In the last decades a series of sexual services that offer company, talk, and more generally, what is understood as a ‘girlfriend experience’, are increasingly offered to a middle and upper-middle class clientele. These services involve a change in the boundaries of intimacy. We argue that they can be interpreted as part of the general process by which late capitalism has subsumed the 1968 critique that demanded liberation and authenticity. Based on an analysis of in-depth interviews with escorts and street walkers, we explore the discourse of authenticity in escort work in Spain and how the line is drawn between an ‘authentic intimacy’ that is sold, and a ‘private intimacy’, which involves the non-commodified affective life of the sex worker. We argue that escorts and street walkers draw these borders differently, the former emphasising authenticity in their service. Both, however, deploy a form of emotional labour.

Literature on welfare attitudes has reached a stylized scheme in which egalitarian values and self-interest concerns are the two main determinants of welfare attitudes. We aim to bring forward existing research by identifying additional values that people draw on to elaborate opinions on welfare issues. Using data from the European Social Survey 2008 and 26 countries, we find that values such as multiculturalism or authoritarianism, among others, lie at the roots of welfare attitudes. However, egalitarianism is the only value with a significant effect in all countries. Differences between welfare regimes in the values associated with welfare opinions exist but are unconnected with aggregate support for the welfare state, suggesting that this institution can achieve a high level of legitimacy on different moral grounds.

No abstract