality and that of 

their male clients. In supplying this evidence from a specific group of sex 

workers, I contest Adkins’ (1995, p. 159) claim that the power relations to 

which sex workers are subject ‘limit their ability to determine the use of their 

bodies’ and instead suggest that this assertion may be more applicable to the 

subtle exploitation found in formal occupation structures. To understand the 

nature of sexual services in prostitution, as Brewis and Linstead (2000a, p. 

229) have argued, we must look to the micropractices of the organization of 

sex work and its complexity and resistance to dominant discourses. 

This article therefore draws on and contributes to the theoretical debates 

regarding the sex-as-labour contention (Kesler, 2002; O’Connell Davidson, 

2002), the gendered and sexualized nature of employment (Adkins, 1995; 

McDowell, 1997) and the aesthetic and emotional labour of service work 

(Hochschild, 1983; Taylor and Tyler, 2000; Warhurst et al., 2000; Wellington 

and Bryson, 2001). Here, I argue that sex workers undergo a reconceptualization 

of their own sexuality in the workplace that is distinct and purposely 

separate from the construction of their identity in other spaces such as in their 

intimate romantic sex lives, or as mothers, daughters, friends and citizens. 

My contention, which is grounded in the voices of women who work in prostitution, 

is that under certain material conditions some sex workers are able 

to exploit the demands of sexualization by engaging in emotional and sexual 

labour for male clients and emotion work on themselves. These processes 

produce emotional management strategies that protect individual women 

from the potential stresses of selling sex while at the same time increase their 

marketability and financial gain. 

In sum, I describe how producing a certain kind of identity in the sex 

industry, borne out of the specific requirements of male desires that clash 

with female desires to separate sex as an economic unit from romantic relations 

in private, is intrinsic to how some sex workers perform the ‘prostitute’ 

role. After describing the parameters of this ethnographic study, I provide a 

brief overview of the growing body of evidence that illustrates how sex 

workers create a montage of emotion management strategies. Findings from 

my study make a new injection to this literature, by describing how some sex 

workers, who could be described as ‘flourishing professionals’ (Glover, 

1969), create a ‘manufactured identity’ specifically for the workplace. I argue 



that this manufactured identity is functional at two levels. Firstly, similar to 

other emotion management strategies, this technique is applied only in the 

work setting for the purpose of psychological protection from a range of 

negative effects caused by selling access to parts of the body. Secondly, and in 

my argument, more significantly for the debate regarding the sexualization 

of female labour, sex workers create a separate character so they can perform 

the ‘prostitute’ role as a business strategy. The objective of this strategy is 

to make financial gain by exploiting the male customers’ desire for a stereotypical 

display of female sexuality. The process of conforming to heterosexualized 

imagery in prostitution is conceptualized as not simply conformity or 

exploitation but as a calculated response made by sex workers to capitalize 

on their own sexuality and the cultural ideals of the client. 

The study 

This article draws on a ten-month ethnographic study of female prostitution 

in Birmingham, UK, during 2000–2001. The study concentrated on indoor sex 

markets (licensed saunas, brothels, escort agencies, women who worked 

from home) in an attempt to move the focus away from the street market, 

which is largely characterized by drug use, male coercion, violence and 

exploitative ‘pimping’ relationships and limited material resources (Church 

et al., 2001; Hart and Barnard, 2003). Concentrating on other prostitution markets 

is essential because the majority of women who work in prostitution in 

Britain do not work on the street but from indoor locations. 

The original aims of the research were to explore the perceptions of risk 

amongst indoor sex workers and the strategies they create to manage occupational 

hazards (Sanders, 2004a, 2004c). This focused on women’s experience 

of violence, state policing and criminalization; harassment from 

protesters and stigma. A central objective was to explore the social processes 

that impact on personal relationships and private lives. I therefore spent time 

with the women to find out how their occupation affected their personal 

lives. Much of the resulting understanding of the social organization of sex 

markets and the processes within the sex enterprise is drawn from over 1000 

observation hours in sex establishments. This part of the data collection 

included ‘hanging out’ with women in their place of work as well as invitations 

to participate in their domestic and social life (for further details of the 

methodology see Sanders, 2005). 

In addition to the observations, I conducted formal taped interviews with 

50 sex workers (of whom 45 worked from indoor establishments while five 

worked on the street), three female owners of these establishments and two 

female receptionists. Women were selected for this study on the basis of 

three criteria: they had to be aged 18 years or over, British citizens and define 



their involvement in sex work as ‘voluntary’. Such criteria were imposed to 

avoid concentrating on young people exploited through the sex industry, 

trafficking and coercive pimping which, although extremely important areas 

for research, were beyond the scope of this enquiry. The arguments in this 

article are based on the indoor sex workers in this sample who experienced 

a set of material conditions that were significantly different from those of the 

sex workers I met who worked on the street. The verbatim quotes reported 

here are from women who worked from secure indoor markets and were 

entrenched in the local sex-work community networks. Unlike the typical 

patterns of prostitutes’ histories that are reported in the literature, the participants 

I have based this set of arguments on were not scarred by drug 

abuse, violence by clients, financial exploitation from male partners or recurring 

patterns of arrest. They tended to define themselves as ‘career girls’ or 

‘working girls’, expressing entrepreneurial attitudes and business acumen. 

This group of women had made some form of decision regarding entering 

into prostitution as a means of making money and do not represent the 

many other women who are tricked, coerced or simply trapped into the sex 

trade. 

These indoor workers tended to enter prostitution at a later age compared 

to women on the street. The mean age of their entering prostitution was 23 

years, with an average career length of nine years. Thirty-three women had 

worked in more than one sex market over the years, and at the time of interview 

12 women worked in more than one market. Participation in the mainstream 

labour market was made difficult by women’s responsibilities for 

childcare. Thirty-six of the 45 interviewees had 74 children between them, 

with an average of two children each. Twenty-one women described themselves 

as lone parents and they all said they entered prostitution to provide 

financially for their family. This decision was made in the light of an absence 

of child maintenance from the father and an inability or unwillingness to rely 

only on welfare benefits. Also relevant to this study are the educational 

experiences and participation in the formal labour market of the respondents. 

There appears to be no ‘typical’ route into the sex industry as the group of 

women have had varying degrees of formal education, training and professional 

experience. Thirty-four of the 45 participants had left school at the age 

of 16 with few qualifications and had entered manual, unskilled or semiskilled 

jobs. Eleven interviewees had gone to college immediately after 

school to acquire various vocational qualifications (hairdressing, social care 

skills and catering). Of these 11, five women had completed professional 

nursing training (two specialized in psychiatric nursing) while two others 

had taken first degrees at university. At the time of the study, three women 

were working towards a university degree. Eight of the women, moreover, 

had been in professional occupations and had decided that the income and 

freedom to ‘be your own boss’ outweighed mainstream employment 

opportunities. 



Strategies to manage emotions in sex work 

Most of the literature on the strategies of emotion work that sex workers 

adopt echoes the need for psychological security and individual separation 

from the experience of sex as a commercial enterprise. Research has established 

links between selling sex and low self-esteem and post-traumatic 

stress disorder (Farley, et al., 1998), depression (Bagley, 1999) eating disorders 

(Cooney, 1990) and feelings of self-blame, guilt and disgust (Sanders, 2004a). 

Others have argued that, because prostitution is a consumption industry that 

leaves the body in an ambiguous state of commodification, the individual sex 

worker risks the consumption of her self-identity together with her sale of sex 

(Brewis and Linstead, 2000a, p. 209). 

Psychological protection strategies towards damage limitation includes a 

complex range of individual and collective strategies and, as Pateman (1988, 

p. 207) recalls, exemplify how the prostitute needs to retain her sense of self. 

These distancing strategies centre on the woman performing emotion work 

on herself in the classic sense of ‘deep acting’ (Hochschild, 1983). In the context 

of prostitution, emotion work is carried out on feelings in private. 

Women work on their internal feelings to separate, change and revise one set 

of feelings that are appropriate during sex work while reserving another set 

of emotions or feelings for private interactions. For example, sex workers 

who are aroused and attracted to a client may try to turn this unwanted or, in 

their view, inappropriate emotion into something more acceptable. Sex workers 

perform emotion work by managing their own boundaries, feelings and 

identities. Brewis and Linstead (2000b, p. 84) recognize the hard work associated 

with these internal processes: 

Prostitutes, due to the intensity and intimacy of their physical involvement 

in their work, do not necessarily find the distancing process easy, and a 

variety of styles and methods are employed by working girls (and boys) to 

sustain the mask, or series of masks, which make earning a living through 

the sale of sex possible. 

Sex workers therefore create pragmatic, symbolic and psychological defence 

mechanisms to manage the tensions of selling sex (Boynton, 2002, p. 8; Day, 

1994; Phoenix, 2000; Warr and Pyett, 1999). O’Neill (2001, p. 89) describes 

how the objective of ‘separating the body from the self’ results in an ‘exceptional 

control of the inner world’. Hoigard and Finstad (1992) found that the 

public and the private worlds of the female sex worker are divided by blanking 

out techniques, retaining physical boundaries, keeping to time, disguising 

their physical appearance and avoiding emotional relationships with 

(long-term) customers. McKeganey and Barnard (1996, p. 84) report that 

rituals based on clothing, make-up and bathing allow women to act in and 

act out of the work role. Below I review some popular emotion management 

strategies observed both in my study and the wider literature: body exclusion 



zones, the condom as psychological barrier, the preference for providing 

domination services and the meanings attached to sex as work. 

Bodily exclusion zones 

Research has established that certain sex acts are not generally sold as they 

are too time-consuming, too painful or are simply reserved for private activities 

(Hoigard and Finstad, 1992; McLeod, 1982; Phoenix, 2000). Retaining 

body exclusion zones was a universal technique amongst my respondents in 

all markets: 

If I have done the same client a million times, they still get the same spiel: 

don’t kiss, don’t do anal and you can only kiss and touch on top [part of the 

body]. (Krystal, working premises) 

‘If they ask you what service you are offering you will tell them no fingering, 

no licking and no kissing’ (Carrie, sauna). O’Connell Davidson (1998) 

explains how Desiree, a successful entrepreneurial sex worker, maintains a 

strict code of body parts for sale while others are reserved for private use. 

Another worker interviewed by Boynton (1998, p. 25) explained that certain 

body parts are similarly ‘off limits’. These parts of the body and specific sex 

acts are considered too intimate to be sold, or reserved for the worker’s own 

sexual pleasure. 

The condom as psychological barrier 

Closely tied to the notions of creating a non-intimate experience for the sex 

provider during the commercial sex act, the condom is consistently used in 

commercial sexual transactions, not only as a health protection mechanism 

but as a psychological barrier. The sex workers commented that they found 

‘comfort in the fact that the condom prevented the flesh of the client touching 

their own body, particularly internally’ (Sanders, 2002, p. 563). They considered 

that the thin rubber sheath that separated their genital organs from those 

of the client symbolized an absence of intimacy, in their efforts to frame the 

commercial sexual encounter as one devoid of the traditional feelings associated 

with a romantic sexual liaison. Some women were particularly 

repulsed by the notions of having flesh-to-flesh contact with the client’s genitalia 

and the condom prevented this type of intimacy. If an instance occurred 

where there was such physical contact, as when a condom broke or came off, 

the sex worker often felt violated and ‘dirty’ (an argument also made by Day, 

1994, p. 174; Plumridge et al., 1997; Warr and Pyett, 1999). The condom was 

therefore considered to be an essential tool of the trade, not only because it 

prevented sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy, but because it 

filtered out any intimate feeling in what is generally considered to be the 

most intimate form of physical contact. 



The preference for domination services 

Twenty-seven interviewees said that although they mainly offer straightforward 

sex acts they prefer to sell bondage and domination services. This 

preference can be understood in three ways. Firstly, there is a simple economic 

calculation here, because domination services are a specialist market, 

and so reap higher remuneration than ordinary sexual services. Secondly, 

there is a direct reduction of body contact and penetration is rarely involved: 

The domination ones, they are not actually touching your body — it is all 

caning them or finishing off with the hand. They are the best ones. You are 

giving them abuse which you can’t do in actual life to a man can ya?! Them 

ones, it is all game play and miming. But I do like the domination. Some I 

don’t even have to touch and I have got 50 quid in my hand. The caning: 

the idiots — they are paying you money to whip them and beat them. 

Those are the ones that you like because there is no body contact. (Laura, 

working premises) 

Domination requires less of the female body compared to intercourse and 

often implements (such as whips, chains and leather) are used, which 

increase the physical and psychological distance between the worker’s body 

and that of the client. As Scambler and Scambler (1997, p. 115) also report, sex 

workers do not themselves engage in the sexual fantasies that the client 

requests but instead act out a set of prepared, routine speeches and predictable 

interactions that they repeat with other customers. 

Finally, the fantasy of domination rests on the client’s subordination to the 

female: 

I like the domination ones where you can mark them and tie them up. I get 

a kick out of it. It is the power. I really like that. I wouldn’t let them hurt me 

but I would spank them all day long and spit on them. . . . I like the control 

of that and I can have £80 and not even sleep with them. (Katrina, working 

premises) 

Katrina’s comments represent a familiar narrative (see also O’Neill, 2001, 

p. 87) of workers who prefer domination because they feel an increased sense 

of power. 

Sex as work 

Sex workers actively create separate interpretations of the sexual acts they 

perform in a commercial work context in contrast to sexual relations they 

have in their private lives. Some of the women in my study said they attached 

no emotions to the commercial sex exchange while others described how 

clinical and sterile the act was. For Astrid the clinical world of sex work is 

strikingly different to intimate sex with her partner: 



My fella hasn’t been home for three weeks. That is when I last had sex. It is 

personal at home, in here it is clinical. At home it is for my pleasure. I swear 

to god it [sex work] is like something you hate doing but it comes to me like 

washing up, like, it has got to be done. When you are with a punter you are 

thinking of something, and that is it, done. (Astrid, working premises) 

The ‘fluidity of sexual identity’ (Hubbard, 2002, p. 366) is exemplified 

amongst sex workers who engage in a different form of sexual labour at work 

compared to their personal sexual interactions: ‘I could never do oral [at 

home] because I’d think I was in here [at the sauna], and I could never put 

stockings on as I would think I was acting for a punter. I want it to be love 

and hands and kisses at home’ (Laura, sauna). Although there were some 

exceptions, most women did not receive sexual pleasure from their clients, 

but instead faked their arousal and physical stimulation. Shaping their inner 

emotions through emotion work in this way is the basis of how sex workers 

manage difficult and risky emotions. 

Having reviewed how my data fits on to those in other studies, the remainder 

of this article introduces a strategy that, at several levels, appears to be a 

fundamental and largely effective way to manage emotions in a precarious 

set of economic and gender relationships. These findings lead me to argue 

firstly, that a manufactured identity is a consistent occurrence amongst 

indoor sex workers and secondly, that this has a significant bearing on the 

degree to which they are successful in terms of their business success and 

minimizing psychological damage. As I will describe below, creating a manufactured 

identity is a combination of both sexual labour and ‘deep’ emotion 

work to alter one’s own emotions; that is, emotional labour as a physical 

manifestation of feelings that are displayed for the benefit of the client in 

order to create the desired response (what Hochschild [1983, p. 10] defines as 

‘surface acting’) in performing the role of the prostitute. 

Manufactured identity 

Fifteen respondents described how they create an identity specifically for 

their work. This identity is supported by a pseudonym, a fictitious life story, 

a family background and a childhood history. The substance of this strategy 

is best described in their own words: 

I have been ‘Angela’ for nearly 25 years. I have a story about who Angela 

is that is different from my real life. She is a prostitute and she does all sorts 

of naughty things for money. She swears more and acts differently than I 

would ever do. They [clients] do not know anything about my personal life 

and whatever I tell them is complete fabrication. They have no idea who I 

really am. (Angela, working premises) 

We just make up a fictional character. I say I am a single woman and that 

I have not got any kids. How I work it is on what my friends are doing who 



are single and out clubbing. They [clients] love it because they think I am 

a sex beast. If we [referring to self and colleague] are together we pretend 

we are a couple of dykes who love each other and can’t get enough of each 

other. . . . Even when we are answering the phone we put on a different 

voice, a work voice which is sexy and flirtatious. (Leigh, working 

premises) 

You go into a mode; like, I am ‘Belinda’ (like, that is not my real name), 

and I become her. It is just like acting, like you are on the telly. If they ask 

me questions I will answer them, but it is not the truth and they don’t 

know that. Like, I make up where I live, and I lie, because that is Belinda. 

Belinda is nineteen, she is single, she likes going out for a drink, she lives 

in Solihull on her own. (Belinda, sauna) 

There are several reasons why sex workers manufacture an identity specifically 

for the workplace. Women do not want to reveal their personal identifiers 

for fear of a client stalking them or finding out their personal details. 

Because many women work in the sex industry in secret, without the knowledge 

of their partners, family and friends, they also want to avoid association 

with the ‘whore stigma’, moral condemnation and nefarious stereotypes: 

You have to have a cameo role apart from the other role you have in the 

sauna. You do not want to divulge where you live at all costs. You tell your 

family one thing, but then you tell your clients another thing that protects 

that family life. The clients ask me about my life and I usually talk about 

psychology, as it is part of what I know. Eleanor is a student in Manchester 

and she is studying psychology. (Eleanor, sauna) 

Simmel (1955) describes how the modern ‘self’ is capable of multifaceted 

identities that are acted out in as many social roles. Certain parts of our identity 

are separated out and replayed or ‘switched on’ in relation to the time, 

space, activity and audience with which we interact. In boundary work, we 

classify the self to allocate our forms of self to the appropriate situation. For 

most women, sex work is not the transference of private sexual relations to a 

commercial context but, instead, is considered one particular type of gender 

and sexual performance that is different from gendered embodiments in 

other parts of their lives. The microgeography of the sauna or brothel is 

where the enactment of the prostitute role takes place and where the ‘scripted 

performativity in the creation of sexual identities’ (Hubbard, 2002, p. 366) is 

mediated through colleagues, clients, a unique spatial setting and stage 

props found only in the sex establishment. 

The following section of the article is divided into two. Firstly, I describe 

how the manufactured identity is implemented as a strategy to protect individuals 

further from the negative repercussions of working in a clandestine 

and illegal activity and, secondly, I explain how a manufactured identity is 

constructed as a business strategy. 



Protecting the self 

O’Neill (2001, p. 84) states that ‘making out’ in prostitution is achieved ‘by 

“performing” the “prostitute” role/identities within certain times and 

spaces’. Virtually all the sex workers I interviewed understood their interaction 

with clients as an act that prevents the client from knowing their personal 

identifiers and their private character: ‘You are just acting. We are our 

name when we go in that room we are not the real person’ (Astrid, working 

premises). The pseudonym, which is universal in the sex industry, is an 

important stage prop that sex workers adopt in order to act their role and 

maintain a barrier between the character exposed to the client and what the 

women consider to be their ‘real’ personality: 

It is, like, coming into an acting role as soon as you come through the door. 

I am, like, that person and not who I really am when I am sitting at home. 

It is like being an actress for the day and when you go home you are not 

like that. Psychologically that is how I look at the job. I do not feel, like, I 

have to block it off as I am a realist and I know I am doing it, but that is my 

way of making work and everything separate. (Eleanor, sauna) 

Above, Eleanor explains the complex functions of the manufactured identity. 

Impression management at work is a coping mechanism that separates out 

work life from private life. As Eleanor comments, ‘being an actress for the 

day’ does not have the status of a denial but instead is a tool for managing the 

negative consequences of engaging in sexual, physical and emotional labour 

that attract public condemnation and generate private dilemmas. Parallels 

between the role of the prostitute and that of acting were a recurring theme: 

Personally I feel like it [having sex with clients] is no different to the actors 

who do the sex scenes on the telly. . . . I know the actors are not having 

penetrative sex but it is very similar to what we do. (Sammy, sauna) 

In a similar way to the dramatic quality found in management consultancy 

(see Clark and Salaman, 1998), manufacturing a sexual persona specifically 

for work is an intentional strategy that is consciously constructed. Kelly 

revealed how she watches pornographic films to learn how to perform erotic 

acts: ‘I just act, I literally do. I watch pornos and act like that in the room’. As 

Roberts et al. (1995) illustrate, faking orgasms and sexual excitement is a 

female skill that is learnt through sharing stories, imitation and dramatic 

performance. The social construction of competence amongst sex workers 

includes being sufficiently sexually skilled to provide the client with sexual 

satisfaction and to achieve what is known by male clients as ‘the girlfriend 

experience’. 2 Indeed, bodily capital is an essential ingredient in occupations 

where the body is on display and is the central focus of the work task, ingroup 

relations and bargain exchange. Monaghan (2002) describes how a 

specific male physique is a symbol of competence amongst door staff in pubs 



and nightclubs, where information on body building and body techniques 

are traded in this working-class, male-gendered occupation. Similarly sex 

workers craft their bodies to match the male fantasy of the female cultural 

ideal that enables paying customers to act out their own macho image and 

conform to social expectations of the active sexual male. 

Ali describes how she uses her body capital to be a successful sex worker 

just like an actor performing in the theatre: 

When I was at school I was in the drama and theatre group and it [sex 

work] is quite similar. When you are doing the fantasies you are not the 

same person that you are when you are at home with the children or with 

your friends. I am acting that part and I am not me, really. I just pretend to 

be what they want me to be. . . . I am not real and what they want is not 

real . . . that is why they come here because it is nothing like real life. (Ali, 

works from home) 

Goffman’s (1963, p. 10) concept of the performance of the self, where individuals 

take on a part, play a role and convince an audience, can be used to 

understand how respondents move in and out of their work character. He 

explains how performance is used for the benefit of an audience, even though 

the ‘cynical performer’ may have no interest in the performance, except as a 

means to an end. Goffman states explicitly that cynical performance can be 

used to protect the inner self from contact with the audience. However, 

unlike the emotional management strategies described above (the use of 

condoms and so forth), the manufactured identity is especially significant 

because it has another function: it is a calculated business strategy to attract 

and maintain high-paying customers. 

Performing as a business strategy 

Sex workers adopt expected sexual qualities and physical appearances as a 

public display of emotional labour. O’Neill (2001, p. 89) argues that: 

emotional labour is a central aspect of the women’s relationship with the 

client and involves them in manipulating, suppressing and falsifying their 

own feeling life in order to do the intimate work. 

Sex workers engage in emotional labour for male clients, not only through 

physical relief but, like beauty therapists (Sharma and Black, 2002), provide 

pampering, frivolity and empathy. Kempadoo and Doezema (1999) and 

Chapkis (1997) have also argued that when women engage in sexual or erotic 

activities in prostitution it should be understood as selling a form of emotional 

labour. 

As I suggested earlier, the ‘aesthetically pleasing performance’ 

(Wellington and Bryson, 2002, p. 934) is expected in most service work 

industries, especially those that boast a predominantly female workforce. 



Even in service industries where the consumer is female, such as the beauty 

industry, female workers engage in ‘subjective labour’ to make purchasers 

look and feel better (Sharma and Black, 2002, p. 918). In my study Natasha is 

an extreme example of how sex workers engage in emotional labour to provide 

the desired appearance and produce an effective response in the client. 

The manufactured identity that Natasha has created includes ‘body work’ 

(Wolkowitz, 2002) such as physical body changes (breast implants and minor 

facial surgery) and creative thought to make her working character, both on 

the website and in face-to-face interactions, as marketable as possible. 

Natasha tells me she is a personal trainer in the morning, who earns £300 for 

three quarters of an hour. Her story goes as follows: 

Outrageous amounts of money but, whatever, they believe me. My wage 

funds my lifestyle. Then I would never need to do this for the money. I 

came from a public-school background, educated at a very nice school 

from age seven to 18, at which point my father, who was a group captain 

in the Air Force, sent me to the States to university. Now I am spending 

time here and in New York. Daddy is a retired Marshall and worth three 

and a half million and I am now waiting for his inheritance. That is what 

I portray. . . . Even the voice I am talking to you in now is because we are 

in this place [where she works]. I mean, I do not necessarily talk in this 

nature. But this is the way that you are in this character, in this dress, and 

that is who I have had to become at work. 

Natasha’s physical appearance supports the story she tells her clients and the 

person she pretends to be when she is marketing, negotiating and performing 

the service. Her appearance gives the impression that her character is 

genuine: the gorgeous hair (wig) and clothes of a seductress, the breasts of a 

page three model (implants) and a penthouse that her fake character would 

live in (rented premises). Natasha has spent thousands of pounds constructing 

an ‘authentic performance’ as a business investment. Her manufactured 

identity is so well performed that Natasha insists that her clients are convinced 

that the character she performs at work is the same as the one that 

appears in other parts of her life. She has regular clients who part with £250 

an hour for her services, and a popular following on Internet chat rooms. Yet 

Natasha’s appearance, personality and behaviour in the private, domestic 

sphere is very different: 

In reality I have a very normal background. Nothing like what I portray. 

But you get into role and you kind of believe it yourself, but of course I 

do this for the money. They believe it and it works for me. . . . At home I 

am completely different. I even look totally different and when women 

from the agency see me outside of here they don’t recognize me. I don’t 

ever wear clothes like this, or act so confidently, or speak like this. I have 



two children and I spend my time running around after them, like any 

mum. 

Such data suggests that when planning their work role, sex workers, like 

waiting staff in a restaurant (see Crang, 1994, p. 687), imagine what the customer 

wants: ‘You have to imagine yourself to be the person that people want 

from a man’s point of view . . . you have to be what they want’ (Beryl, working 

premises). Creating ‘counterfeit intimacy’ (Boles and Garbin, 1974; Enck 

and Preston, 1988) enables the worker to produce the desired response in the 

client who wants to buy into particular notions of femininity, masculinity and 

heterosexuality. 

Yet creating a different type of personality just for the workplace requires 

a complex interaction between the individual, the environment and the male 

clientele. From a participant observation study, Frank (1998, p. 192) reports 

that dancers in an American strip club become skilled in consistently remembering 

and applying their manufactured identity, because if they do not clients 

will realize that they are faking and withdraw their business. To solidify 

the ‘realness’ of the fake identity, the women I interviewed worked hard to 

make their character appear genuine: ‘You just have to remember what you 

have said in case they come back’ (Belinda, sauna). These respondents realized 

that clients will only believe their story if it is consistent and expresses 

some kind of genuine experience: 

I am really good and I want them to think that when they leave the room. 

I do not want them to think when they walk out that they have just 

shagged a goddamn robot. . . . You rely on them coming back. It is like a 

clothes shop who relies on people coming back to buy their clothes because 

their clothes are good. It is exactly the same. I have got to bring them back. 

(Beryl, working premises) 

These women invest in their work roles in order to give the impression of a 

mutual exchange of sexual intimacy; something that is considered to be a 

sign of quality in heterosexual relationships (Daker-White and Donovan, 

2002). Butler (1993, p. 5) describes the importance of realness in any gender 

performance: ‘. . . what determines the effect of realness is the ability to compel 

belief, to produce naturalised effect’. To convince their clients that the act 

is real, these sex workers must ‘compel belief’ through their performance, 

because their fabricated identities form the basis of the relationship between 

the client and the worker. However, the intensity of the process means that 

sometimes the sustainability of the performance is brought into question. 

Interviewees describe how they concentrate on remembering their story to 

avoid real information slipping into the conversation: 

There are occasions when I nearly say ‘well, my son. . . .’ And I have to shut 

up. But then I don’t necessarily think there has to be some major separation 



— rather I see it as a different aspect of who I am, an ability, a multifaceted 

personality. (Natasha, working premises) 

The difficulty in maintaining distinct separations between different ways of 

interacting and appearing is also visible in the way they occasionally impart 

personal information. Workers who have had regular clients for some years 

explain that it is inevitable that customers will discover snippets about their 

real life: ‘The regular clientele — you get to know them and you talk about 

things a lot more’ (Beryl, working premises). Maintaining a separate identity 

at work is further complicated by the fact that some clients realize the 

assumed identities are fake, because they try to find out aspects of women’s 

personal lives: 

Clients get obsessed with real names. I have a few clients who I’ve seen for 

a while who call me by my proper name, which is something that just happened 

over a period of time. Some clients, though, from the initial appointment, 

seem to place a weird emphasis on finding out real names and then 

phoning, mailing using your name twice a minute, as if it adds something 

special to the relationship. (Esther, escort) 

Conversely, the same women who hide their personal character agreed that 

they could not fully divorce some traits that they reserved for private from 

their work: 

It is acting, but you still have to be part of yourself, because if you put on 

a totally fake front (which I have tried), then it doesn’t get your clients 

back. The clients won’t come back because they need to know a part of you. 

(Kelly, sauna) 

Investing facets of their personality into their working identity, rather than 

constructing an entirely fake working identity, appears to be necessary for 

these sex workers to create an ‘authentic performance’ that retains their clients 

and ultimately achieves their goal of making financial gain through 

emotional and sexual labour. Retaining some sense of their everyday characteristics 

may also prevent alienation in the workplace. Frank (1998, p. 193) 

summarizes how erotic dancers sell particular versions of themselves ‘falling 

somewhere between fact and fiction’, so that their manufactured identity is a 

‘concatenation of lies, truths and partial truths’. In a similar way, these sex 

workers engage in a continual process of creating, maintaining and sustaining 

their manufactured identity in order to make money and keep sane. 

Capitalizing on sexuality 

In prostitution, the group of sex workers who invest in a manufactured identity 

explicitly exploit the processes of sexualization in the workplace. They 



adopt identities that conform to the aesthetic nature of the prostitute role as 

a business strategy to attract regular custom and, ultimately, a steady clientele. 

Performing the prostitute role can be an exact and calculated method 

that utilizes the expectations of male sexual desire to make maximum financial 

gain in the minimum amount of time. Sex workers like Natasha and Beryl 

are proud of their convincing work identities and do not feel their clients are 

cheated. Hochschild (1983, p. 136) remarks how the process of emotional 

labour can leave the labourer feeling satisfaction, rather than estrangement: 

‘When feelings are successfully commercialized, the worker does not feel 

phony or alien; she feels somehow satisfied in how personal her service actually 

was’. Natasha is very clear that the work she does is only fantasy: 

This is a fantasy. It is a place where I can parade myself. It is a forum where 

I can be who I want to be, to be adored for someone who isn’t real. They 

adore me and want me and love me but I am very aware that that is not me. 

Cockburn (1991) describes how employers (implying men) exploit sexuality 

for profit, but there is no attempt in the literature to explore how, in certain 

types of service work (especially where individuals are self-employed), it is 

possible that employees or entrepreneurs can exploit both their own sexuality 

and that of their customers for financial gain. Nevertheless, the rise of 

the image consultancy industry (Wellington and Bryson, 2002) and the 

beauty industry exemplifies the importance of heterosexualized bodies as a 

performance. Sharma and Black (2002) describe how the beauty therapist is 

at an intersection of professionalization and sexualization because she must 

subscribe to the feminine ideal (especially with the increase in male customers 

who buy beauty treatments) while at the same time provide a selfpresentation 

that is professional and distanced from the seedy notions of a 

massage parlour. 

The sex workers I interviewed used the desired commodification of attractiveness, 

body parts and sexual acts to ‘capitalize on sexuality’ (Singer, 1993, 

p. 39). They actively manipulated their own appearance and controlled their 

characteristics so that they matched the work environment of the sauna or 

brothel. Heterosexuality may be required as part of the sex routine (as is 

bisexuality through standard requests for ‘two-girls’ or ‘lesbian shows’) but 

in private sexual relations this compulsory heterosexuality is not transferred. 

These women described how their private sex lives were distinctly different 

from their work-based sex. Thus, some women opted for celibacy; others 

were in long-term straight or gay partnerships and others transgressed the 

‘golden rules’ by having private relationships with the men they had originally 

met as paying customers. Prostitution here becomes a site where different 

versions of the meaning of sexuality are enacted and performed 

(Nencel, 2001). Not unlike the work space of a hospital ward, an aeroplane or 

a beauty salon, where femininity is constructed and enacted as part of an 

occupation, prostitution is a site that enables some women to emphasize and 



effectively manipulate aspects of heterosexual femininity in order to 

capitalize from this financially. 

My sex worker interviewees also capitalize on the sexuality and desires of 

male clients by inverting their own sexualized behaviour as a resistance 

strategy. Katila and Merilainen (2002, p. 339) point out that there are many 

different ways in which the organizational status quo can be challenged, 

including ‘using silence, reclaiming “trivial” discourse, responding to verbal 

harassment, telling the truth, [and] utilizing creative code-switching in language’, 

and to this list I would add the appropriation of humour and sexual 

banter. An example of the latter is, for example, when nurses engage in sexual 

banter with their male patients, as part of what O’Brien (1994, p. 404) 

describes as ‘ego-work’ to enhance the feeling of well-being in the patient. 

Although this is not interpreted as resistance, Adkins (1995, p. 131) found 

that women in the tourism industry responded to male sexualized interactions 

by ‘laughing it off’ and ‘playing along with it’. As I have argued elsewhere 

(Sanders, 2004b), sex workers also actively rely on, and to some extent 

encourage, sexual innuendo and jovial relations with clients as an important 

tool in the commercial transaction: ‘You have to be bubbly and confident and 

chatty, even when it is totally fake’ (Anthea, works from home). During the 

ethnography, the observations I made of encounters between clients and sex 

workers demonstrated how women initiated sexual banter to ensure that the 

transaction went smoothly, framed the interaction in a relaxed tone, avoided 

confrontation and provided the client with 30 minutes of pleasure out of his 

mundane day. Humour was not a response to pacify men (as suggested by 

Adkins) but a purposeful interaction to ensure that the client complies and 

completes the transaction in the minimum time possible. 

Some women then consciously perform their role of the ‘prostitute’ and 

approach their business as a ‘strategist’ (Goffman, 1974, p. 523), sexual technician, 

labourer and actress. Theory that locates power and influence only 

with male customers or the wider structures that determine economic relations 

leaves female sex workers theoretically devoid of agency, responsibility 

and rationality. In relation to the sex industry, taking no account of the informal 

and self-regulatory nature of the sex trade in terms of codes of practice 

and norms of acceptability ignores the complexity of the levels of organization 

inherent in an illicit economy. The strategies that are deeply embedded 

in this age-old profession have been passed down to promote the selfrealization 

of individual women who are prepared to capitalize on structural 

and popular discourses of the female ideal. 

Conclusion 

This article has provided an overview of the extent and nature of emotional 

and sexual labour performed by sex workers in order to produce the desired 



response in their clients and protect their own mental well-being from the 

damage related to sex work. It provides a review, supplemented with additional 

primary empirical findings, of the different types of emotion management 

strategies that sex workers adopt to separate their working lives from 

their personal lives. By tying sex work to other types of service work, we 

experience little surprise at the extent of emotional labour needed in prostitution 

because ‘emotional labour is precisely what we should expect to be 

required of any group of workers who “process” other people’s bodies’ 

(Sharma and Black, 2002, p. 925). What is new in this article is the analysis of 

the complex creation of a manufactured identity that consists of a character 

constructed only for the workplace. This dual-purpose strategy is different 

from the other strategies: it not only serves as a form of psychological separation 

by protecting personal identifiers and everyday details such as family 

life from the work sphere, but the manufactured identity is also a carefully 

designed business strategy. The latter function provides insight into how 

some sex workers manipulate their own body capital and emotional and sexual 

labour to create a marketable character that will appeal, and implicitly 

conform, to the demands and expectations of the male client. 

A manufactured identity can be understood as an example of a resistance 

strategy that enables sex workers to control the workplace. Yet this is not an 

option for all sex workers, but depends on a specific set of circumstances. 

The ability to create a manufactured identity depends on the individual’s 

personal biography, her experience of the sex trade and the location of her 

work (whether on or off the street). Some women are constrained by drug 

use, coercive relations, racialized boundaries, poor education and access to 

material resources such as housing and technology. These factors render 

their sex-work environment precarious and vulnerable to occupational 

risks. 

Nevertheless, given that the broader structural and material conditions in 

which women experience their day-to-day economic lives are out of their 

own control in the current system, the sex workers who do have the emotional, 

intellectual and body capital to create emotion management strategies 

are not necessarily worse off than female labourers in official employment. 

Prostitution is a consumer industry where sexuality is explicitly for sale, but 

it can be argued that this is not vastly different from other feminized workplaces 

where sexuality is capitalized on, not only by female workers but also 

by employers. The sexualization of sex work is complex, because there is a 

subgroup of women who experience a certain set of material conditions that 

enable them to manage their appearance, their bodies and their enhanced or 

exaggerated dimensions of femininity as an economic tool through which 

they can make money and build successful businesses. While not disagreeing 

with Pateman’s (1988) assertion that labour power, and in particular sexual 

labour, is a gendered phenomenon, how and why sexual labour comes into 

being or, more importantly is sustained, in a gendered form, is a complex 



process that does not necessarily leave women as the passive recipients of 

male demands. 

Despite the display of stereotypical characteristics and bodily manifestations 

through strategies such as the ‘manufactured identity’, a multidimensional 

understanding of different groups of sex workers shows that some 

women also manipulate male sexuality and sexual desire to their own 

advantage. With the expansion and normalization of the ‘sexploitation’ 

industry (Murphy, 2003) and the centrality of image and hybrid identity in 

the service economy, the sexualization of the female body is not only 

influenced by male profiteers and purchasers but can be understood as a 

calculable strategy for ‘doing gender’ (Tyler and Abbott, 1998, p. 435) and 

manipulating the desires of men who conform to the cultural ideal of 

masculine heterosexuality. 

Acknowledgements 

Thanks to the three reviewers and the editors for their concise and thorough 

comments on an earlier draft. Thanks also to the women who gave me insight 

into their lives and helped to break down stereotypes and misconceptions. 

Notes 

1. The sexualized identity of the male worker in mainstream occupations has only 

more recently been the subject of empirical studies and theorizing (see McDowell, 

1997; Mills, 1998; Monaghan, 2002). 

2. The term ‘girlfriend experience’ is frequently used on websites patronized by 

male clients who discuss their commercial interactions and describes a highquality 

interaction with a sex worker that is characterized by intimacy as well as 

sexual gratification. 

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