The Morality of Market Exchange: Love, Money, and Contractual Justice

Abstract

Prostitution as a cultural practice describes the line between what must be given as a gift and what may be exchanged as a commodity; an investigation of prostitution can therefore further our understanding of the ideological underpinnings of commodity exchange. This study uses interviews with prostitutes' clients to show how commodity exchange can be understood as being morally superior to gift exchange. The interviewees praise "market exchange" of sexfor lacking the ambiguity, status-dependence, and potential hypocrisy that they see in the "gift exchange" of sex characteristic of romantic relationships. This justification of market exchange suggests that theories of the "moral economy" that posit a dichotomy between "premarket" and "market" societies understate the degree to which market societies are,for their participants, also moral economies: they are economies embodying moral beliefs about individual autonomy, democratic equality, and unambiguous and nondiscretionary fulfillment of obligations. Critics of the market do themselves a disservice in ignoring the powerful moral appeals of market exchange. More generally, sociological analyses that pit "norms" against "self-interest" ignore the ways in which norms can enable as well as constrain self-interested market behavior.Sociological analyses of prostitution tend to concentrate on the role of the prostitute and neglect the role of the customer, or "john." In the last thirty years, of the hundreds of books and articles written on the sociology of prostitution, fewer than ten have systematically examined the role of the customer.1 This neglect of one of the central parties to the transaction is unfortunate for several reasons. First, it echoes the double standard in law enforcement that still finds prostitutes being arrested about four times more often than customers, even though, since professional prostitutes have fifteen to twenty clients per week (McLeod 1982), there are many more customers than prostitutes and thus many more men than women involved in "sex-related crimes." Second, neglect of the "demand" side of the transaction naturalizes this demand, making it seem to be a biologically * Direct all correspondence to:

Entire Issue / Numéro complet

“…Depuis une quinzaine d'années, de plus en plus d'études s'intéressent aux clients, à leurs motivations à acheter des services sexuels et à leurs attitudes face aux travailleuses du sexe (par ex., Bernstein, 2007;Di Nicola, Cauduro, Lombardi, & Ruspini, 2009;Holt & Blevins, 2007;Jeffrey & MacDonald, 2006;Jordan, 1997;Joseph & Black, 2012;Katsulis, 2010;Kinnell, 2006;Klein, Kennedy, & Gorzalka, 2009;Lowman & Atchison, 2006;Milrod & Weitzer, 2012;Milrod & Monto, 2012;Monto, 2000aMonto, , 2000bMonto, , 2004Monto, , 2010Monto & Hotaling, 2001;Orchard, Farr, Macphail, Wender, & Young, D. 2013;Pitts, Smith, Grierson, O'Brien, & Misson, 2004;Prasad, 1999;Sanders, 2008;Sharp & Earle, 2002;Xantidis & McCabe, 2000). La plupart de ces travaux http://cgjsc-rcessc.uwaterloo.ca indiquent qu'en regard des données sociodémographiques, les clients ne sont nullement différents des non-consommateurs de services sexuels.…”

The Social Construction of Inter-Ethnic Marriages in the Greek Cypriot (GC) Republic of Cyprus: An Ethnographic Investigation of GC Male Marriages to Eastern European (EE) Females

“…Therefore, as many EE young women found themselves struggling to make a living amidst the economic and political chaos of the fallen communist countries, they resorted to sex work, mail order marriages, and menial factory, farm, and domestic work abroad as viable employment alternatives to make money and support their families. Working and temporarily relocating abroad presents many EE women with ample opportunities, through marriage with local men, for gaining permanent residence in economically developed countries, thus offering them a permanent escape from poverty (Prasad 1999).…”

“…Sexuality, therefore, plays an important role in the social exchange processes that characterize intimate relationships (Prasad 1999). The power motto of the machismo ethic involves the exchanging of money, goods, services, and rewards for the enhancement of a man's sexual, emotional, and psychological well-being and masculine self-worth in the eyes of his significant others.…”

Introduction

“…Although focusing on the clients of prostitutes, other studies (Prasad 1999, Allison 1994, Bernstein 2002, indicate that the growing sex industry may both express and reflect a general shift away from relational sex, as embodied in the logic of the gift, towards recreational sex, in which the cash element reduces the extent of interpersonal transactions. Here the difference is understood as one between long-term relationships involving mutual obligations and short-term and bounded sexual encounters that appear to contain less hypocrisy and mutual obligation than the former.…”