No Way To Make A Living » sex

Sex at the Job Centre

Lynne Pettinger — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:47:21 +0000

You can find all sorts of jobs at Jobcentre Plus, the statutory agency that helps the unemployed back into work: it’s the place to look if you fancy a working as a driver, check-out assistant, nanny or adult model. Yes, that does say adult model. You could also find work as a ‘webcam performer’. “Duties include performing to a web cam for clients or customers fantasies” and require the performer to be nude (http://jobseekers.direct.gov.uk/ search term ‘webcam performer’ accessed 6th July 2010).

It seems commercial sex in a striptease culture (McNair, 2002) is mainstream. The liberalisation of sexual behaviour reflects a particular conceptualisation of modern subjectivity as individualised and commodified (Livingston, 1998). This perspective acts as a powerful moral pull in favour of the normalisation of the right to a range of sexual behaviours that might formerly have lain in the domain of the abject. This liberalisation, even a compulsion to speak of sex, retains a hint edge of moral taint, though. In the case of commercial sex, from the everyday erotic labour of bar staff (Boyle, 2007) to market exchange of sexual intercourse, there is a tension between tolerance and taint. On one hand is a powerful drive towards tolerating or accepting sexual practices where those who engage are seen as making legitimate choices as agents in modern society. On the other are arguments that such practices are invariably degrading and inappropriate, either because sex – like other intimacies – ought not be marketised, or because those selling sex cannot make a ‘free’ choice to self-exploit (Barry, 1995). And even those who feel empowered by a (postfeminist) right to speak and act as a sexual subject are, for McRobbie, being interpellated into a dominated subject position (McRobbie, 2009).

What sort of work is this webcam performing? Well, such Live Sex Acts (Chapkis, 1997) might be ways in which workers can maximise the returns from what Hakim calls ‘erotic capital’ (2010): sex appeal, charm, social skills and all-round phwoarness. Prostitution, classically understood is not advertised by JobCentre plus. It is morally outside the pale as it involves the transgression of corporeal boundaries. The webcam performer, however, though their corporeality is central, seems to escape this outsiderdom. They and the customer (the webcam wanker) are engaged in a cyborg reality of sex work. Sight and sound are the senses that matter, not touch and smell and taste. The body is seen and heard; consumed like a tv programme, not consumed like a cake.

The ad says that the job involves “explicit sexual dialogue which may cause embarrassment to some people”. This interests me: the nudity is present in a matter of fact way, it’s the talk that is problematic and may provoke an emotional response. In the exhibition at Tate Modern Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera there are several photographs that explore dimensions of the sex industry. Susan Meiselas’s pictures of strippers and Cammie Toloui’s remind us that there is nothing passive, nothing safe, nothing disembodied about ‘just looking’.

References

Barry, K. (1995) The Prostitution of Sexuality. New York: New York University Press.
Boyle, K. (2007) ‘The mobilisation of sexuality: an ethnography of the sexualised labour process in the style bar industry.’ Paper presented to the 25th International Labour Process Conference.
Chapkis, W. (1997) Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labour Routledge.
Hakim, C. (2010) ‘Erotic Capital’ European Sociological Review doi:10.1093/esr/jcq014 .
Livingston, J. (1998) Modern subjectivity and consumer culture, in Strasser, S., McGovern, C. & Judt, M. Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the 20th Century: 413–430. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McNair, N (2002) Striptease Culture: Sex, Media, and the Democratization of Desire. London: Routledge.
McRobbie, A. (2009) The Aftermath of Feminism Sage.

Five Daughters and the Unknown Punters

Lynne Pettinger — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:53:50 +0000

Five Daughters (BBC 1, 25^th, 26^th, 27^th April) told the stories of Tania Nicol, Gemma Adams, Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell and Annette Nicholas, who were murdered in Ipswich in 2006. It was based on testimony of those involved. The five women were sex workers (or ‘Vice Girls’ to readers of some newspapers) working on the streets to fund drug addiction. Teela Sanders (2005) shows how women working in the indoor sex market aim to get a regular clientele as a way to manage risk, both the obvious risk to personal safely, but also the risk of not having any customers, and so not making any money. A punter’s appearance, age and ethnicity are used to indicate trustworthiness, as is their compliance with instructions (2005: 57–70). In Five Daughters, once news of the first two murders is out, the women working the streets whisper to each other: regulars only. It makes sense. Less risk.

In the show customers (‘punters’) are shadowy figures: one walks into a café, later we see one of the sex workers being punched from inside a car. Steven Wright, the man eventually sentenced for all 5 murders is almost disembodied in the show; we see his car prowling, then we see his hands on the wheel, and eventually his face, his body, his voice emerge. This relative invisibility makes it easy not to consider who are the punters. If we did, we’d see that they are very ordinary men, they are men you know.

The other punter who appears in Five Daughters is Tom Stephens, the initial suspect. He lurks with flowers at the edge of a police cordon, later we see him driving away with one of the women, hoping to protect her from the unknown threat. The real Tom Stephens was interviewed by the Sunday Mirror:

Michael Duffy (interviewer from Sunday Mirror): You seem a smart, well-educated man. How is it that you can spend time with these people? How is it that you can find common ground with them?

Tom Stephens: I’m sad and lonely. I made compromises on my morals to go down (to the red light area) the first time, so I suppose getting involved with them isn’t a huge leap.

Michael Duffy, Sunday Mirror, 17/12/2006

Duffy and Stephens conspire to deny that punters play any part in the moral denigration that they easily ascribe to the prostitutes. For Duffy ‘these people’ are the inverse of smart and well-educated, they are abject. Stephens knows the red light district is a damned place, but it holds such an attraction for him. In this way, neither recognises what customers contribute to the moral status of those who sell sex. In my research into Punternet, a website where men write customer service reviews of commercial sex, this is quite common. Men speak of brothels as good when they are clean, safe and discreet and of prostitutes as good when they offer gifts beyond the formal contract. And they speak of each other as potential harmers, who could damage ‘good’ girls if they don’t treat them right. It’s never them who cause harm.

Wacquant says this sort of thing shouldn’t surprise us, it is “unexceptional” to say we all live in a moral world (Wacquant, 2002: 1472). Public discussions of prostitution tend to circulate a sterile debate between ‘free choice’ and ‘trafficked’ exploitation in a way which negates the complexity of prostitution by presenting it primarily as a question of worker’s agency. Addressing prostitution is impossible without addressing customers, and addressing customers requires understanding of how they constitute the market as moral and negotiate their own roles and identities within that.

References

Sanders, T. (2005) Sex Work: A Risky Business. Cullompton: Willan.
Wacquant, L. (2002) ‘Scrutinizing the street: poverty, morality, and the pitfalls of urban ethnography’. American Journal of Sociology, 107(6) 1468–1532.

Alan Sillitoe and other Nottingham Lads

Lynne Pettinger — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 20:19:08 +0000

I know a few Nottingham lads, mostly living in London these days. My friends had granddads who worked in one of the big Nottingham light industries: for Players, Boots or Raleigh, unless they were unlucky and had to go down the mines. I’ve had a lot of fights with my Nottingham friends about the cultural identity of the midlands. Being from Yorkshire means I look down on the light industries; the midlands are not northern enough, they just aspire to be (see Stuart Maconie’s Pies and Prejudice). My friends reckon that the shared coalmining heritage, as the picture suggests, brings Nottingham into the north, and that just begs the answer “scabs” (see GB84 by David Peace for a fictionalised account of the miners’ strike for more).

Alan Sillitoe[i], who died today, makes the case for Nottingham being psychogeographically northern better than anyone else. The world of Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday morning already discussed on the site, is what my friends’ granddads had when they were back from the war: they were skilled on the production line, got a good pay packet and tipped it up to their mothers, and then to the wife, getting 5 shillings back for fags and booze.

In ‘Mr Raynor the school teacher’, one of the short stories that are part of ‘the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’ collection[ii], there are hints as to the changing relations of power in post-war Nottingham: the incipient decline in authority and the rise in women’s employment concomitant with increasing sexualisation in the public sphere. Mr Raynor’s class don’t mind how his attention drifts from teaching, they’re not committed to school. Mr Raynor is one of the few almost-sympathetic authority figures in Sillitoe’s early work; sympathetic because he isn’t quite in control (as the student Bullivant, with his “Teddy boy ideas” susses out). It’s an open secret that Mr Raynor likes to watch the girls working at the department store across the road from his school. The shopgirls come and go; work for them just fills in a space between leaving school and getting married (or getting pregnant). He has his favourites amongst them and the story focuses on his memory of the best:

As she walked she had carried her whole body in a sublime movement conducive to the attraction of every part of it, so that he was even aware of heels inside her shoes and finger-tips buried perhaps beneath a bolt of opulent cloth.
Sillitoe, 2007: 69

The shop worker here is as much the object of consumption as the bolts of cloth and the suits she sells. As the class misbehaves and distracts him, Mr Raynor tries hard to hold onto the image of the nameless girl, who is both the cause of his distraction and the thing that keeps him going through the daily grind. The voyeuristic gaze isn’t enough, though by the time the (married) Mr Raynor has plucked up the courage to talk to his favourite, she’s stepping out with a young man and he’s missed his chance. And then, this emancipated, sexy young woman, earning her living at the coalface of the new consumer society, becomes a woman punished: she’s killed by her young man. Mr Raynor mourns her, but his life continues its cycle of keeping just enough control of the classroom to leave time for more daydreaming.

References

Maconie, S. (2007) Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North. Ebury Press.
Peace, D. (2005) GB84. Faber and Faber.
Sillitoe, A. (2007 [1959]) The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Harper Perennial.

[i] I saw Alan Sillitoe at the Essex Book Festival in 2008. He gave a charming talk about his writing, tolerated all the questions being about his early work very patiently, and ended by demonstrating his hobby: morse code. It was a splendid vision of his private passion.

[ii] The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner itself speaks to the chip on every rebel or awkward sod’s shoulder.

Ordinary Misbehaviour

Lynne Pettinger — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 15:54:33 +0000

I write for a not-for-profit music website. The site is run by one extraordinary man, ‘John’, and it’s quite a management task. The staff writers get together once, maybe twice a year. The recent meet up in a cottage in the rainy Peak District was fiery. Office parties often are. There would be no reason any of us staff writers would ever meet if it wasn’t for the site: we live miles apart, with lives that scarcely connect. The difference between us, and the irregularity of our contact, produces conflicts that – I suspect – would differ if we met daily in the same workplace.

Let me explain why I described the meet-up as fiery and then perhaps you’ll see the point. In the red corner, ‘Muriel’, the pink-haired vegan activist and Lynne, the lecturer in the sociology of gender. In the blue corner ‘Des’, attention-seeker with wandering hands, every other word a swear word. Face-off: I shout at him not to fondle me. Later, there’s been more drinking. Des throws my King Creosote[i] cd on the fire. Acrid smoke and no-one knows quite what to do, certainly not Des, who laughs. I don’t understand such pointless destruction. Now the fall out: I get Des to replace the cd; John must manage his future involvement in the site.

Whilst organisations appear to operate in the sphere of rationality, anyone who has ever worked in one knows this is an illusion: emotion is never absent; and nor is sex (Brewis and Linstead, 2000). The office party appears – in public discourse — as a liminal space where boundaries, particularly around sex at work, are transgressed. Holliday and Thompson, however suggest that

far from being a space where one is beyond organisational control, the real function of the office party is to further refine the organisational subject.

(2001: 127)

That is, Des forced the group to notice him as the opposite of a desexualised, disembodied, rational worker: at the office party he was re-embodied (as was I, through his actions). And he then must be scrutinised and his future behaviour regulated. I had no qualms in complaining about Des’ behaviour, as I didn’t have to face him on Monday morning.

That we did not have an established daily relationship might also have contributed to his actions; would he have dared to behave badly if he had more to lose from being known as a wrong ‘un? On the other hand, I wonder if Des wouldn’t have been shamed more effectively if surrounded by people who see him day-in, day-out; if the collective strategies for managing him had been refined over time, if there was a well-established idea about what was acceptable. Working in proximity to colleagues produces a sort of cohesion in the way home-working never can, even as it also makes for daily frustrations.

It might seem like this is an unusual case and therefore has little to say about the ordinary experience of sex at work. Certainly, few organisations are as decentralised as this one, even as homeworking, flexibility and outsourcing have been growing for years, producing organisations that are not made up of company men, but individualised workers. Cohesion and collectivity are hard under such atomised circumstances. But too often harassment is seen as rare and individualised, not systemic and therefore impossible to generalise from. Sex, violence and work are entwined in ways that are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, wound into the fabric of working lives.

References

Brewis, J. and Linstead, S. (2000) Sex, Work and Sex Work: Eroticizing Organization. London:

Routledge.
Holliday, R. and Thompson, G. (2001) ‘A Body of Work’ in Holliday, R. and Hassard, J. (eds.) Contested Bodies. London, Routledge: 117–133

[i] Flick the Vs, since you ask, folk-electronica, and really quite good.

Mr Walker, It’s All Over: Gender Politics in Office Songs

Lynne Pettinger — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 14:20:12 +0000

Nowaytomakealiving.net is named after a mishearing of the Dolly Parton song 9 to 5, one of a small number of songs about office work. 9 to 5 is the theme song to the 1980 film, where Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda seek revenge on a sexist boss who harasses them and steals their ideas. Gender politics, the constraint of living within industrialised organisational time, solidarity in the workplace and the unfulfilments of work (‘There’s a better life, and you think about it don’t you?’) are all themes in the film, which the song hints at (here sung with the surprising assistance of adults dressed as disney characters).

The narrator in Billie Jo Spears’ 1969 country song Mr Walker it’s all Over could have done with some female colleagues like Dolly, Lily and Jane. ‘I don’t like the New York Secretary’s life’, and who can blame her, when it’s too full of men, from the company president on down, with hands ‘reaching out to grab the things that I consider mine’. So she’s heading back to Garden City, Kansas, because ‘the boy next door don’t know it but come June he’s gonna gain himself a wife’. A late-1960s experiment with women working in the big city is here doomed to failure, and an earlier femininity is reasserted.

Step into the Office Baby by Belle and Sebastian is also about office politics and sexual harassment. Here, the roles are reversed, as we might expect in a post-feminist world. She says

We need to talk
Step into my office, baby
I want to give you the job
A chance of overtime
Say my place at nine

He, though, isn’t sure. He’s ‘a slave to work’, he’s ‘only living when I walk amongst office staff’. And he’s not sure that he wants the sort of overtime she has in mind.

She wants him to sharpen up, be a man, complete with retro phallic necktie.

I've got to change my ways
Dress for business every day
A sharp suit and a kipper tie
A big arrow pointing to my fly

It’s not just the inversion of heteronormative expectations that’s notable in the contrast between Mr Walker and Step into the Office, it’s the meaning of private sphere. In 1969, she could escape back home, where her mom and her man will save her. In 2003, he has nowhere to hide: his own place isn’t a sanctuary from work, but a place where work is in his head ‘in bed by nine, my thoughts composed’, and he succumbs to the office affair, goes to her place to ‘take down her little red dress’. The office is no escape from sexual politics.