Touching encounters : the sex and work of male-for-male internet escorts

Walby, Kevin

doi:10.22215/etd/2010-09620

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 190 publications

(288 reference statements)

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“…Although advertisements to clients clearly cannot be assumed to translate into client numbers, it is nevertheless performatively significant that cis female, trans, gay, bi, and couple clients are being positioned as potential consumers in this way. It also supports previous research that has noted that women and couples buy sex (Lee-Gonyea et al, 2009), as well as studies on male-to-male escorting (see, for instance, Collins, 2012;Minichiello & Scott, 2014;Morrison & Whitehead, 2007;Walby, 2012).…”

Section: Clientssupporting

confidence: 89%

Sex counts: An examination of sexual service advertisements in a UK online directory

Kingston

Smith

2020

British Journal of Sociology

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Internationally, sex work research, public opinion, policy, laws, and practice are predicated on the assumption that commercial sex is a priori sold by women and bought by men. Scarce attention has been devoted to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer/questioning (LGBTQ) sex working as well as women who pay for sex. This is as much an empirical absence as it is a theoretical one, for the ideological claim that women comprise the “vast majority” of sex workers is rarely, if ever, exposed to empirical scrutiny. Focusing on the UK, we address this major gap in evidence in order to challenge the gendered and heterosexist logics that underpin contemporary debates. We do so by presenting large‐scale data gained from the quantitative analysis of 25,511 registered member profiles of an online escort directory. Our findings point to heterogeneity rather than homogeneity in the contemporary sex industry including in terms of gender identity, sexual orientation, and advertised client base. For example, while two‐thirds of advertisements self‐identify as “Female,” one in four are listed as “Male;” less than half list their sexual orientation as “Straight;” and nearly two‐thirds advertise to women clients. Our study thus challenges prevailing heteronormative assumptions about commercial sex, which erase LGBTQ sex workers and other non‐normative identities and practices, and which we argue have important political, practical, and theoretical consequences.

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Section: Clientssupporting

confidence: 89%

Sex counts: An examination of sexual service advertisements in a UK online directory

Kingston

Smith

2020

British Journal of Sociology

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“…Backpage.com, Eros.com, Redzone.com, and individual websites, and I contacted women who identified as belonging to an ethnic group in their advertisements (see K. Walby, 2010).…”

Section: External Approvalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“So It’s Not Always the Sappy Story”: Women of Colour and Indigenous Women in the Indoor Sectors of the Canadian Sex Industry Speak Out

Raguparan¹

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The lived experiences of racialised and Indigenous indoor sex workers are often made to be invisible. Frequently, they are left unmarked and are imbedded within White indoor sex workers' experiences; alternately, stereotypes about racialised and Indigenous sex workers mean their experiences are overgeneralised and assumed to be part of street-based sectors. This study draws on forty in-depth interviews with racialised and Indigenous indoor sex workers from nine different cities across Canada in order to bring their intersectional experiences to the forefront of contemporary discussions. Grounded in Kimberlé Crenshaw's conceptualisation of intersectionality, this dissertation takes a post-intersectionality approach of collaborative intersectionality to examine the multilayered experiences of research participants and expose multidimensional, inter-categorical complexities of and differences between participants' experiences. With the objectives of deconstructing and, at times, decolonising normative assumptions, attitudes, and political initiatives that essentialise the experiences of women in the Canadian sex industry, this study addresses a much-needed research gap by looking at racialised and Indigenous women's participation in different indoor sectors. Furthermore, it contributes to valuable analyses on human rights, employment standards, agency, and resistance within a growing body of critical sex work literature.

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“…Dorais (2005) reminds us: before any act can be viewed as deviant, and before any class of people can be labelled and treated as outsiders for committing an act, "someone" must have made the "rule" that defines the act as deviant. Deviations from monogamous, heterosexual and procreative relations came from a sexological understanding of reversal that assumed gender roles were natural and that deviation (not acting in controlled normalized manners) was unnatural (Walby 2012). Problematizing deviant (non-monogamous hetero) sexual behaviours produced an intertwining of MSW with the label of male homosexuality in a historically regulatory discourse.…”

Section: Nathan Dawthornementioning

confidence: 99%

“…With the term "straight" I experienced what Walby (2012) outlines as meaning generated through interaction, that "one never knows how certain words or gestures might be interpreted and shape the ensuing dialogue"(69). In eliciting narratives, I saw how generalization breaks down.…”

Section: Nathan Dawthornementioning

confidence: 99%

Research Reflections: Queering the Ethnographer, Queering Male Sex Work

Dawthorne

2015

UWOJA

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This paper is a reflection on an ethnographic moment that occurred as I sought the narratives of male sex workers specific to London, Ontario, a mid-sized Canadian city. Here an informant effectively queered my inadvertent erasure of men-who-sell-sex-to-women during the initial phases of fieldwork. In order to understand what happened, I explore the important role of reflexivity to negotiate productive misunderstandings that occurred and to illuminate the assumptions I made. To provide a contextualized account of the phenomenon of male sex work ultimately requires that I move beyond homonormative (or any normative) pre/conceptualizations avoiding and acknowledging the re/production of essentialized categories.

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Touching encounters : the sex and work of male-for-male internet escorts

Cited by 5 publications

References 190 publications

Sex counts: An examination of sexual service advertisements in a UK online directory

Sex counts: An examination of sexual service advertisements in a UK online directory

“So It’s Not Always the Sappy Story”: Women of Colour and Indigenous Women in the Indoor Sectors of the Canadian Sex Industry Speak Out

Research Reflections: Queering the Ethnographer, Queering Male Sex Work

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