standards than we might, for example, judge the connection we have with a favorite bartender, a hair stylist, or even a therapist—when, actually, we might prefer a bit of distance, and understand that that is part of the point.
Negotiating authenticity isn’t just the domain of sex work. Bernstein relates the emergence of bounded intimacy to the broader transition to the service economy from industrial labor. In an economy in which workers of all kinds are called on to produce an experience—not just a coffee, but a smile and a personal greeting; not just a vacation, but a spiritual retreat—sex work fits quite comfortably.
Brents, Jackson, and Hausbeck, in their study of Nevada’s brothels, for example, describe how some of these workplaces are defined not just as sexual escapes but as escapes from the workaday world into a conventionally feminine environment. It’s not only the sexual performance that will attract acustomer but the performance of leisure and comfort—not unlike the luxury vacation resort, where customers are offered a comprehensive experience of escape.
After Sexualization
Critics miss the ways in which the sex economy is working to mainstream itself in their shallow focus on sexualization: not to sexualize the mainstream, but the other way around. As the researchers observed, raunch isn’t used to appeal to the mainstream in the Nevada brothels, but they instead market themselves as classy and upscale, as the kind of places anyone might want to experience. It’s the mainstream leisure industry in Las Vegas—where brothels are not permitted—that plays up the sinfulness of sex appeal. This interplay is what they describe not as a sexualization of culture but as a convergence.
When opponents of sexualization and sex work do take aim at those who profit from women’s images, their attack can be narrow and reactionary. Critics misread the interconnections between the mainstream and sex economies and media as one of contamination rather than coexistence, and so they lack the ability or will to situate sexual images in the market or the wider social sphere. Simply removing the visible top layer of our sexually converged economy will not go far at all to changing what sexualization is said to reinforce: the fundamental inequities of the rest of the economy. These campaigns start and end with erasing women’s bodies.
If we take the naked girl out of the picture in
Playboy
or on this page , it does nothing to free any of us from the constraints on women’s actual sexual lives, on our power. To remove so-called sexy images from view in the supermarket, the Internet, wherever they are said to do the most damage becomes a quick, soundbite-y substitute for the kinds of demands we might make if we shifted our attention off the exposed skin and onto the lives of those women off the screen, off the clock.
The incoherence of these arguments is most evident in complaints that women in sex work are somehow responsible for the desire of women outside the industry to act like them, and for free. No other generation of young women, Levy claims in
Female Chauvinist Pigs
, have grown up “when porn stars weren’t topping the bestseller charts, when strippers weren’t mainstream”—as if making icons of sex workers were confined to the twenty-first century (ask the courtesans of Venice, the burlesque queens of old), or the public’s embrace of pop representations of sex work is the same as embracing sex workers. “The thong,” she warns, “is the literal by-product of the sex industry,” as if this is reason enough to cast them out, as if this is what holds us back. The thong and the women who first wore them are interchangeable for Levy, and interchangeable, too, with actual male dominance. They mistake the sex workers’ whole selves, as they accuse men of doing, with their uniform for the day.
Objects in the Rear View May Appear
Sex workers are only a symbol for Levy and other “raunch
Negotiating authenticity isn’t just the domain of sex work. Bernstein relates the emergence of bounded intimacy to the broader transition to the service economy from industrial labor. In an economy in which workers of all kinds are called on to produce an experience—not just a coffee, but a smile and a personal greeting; not just a vacation, but a spiritual retreat—sex work fits quite comfortably.
Brents, Jackson, and Hausbeck, in their study of Nevada’s brothels, for example, describe how some of these workplaces are defined not just as sexual escapes but as escapes from the workaday world into a conventionally feminine environment. It’s not only the sexual performance that will attract acustomer but the performance of leisure and comfort—not unlike the luxury vacation resort, where customers are offered a comprehensive experience of escape.
After Sexualization
Critics miss the ways in which the sex economy is working to mainstream itself in their shallow focus on sexualization: not to sexualize the mainstream, but the other way around. As the researchers observed, raunch isn’t used to appeal to the mainstream in the Nevada brothels, but they instead market themselves as classy and upscale, as the kind of places anyone might want to experience. It’s the mainstream leisure industry in Las Vegas—where brothels are not permitted—that plays up the sinfulness of sex appeal. This interplay is what they describe not as a sexualization of culture but as a convergence.
When opponents of sexualization and sex work do take aim at those who profit from women’s images, their attack can be narrow and reactionary. Critics misread the interconnections between the mainstream and sex economies and media as one of contamination rather than coexistence, and so they lack the ability or will to situate sexual images in the market or the wider social sphere. Simply removing the visible top layer of our sexually converged economy will not go far at all to changing what sexualization is said to reinforce: the fundamental inequities of the rest of the economy. These campaigns start and end with erasing women’s bodies.
If we take the naked girl out of the picture in
Playboy
or on this page , it does nothing to free any of us from the constraints on women’s actual sexual lives, on our power. To remove so-called sexy images from view in the supermarket, the Internet, wherever they are said to do the most damage becomes a quick, soundbite-y substitute for the kinds of demands we might make if we shifted our attention off the exposed skin and onto the lives of those women off the screen, off the clock.
The incoherence of these arguments is most evident in complaints that women in sex work are somehow responsible for the desire of women outside the industry to act like them, and for free. No other generation of young women, Levy claims in
Female Chauvinist Pigs
, have grown up “when porn stars weren’t topping the bestseller charts, when strippers weren’t mainstream”—as if making icons of sex workers were confined to the twenty-first century (ask the courtesans of Venice, the burlesque queens of old), or the public’s embrace of pop representations of sex work is the same as embracing sex workers. “The thong,” she warns, “is the literal by-product of the sex industry,” as if this is reason enough to cast them out, as if this is what holds us back. The thong and the women who first wore them are interchangeable for Levy, and interchangeable, too, with actual male dominance. They mistake the sex workers’ whole selves, as they accuse men of doing, with their uniform for the day.
Objects in the Rear View May Appear
Sex workers are only a symbol for Levy and other “raunch
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