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

1. Sanders, T. (2005) Sex Work: A Risky Business. Cullompton: Willan.
2.  Wacquant, L. (2002) ‘Scrutinizing the street: poverty, morality, and the pitfalls of urban ethnography’. American Journal of Sociology, 107(6) 1468–1532.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/825/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/751 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/751#comments Mon, 05 Apr 2010 09:45:48 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=751 The hotel inspector Dawn met judges standards in B&Bs, making a virtue of cleanliness and ‘good’ service. B&B owners, in turn, judge and regulate their customers. Chris Grayling, currently shadow home secretary, thinks christian B&B owners should be allowed to turn away guests they consider to be sinners. Markets don’t just reflect (notionally private) moralities; they actively produce them, through ideas about what service ought to be like, or how customers ought to behave. Regulation intervenes to alter the market: to generate trust by awarding 4 stars, or to proscribe unequal treatment on the basis of sexual identity. Grayling implies that running a B&B is distinctly different from running a hotel, because it is ‘home’ as much as ‘work’, as I’ve argued here. But to participate in the public world of the market, the B&B owner must sign up to the liberal individualism that permits free sexual expression and conceives of the men in room 26 as customers above all else.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/751/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/708 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/708#comments Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:45:55 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=708 H&M, the Scandinavian fast fashion brand has just opened a store in the town I live in. It opened a few days after a fire killed 21 employees of a knitwear factory in Bangladesh which is subcontracted by H&M to make those cute stripy jumpers, and that really useful little black cardy.



My friend called me last Saturday,

‘let’s meet in Hennes’, she said.

I agreed. I thought I’d just have a look and not say anything to her. But I couldn’t help myself (story of my life).

‘I’m not buying anything here, after all those people died’.

That made it impossible for my friend to even try anything on (I think she might go back without me; and I will confess to her now I was wearing something I’d bought in H&M last year the next time we met).

I’ve read Naila Kabeer’s (2000)The Power to Choose, and was persuaded so well by her arguments against reading Bangladeshi working women as cultural dopes, stepping blindly into exploitative paid work whilst carrying the burden of housework and facing down challenges to their reputations as good women. Kabeer’s incorporation of how culture is “woven into the content of desire itself” (2000: 328) is persuasive. Women chose paid work outside the home and still counted as good, they liked working in a clean place for good wages far more than labouring in a field, and took pleasure in contributing to meeting their family’s desire for more income.

Kabeer gives the garment workers agency and voice. They are not an innately malleable, grateful, reserve army of nimble fingered knitters; they are not victims of a disorganized capitalism where feminism and neoliberalism combine to turn “a sow’s ear into a silk purse by elaborating a new romance of female advancement and gender justice” (Fraser, 2009). For Fraser, the normalisation of the dual income family working for low wages in insecure employment marks a failure of feminism, for (without realising it) privileging choice no matter what.

When War on Want describe sickening factory conditions and I read of these injuries and deaths, this is damage, and Fraser’s is the line that persuades me. As I don’t want my consumption practices to cause harm, that means no to H&M. In turn that means job losses, either because political pressure on H&M makes them choose a new subcontractor (one less famous for its working conditions), or because of the fall in demand caused by my bleeding, liberal, western heart. This is damage too. I’m not adding much to an unanswerable debate other than easing my own conscience by playing out the tensions: strong conclusions are impossible when there’s only a choice between forms of damage.

References

1. Fraser, Nancy (2009) ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’. New Left Review 56.
2. Kabeer, Naila (2000) The Power to Choose. Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka. London: Verso.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/708/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/494 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/494#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:06:04 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=494 Nik Rose’s conceptualisation of the late modern self as being compelled to engage in the active governance of the soul has been provocative for those who study intermediary work. Internalising norms of self-exploitation, to work harder, longer, faster, to let work dominate ‘the social’ is seen by Angela McRobbie (2002) as characteristic of work in the speeded up culture industries. Incentives and self-discipline, not rules, procedures and a boss’s overt authority, regulate the work force when the soul is governed (du Gay 1996, Rose 1990).


Cary Grant as Walter Burns in ‘His Girl Friday’

This sort of interpretation could easily be made of a friend of mine who works as an economics journalist. He puts the hours in, and he seems to like it. An omnivorous cultural capital enables him to reference Keynes, Donald MacKenzie, Don de Lillo, Enron and The September Issue in the space of the 8 minute dissection he gives me of the current state of the financial crisis. This impresses me, because he has an explanation, and even a position on each of these things, and it amounts to a story worth hearing. It seems that the acquisition of the new is the dimension of governance which he has internalised, and its relentlessness is something quite demanding. Immediacy is one of the dimensions of the professional ideology of the journalist listed by Mark Deuze (2005: 447). To stop, or to slow down even, is to lose track, and possibly to lose status.

But we sociologists do tend to the negative. There might also be pleasure – and virtue — in this immediacy, this quest for knowledge and for novelty, and a satisfaction in using knowledge to produce knowledge. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre describes character as combination of role and personality. Some roles at particular historical moments embody the character of the age: the Prussian officer and the English public school teacher in the late 19th Century. For MacIntyre, such a character legitimates and embodies the moral order of the age. And I wonder, what if the journalist is the Character of our time? The person of virtue in the liquid modern world without grand narratives, filled with uncertainty and, would be the person who steps into the public spaces of incomprehension, masters enough of a story to tell, with quick words and references to now, and always has an eye out for the next tale.

References

1. Deuze, M. (2005) ‘What is journalism? Professional identity and ideology of journalists reconsidered. Journalism. 6: 442–464.
2. Du Gay, P. (1996) Consumption and Identity at Work. London: Sage.
3. MacIntyre, A. (1984) After Virtue: A study in moral theory. University of Notre Dame Press.
4. McRobbie, A. (2002) ‘Club cultures: notes on the decline of political culture in speeded up creative worlds’. Cultural Studies. 16 (4): 516–531.
5. Rose, N. (1990) Governing the soul: the shaping of the private self. London: Routledge.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/494/feed 2