11.

Sex as Work & Sex

Work
Laura Agustn1
An army colonel is about to start the morning briefing to
his staff. While waiting for the coffee to be prepared, the
colonel says he didnt sleep much the night before because
his wife had been a bit frisky. He asks everyone: How
much of sex is work and how much is pleasure? A Major
votes 75-25% in favor of work. A Captain says 50-50%.
A lieutenant responds with 25-75% in favor of pleasure,
depending on how much hes had to drink. There being
no consensus, the colonel turns to the enlisted man in
charge of making the coffee. What does he think? With
no hesitation, the young soldier replies, Sir, it has to be
100% pleasure. The surprised colonel asks why. Well, sir,
if there was any work involved, the officers would have me
doing it for them.

1
Laura Agustn is the author of Sex at the Margins: Migration,
Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (Zed Books 2007) and
recently participated in a BBC World Debate on Human Traffick-
ing held in Luxor, Egypt. She has been studying sex work since
the early 1990s and blogs several times a week at The Naked
Anthropologist.

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Perhaps because he is the youngest, the soldier consid-

ers only the pleasure that sex represents, while the older
men know a lot more is going on. They may have a better
grasp of the fact that sex is the work that puts in motion
the machine of human reproduction. Biology and medical
texts present the mechanical facts without any mention
of possible ineffable experiences or feelings (pleasure, in
other words), as sex is reduced to wiggly sperm fighting
their way towards waiting eggs. The divide between the
feelings and sensations involved and the cold facts is vast.
The officers probably also have in mind the work in-
volved in keeping a marriage going, apart from questions
of lust and satisfaction. They might say that sex between
people who are in love is special (maybe even sacred), but
they also know sex is part of the partnership of getting
through life together and has to be considered pragmat-
ically as well. Even people in love do not have identical
physical and emotional needs, with the result that sex
takes different forms and means more or less on different
occasions.
This little story shows a few of the ways that sex can
be considered work. When we say sex work nowadays the
focus is immediately on commercial exchanges, but in this
article I mean more than that and question our ability
to distinguish clearly when sex involves work (as well as
other things) and sex work (which involves all sorts of
things). Most of the moral uproar surrounding prostitu-
tion and other forms of commercial sex asserts that the
difference between good or virtuous sex and bad or harm-
ful sex is obvious. Efforts to repress, condemn, punish
and rescue women who sell sex rest on the claim that they
occupy a place outside the norm and the community, can

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be clearly identified and therefore acted on by people who

Know Better how they should live. To show this claim to
be false discredits this neocolonialist project.

Loving, With and Without Sex

We live in a time when relationships based on romantic,
sexual love occupy the pinnacle of a hierarchy of emotional
values, in which it is supposed that romantic love is the
best possible experience and that the sex people in love
have is the best sex, in more ways than one. Romantic
passion is considered meaningful, a way for two people
to become one, an experience some believe heightened if
they conceive a child. Other sexual traditions also strive
to transcend ordinariness in sex (the mechanical, the fric-
tional), for example Tantra, which distinguishes three
separate purposes for sex: procreation, pleasure and lib-
eration, the last culminating in losing the sense of self in
cosmic consciousness. In the western romantic tradition,
passion is conceived as involving a strong positive emotion
toward a particular person that goes beyond the physical
and is contrasted to lust, which is only physical.
It is, however, impossible to say exactly how we know
which is which, and the young enlisted man in the opening
story might well not understand the difference. Sex driven
by surging or excess testosterone and sex as adolescent re-
bellion against repressive family values cannot be reduced
to a mechanical activity bereft of emotion or meaning;
rather, those kinds of sex often feel like ways of finding out
and expressing who we are. And even when sex is used to
show off in front of others, or to affirm ones attractiveness

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and power to pull, meaningless would seem to be the last

thing it should be called. Here it is true that one person
may not only lack passion but totally neglect anothers
feelings and desires, but just as often this other person is
engaged in the same pursuit. The point is that reductions
like lust and love dont go very far towards telling us what
is going on when people have sex together. Moreover, while
real passion is meant to be based on knowing someone
long and intimately, a parallel story glorifies love at first
sight, in which passion is instantly awakened and this
can occur as easily at a rave or pub as at the Taj Mahal.
Part of the mythology of love promises that loving cou-
ples will always want and enjoy sex together, unproblem-
atically, freely and loyally. But most people know that
couples are multi-faceted partnerships, sex together being
only one facet, and that those involved very often tire of
sex with each other. Although skeptics say todays high
divorce rate shows the love-myth is a lie, others say the
problem is that lovers arent able or willing to do the work
necessary to stay together and survive personal, economic
and professional changes. Some of this work may well
be sexual. In some partnerships where the spark has
gone, partners grant each other the freedom to have sex
with others, or pay others to spice up their own sex lives
(as a couple or separately). This can take the form of a
polyamorous project, with open contracts; as swinging,
where couples play with others together; as polygamy or
temporary marriage; as cheating or betrayal; or as paying
for sex.

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The Sex Contract

Even when love is involved, people may use sex in the
hope of getting something in return. They may or may not
be fully conscious of such motives as:

I will have sex with you because I love you even if I

am not in the mood myself

I will have sex with you hoping you will feel well dis-
posed toward me afterwards and give me something
I want

I will have sex with you because if I dont you are

liable to be unpleasant to me, our children, or my
friends, or withhold something we want

In these situations, sex is felt to be and accepted as part of

the relationship, backed up in classic marriage law by the
concept of conjugal relations, spouses rights to them and
the consequences of not providing them: abandonment,
adultery, annulment, divorce. This can work the opposite
way as well, as when a partner doesnt want sex:

I will not have sex with you, so you will have to do

without or get it somewhere else

The partner wanting sex and not getting it at home now

has to choose: do without and feel frustrated? call an old
friend? ring for an escort? go to a pick-up bar? drive to a
hooker stroll? visit a public toilet? buy an inflatable doll?
fly to a third-world beach?
People of any gender identity can find themselves in this
situation, where money may help resolve the situation, at

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least temporarily, and where more than one option may

have to be tried. Tiring of partners is a universal experi-
ence, and research on women who pay local guides and
beach boys on holidays suggests there is nothing inher-
ently male about exchanging money for sex. That said,
our societies are still patriarchal, women still take more
responsibility for maintaining homes and children than
men and men still have more disposable cash than women,
making the overtly commercial options more viable for
men than for others.
We dont know how many people do what, but we know
that many clients of sex workers say they are married
(some happily, some not, the research is all about male
clients). In testimonies about their motivations for paying
for sex, men often cite a desire for variety or a way to cope
with not getting enough sex or the kind of sex they want
at home.

I want to have sex with you but I also want it with

someone else

This is the point in the sex contract many have trouble

with, the question being Why? Why should someone with
sex available at home (even good sex) also want it some-
where else? The assumption is, of course, that we all ought
to want only one partner, because we all ought to want the
kind of love that is loyal, passionate and monogamous. To
say I love my wife and also I would like to have sex with
others is to seem perverse, or greedy, and a lot of energy is
spent railing against such people. However, there is noth-
ing intrinsically better about monogamy than any other
attitude to sex.

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If saving marriages is a value, then more than one sex

worker believes her role helps prevent break-ups, or at
least allows spouses to blow off steam from difficult rela-
tionships. Workers mean not only the overtly sexual side
of paid activities but also the emotional labour performed
in listening to clients stories, bolstering their egos, teach-
ing them sexual techniques, providing emotional advice.
Rarely do sex workers position clients spouses as enemies
or say they want to steal clients away from them; on the
contrary, many see the triangular relationship wife, hus-
band, sex worker as mutually sustaining. In this way
sex workers believe they help reproduce the marital home
and even improve it.

Sex as Reproductive Labour

In support of the idea that sex reproduces social life, one
can say that people fortunate enough to experience sat-
isfying sex feel fundamentally affirmed and renewed by
it. In that sense, a worker providing sexual services does
reproductive work. Paid sex work is a caring service when
workers provide friend-like or therapist-like company and
when they give a back rub whether the caring is a per-
formance or not. The person providing the caring services
uses brain, emotions and body to make another person
feel good:

Leaning over to comfort a baby

Leaning over to massage aching shoulders

Leaning over to kiss a neck or forehead or chest

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Leaning over to suck a penis or breast

If the recipient perceives the contact as positive, a sense

of well-being is produced that the brain registers, and the
individuals separateness is momentarily erased. These
effects are not different simply because the so-called eroge-
nous zones are involved rather than other parts of the body.
In this sense, sex work, whether paid or not, reproduces
fundamental social life.
The argument against sex work as reproductive labour
is that sexual experiences, while sometimes temporarily
rejuvenating, are neither always felt as positive nor es-
sential to the individuals continued functioning. Humans
have to eat and keep our bodies and environments clean
but we dont have to have sex to survive: the well-being
produced by sex is a luxury or extra. Sex feels as essential
as food to a lot of people, and they may be very unhappy
without it, but they can go on living.

Sex as a Job
The variability of sexual experience makes it difficult to
pin down which sex should properly be thought of as sex
work. My own policy is to accept what individuals say. If
someone tells me they experience selling sex as a job, I
take their word for it. If, on the contrary, they say that
it doesnt feel like a job but something else, then I accept
that.
What does it mean to say it feels like a job? There are
several possibilities:

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I organise myself to offer particular services for

money that I define

I take a job in someone elses business where I control

some aspects of what I do but not others

I place myself in situations where others tell me

what they are looking for and I adapt, negotiate,
manipulate and perform but its a job because I get
money
There are other permutations, too, of course. All service
jobs involve customer relations, which are eternally un-
predictable. Some clients are able to specify exactly what
services they want and make sure they are satisfied, but
some cannot and may end up getting what the worker
wants to provide. To imagine that the worker is always
powerless because the client pays for time makes no sense,
since all workers jockey for control in their jobs of what
happens when and how long it takes. This is a simple defi-
nition of human agency. And its important to remember
that a very large proportion of sex work is spent on selling:
the seduction and flirtation necessary to turn atmosphere,
potentiality and possibility into an exchange of money for
sex.
Furthermore, although we like to think about the two
roles, salesperson and customer, as separate, in the sexual
relation roles can be blurred. Theorists want to think
about the worker doing something for the client or the
client commanding the worker to act. But carrying out a
command does not exclude doing it ones own way, nor, for
that matter, enjoyment, feelings of connectivity and the
reproduction of self.

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Non-Partner Sex in the Home

Many would like to believe that non-commercial (or real)
sex takes place in homes, while commercial sex lurks in
seedy other places. However, sex outside the partner-
ship easily takes place while one of the partners is not
there. This can be sex that is ordered in and paid for or
adulterous, promiscuous, play or non-monogamous sex.
Sometimes the non-partner is considered almost one of
the family a live-in maid or nanny. Other times the non-
partner is someone whos come to perform some other paid
job the proverbial milkman or plumber. Theres also sex
in the home online, via webcam, or over the telephone, as
well as images or objects that enhance a sexual experience
in which no partner is necessary at all. The sex industry
penetrates family residences in many ways and cannot be,
by definition, the familys Other.
Most commentary on how the sex industry is changing
focuses on the Internet, where apart from more conven-
tional business sites, sexual communities form and reform
continuously. Social networking sites like facebook pro-
vide spaces where the commercial, the aesthetic and the
activist intersect and overlap, also complicating the tradi-
tional divide between selling and buying. Chat and instant
messaging provide opportunities for people to experiment
with sexual identities including commercial ones. Much
of all this is unmeasurable, taking place on sites where
all participants are mixed together, not sorted into cat-
egories of buyers and sellers. Statistics on the value of
pornography sold on the Internet focus on sites with cat-
alogues of products for sale, but the sphere of webcams,

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like peep shows of old, blurs the wobbly line between porn
and prostitution.
Although some (like my colleague Elizabeth Bernstein
2007) claim that sex workers offering girlfriend-like ex-
periences are a manifestation of post-industrial life, I am
not convinced. Sex worker testimonies from many periods
reveal the complexity always waiting to happen when brief
encounters are repeated, when clients seek again someone
with whom they felt a bond as well as a sexual attraction.
Nor am I convinced that the experiences of upper-class
clients patronising courtesans, geishas or mistresses are
inherently different from the socialising of working-class
men and women in treating cultures. Instead, it is clear
that the lines between commercial and non-commercial
sex have always been blurry, and that middle-class mar-
riage is itself an example.
Scholars of sexual cultures wont get far if they follow
dogma that considers marriage to be separate and outside
the realm of investigations of commercial sex. In soci-
eties where matchmaking and different sorts of arranged
marriages and dowries are conventional, the link between
payment and sex has been overt and normalised, while
campaigners against both sex tourism and foreign-bride
agencies are offended precisely because they see a money-
exchange entering into what they believe should be pure
relationships. We have too much information now about
non-family forms of love and commitment, non-committed
forms of sex and non-sexual forms of love to hold on to
these arbitrary, mythic divisions, which further oppressive
ideas about sexually good and bad women. We know now
that monogamy is not necessarily better, that paid sex can
be affectionate, that loving couples can do without sex,

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that married love involves money and that sex involves

work.
I see no postmodern crisis here. Some believe that the
developed West was moving in a good direction after the
Second World War, towards happier families and juster
societies, and that neoliberalism is destroying that. But
historical research shows that before the bourgeoisies ad-
vancement to the centre of European societies, with the
concomitant focus on nuclear families and a particular ver-
sion of moral respectability, loose, flexible arrangements
vis--vis sex, family and sexuality were common in both
upper- and working-class cultures (Agustn 2004) . In
the long run it may turn out that 200 years of bourgeois
family values were a blip on the screen in human history.

Sex, Equality & Money

Understanding professional sex work has not been made
easier by making equality the standard for gender rela-
tions. We can only really know whether sexual experiences
are equal if everyone looks and acts the same, which is
not only impossible but repressive of diversity. In sexual
relations, equality projects run into the problem of dis-
similar bodies, different ways of exhibiting arousal and
experiencing satisfaction, not to mention differences in cul-
tural background and social status. Those who complain
about other peoples perversity and deviance are accused
in return of being boring adherents of repressive sex.
In terms of the work of sex, we run into a further diffi-
culty vis--vis equality, the clich that sees participants
taking either an active or a passive role and identity. But

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many people, not just professional sex workers, know that

the work of sex can mean allowing the other to take an
active role and assuming a passive one as well as taking
the active role or switching back and forth. Sometimes peo-
ple do what they already know they like, and sometimes
they experiment. Sometimes people dont know what they
want, or want to be surprised, or to lose control.
For some critics, the possession of money by clients gives
them absolute power over workers and therefore means
that equality is impossible. This attitude toward money
is odd, given that we live in times when it is acceptable
to pay for child and elderly care, for rape, alcohol and sui-
cide counselling and for many other forms of consolation
and caring. Those services are considered compatible with
money but when it is exchanged for sex money is treated
as a totally negative, contaminating force - this commodi-
fication uniquely terrible. Money is a fetish here despite
the obvious fact that no body part is actually sold off in
the commercial sex exchange.

Sex Work & Migrancy

In many places, migrant women and young men do most
of the paid sex work, because:

there are enormous structural inequalities in

the world, because there are people everywhere
willing to take the risk of travelling to work in
other countries and because social networks,
high technology and transportation make it
widely feasible (Agustn 2002). Migrants take

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jobs that are available, accept lower pay and

tolerate having fewer rights than first-class cit-
izens because those are less important than
simply getting ahead. Even those with qualifi-
cations for other jobs, whether as hairdressers
or university professors, are glad to get jobs con-
sidered unprestigious by non-migrants. While
many view migrants in low-prestige jobs as ab-
solute victims too constrained by forces around
them to have real agency, social gain or enjoy-
ment, there are other ways to understand them
(Agustn 2003).

Critics hold that migrants who work in private homes

reproduce the social life of their all-powerful employers
but accomplish little on their own behalf. This is strange,
because low-prestige workers who are not migrants are
acknowledged to gain a connection to society, knowledge
of being a useful economic actor and more options because
of having money.
We look at migration as neither a degradation nor im-
provement . . . in womens position, but as a restructuring
of gender relations. This restructuring need not neces-
sarily be expressed through a satisfactory professional
life. It may take place through the assertion of autonomy
in social life, through relations with family of origin, or
through participating in networks and formal associations.
The differential between earnings in the country of origin
and the country of immigration may in itself create such
an autonomy, even if the job in the receiving country is
one of a live-in maid or prostitute. (Hefti 1997)

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One of the great contradictions of capitalism is that even

unfair, unwritten, ambiguous contracts can produce active
subjects.

Ways Forward
I have proposed the cultural study of commercial sex
(Agustn 2005), in which scholars are free of the con-
straints of the traditional study of prostitution, where
ideology and moralising about power, gender and money
have long held primacy. Cultural study does not assume
that we already know what any given sex-money exchange
means but that meaning changes according to specific cul-
tural context. This means we cannot assume there is
a fundamental difference between commercial and non-
commercial sex. Anthropologists studying non-western
societies consistently reveal that money and sex exchanges
exist on a continuum where feelings are also present, and
historians reveal the same about the past (for example,
Tabet 1987 and Peiss 1986).
Sex and work cannot be completely disentangled, as the
officers knew and the enlisted man would some day find
out.

Works cited
Laura Agustn. 2005. The Cultural Study of Com-
mercial Sex. Sexualities, Vol 8, No 5, pp 618-631.
_____________ 2004. At Home in the Street: Ques-
tioning the Desire to Help and Save. In Regulat-

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ing Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity. E.

Bernstein and L. Shaffner, eds., 67-82. New York:
Routledge Perspectives on Gender.

_____________ 2003. Sex, Gender and Migrations:

Facing Up to Ambiguous Realities. Soundings, 23,
84-98.

____________ 2002. Challenging Place: Leaving

Home for Sex. Development, Society for Interna-
tional Development, Rome, Vol. 45.1, March, 110-16.

Bernstein, Elizabeth. 2007. Temporarily Yours:

Intimacy, Authenticity and the Commerce of Sex.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hefti, Anny Misa. 1997. Globalisation and Migra-

tion. Paper presented at European Solidarity Con-
ference on the Philippines, Zurich, 19-21 September.

Peiss, Kathy. 1986. Cheap Amusements: Working

Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Tabet, Paola. 1987. Du don au tarif. Les relations

sexuelles impliquant compensation, Les Temps Mod-
ernes, n 490, 1-53.

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