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Digitalising sex commerce and sex work: A comparative analysis of

French, Greek and Slovenian websites

Mojca Pajnik*, Nelli Kambouri, Matthieu Renault & Iztok Šori

Mojca Pajnik*

Faculty of Social Sciences (University of Ljubljana) and The Peace Institute, Institute

for Contemporary Social and Political Studies

Kardeljeva ploscad 5 / Metelkova 6

1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

Email: mojca.pajnik@mirovni-institut.si

Nelli Kambouri

Centre for Gender Studies,

Dept. of Social Policy, Panteion University

136, Syggrou ave., GR-17671 Athens

Email: hellikam@gmail.com

Matthieu Renault

Université Paris 13, Pléiade

99 Avenue Jean Baptiste Clément, 93430 Villetaneuse, France

Email: matthieu.renault@gmail.com

Iztok Šori

The Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies

Metelkova 6, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

Email: iztok.sori@gmail.com

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Digitalising sex commerce and sex work: A comparative analysis of

French, Greek and Slovenian websites

The aim of this article is to explore the complexity of the online sex trade and

work by analysing sexuality related commercial websites, with reference to

three European states, France, Greece and Slovenia. The article compares

websites in each specific socio-cultural context, in order to provide insights

into the various types of networks and services that emerge, and to explore how

they operate, how they communicate and how sex is being merchandized. We

have conducted a two-tier analysis: The first part discusses results of a

quantitative macro-analysis exploring 149 websites, while the second part is a

micro-analysis analysing the visualization of egocentric network of three

selected websites. The focus is on understanding how gender relations develop

in digital environment and how within cyberspace sectorial and national

divides are dealt with. While there is evidence to suggest that in some sectors

the internet has opened avenues for sex workers to work independently of the

control networks, there are also many forms of exploitation that arise from new

media. We observe that sex commerce online is not particularly attentive to the

agency of sex workers but is, to the contrary, oriented to provide opportunities

and a forum for businessmen and clients.

Keywords: sex work; sex commerce; internet; gender hierarchies; web

crawling;

Introduction

During the past few decades, cyberspace has emerged as a space allowing various

possibilities for sex commerce and work including new interactive practices such as

online dating, cybersex and amateur porn that can be based on user-generated content

and interaction. These practices have opened up new opportunities for independent

sex workers and marginalised social groups to engage in the production of sexual

scripts and images that often turn against and challenge the dominant power relations

and gender norms in the sex industry (Jacobs et al. 2007). Parallel to this, however,

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the web has provided new advertising and networking opportunities for actual places

of sex commerce, such as nightclubs, brothels, striptease or erotic massage parlours

with known offline locations.

The aim of this article is to explore the relationships between different types of

websites, national contexts and forms of sex commerce and work and understand their

on- and offline interconnections. First, we start from the hypothesis that online sex

commerce and work do not constitute a monolithic set of practices that simply

reproduce unequal gender relations offline. Scholarly studies of ‘sex for sale’ have

pointed out that the term is used to describe a variety of sex-related commercial

practices, including prostitution, striptease, erotic massage, and porn (Weitzer, 2003).

Second, the complexities of sex commerce and work are analysed in relation to three

European geographical locations and sociocultural and legal contexts, namely those of

France, Greece and Slovenia, but also in relation to the transnational online and

offline environments in which they are produced.

The digitalisation of sex trade and work involves shifts towards new forms of

discourse and types of communication, interaction, engagement and networking that

cannot be captured by those perspectives that disregard the techno-cultural

transformations of sexual relations (Blair, 1998). Broadly speaking, while new media

offer possibilities for gender swapping and the construction of fluid identities that

transcend gender, ethnic and racial boundaries, the assumption that digitalisation will

enable us to do away with physical bodies and gender and racial inequalities has

proven to be quite misleading (Balsamo, 1996; Turkle, 1995, Nakamura, 2008). Our

approach is thus to study sex commerce and work as a complex, contradictory and

changing set of everyday practices. The theoretical frame integrates perspectives from

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feminist and geographers’ approaches to analyse sex trade and work in conjunction

with culture, gender and policy.

Feminist perspectives on sex commerce and work

Feminist thinking on commercial sex and work has developed along two lines that use

different terminologies to describe practices of ‘sex for sale’. These perspectives

adopt opposing principles that also determine the ways in which the digitalisation of

sex commerce and work is conceived and analysed.

First, second wave feminists consider the sex industry as a product of

patriarchal gender relations, as an expression of women’s inferior position and the

gender inequalities and hierarchies that prevail in societies. The main premises are

based on theoretical accounts arguing against the sex industry based on the principle

that treating women’s bodies and sexual capacities as commercial products is morally

and politically objectionable and constitutes a form of violence against women

(Pateman, 1980; Jeffreys, 2003; Satz, 1995).

Several studies in this perspective emphasise the negative role of clients’

demand for paid sex and the strong linkages between the purchase of sex,

pornography and violence against women (Macleod et al., 2008; Farley et al., 2012).

The advocacy of abolitionist positions, including the criminalisation of clients and

assistance to prostitutes to escape sexual exploitation and dependency, is central to

this position. In the 1990s, the discussion of prostitution largely shifted to the issue of

trafficking that became the cornerstone of a new analytical and policy framework that

has determined the agendas of academics, governments, international and non-

governmental organisations. Abolitionist feminists have played a central role in

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defining trafficking as an extreme form of male domination and violence, which is

identical to sexual slavery (Barry, 1979).

Most analyses linked to this perspective have anticipated the negative impact

of new media on sexual practices, arguing that they contribute to the spread of

prostitution, sex tourism and commerce and have the effect of normalising trafficking

(Hughes, 1999; 2003; Jones, 2001). Research in this strand also confirms that online

forums on prostitution, where male clients’ debate services, generate a cynical view of

women (Holt and Blevins, 2007). Further, it is posited that the changing nature of

online escorting has produced new forms of violence, including online harassment

and stalking (Davies and Evans, 2007). In general, this line of research tends to

provide further evidence for the feminist abolitionist argument that advocates the

criminalisation of prostitution as a form of sexual violence against women.

Second, there are perspectives which emphasise that sex work is a form of

labour that does not necessarily presuppose violence. On the basis of this approach,

many scholars have criticised the abolitionist rhetoric. Central to their arguments is

the concept of the law as constructing zones of illegality and precarity in which

(migrant) sex workers are trapped and forced to work in adverse, often violent,

conditions. This strand of research is more in line with the demands of sex worker

activism and the self-organisation of sex workers who reject the abolitionist argument

and call for the recognition of paid sexual services as a form of work, the protection

of sex workers and the recognition of their human and labour rights (Delacoste and

Alexander, 1998; Kempadoo and Doezema, 1998; Augustín, 2005; 2007). From this

perspective, the discourse of trafficking has been criticised for making broad and

generalising claims about commercial sex based on selected stories as well as

arbitrary and unreliable statistical estimates that exaggerate the global spread of

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trafficking networks and their impact on sex commerce and work (Weitzer, 2007;

Doezema, 2005, Andrijasevic, 2007, 2010; Berman, 2003).

Authors in this strand have denied the validity of the dichotomy between

prostitution versus sex work. Doezema, for example, argues that the sex work

perspective does not deny that violence and sexism exist in this sector, but considers

them as a product of illegality and stigma that legitimises the exclusion of sex

workers’ organisations from policymaking processes (Doezema, 1998). In this

context, there is a research and activist strand that reveals the more ‘positive’ aspects

of digital sex work. Scholars argue that the internet offers female and male sex

workers new opportunities to market their services, increase their independence and

autonomy, and participate in sex workers’ networks or develop sex-related cyber-

activism. In particular, the digital side of prostitution is the subject of recent research

that brings to the forefront the empowering role of the internet in the work-life

balance of male, gay and bisexual escorts who advertise online (Uy et al., 2004),

while more general content analysis of escort websites from a sex work perspective

reveals escorts’ active online marketing practices (Castle and Lee, 2008; Lee-Gonyea

et al., 2009). In the context of exploring sex commerce, research also finds that race,

gender and sex ‘don’t overdetermine’ the online sex tourism debates (Chow-White,

2006).

Finally, in the study of porn there are also several publications that focus on

the positive impact of amateur porn in challenging predominant images of politically

correct sexuality and stress the positive social impact the online production and

consumption without intermediaries may have, including the blurring of the

boundaries between users and producers of porn (Paasonen, 2011; Jacobs et al.,

2007). All of these analyses emphasise the determining role of sex workers’ own

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perspectives in challenging predominant stereotypes and practices of inequality,

violence and exploitation through the usage of new media. The agency of sex workers

should not be taken for granted since online marketing strategies often prescribe

sexual representations which do not necessarily do away with gender and racial

divisions (Magnet, 2007). Still, undoubtedly sex workers’ online agency has become

an influential factor in the shifting discourses on sex commerce and work.

Geographies and policies of prostitution and sex work

Drawing mostly on the sex work perspective, geographical studies of prostitution

bring to the fore how prostitution laws and policies produce spaces of exclusion and

construct sex workers as outcasts within urban centres. A look back into history

shows that prostitution has always been heavily regulated in relation to the moral need

to safeguard public spaces and protect inhabitants of cities against the ‘immorality’ of

prostitutes (Walkowitz, 1980). Laws on contagious diseases, medical checks,

hospitalisation, re-education and rehabilitation were methods used from the 19th

century on to prevent women from working in prostitution and to increase prostitutes’

vulnerability to and dependency on male clients and procurers. These methods

boosted male clients’ ability to obtain information about prostitutes and report them to

the police. Throughout the 20th

century, the regulation of prostitution reproduced

images of prostitutes as an ‘undesired social class’.

Contemporary national policies continue to approach prostitution as a moral

issue and impose public order acts that aim to cleanse urban spaces from ‘immoral’

individuals and criminal and/or semi-criminal activities in order to design

economically efficient areas, invite investments and sustain wealthy neighbourhoods.

In France, Mathieu (2011, 114) shows how laws on internal security that ban

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prostitution are built on the argument of making citizens feel safe in public places.

Sex workers are forced by urban-cleansing policies to move to less crowded areas, on

the outskirts of cities where they are more isolated and exposed to greater risks of

violence. Prostitutes are portrayed as threatening the public image of cities,

intimidating potential investors and endangering the quality of life of the inhabitants.

Zero-tolerance policies thus appear as strategies of ‘gentrification’, regulating spaces

by securing consumption and investment – via the expulsion and displacement of

deviant groups such as prostitutes from city centres (Mathieu, 2011, 116, 119;

Hubbard, 2004).

The establishment of prostitution-free zones through policies of ‘spatial

governmentality’ (Sanchez, 1997) maintain control over sex workers and draw

boundaries between the urban spaces of the privileged and prostitutes as

‘paradigmatic subjects of exclusion’, or the ‘female outlaw’ (Sanchez, 2004,

863‒864). The displaced subjectivities of sex workers remind us of the analysis of

Hannah Arendt (1951) who theorised totalitarian regimes of displacement as those

that deprive groups of their own existence and reduce them to outlaws, the outcast;

bare and naked humans who are forced to be invisible in space and culture.

The theoretical perspectives outlined above that consider the issue of urban

policies (policing) and their effect of creating the feminine outcast are helpful in the

analysis of prostitution in online environments. These can appear as enabling sex

workers’ agency but can also increase their dependency on powerful entrepreneurs.

The article addresses these problematisations in relation to the three case studies in

three different countries – France, Greece and Slovenia, which present similarities as

well as differences. We chose the three country cases, western, southern and eastern

European country, because they show comparable policy regimes, yet with different

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outcomes for sex workers’ agency on the Web. Despite similar regimes our French

sample shows greater visibility of sex workers online which might be attributed to the

fact that France has longer tradition of debating and analysing prostitution and sex

work if compared to Greece and Slovenia. The three cases were chosen also because

they exhibit low visibility of sex workers in the public which makes it interesting to

compare the possible reallocation of the business on the Web.

In France, Greece and Slovenia, prostitution is the only area of sex commerce

and work that is regulated. On the contrary, in all three states most forms of sex work

are not covered by specific legal policies. The comparison of the three states rests on

similar legal and policy regimes that produce grey spaces of illegal or semi-legal and

precarious employment conditions with which sex workers have to conform. This

results in a peculiar configuration of space which manifests the double standards of

state policies and legislation. In general, the legal regimes and policies in the selected

states are grounded on an inconsistent mixture of moral reasoning, from defending

public morality and security to the protection of the human rights of prostitutes, while

the perspectives of the sex workers’ themselves are more or less ignored.

In Slovenia, prostitution was decriminalised in 2003: yet selling sexual

services is punishable in public places, where it constitutes an offence. Also the

activities of pimping and mediation of prostitution are criminal offences, however

clients are not subject to the law. Apart from private apartments, prostitution is

performed in several nightclubs where predominantly migrant women are officially

employed as ‘artistic dancers’. By issuing working permits for those dancers, the state

directly controls the number of immigrant women working in prostitution. In Greece,

prostitution is legal, but only within licensed brothels. The law prohibits the

establishment of brothels in close proximity to social institutions such as churches,

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schools, hospitals etc., which in practice creates a situation where at least in densely

populated cities it is almost impossible to establish legal brothels. Consequently, the

complicated and restrictive licensing procedures render most brothels illegal. This

form of illegality is largely tolerated by the police, resulting in the proliferation of

‘studios’, which are brothels scattered around the Greek cities. The legal framework

in France is similar: in 2003 a bill on ‘passive soliciting’ that bans prostitution in

public spaces was adopted, while in 2013 a new law introduced the penalisation of

clients. While prostitution in public spaces is banned, there are several ‘hidden’

practices through which sex workers are able to work, including online escorting,

massage and striptease.

Methodology

While extensive literature exists on the historical and socio-political developments

and understandings of sex commerce and work, research analysing its online aspects

has only developed recently and continues to be limited in scope (cf. Döring, 2009).

Our approach is different from previous analyses in the sense that it researches both

sex commerce and sex work online by recognising their diffusion. In addition, we

adopt the perspective that feminist ethics and a feminist geographical lens are crucial

for bringing needed reflexivity and reciprocity into online research (Morrow et al.,

2014). So far, research has mostly focused on analysing specific websites like escort

websites (Lee-Gonyea et al., 2009), male escort websites (Castle and Lee, 2008), gay

and bisexual escorts (Uy et al., 2004). In this study we are interested in grasping the

complexity and exploring the dynamics of sex work in different sectors of sex

commerce and work, from escort, dating and nightclub websites to brothels and street

prostitution. In other words, we are interested in understanding the relationships

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between different types of websites connoting different geographies, and different

forms of sex work.

In order to explore sex commerce and work online we conducted a two-tier

analysis in France, Greece and Slovenia. The first part discusses the results of a

quantitative macro-analysis exploring commercial websites in three languages, while

the second part is a micro-analysis exploring the visualisation of the egocentric

network of three selected websites, one from each country. The quantitative part of

the analysis included 149 sex-related commercial websites, with the goal of building a

corpus of the main actors engaged in sex commerce on the Web in the three states.

More specifically, we retrieved a list of websites using relevant search terms in

French, Greek and Slovenian with the help of the Google’s search engine. The

decision on the search terms was made on the basis of the existing debates between

the abolitionist and sex work perspectives presented above. We then considered the

results of our own previous analysis (Pajnik and Renault, 2014) which revealed that

discourses on prostitution and trafficking are hardly related on the Web. Following

these findings, the list of search terms included possible links to sex business in

general (such as sex commerce, sex industry), types of sex exchange (escort, erotic

massage, striptease, table dance, dating, call girl) and the usual locations (nightclub,

escort agency, massage parlour, brothel).

After selecting the relevant websites, an automatic Web exploration process

(or crawl) (Diminescu, 2012) starting from the websites of the three cases was

launched.

In so doing, new lists of websites were produced and we selected ones relevant

to the analysis. Altogether, we selected the 149 best-ranked websites that allowed us

to analyse fragments of the extensive online sex market and work.

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We performed an online coding of websites from the period of 24 February to

8 March 2012, which was conducted by five coders (two for the Greek and Slovenian

and one for the French sample). We then gathered information about each website

such as its location, type, languages, quality of set-up, forms of connection available,

types of sexual services and patterns of commercial orientation such as

advertisements, registration fees etc. The data analysis adopted a quantitative

statistical method using SPSS software and web cartography with Gephi software.

Typology of websites: Persistence of the national context

One of the initial questions the study tried to address was how online spaces are

linked to actual legal and illegal geographical locations. In order to define the

geographical location of the websites, we searched for the location of the actors who

manage them. The location of the server in most cases differed from that of the actors

who managed the website, manifesting strategies for overcoming restrictive national

laws on both prostitution and web security. From the sample of 149 websites, 52

(35%) websites were allocated to France, 44 (30%) to Slovenia and 41 (28%) to

Greece, while 11 (7%) websites were recognised as being related to one of the three

countries but having a larger international or Europe-wide scope. We found that,

contrary to the generalising discourses on online prostitution and trafficking, the

national context and law still play a very important role in defining the meanings

attached to specific forms of sex commerce and work.

Simultaneously, however, these online meanings tend to also be determined by

global and transnational trends. While national languages were in most cases the main

languages of the websites, several were multilingual and contained English and other

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language sections. This finding not only highlights the prevalence of sex tourism but

also (in the case of Greece and Slovenia) the commercial strategies for promoting and

linking the websites in order to increase their popularity with other international sex

industry hubs.

The second question the analysis sought to address concerned the types of sex

work advertised and promoted in these online spaces. Our analysis defined the types

of websites according to the predominant types of sex commerce engaged in. We

found that sex commerce is very varied and vibrant, especially in Greece, but also in

France, and less so in Slovenia. We listed seven categories of websites: 1) 22.8% of

websites were nightclubs; 2) 18.8% were escorts; 3) 14.8% were massage parlours; 4)

12.8% were dating; 5) 8.7% multifunctional sexual hubs; 6) 6% shops/advertising,

while 7) the category ‘other’ included 16.1% of the websites. These findings indicate

that sex for sale is more diverse than national law presupposes, with prostitution being

only one of the possible forms it may take.

However, a content analysis of advertisements and client discussions showed

that some of the advertised spaces may have served multiple purposes. For example,

although dating websites often presented themselves as providing a space for free

dating, paid sexual services were also available there. Similarly, several massage

parlours also offered erotic massage. These findings revealed the blurred boundaries

between different forms of sex commerce and work and the complexities of

identifying ‘prostitution’ as distinct from other forms of sex work. Thus, our research

purposely refrained from focusing on one specific type of sex service only, but instead

focused on the interconnections and differences between different types of sex work.

We also observed that the sex industry reflects some peculiarities that differ in

the three cases. The data show that 58.8% of the nightclub websites are located in

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Slovenia (45.5% of websites of the Slovenian sample or 20 out of the total 44),

followed by Greece with 23.5%. France shows the prevalence of escort websites, at

46.4%, followed by Greece with 25%. While France is the country with the lowest

share of nightclub websites, Slovenia is the country with the smallest share of escort

websites. Given the interconnectedness between different forms of sex work, the

predominance of some websites over others indicates that national, cultural and legal

contexts play an important role in defining forms of sex work that are more

‘acceptable’ or more tolerated. The meanings attached to nightclub or escort sex work

in Slovenia obviously differ from those in France. This indicates that, despite the

globalising potential of the Web, national geographies are still important in defining

the relationship between online and offline sex commerce and work.

The diffusion of services and prevalence of a commercial orientation

Another dimension of our research addresses the type of services provided. The most

common type was escort, detected as a service for 31.5% of websites, followed by

erotic massage (22.1%), dating (21.5%), striptease (18.8%), erotic show (16.1%),

table dance/lap dance (15.4%) and online sex (11.4%), which all points to a great

variety of services. If we look at types of services according to types of websites, we

see, not unsurprisingly, that multifunctional sexual hub websites offer the greatest

variety of services. Escort websites and massage parlour websites are more

straightforward in the sense that they hardly offer other services apart from

escort/massage: 7.1% of escort websites offer erotic massage, 3.6% online sex and

striptease. Thus, the data show that although websites originally designed to be

multifunctional offer the greatest variety of services, most websites in fact exhibit a

certain level of variety.

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The shares of websites that gather information on services based on user-

generated content is relatively small which indicates, quite surprisingly, that the

websites are not so keen on self-improvement based on customers’ reviews. However,

this might also be a result of the illegality of such businesses or at least some of their

parts. The share is the largest with multifunctional sexual hub websites (23.1%),

followed by escort websites (21.4%). Multifunctional sexual hub websites are also

among those that tend to use most of all social media (53.8%), followed by massage

parlours (40.9%) and nightclubs (38.2%). In addition, we found that only a very small

percentage of websites (6.7%) provide links to websites that are not commercial.

Thus, commercially oriented patterns of communication are highly closed in the sense

that they focus almost exclusively on profit-making strategies. We observed that in

the vast majority of websites there is almost no information on education, (self)help,

medical and other issues targeting customers and/or sex workers and addressing the

non-profit making aspects of these industries.

The strict commercial orientation of most websites can also be measured

according to the inclination they exhibit towards advertising. We found that a large

share (59.7%) of websites publish advertisements, mostly in the French case (43.8%),

followed by the Slovenian (25.8%) and Greek (22.5%) cases. In this context, we are

also interested in seeing to what extent websites have interactive components and

encourage communication with users. In particular, we examine whether websites

provide search options for visitors and the prices of their services: 33.6% of websites

enabled search option tools where customers could select what is ‘on offer’, and

38.3% of websites listed the prices of sexual services. Search menus were mostly

available for dating websites (73.7%), multifunctional hubs (61.5%), the category of

‘other’ websites (54.2%), shops/advertising (44.4%) and escort (28.6%). Prices were

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mostly available for escort (75%) and shops/advertising (66.7%), and were less

frequent for massage parlour (13.6%) and nightclub websites (20.6%). The small

share of sites providing prices can partly be explained by the illegality of some forms

of sex work since, for instance, a nightclub can unofficially function as a brothel but

can also be part of a strategy for increasing the bargaining possibilities of sex workers

and sex work organisers.

Case studies: Exploring online networks

The second part of our analysis is based on the retrieval (web crawling)4 and

visualisation of the egocentric networks of three selected websites or egos in graph

terminology (one per country). An egocentric network consists of a website and its

immediate neighbours; in the latter case, the websites cited (hypertext links) by the

individual plus the relations between these websites. It was our purpose to use the

case studies to supplement the findings presented above with analysis that stems from

the micro perspective of websites, to reflect in more detail the online geographies of

sex work. On the maps (see Graphs 1, 2 & 3), the nodes are the websites and the links

(or, in graph terminology, edges) are the hypertext relations between them. The

position of a node on the graph therefore depends on all of its relations with the other

nodes. It is a relative position; there is no external referential: north/south and

east/west have no meaning, one can rotate the graph without altering its structure.

With regard to the size of the nodes, the criteria used include the number of inbound

links, meaning that the size of node/website A depends on the number of other

websites that cite A (have a link to A).

Sloescort (http://www.sloescort.com/) is an interactive platform for clients of

prostitution or sex-work-related services such as striptease, table dance, or swinger

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parties. The principle language is Slovenian, but some information is available in

English. It started to operate as a self-organised forum for male clients to exchange

information and experiences on prostitution. Its non-commercial nature changed

recently with a new administrator who began to charge membership fees and

additional costs for advertisements published by organisers of sex work and sex

workers. Sloescort is the only forum of its kind operating in Slovenia and represents

the biggest and most comprehensive database on sex work. It is the first meeting place

for clients and an important contact place for sex workers and organisers of the

business. The forum constitutes a very profitable business. Even before its

commercialisation, according to the administrator there were around 25,000 registered

users, of whom some 10,000 were active users (December 2012), which is considered

relatively high in the Slovenian context. The large number of users attracts

advertisers, and the forum’s popularity rose also as a consequence of advertising on

other commercial sex work websites.

Bourdella (http://www.bourdela.com/), which means ‘brothels’ in Greek, is a

website that provides information about different forms of commercial sex work and

also acts as an interactive space for clients, including brothels, studios, sex clubs, bars,

city tours, call girls, massage, transsexuals, hotels, sex shop, forum, porn and porn

movies. It is the largest and most popular Greek sex-work-related website and,

although it contains a very small English-speaking section, it is mostly addressed to

Greek-speaking clients/users. It has 125,880 members (December 2012). It also has

its own Twitter profile and a Facebook page. Bourdella was created by a client with

the aim of disseminating information about sex work in Greece and constructing a

forum where providers of sex services could advertise and clients could debate the

quality of the sex services. Unlike Sloescort, it does not charge a membership fee but

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makes profit solely from advertising. In fact, Bourdella functions as the main online

advertising space for studios, brothels and escort agencies in Athens, but does not

have any independent escort advertisements. Advertising is interrelated with the

interactive features of the website since users are warned that links to websites

providing sex-work-related services that are not advertised on Bourdella, with the

exception of porn, will be immediately removed by the administrators. Due to this

prohibition, it has become imperative for organisers of sex work to advertise on

Bourdella. Similarly, the importance of the Sloescort forum as an advertising medium

is growing as rising numbers of advertisements are appearing online, most of which

give the impression that the escorts work independently.

Both of these websites are male-oriented. Sloescort limits membership to adult

males only. Although the gender identity of users cannot be identified, female sex

workers usually appear on both websites as objects of male clients’ gaze and

discourse. They are mostly represented in sexualised images in the advertising

sections or become the objects of male discussions, ratings and evaluations in the

forums. Further, both Sloescort and Bourdella are heterosexually-oriented. While gay

and lesbian content very rarely appears in these online spaces, in both of them there is

information on transvestite prostitution. In both Greece and Slovenia, lesbian, gay,

bisexual and transgender (LGBT) sexual commerce and work appear on separate

websites, as sections of Gay Romeo (global dating social network for gay, bisexual

and transgender men). The analysis of these two websites thus indicates that in

specific national contexts the Web can be used to consolidate and reinforce sexist

stereotypes and the control of sex workers’ online presence. While state policing is

more limited than in geographical spaces, the digital spaces of sex work may also be

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‘policed’ by private networks that impose specific masculinist and heterosexual

perspectives on prostitution and sex work in order to attract a specific clientele.

The third website constitutes a different case study from an organisational

point of view. France-escortes (http://www.france-escortes.com/) is a French

advertisement directory of women working as escorts. In addition to French, it is

available in the languages of all neighbouring countries: German, Spanish, Italian and

English (most of the content of the ads is only available in French), showing a much

broader and specialised client targeting strategy than in the Slovenian and Greek

cases. Ads are classified according to their geographical locations, according to a list

of cities and ethnicity of the workers. Information on ethnicity is also a common

feature on the Slovenian and Greek websites, as are most of the other categories and

descriptions which can be found on France-escortes (name/pseudo, photos (most

often semi-naked), location, phone number, form for sending email etc.). Contrary to

the other cases, the main users are sex workers themselves. Escorts have to subscribe

(create a free account) on the website to post their ads and more generally to be

connected to the website – ‘recently online’ are mentioned in the left frame of the

homepage. A directory of related ‘partner’ websites plus other links are provided.

Finally, other actors can publish paid advertisements on the website. Even if the

website presents itself as an escort website, the ads actually mention a large range of

services: massage, job offers (for porn movies), and most often explicit sexual

relationships. In that sense, France-escortes not only operates as an escort website but

also as a sexual hub.

Graph analyses

Our research focus was to reflect, from a micro perspective, how sex commerce and

20

work are organised and how they operate online, what kind of (dis)connections they

show and what they tell us about the online spaces of control and sex workers’ self-

organising. In order to ensure comparability, we considered the following steps of the

graph analysis: 1) describing the chosen website or ‘ego’ (location, content, owners

etc.); 2) describing the situation of the ‘ego’ in the graph (density, position of nodes in

relation to the ego, existence of other possible dominant websites); 3) exploring the

general topology of the graph, e.g. identifying clusters (groups of websites) and

bridges between clusters; 4) describing the topological structure of the cluster,

exploring why or on what criteria it is built and reflecting the content; and 5)

exploring the situation of bridge websites.

The Sloescort graph (see Graph 1) does not form a dense network; most of the

nodes are linked with the central positioned ego, whereby the links are predominantly

unidirectional driving from the ego to other nodes. The graph reflects the type of the

website where information is being provided by its members and advertisers; other

websites cite it rarely. Also quite obvious is the absence of connections between the

nodes representing different sex work services and product providers. Consequently,

we can observe weak networking between different actors in the online Slovenian sex

industry. However, we also observe that the web cartography does not reflect all

relations existing in the offline environment, also for legal reasons, since organising

prostitution remains an illegal activity.

Sloescort is not the biggest node on the graph. Among the sites with more

inbound links there are some media websites, the information websites Ljubljana.si

and Vimeo, and the website Zavod69. The structure of the graph seems diffuse, but

four clusters are recognisable, two of them are sex-work-related, with one

representing media websites and one built around an information website. The

21

network constructed around the node of Zavod69 can be considered as a separate

cluster (at the top of the graph) which incorporates the nodes representing the

businesses of Zavod 69 (central hub website, the Hardcore nightclub and the Erotica

69 erotic fair), two nightclubs (http://nightclub.si/) and a brothel in Austria

(http://www.casa-carintia-kaernten.at/). This cluster has quite good connections to the

media cluster (upper left corner) that builds the densest network and has the biggest

nodes. We can find unidirectional and bidirectional links between media nodes and

the ego. In the case of unidirectional links, Sloescort cites articles interesting to its

users. In the case of bidirectional links, media reports about the forum and the forum

shares links to the media. The biggest nodes in this cluster represent online media

(such as Siol). A small cluster is built around the official website of the city of

Ljubljana, which provides information on the municipality and life in the city. The

ego is not linked to the node directly ‒ the bridge websites represent tourist businesses

such as hotels and guesthouses where clients and sex workers presumably meet, and

in some cases they may operate as brothels.

Most of the nodes on the graph are not connected in a network and can be

considered as a separate cluster, built out of websites which are cited on the forum by

either users or sex work organisers (bottom right corner of the graph). These websites

chiefly represent nightclubs and ‘daily rest’ accommodation. They are not usually to

be found in the city centres; instead, they operate on the outskirts of cities and in the

countryside. We can assume that the ‘special governmentality’ as a result of the

prostitution policy that cleanses the cities of sex workers tends to be reproduced

online. We can also see that these businesses are not connected to each other, which

again leads us to the conclusion that the Slovenian sex work business is not very

interrelated.

22

˂graph 1˃

The graph of Bourdella (see Graph 2) is very dense and centralised. Already

the title implies a direct link between offline and online practices which is not visible

on escort websites. While the title is bourdella, most of the advertised spaces are

‘studios’, a term used to describe mostly illegal spaces of prostitution scattered all

over Athens. There are, however, linkages with other forms of sex work. The node of

Bourdella occupies the central space in the graph, with the vast majority of nodes

being directly connected to the central ego, while there are very few connections

amongst the nodes themselves. The only exception is in the upper left corner cluster

where there is a node that refers to porn structured around the European Girls Adult

Films Database (http://egafd.com/) and to adult YouTube videos and two nodes that

refer to two Greek escort/call girl agencies developed mainly around http://greece-

athens-escorts.c/ and http://www.aphrodita.tv/call-girls that provide information on

escorts travelling in Greece and Turkey.

The bottom right hand side is covered with links to the blogs of specific

studios – primarily located in Athens – and is structured around the central Bourdella

brothel section. The website functions as an online mapping of the Athenian

landscape of organised sex work categorising and homogenising spaces of sex

commerce. In this landscape, Bourdella appears to be an authority, a node that

provides information and organises the spaces of commercial sex work. Only street

work and escorting are excluded. If we also consider the fact that there are several

brothel and studio advertisements within Bourdella which have no links to outside

websites, we may conclude that it constitutes the principal source of information on

and interconnection between providers and clients. While sex workers may also be

using its services, there are very few profiles of sex workers in its forums. The

23

reading of this online mapping manifests that in the Greek Athenian context, despite

formal prohibitions and legal restrictions, sex work spaces (studios) are dispersed and

visible in the city, yet centrally controlled and organised.

Contrary to the overall absence of sex workers from the profiles, they have a

strong presence as objects to be advertised. The studio websites tend to have a

standard format which includes pictures of the space and sex workers, the timetable

and often a price list. Usually the URL is the name and address of the brothel. They

are all registered with .com URLs and seem to have been produced by the same

developers, according to some informants and by the bourdella.com team itself. All

the websites in this cluster include a section entitled ‘critics’ which consists of a link

to the bourdella.com ratings and commentaries of the sex workers working in the

brothel. The interactive features of bourdella.com therefore function as part of the

advertising and profit-making scheme of the website, adding extra value to each

online item being commented upon by the users. This user-generated marketing

strategy contributes to the commercial success of the website, but does not seem to

have features that include sex workers themselves. In general, we can argue that,

contrary to the overvisibility of clients and brothels, websites like bourdella.com tend

to promote sexist perspectives on sex work, exclude sex workers themselves and

marginalise their voices.

˂graph 2˃

France-escortes is a website composed of various advertisements by

independent escorts with whom clients can interact and book a meeting. The variety

of photographs and profiles indicates that many of them are generated by sex workers

24

themselves, while there are also others which may have been generated by escort

agencies. The website also includes male and trans profiles, although the majority of

sex workers are females. The decentralised character of this type of website is also

reflected in its structure and linkages with other websites. The node in the case of

France-escortes (see Graph 3) is located in the centre of the graph and ‘mediates’

between two main groups of websites. As such, this is a relatively small node that

performs a role of a hub. It has many outbound links, but no role of authority (and it

has an average number of inbound links). Finally, there is no dominant authority in

the graph, but a large range of well-connected websites, revealing different

organisational patterns of the sex business in France compared to the Greek and

Slovenian cases.

The graph can be divided into three clusters: The cluster located at the top of

the graph is visibly disconnected from the rest of graph. This cluster is quite sparse,

but one can nonetheless identify a denser zone at the top of it. In the bottom part of

the cluster, we observe a group of websites that are linked only to France-escortes.

These websites are either referred to in the link section of the site (these are mainly

general directory websites like annuonline.com) or in the escort ads themselves

(individual websites). The middle of the cluster is very similar, except that the

websites are somewhat more connected with each other, and that it also contains

general sex websites like sexibe.com or yatoosexy.com.

The top part of the cluster is composed of general directories and personal

escort websites, and also has some specific features. We observe that it, firstly, refers

to other countries/nationalities, especially Romanian and Canadian. In this respect, we

can make the hypothesis that a further web exploration might allow an international

network of escort websites to be retrieved. Second, the cluster contains a few

25

authorities such as openadultdirectory.com and escort-site.com. Open Adult Directory

is a huge sexual hub (bdsm, fetish, escorts, body rub and massage experts, models,

exotic dancers and other adult entertainment professionals) that references websites

from all over the world, while Escort-Site is a platform for creating personalised

escort websites. These two authorities confirm that the French online escort market is

embedded in an international network of escort services and shows that it is headed by

English-speaking websites operating on an international level. This indicates that,

contrary to the Greek and Slovenian websites studied, sex workers located in different

spaces may participate, including for example, Greek and Slovenia escorts.

The big cluster located at the bottom of the graph builds a dense and

homogeneously connected network of different kinds of sex work websites: porn

videos and photos, sex cam and chat, directories of sex websites, sex dating websites.

This cluster could be considered a (small) region of the web porn that is currently

available. The non-centralised and transnational character of these websites indicates

that it is less linked to spaces of sex work, marginalised under existing legislation, and

less controlled, organised and categorised. Moreover, by bringing sex workers rather

than clients to the forefront, i.e. enabling them to publish own advertisements it

promotes a slightly different perspective on sex workers as entrepreneurs rather than

commercial objects.

˂graph 3˃

Comparative discussion of the cases of networks

Egocentric graphs reflect the structure and peculiarities of both national and sector

specific contexts. In general, it can be said that in most niche national contexts

26

(Slovenian or Greek) online and offline sex commerce tends to be highly centralised,

whereas in more transnational contexts (the French case) it tends to be much more

decentralised. Moreover, decentralisation tends to be more dominant in sectors such

as escorting where sex workers are able to assert their agency and presence online

rather than act in implicit and covert ways (fake profiles) or be used and presented as

commercial objects.

Overall, decentralisation allows the more active online participation of sex

workers and a wider diversity of users, including gay and transsexual ones. The

French online environment also shows a stronger involvement in transnational sex

work networks, which can at least be partly explained by the usage of French,

whereas Slovenian and Greek are languages that appeal only to a niche market. Cross-

border online connections tend to confirm observations from the field that at least

some sex workers, clients and sex work organisers operate transnationally, especially

in escorting.

Moreover, we observe strong interrelatedness between the offline and the

online. In Greece and France, sex work organizers and operators appear to be much

more open about their business activities, making practically no effort to hide from

the public eye at least in digital environments. Possibly, especially when hosting is

transferred abroad, they feel that the Web is more ‘secure’, gives them more power of

control and that they do not have to disguise their business strategies. This is apparent

in both the Bourdella and the France-escorte egocentric graphs. In Slovenia, on the

contrary, only in recent years have smaller networks begun to emerge and become

apparent also in public discourse. Yet it has to be pointed out that not all of the

connections visible on the graphs are based on business cooperation (and vice versa).

Many links are merely informing users about sex and/or sex-work-related services

27

and products. Online connections are in fact distinct, revealing how the digitalisation

of sex commerce and work has its own autonomous logic that in turn impacts on the

offline spaces of sex work.

In order to attract clients, national websites seek to become a must-use for sex

workers and sex work organisers. While in Greece, studios in particular, depend

heavily on online advertising, and in France sex workers themselves (mainly escorts)

seem to use predominantly the internet to directly interact with their clients. In

Slovenia, the online communication of sex workers is controlled by clients

themselves. Thus, both Sloescort and Bourdella are good examples of how spatial

governmentality is actually reproduced in online networks. Sex workers are visible

online but mostly via mediated representations in the form of advertisements

published by organisers of the industry.

In all three case studies, we find a strong entanglement of different sex-work-

related businesses and practices, such as pornography production, prostitution,

striptease, erotic fairs etc. In some cases, different businesses are run by the same

legal entity. Simultaneously, the same sex workers are advertising for different forms

of sex work, for example striptease, escort and online sex chat. Not just services, but

also products are being merchandised online – sex shops are advertising on sex-work-

related websites and have the role of sponsors in these networks. Frequent advertisers

also include dating websites, especially those specialised in sex dating, which again

often function as portals where sex workers seek clients. The absence of non-

commercial websites or actors in these networks indicates the strong profit orientation

of this type of online activity.

Besides sex workers, clients and sex work organisers, our analyses reveal the

emergence of a relatively new group of powerful actors in the sex industry: the

28

owners and administrators of popular websites and other providers of internet

platforms which clients, sex workers and sex work organisers use and depend on.

Although these typically male actors may not be directly involved in the sex industry

except as clients, they enjoy monopoly positions in an online environment that

enables them to impose their own rules and conditions and at the same time, gain

privilege and profits out of advertising and promoting offline spaces.

Finally, even though national geographies and policies are structuring sex

work and commerce online, there are global patterns of how sex workers and services

are presented and advertised. The strong resemblances and identical settings in the

aesthetics and designing of websites indicate that there are specific global providers

that are determining the ways in which online sex commerce is developing.

Conclusions

Our two-tier analyses of the online sex work environments in Greece, France and

Slovenia revealed differently diffused, adaptable and commerce-oriented markets. A

variety of sex work services and providers was identified, showing a strong

commercial orientation, and rarely making connections to non-commercial websites.

The analyses demonstrated the strong entanglement of different sex work services as

well as businesses. The internet enables the national and transnational consolidation

and promotion of sex commerce and work and simplifies the pursuit of sexual

services. However, we can still observe relatively closed national online sex work

environments which vary according to the size, interconnectedness, level of

centralisation, kinds of sex work and services present, target group strategies, and

languages used. Those features depend strongly on the offline peculiarities of each

national sex work market and policies, but are also part of a distinct logic that is being

29

generated by new global types of communication and networking.

While evidence suggests that in some sectors, like escorting, new media have

opened up avenues for sex workers to work independently of the control networks

that previously regulated their lives, there are also many forms of sexist treatment of

sex workers that arise online. In two of our case studies (Sloescort and Bourdella), we

observed that online sex commerce marginalised the agency of sex workers and was

oriented to providing opportunities and a forum for businessmen and clients of sexual

services. Through such online media, clients were given the opportunity to select sex

workers according to a wide range of criteria but also to participate in a distinct online

community that gave them power to shape the sex work market according to their

own interests and enforce strictly heterosexual and sexist gender perspectives. On the

Slovenian and Greek forums, women were commodified (presented, rated and

commented upon) as sex goods available to be consumed by men. Although even on

the platforms designed for independent escorts, sex workers have to adapt to global

patterns of presentation - which limits their agency and ability to control their labour -

the French case indicates that there are other contexts within which there is space for

the agency of sex workers.

Despite the new possibilities the Web has opened for sex workers, the above

analysis indicates that it has also created new forms of gender inequality. These are

not identical to violence and coercion, but may involve new types of gender

stereotyping, new forms of power granted to clients to exercise control over sex

workers, new avenues to express publically sexist rhetoric that is degrading for sex

workers and new forms of dependency on digital managers and providers that may

limit the possibilities sex workers have available to exercise their work independently.

While moral crusades and the regulation of prostitution offline creates the

30

displacement of prostitutes and increases their precarity in the national and global

context, similar displacements tend to be produced online. If sex workers are expelled

from the cities to ‘comfort’ the local inhabitants and secure consumption and

investment, then, as we have shown, they may also be silenced online by other

powerful actors, i.e. procurers, clients and web administrators that appear as a new

class of managers ‘securing’ the web to increase their investment by silencing and

marginalising sex workers.

Acknowledgments

Material for this work was collected as part of the project MIG@NET: Transnational Digital

Networks, Migration and Gender (http://www.mignetproject.eu/) funded by the 7th

Framework Programme of the EC, 2010‒2013. We want to thank the editors for their

support during the process and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Notes on contributors

Mojca Pajnik is senior research associate at the Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary

Social and Political Studies in Ljubljana and assistant professor at the Faculty of Social

Sciences, Department of Communication, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Topics of her

research relate to issues of citizenship, media, gender (in)equality and migration. She is

author of Prostitution and Human Trafficking: Perspectives of Gender, Labour and Migration

(PI, 2008), co-editor of several books, among them Contesting Integration, Engendering

Migration: Theory and Practice (with F. Anthias, Palgrave, 2014) and Alternative Media and

the Politics of Resistance: Perspectives and Challenges (with J. D. H. Downing, PI, 2008).

Nelli Kambouri holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science,

UK. She has worked as an occasional lecturer teaching gender, social policy and the labour

market and she was part of the research teams of the projects Mig@net and GeMIC, which

were coordinated by the Centre for Gender Studies at Panteion University and funded by the

FP7 program of the European Commission (FP7). She is currently working in Athens as a

research fellow at the Centre for Gender Studies, Panteion University. She has published a

book, journal articles and chapters in edited volumes on gender, migration and social

movements in Greek and English.

31

Matthieu Renault has PhD in political philosophy and is engineer in computing sciences,

specialist in digital methods for human and social sciences. He was a research assistant with

the ICT-Migrations research program at Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'homme,

Telecom ParisTech where he contributed to the e-Diasporas Atlas project dedicated to the

cartography and analysis of diasporas on the Web. Currently he is a He is currently a

postdoctoral fellow at the University Paris 13, Department of Anglophone studies.

Iztok Šori holds a PhD in Sociology (University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts) and is a

researcher at the Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies,

Ljubljana. So far he has been involved in research projects at the various institutions on

prostitution, trafficking in persons, violence against women, gender mainstreaming, women

representation in politics, reconciliation of private and professional life and migration. In his

PhD thesis he studied social and individual contexts of being single as a lifestyle in Slovenia.

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Graph 1

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Graph 2

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Graph 3