“A Cathartic Moment in a Man’s Life”: Homosociality and Gendered Fun on the Puttan Tour

Abstract

Rarely addressed in academic scholarship, the puttan tour is a well-known form of entertainment in Italy where young men drive around in small groups with the aim of spotting street sex workers.On some occasions the participants will approach the sex workers to strike up a conversation. On others they will shout out insults from their car then drive away. This paper aims to advance a detailed analysis of this under-explored cultural practice drawing on a diverse body of scholarship exploring the intersection of masculinity, leisure, and homosociality. By analyzing stories of puttan tours gathered mostly online, including written accounts and YouTube videos, our aim is to explore the appeal of the puttan tour through an analysis of how homosociality, humor and laughter operate in this example of gendered fun. To this end, we look at the multiple and often equivocal meanings of this homosocial male-bonding ritual, its emotional and affective dynamics, and the ways in which it reproduces structures of inequality while normalizing violence against sex workers. IntroductionAs a teenager growing up in Italy in the late 1980s, Isabel, the first author of this paper, recalls how every now and then on a Saturday the 'boys' of her group of friends would meet late at night after the 'girls' had gone home and drive to a nearby city for a puttan tour. The puttan tour -'whore tour' in English -consists of a small group of young male friends who, usually at night, drive around to spot street sex workers, approach them to strike up a conversation, or shout insults at them from their car. The aim of the puttan tour is not for the 'tourers' to purchase sexual services, but to spend time together, exchange jokes, laugh and have fun while engaging with the (real or 2 imagined) spectacle of street prostitution. While not unique to Italy, the puttan tour is typically understood as a common ritual for young men in the country. 1 When in her previous work Isabel briefly reflected on this experience, she commented on how the acceptance of the puttan tour as a form of entertainment reflected "the normalized male objectification of prostitute women, both as sexual bodies and, in this particular case, as a source of mockery upon which masculine identities are performed and reinforced" (Crowhurst 2007: 83).While mostly interested in addressing the role of the puttan tour in the material and discursive construction of outdoor prostitution in Italy, Isabel also made reference to a rather generalized and homogenous notion of masculinity in parallel with the other few studies that briefly mention and attempt to make sense of this common ritual. Agustin, for example, has written that the puttan tour is about young men spending time together, looking for and at street sex workers, sometimes drinking, taking drugs together, and "in general, being men" (2006: 77). Similarly, Leonini (1999) claims that the puttan tour is a complex ritual predicated upon a particular construction of masculinity which is not about actual sexual consumption ...

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