Its all supply and demand': Market fatalism and norm construction by prostitution clients in the...

‘It’s all supply and demand’: Market fatalism and norm construction by prostitution clients in the Netherlands and Belgium

Stef Adriaenssens

HUB RESEARCH PAPER 2010/18 MEI 2010

‘It’s all supply and demand’:

Market fatalism and norm construction by prostitution clients in the

Netherlands and Belgium

Author

Stef Adriaenssensi

HUB – University College Brussels

Content

Introduction ......................................................................................... 1

1 Moral economies and prostitution ..................................................... 3

2 Unveiling moral economies in prostitution .......................................... 6

3 Johns and their moral economies ..................................................... 8

3.1 Sex work and market fatalism .................................................... 8

3.2 Criteria for transactional satisfaction .......................................... 11

4 Conclusion and discussion .............................................................. 14

Bibliography ....................................................................................... 18

Endnotes ............................................................................................ 21

Abstract

Given the deviant nature of prostitution, expectations and information used

to depend on clients‟ personal experiences. This has changed fundamentally

during recent decades. The emergence of user-generated websites discussing

commercial sexual exchanges has allowed moral economies of prostitution as

a distinctly social phenomenon to develop.

This contribution reconstructs the social norms of prostitution clients with the

help of a qualitative analysis of internet reviews by clients in the Netherlands

and Belgium. Clients develop a dominant market fatalist approach to

exchanges with sex workers, so that prostitution is constructed as „just

happening‟ paralleling everyday consumption practices. It emulates

mainstream exchanges, for example in fixed price norms. It is argued that

this market fatalist approach consists of a moral economy concealed behind a

veil of amorality. Reconciling these market fatalist expectations with an

equally strong demand for authentic and personal experiences with the sex

worker is further analysed and discussed.

Keywords

Market fatalism

Moral economy

Prostitution

Sex work

Social norms

Netherlands

Belgium

Adriaenssens, Market fatalism and norm construction by prostitution clients

Page 1

Introduction

The demand side of prostitution is about reconciling the logic of the intimate

with commercial scripts. As has been argued in recent economic sociology,

the stark symbolic division between private and intimate life and the public

sphere of economic life poses real problems for people, individually and

collectively. It creates a need for the management of boundary crossing and

norm construction, regulating the interaction between the one and the other

sphere. The way involved parties deal with and look at prostitution

exchanges is at the heart of this management and norm construction.

This paper is about the social norms of clients who purchase commercial

sexual services. The aim of the paper is to investigate what is called „moral

economies‟ regarding sexual transactions: collectively validated beliefs about

normal, correct, satisfying and just exchanges between clients and sex

workers in the prostitution sphere. It goes without saying that prostitution is

a peculiar commodity. For one thing, most clients do not communicate

openly about their practices, and even actively conceal it. More generally

prostitution is shrouded in concealment and fear of damaged reputations. On

a more practical level this is associated with the fact that most commercial

sexual services take place in the informal or underground economy

(Venkatesh, 2006).

The approach to prostitution from the viewpoint of clients has recently gained

quite a lot of attention (overviews in Cauduro, 2009, Monto, 2010), so that

the complaint that the literature is one-sidedly focussing on sex workers (e.g.

in Mansson, 2006, p. 88) has lost much of its earlier validity.

One possible objection against the subject of clients‟ moral convictions might

follow from the position that participation in this market can only be immoral

by its very nature. This stance is close to what Ronald Weitzer (2010) calls

the oppression paradigm of prostitution. The assessment that purchasing

sexual services is fundamentally immoral is the object of heated debates (see

for instance the exchange of arguments in Farley, 2004, Farley, 2005,

Weitzer, 2004), in particular within the feminist movements (for an overview

of some national discussions see Outshoorn‟s excellent compilation, 2004).

However valuable this debate may be, and however important the outcome

for policies surrounding prostitution, it does not really touch upon the

problem tackled in this paper. Studying the moral convictions concerning a

practice does not entail a moral justification of the practice or a moral


Page 2

condemnation. Even assuming that exchanges in prostitution are immoral by

their oppressive nature, this does not automatically entail that clients have

no moral framework to engage in and within which to evaluate sexual

transactions. Quite the contrary. As a vivid and long standing research

tradition has illustrated abundantly, deviant behaviour usually goes together

with strong moral feelings on the part of the deviants themselves. For

instance, assuming one accepts that the use of illegal drugs is immoral, this

does not preclude that drug users from constructing social norms about what

is allowed and what not, and from seeing these norms as guiding their

actions (Becker, 1991). Analyzing the moral economy of prostitution clients

is therefore agnostic towards the debate about the oppression paradigm. At

best it proves the existence of a gap between the ethical evaluation of

prostitution by some commentators and scholars on the one hand, and the

moral convictions of clients on the other. This conclusion could hardly be

called surprising.

Because of its ubiquity, some assess prostitution as a „normal‟ activity of

mankind (e.g. Reynolds, 1986, p. 3). Sociologists, however, have often

stressed that statistical prevalence does not define deviance (Henry, 2009,

pp. 16-17). Many social audiences do no accept prostitution as a normal or

ordinary phenomenon. One of the reasons for this may be that prostitution,

unlike most human activities, overtly combines intimacy with the logic of

market exchange. It is caught in a contractual relationship exchanging sex

for money, and both parties know and acknowledge that in thought and

behaviour. Prostitution therefore takes place in a marketplace. At the same

time it consists of a market where commodities of an intimate nature are

transacted. Selling sexual services is firmly associated with private life

because it is inextricably connected to the body (therefore some speak about

prostitution as „body work‟, Wolkowitz, 2002), and because sexuality is

mainly defined as „private‟. This definition of the situation is even stronger in

modern societies, because of a strong sense of separate worlds of private

and public life.

This contribution documents empirically how intimate interactions combined

with market exchanges are managed by clients. In order to do this, the first

section introduces the central conceptual framework of moral economies,

social norms and market fatalism. These concepts bring norm construction by

johns into focus. How this central problem is empirically tackled is explained


Page 3

afterwards. The emergence of the internet as a locus of norm construction

and externalization is depicted in the second section. The selection of data

from user-generated content on the internet is explained and assessed. In

the third section the results of the data analysis are presented. The

concluding section summarizes and discusses the results.

1 Moral economies and prostitution

This paper is built on the conception that stable markets are coordinated by

institutionalized expectations of the parties involved. This implies that regular

participants in market exchanges by definition construct social norms about

their market relationships. It is most important, however, to distinguish

between situations where they do so knowingly and outspokenly within a

moral framework, and situations where they define their normative

constructions as mere descriptions of reality rather than prescriptive ideas.

Markets thus differ in the extent to which consumers and producers

externalize these normative expectations. In some markets there is an

exceptionally strong and explicit moralization at work so that people often

talk about exchanges in these markets in a personally committed way. When

these exchanges go wrong, it usually is clear that they are being assessed

with the help of moral criteria.

What we are referring to can be denoted by the generic concept of „moral

economy‟. The concept was developed in the 1970s to make sense of 17th

century food riots which had hitherto been analysed from a reductionist

biological stimulus-response framework starting from the logical connection:

hunger, therefore rioting. Edward Thompson (1971, 1991) made a strong

and well-documented case for the intentional and morally founded

reinterpretation of the collective behaviour of what was previously referred to

as „the mob‟.

The concept of „moral economy‟ has evolved tremendously since Thompson‟s

landmark studies. We will make use here of moral economies in the wider

sense that it has taken on in the last decade or so, following on from the

applications in other fields and time periods. Basically its meaning was

extended to different kinds of socio-economic action, assuming that people

use normative and moral standards to assess and direct situations and

transactions. This has been applied to a whole array of problems. Interesting

applications have, for instance, been developed in the area of social policy,

redistribution and welfare states (Mau, 2003, Svallfors, 1997, van Oorschot,


Page 4

2000). These studies often look for the congruence between public opinion

and the structure of the welfare state from a comparative perspective. Other

approaches have looked at the legitimacy of black market transactions (e.g.

Karstedt and Farrall, 2006). Building upon this extended use, the concept of

moral economy is defined as the collectively validated beliefs and norms

about expected and correct market exchanges or other economic

transactions (compare Mau, 2006, p. 466).

The universality of moral economies, thus of the normativity of market

exchanges, does not necessitate open endorsement by its agents. It is of

central importance for this study to stress that what clients perceive as just,

fair, correct or plainly normal prostitution transactions and services may be

hidden under an explicit discourse of amorality. This possibility does not

negate the normative content of standards and expectations about

behaviour. The mere fact that clients make use of standards and

expectations about their and the sex worker‟s behaviour already suffices to

call them social norms. Of course it would pose a qualification if (some of)

the behavioural expectations the johns hold are unspoken, but it would not

prevent one from considering this attitude as normative. It will be argued

that the difference between concealed and explicit normativity plays a central

role in the moral economy of prostitution.

Market fatalism is an attitudinal phenomenon which is built on a definition of

markets and market life as „just happening‟, unavoidable, unalterable, as

much a fact of life as the laws of nature (Svallfors, 2006, pp. 52-53). This set

of social norms is built close to the laissez faire doctrine that every

participant in market transactions is responsible for his own fate (Lane, 1978,

p. 10), and that any party engaging in a transaction agrees with it and

derives an advantage from it. The normative evaluation of exchanges from a

market fatalist mindset is purely procedural: as long as the essential

conditions of a market exchange are met, the outcome is „just‟ (compare

Lane, 1986, p. 390). In its strongest and ideal typical form this may lead to a

set of circular arguments, whereby the mere presence of a market exchange

serves as proof of the fundamental fairness and profitability of the

arrangement for all the exchanging parties. Note also that this approach has

strong generalizing implications: once we denote some transaction as a

market exchange, it implies reciprocal advantage.


Page 5

The market fatalist norm is conducive to the popular argument that morality

and market life should be set apart. This argues that morality and the

economy should be and are separate worlds (Zelizer, 2005): if morality has

anything to do with people‟s behaviour, it certainly does not do so in the

economic realm. It should, however, be clear that market fatalism is just one

type of moral economy (albeit an important one in contemporary market

societies). The mere existence of market exchanges is built upon shared

expectations on the part of the participants. These expectations essentially

have a moral dimension. Though most people that endorse market fatalism

will explicitly class their convictions as mere descriptions of reality, a

consistent market fatalist expects other people to behave in exchanges

according to this logic, and he will disapprove of other behaviour,

denominating it unnatural, unjust or incorrect. Market fatalism as an instance

of so-called „amoral‟ expectations therefore is a form of norm construction,

just as not believing, for instance, in a political project is also a form of

belief.

On the other hand, market fatalism has at least one characteristic that may

distinguish it from many other moral economies. The peculiarity of market

fatalism as a normative stance lies in the concealment of its moral nature.

While Thompson‟s members of 17th century „mobs‟ made no secret of their

moral assessment of market transactions, the ideal typical market fatalist will

deny that his convictions are moral in nature. He will argue that he is doing

nothing more than to describe what reality looks like. What‟s more, the

disclosed nature of its normativity is an essential feature of market fatalism.

If one agrees that the pure procedural justice of market fatalism is a moral

view, it would lose one important basis for its legitimacy, namely that it is

grounded in reality itself. Market fatalism implicitly or explicitly rests on the

argument that it is descriptive rather than regulative.

In the following sections we will discuss the emergence, mechanisms and

dynamics behind the moral economies of prostitution clients. The common

socialization of clients through user-generated internet resources is a quite

recent phenomenon. Apart from the immense impact on clients and their

perception, evaluation and expectation about sexual transactions, it also

made a wealth of data available for quantitative and qualitative research.

This paper is built on the internet records of discussions about and reviews of

sexual encounters between sex workers and their clients, and of other


Page 6

prostitution-related experiences of so-called „johns‟, clients of heterosexual

prostitution in Belgium and the Netherlands. This is the subject of the next

section.

2 Unveiling moral economies in prostitution

In this section I briefly describe how the data that were collected can help us

understand how johns develop social norms assessing the quality of

commercial sexual exchanges. The data consist of content on the internet

generated by prostitution clients. There is little doubt that the emergence

and rapid growth of the internet through the past two decades has influenced

our perception and norms about interaction, consumption and information

tremendously. It has created a new locus of socialization combining elements

of the classical primary, secondary and tertiary types of socialization (see

also DiMaggio, 2001). This is all the more applicable to sexuality. From its

early days on, sex in general and commercialized forms of sexuality in

particular were important elements driving the growth of the internet (Quinn

and Forsyth, 2005, Döring, 2009).

In the past two decades the emergence and growth of the internet has

changed commercial sex work profoundly. It has provided clients with an

opportunity to exchange information and experiences. These opportunities

are used nowadays to a considerable degree. Before the emergence and

large scale success of cyberspace for prostitution clients, the latter were

mainly dependent on their own experiences for information and exchanges of

ideas and experiences. The instances where commercial sexual experiences

were discussed with primary relations or other significant others most

probably were (and still are) scarce. Given the stigmatized and deviant

nature of consumption practices of commercial sex, this was and is a matter

only discussed within quite confidential personal relationships. The internet

now exists of an extended virtual space where commercial sexual

experiences are discussed in a number of impressively popular user-

generated websites. They gave rise to what is referred to as “an alternative

normative order” (Earle and Sharp, 2007, p. 13) which allows punters to

make sense of their practices, and to literally „become‟ a punter in the sense

of constructing a definition of the situation and a normative logic of

prostitution consumption.


Page 7

Apart from its importance in contemporary commercial sexual phenomena,

from the researchers‟ point of view the internet has a methodological

advantage in relation to other forms of social interaction. Records of

interaction on the internet are easily retrieved and made the subject of

research. Students of commercial sex in general and of prostitution in

particular have seized on these opportunities recently, in quantitative

(Adriaenssens and Hendrickx, 2010, Moffatt and Peters, 2004) but mainly in

qualitative (Soothill and Sanders, 2005, Castle and Lee, 2008, Holt et al.,

2008, Blevins and Holt, 2009, Earle and Sharp, 2007) research. It is this

latter approach that this paper adopts to study the normative standards that

prostitution clients apply and develop in their encounters with sex workers.

The data analysed comes from www.hookers.nl, the leading website for johns

in the Low Countries. The website contains data generated by clients

(mainstream heterosexuals) from their commercial sexual experiences,

mainly in Belgium and the Netherlands. It was founded in 2002. The site is

owned by a company that provides online adult entertainment and derives its

income from advertisements. Consultation of the site and anonymous

participation by clients (identified by an alias) are free. The website contains

a huge quantity of user-generated content. At the moment when the data

were downloaded from the site (19 October 2009), there were 32,884

discussions going on, adding up to a total of 217,525 messages. Two other

general message boards exist, both Belgian2. Neither of these two comes

near hookers.nl in geographical area (both focus on Belgium alone) or

market share.

Apart from its market leadership in user-generated sites on prostitution and

its coverage of both Belgium and the Netherlands, the website has some

other helpful characteristics for our research. One element is that the users

can add information to the website in two formats: free content and a

standardized review form about an experience. This allows for both

qualitative content analysis and quantitative analyses.

A second advantage of the data source is that restriction policies are quite

limited. For instance, contrary to other sites, hookers.nl explicitly asks for

information about unsafe sexual practices, and topics about condom use and

the like are frequently brought under discussion. This is not allowed in, for

instance, the well known British website Punternet, which rejects reviews or

discussions mentioning “unprotected vaginal or anal intercourse taking

http://www.hookers.nl/


Page 8

place”3. Whatever may be argued in favour of such a policy, in research

studying the emergence and functioning of informal norms regarding

commercial sex, it is an advantage that the discussions on hookers.nl are

hardly influenced by outside rules.

Last but not least, the content has a distinctly social edge due to its

structure, the intensive participation by clients in discussions and the

popularity of the website. The website does not just collect and present

experiences by johns or their comments on it; they often discuss with one

another and react to each other‟s experiences and evaluations. This

predominant social nature of the website allows for a distinction between

widely accepted social norms, social norms that are under debate and

personal observations and ideas.

3 Johns and their moral economies

The data help us to build an anatomy of the moral economy of clients who

purchase physical sexual services. In the first instance, the most obvious

manifest attitude of clients is analysed: their definition of the situation that

they are involved in a perfectly amoral exchange.

Afterwards we argue that this definition of the situation, although „real‟ in the

sense that the clients are honestly convinced of the reality of this definition

of the situation, does not preclude a moralization of the relationship between

client and sex worker and between the client and the transaction. This is

most apparent in the elements that clients come out with in their overall

assessment of a transaction. The demands clients make in terms of time use

and the posture and behaviour of the sex worker all illustrate the overall

assessment of the exchange. These criteria of good transactions, it will be

shown, are explicitly personal and moral in nature.

3.1 Sex work and market fatalism

In the following paragraphs we apply our general starting point to

prostitution. The notable difference between the market fatalist convictions

on the one hand and explicit moral ones on the other will be clarified with the

help of a comparison between clients‟ and sex workers‟ moral economies of

prostitution. In Thompson‟s historical analyses of „the mob‟ and in many

other instances, there is explicit moralisation of expectations in the market


Page 9

relationships which go on. In so-called „amoral market relationships‟

normative expectations are defined as „just reality‟.

The most dominant moral economy script that the punters make use of

undoubtedly is market fatalism. Market fatalism also includes an explicit or

implicit comparison between prostitution and other markets, stressing their

common grounds. One client for instance complained about the poor supply

of sex workers in the East of the Netherlands (bordering Germany) and

mentions his visits to Germany, much to his satisfaction. The reply by

another user is quite illustrative:

Well, it’s all supply and demand. The supply here in Twente and its surroundings is very poor, so the managers and the girls can charge a lot more than elsewhere in Germany or the Netherlands. All the more they don’t give blowjobs without a condom because they know that in this area mongers can’t call on competitors.4

After a long observation about the high fixed costs for sex workers in

windows prostitution, this user argues that talking about exploitation is

nonsense, at the same time nevertheless using a language suggesting

exploitation. However, the arguments that are used to reject this idea rely on

a market fatalist line of reasoning. He does so in such a straightforward way

that it almost looks like an excerpt from an economics textbook:

The system is made up in such a way that the ladies work maximum hours. Is that pitiful? Yes and no. Yes because it is almost inhuman to squeeze the ladies out like that, I reckon. No because they choose it for themselves. Nothing keeps them from going back to Bulgaria or wherever they come from. They seem to make just enough out of it to make it attractive.5

The question is one of what induces this dominant approach towards sex

work transactions on the part of clients. At first sight it may seem

counterintuitive that so many clients stress the amorality of exchanges in

commercial sex. Purchasing sexual services is obviously a discreditable

phenomenon. One consistent reaction that might be expected is that clients

rationalize their behaviour in a moralizing way as something that has a

positive ethical implication one way or another. That substantive rationalizing

strategy is adopted by sex workers sometimes, as illustrated by some of the

stories told by the sex workers of the Quartier du Nord, one of Brussels‟

prostitution areas:

I live for the others. Even my clients, I want to give them pleasure, provide them what

I have never had. People lack love, affection, tenderness. (Jamoulle, 2009, p. 60)6


Page 10

In research based on interviews with sex workers in Birmingham (UK) the

conclusion seems to be comparable, as illustrated by this citation from a sex

worker called Sara:

I see this as being a physical social worker. Ten percent of the job is sex. Ninety percent of the job is chatting, therapy. (…) (Sanders, 2006, p. 2436)

The question then is one of what drives clients to develop collective norms

that obviously build upon the market fatalist script, while sex workers do not

do so, or not so explicitly and dominantly. Both sex workers (Scambler,

2007) and clients (Della Giusta et al., 2009) have in common that they

venture stigmatised and discreditable behaviour. One possible reason for the

difference in dominant adaptation to this behaviour may be that clients have

no straightforward script at hand that morally legitimates their commercial

sexual consumption. No explicitly moralizing discourse is available showing

that their behaviour is not deviant but normal, or even laudable. The market

fatalist script, on the other hand, as an approach that feigns amorality and

resembles mainstream exchanges, does provide a way out of the censuring

judgment. It normalizes the consumption of commercial sex. Condemnation

is much less obvious if one is able to depict prostitution as a market

transaction with the same logic as buying tomatoes, legal advice or a haircut.

It debars, or at least makes less convincing, the societal judgment that

prostitution is a deviant act. The existence of such an adaptation mechanism

of normalization is consistent with the way clients describe their interactions

with sex workers.

This normalization strategy assumes that clients apply the same normative

expectations to sexual exchanges as to other market transactions. We will

apply this general mimicking hypothesis of everyday economic institutions to

prostitution in terms of the phenomenon of fixed prices and bargaining. As

with most late modern Western economies, the everyday consumption

exchanges in the Low Countries hardly know bartering. This generality of

fixed prices has been described in classical Weberian economic sociology as

an important element in the emergence of rational capitalism (in particular

Weber, 2002). On the other hand Clifford Geertz (1978) argued that bazaar

economies with their dominant time-consuming bartering practices had

adverse effects on development due to high transaction costs. What is of

interest to us is the idea that fixed prices are the dominant norm in economic

exchanges in developed nations, while exchanges in some developing

economies are agreed upon by bargaining.


Page 11

The expectation is that clients imitate the general institutionalization of fixed

prices from the mainstream economy into prostitution exchanges. This is

consistent with clients‟ norms about the negotiation of an agreement

between themselves and a sex worker. The participants on the website

explicitly and consistently condemn clients who barter:

I think you can expect nothing more than a quickie for €30. If a Lady suggests €30 herself I think it’s OK, but if you start haggling over the price you show a lack of respect for the Ladies. 7 In principle I don’t dicker as you have to value a lady properly.8

At the same time clients will reciprocally exhibit a dislike of sex workers

knocking off:

When I asked her to sit on me, she asked 75 euro for that, but once I made a move to decline and leave, she indicated that it was OK. You can ask 50 or 75 euro from a client, but afterwards you stop dickering!9

The basic logic of negotiations between a client and a sex worker thus is

reminiscent of the ultimatum game. A sex worker can ask for the price, the

client accepts or declines the proposition. When the sex worker goes into

bargaining, this proves that her initial offer was not an honest one. Likewise

a customer who goes into (excessive) bartering shows a lack of respect for

the sex worker:

In fact, dickering is something I do not do. I ask [the sex worker, SA] what is on offer and the according price and will decide then whether the offer fits the price!10

Clients who indicate that they have done otherwise may be reprimanded for

doing so by their peers in pretty moralizing language („lack of respect‟). This

exposes the fundamentally moral nature of these norms. Sticking to market

fatalism requires that the similarity with everyday exchanges in other

markets is maintained. So the rejection of barter parallels the overall

presence in the Low Countries‟ moral economies of fixed prices and the

absence of bargaining practices.

3.2 Criteria for transactional satisfaction

The normalization strategy of market fatalism may be pretty functional as an

adaptive response to social judgments; it also creates new problems to be

managed in the transaction between clients and sex workers. The

construction of market fatalism in sexual exchanges leaves open the question


Page 12

of how clients deal with the intimate and personal nature of the service

purchased. The reviews of interactions by clients provide an explicit

externalization of the criteria they adopt to assess exchanges. Basically all

the criteria refer to the expectation of a trustworthy relationship and time

spent in a genuinely personal, pleasurable and delightful atmosphere.

Elements of a good transaction refer to natural enjoyment, time use, extra-

sexual qualities and the implementation of the contract as agreed. The

fundamental demand underneath all these qualities, however, is for the girl

to communicate an authentic personal experience with her client. This

demand is extremely difficult to attend to and highly paradoxical, given the

market fatalist definition of the situation given by clients. It nevertheless

plays a central role in their expectations and in their assessment of the

commercial sexual exchange.

An obvious generality in the assessments made by the johns is thus the

authentic and natural attitude of the girls as a necessary condition for a

satisfactory experience. The best buy is natural and authentic; the sex

worker doesn‟t sell in the first place, but experiences genuine pleasure or at

least that is what she displays in a convincing way. In cases where the

quality of an interaction is brought under discussion, there seems to be no

debate about this central criterion for a decent service. The only point

discussed basically is whether a girl is natural, not whether naturalness is a

prerequisite of good service.

It is obvious she doesn’t treat you as a number; she wants to make something special out of it. Not only does she provide good sex, she also makes you feel good!!! That is not possible to achieve by faking or posture.11

This demand implies that clients have a distinctive dislike of obvious signs of

faking, whether it comes from bad acting, overacting or just a lack of

revealed enthusiasm. The very merciless judgments are a product of the

clients‟ impression that the prostitutes‟ performance is not a genuine

experience.

She is not unfamiliar with faking. Quite to the contrary: she is very proficient at it. A big letdown!!12 Really worthless, either fake well or don’t fake at all, but that sound makes my dick grow soft13


Page 13

The demand for a natural attitude and performance is often extended to a

claim for authentic pleasure. There are numerous accounts of clients boasting

about the pleasure they brought the sex worker, even leading to her

orgasms.

After a while she turned pretty wet herself (and that was not lubricant) and she nicely enjoyed along. Faking is out of the question for her.14 She first gave me a glorious blowjob. Then I gave her a reverse oral and apparently she enjoyed it thoroughly (…) She moaned somewhat, absolutely not fake, I think she got a lot of pleasure out of it; when the madam yelled it was time she gave a visible start.15

An important indicator that is often used to assess the naturalness of the

intercourse is the sex worker‟s time use.

It made up a lot that she did not watch the clock tightly16 Also she never hurries telling you that you ‘have' to come17

As has been noted elsewhere (Brewis and Linstead, 1998), this expectation

on behalf of the clients represents a paradoxical inversion of time use

registers in the interaction between male clients and female sex workers. In

mainstream society one usually attributes organised, calculated and rational

time use to the male worlds of formal work, organizations and management.

Informal, emotional and intuitive time use is associated with the private

realm and with relationships, in particular primary relationships, symbolically

often denoted as female. The paradox lies in the fact that male clients in

sexual encounters are stark defenders of a female time use, while the female

providers of the sexual service mainly adopt a male calculative approach to

time. If one takes the nature of the business and the expectations of the

demanders into account, this is a quite logical but nevertheless surprising

conflict of interest. The paradox is part of the clients‟ expectation of spending

time in a reciprocally pleasurable way, which is incompatible with a

calculative time attitude.

The best transactions are reserved for the so-called „girl friend experiences‟

(GFE). The benchmark of a GFE has been used widely by clients, as the

literature has documented extensively (Blevins and Holt, 2009, Castle and

Lee, 2008, Lever and Dolnick, 2010, Sanders, 2008). In their reference to

GFE the clients most definitely reveal what they expect from an ideal sexual

transaction. It is striking that indicators of personal attachment are a central

prerequisite of calling an exchange a GFE:


Page 14

Therefore she was not a real GFE: very sweet and all, but it did not hit off: a bit aloof18

After a while I was allowed to kiss her, and it became a lovely GFE19

For many she is a sweet little thing, but does not wish to kiss or BBFS [Bare Back Full Service, vaginal sex without a condom, SA]. Unless you do not find that important I don’t think any client will experience a GFE with her. 20

There is an unspoken but existential understanding between sex workers and

clients going on here. Clients do not only describe a GFE in terms of good

acting, authentic pleasure and mutual understanding. They stress the

importance of crossing symbolic boundaries, for instance by kissing or not

using a condom. In the social-scientific literature built on observation of and

interviews with sex workers, the use of condoms and refraining from

engaging in certain intimate interactions such as kissing is depicted as a

coping strategy drawing a symbolic boundary between their professional and

the intimate personal life (e.g. Jackson et al., 2005, Sanders, 2005).

It does not take too much imagination to realize the way most sex workers

act up to these demands. It may take careful management and some acting

skills, but from the self assured reactions from the clients one can infer that

sex workers quite often succeed in creating an image of authenticity, even of

authentic pleasure (to be sure, some accounts of personal pleasure on behalf

of the sex worker do exist (Kontula, 2008), but they are doubtless quite

exceptional). Research focusing on the point of view of the sex workers

stresses this problem of management quite often (e.g. Brewis and Linstead,

2000, Sanders, 2005).

4 Conclusion and discussion

Moral economies are the inevitable norms and definitions which participants

construe about market exchanges they are involved in. This paper starts

from the assumption that interaction on internet sites plays an important role

in the construction, reproduction and internalization of the moral economies

of prostitution clients. The sheer scale of the contributions, the number of

clients participating and the interactive nature of the discussions suggest that

this assumption is valid. The deliberations by clients about legitimate

expectations, satisfactory interactions and the criteria for righteous


Page 15

indignation about exchanges that go wrong indicate that they actively

construct the social norms that are part of their moral economy.

What moral economy emerges, then, in the virtual space of the studied

website? Prostitution clients endorse an explicit market fatalist set of

evaluations, norms and expectations. Market fatalism implies that they depict

the interactions as just another fact of life. Our central argument is that this

market fatalism is also moral in nature. At the same time it distinguishes

itself from other moral economies in that it conceals morality. There is some

support for the idea that market fatalism in prostitution may teach us

something about market fatalism in general. Prostitution, indeed, provides a

rather clear case of the moral nature of market fatalism. Where other

transactions in mainstream economic relationships are well hidden under the

veil of amorality, the concealment of the normative constitution of market

fatalism is less effective in prostitution. As a general position we argue that a

general tendency of horror vacui with respect to normativity exists in

markets. Whatever the original structure, participants in systems of

exchange will construct norms and ethical evaluations regarding the

behaviour of themselves and others. Market institutions are among other

things built upon norms, making normativity a necessary condition of

exchange. This general principle implies that the moral economies of

participants structure market exchanges in institutionalized systems of

recurrent exchanges. Surprisingly, many critics of neoclassical economics

seem to agree with the standpoint of neo-liberal ideologists that markets are

void of moral constructions. However, as illustrated in our analysis of

prostitution markets, it is not the absence of normativity that is at work, but

the cloaking of moral judgments in a descriptive discourse.

The market fatalist moral economy may have the function for clients that it

provides the normalization of a discreditable activity. To the extent that this

hypothesis is consistent with the empirical findings, one can infer that a

harsher judgment on prostitution from society may strengthen market

fatalism on the part of clients. This function of market fatalism is illustrated

by the way clients deal with fixed prices. They have a strong expectation,

both for themselves and the sex workers, that both sides will refrain from

extensive bargaining. When haggling does occur, they condemn this with the

help of a moralizing discourse. This fixed price norm is consistent with what

occurs in everyday consumption practices in the Low Countries, where bazaar


Page 16

economies are almost nonexistent. This mirroring of the norms of the

mainstream economy is consistent with the idea of a normalization strategy.

In November 2009 the Amsterdam city government announced that they

would establish a panel of prostitution clients that would advise them on

matters of trafficking, forced prostitution and the like. This initiative is based

on a sound intuition: clients are privileged observers of what is going on in

prostitution. However, at the same time clients are much more than that.

Apart from spectators, they are active participants co-constituting

prostitution markets. Evidently that makes them valuable as a source of

information. But as they are also part of the exchange, the possible success

of such a measure is affected by the convictions of the clients too. It is here

that market fatalism appears on stage. The willingness of clients to invest

time and risk disclosure depends on the partial attribution of responsibility to

themselves. It is improbable that those who hold strong market fatalist

convictions consider themselves concerned with problems such as trafficking

or forced prostitution.

Finally, one cannot but focus on the relationship between commodification

and intimacy, not least because clients seem to have few problems with their

simultaneous presence in prostitution exchanges. Despite the obvious

reliance on market fatalist logic, the strange conclusion remains that many

clients expect the interaction with the prostitute to look like a personal

romantic relationship. This is illustrated by the logic of the girlfriend

experience as the ultimate satisfactory transaction. Some of the qualitative

literature has stressed this before, leading some researchers to question the

divide between personal and commercial sexual relationships (Sanders,

2008). Such an observation may be valid from the clients‟ viewpoint, but

other viewpoints collide with the possible softening of the boundary by

clients. Both the other party involved (the sex worker) and society at large

will define the situation as anything but a reciprocal personal relationship.

Moreover, the objective element of an exchange of money for sexual services

contradicts this illusion. Though clients may endorse the myth of authentic

pleasure in accordance with a market fatalist assessment of the exchange,

the other party involved does not define the transaction as reciprocal,

authentic or personal. The distinction between personal and commercial

sexuality lies precisely in the latter‟s simultaneity of authenticity impression

management and an explicit commercial exchange of sex for money.


Page 17

For the clients, the party studied in this paper, however, it is important to

point out that the quest for authentic and personal intimacy and a market

fatalist approach to prostitution go hand in hand. From the outsider‟s

perspective this may look like a striking inconsistency, but to my knowledge

not one discussion by clients explicitly acknowledges a contradiction here.

For clients a moral economy of market fatalism and authentic intimate

relationships go together in a natural way, at least insofar as they do so

within those sexual commercial exchanges that are deemed satisfactory. This

concomitance makes prostitution clients the prominent front runners of a

more commodified private life. Intimacy does not disappear in this new

world, but it becomes a commodity like many others.


Page 18

Bibliography

ADRIAENSSENS, S. & HENDRICKX, J. (2010) Sex, price and preferences. Unsafe

sexual practices in prostitution markets of the Low Countries. IN HUB (Ed.) HUB

Research Papers. Brussels, HUB - University College Brussels.

BECKER, H. S. (Ed.) (1991) Outsiders: studies in the sociology of deviance, New York,

Free Press.

BLEVINS, K. R. & HOLT, T. J. (2009) Examining the virtual subculture of johns.

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 38, 619-648.

BREWIS, J. & LINSTEAD, S. (1998) Time after time. The temporal organization of red-

collar work. Time & society, 7, 223-248.

BREWIS, J. & LINSTEAD, S. (2000) The worst part is the screwing (1): consumption

and the management of identity in sex work. Gender, Work and Organization, 7,

84-97.

CASTLE, T. & LEE, J. (2008) Ordering sex in cyberspace: a content analysis of escort

websites. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 11, 107-121.

CAUDURO, A. (2009) Review of the research studies on the demand for prostitution in

the European Union and beyond. IN DI NICOLA, A., CAUDURO, A.,

LOMBARDI, M. & RUSPINI, P. (Eds.) Prostitution and human trafficking.

Focus on clients. New York, Springer.

DELLA GIUSTA, M., DI TOMMASO, M. L. & STRØM, S. (2009) Who is watching?

The market for prostitution services. Journal of Population Economics, 501-516.

DIMAGGIO, P. (2001) Social implications of the internet. Annual Review of Sociology,

27, 307-336.

DÖRING, N. M. (2009) The internet‟s impact on sexuality: a critical review of 15 years

of research. Computers in Human Behavior.

EARLE, S. & SHARP, K. (2007) Sex in cyberspace: men who pay for sex, London,

Ashgate.

FARLEY, M. (2004) “Bad for the body, bad for the heart”: prostitution harms women

even if legalized or decriminalized. Violence against Women, 10, 1087-1125.

FARLEY, M. (2005) Prostitution harms women even if indoors. Reply to Weitzer.

Violence against Women, 11, 650-964.

GEERTZ, C. (1978) The Bazaar economy: information and search in peasant marketing.

American Economic Review, 68, 28-32.

HENRY, S. (2009) Social deviance, Cambridge, Polity.

HOLT, T. J., BLEVINS, K. R. & KUHNS, J. B. (2008) Examining the displacement

practices of johns with on-line data. Journal of Criminal Justice, 36, 522–528.

JACKSON, L. A., SOWINSKI, B., BENNETT, C. & RYAN, D. (2005) Female sex trade

workers, condoms and the public-private divide. IN PARSONS, J. T. (Ed.)

Contemporary research on sex work. Binghamton, Haworth Press.

JAMOULLE, P. (2009) Fragments d'intime. Amour, corps et solitudes aux marges

urbains, Paris, La Découverte.

KARSTEDT, S. & FARRALL, S. (2006) The moral economy of everyday crime.

Markets, consumers and citizens. British Journal of Criminology, 46, 1011-1036.


Page 19

KONTULA, A. (2008) The sex worker and her pleasure. Current Sociology, 56, 605–

620.

LANE, R. E. (1978) Autonomy, felicity, futility: the effects of the market economy on

political personality. Journal of Politics, 40, 1-24.

LANE, R. E. (1986) Market justice, political justice. American Political Science Review,

80, 383-402.

LEVER, J. & DOLNICK, D. (2010) Call girls and street prostitutes: selling sex and

intimacy. IN WEITZER, R. (Ed.) Sex for sale. Prostitution, pornography, and the

sex industry. New York, Routledge.

MANSSON, S. A. (2006) Men's demand for prostitutes. Sexologies, 15, 86-92.

MAU, S. (2003) The moral economy of welfare states. Britain and Germany compared,

London, Routledge.

MAU, S. (2006) Moral economy. IN BECKERT, J. & ZAFIROVSKI, M. (Eds.)

International encyclopedia of economic sociology. London, Routledge.

MOFFATT, P. G. & PETERS, S. A. (2004) Pricing personal services: an empirical study

of earnings in the UK prostitution industry. Scottish Journal of Political

Economy, 51, 675-690.

MONTO, M. A. (2010) Prostitutes' consumers: motives and misconceptions. IN

WEITZER, R. (Ed.) Sex for sale. Prostitution, pornography, and the sex industry.

New York, Routledge.

OUTSHOORN, J. (Ed.) (2004) The politics of prostitution. Women's movements,

democratic states and the globalisation of sex commerce, Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press.

QUINN, J. F. & FORSYTH, C. J. (2005) Describing sexual behavior in the era of the

internet: a typology for empirical research. Deviant Behavior, 26, 191-207.

REYNOLDS, H. (1986) The economics of prostitution, Springfield, Charles C. Thomas.

SANDERS, T. (2005) „It‟s just acting‟: sex workers‟ strategies for capitalizing on

sexuality. Gender, Work and Organization, 12, 319-342.

SANDERS, T. (2006) Female sex workers as health educators with men who buy sex:

utilising narratives of rationalisations. Social Science & Medicine, 62, 2434-2444.

SANDERS, T. (2008) Male sexual scripts: intimacy, sexuality and pleasure in the

purchase of commercial sex. Sociology, 42, 400-417.

SCAMBLER, G. (2007) Sex work stigma: opportunist migrants in London. Sociology,

41, 1079-1096.

SOOTHILL, K. & SANDERS, T. (2005) The geographical mobility, preferences and

pleasures of prolific punters: a demonstration study of the activities of prostitutes'

clients. Sociological Research Online, 10.

SVALLFORS, S. (1997) Worlds of welfare and attitudes to redistribution: a comparison

of eight Western countries. European Sociological Review, 13, 283-304.

SVALLFORS, S. (2006) The moral economy of class. Class and attitudes in comparative

perspective, Stanford, Stanford University Press.

THOMPSON, E. P. (1971) The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth

century. Past and Present, 50, 76-136.

THOMPSON, E. P. (1991) The moral economy reviewed. IN THOMPSON, E. P. (Ed.)

Customs in common. London, Merlin Press.


Page 20

VAN OORSCHOT, W. (2000) Who should get what, and why? On deservingness criteria

and the conditionality of solidarity among the public. Policy and Politics, 28, 33-

48.

VENKATESH, S. A. (2006) Off the books. The underground economy of the urban poor,

Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

WEBER, M. (2002) The protestant sects and the spirit of capitalism. IN WEBER, M.

(Ed.) The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Los Angeles, Blackwell.

WEITZER, R. (2004) Flawed theory and method in studies of prostitution. Violence

against Women, 11, 934-949.

WEITZER, R. (2010) Sex work: paradigms and policies. IN WEITZER, R. (Ed.) Sex for

sale. Prostitution, pornography, and the sex industry. New York, Routledge.

WOLKOWITZ, C. (2002) The social relations of body work. Work, employment &

society, 16, 497-510.

ZELIZER, V. A. (2005) The purchase of intimacy, Princeton, Princeton University Press.


Page 21

Endnotes

i Contact: [email protected] 2 One, also in Dutch (http://www.provla.com/vpf), is a site organised by a platform of sex

workers. The other one is a French spoken mirror site of hookers.nl (http://www.dialogueslib.be).

3 http://www.punternet.com/frs/fr_reject.html, consulted on 24 August 2009. 4 Tja,alles is vraag en aanbod. Het aanbod is hier in Twente en directe omgeving zeer

gering,dus kunnen uitbaters en dames een flink hoger bedrag vragen dan in de rest van

Nederland en Duitsland. Bovendien pijpen ze hier niet zonder condoom,omdat ze weten dat je

als wandelaar zijnde hiervoor toch niet bij veel concurrentes in deze regio terecht kunt. FredB., Almelo street and windows prostitution, 19/1/2009 (192045) 5 Het systeem zit dus zo in elkaar om de dames een maximaal aantal uren te laten werken. Is

dat zielig? ja en nee. Ja omdat het haast onmenselijk is om de dames zo uit te knijpen, vind ik toch. Nee omdat ze er zelf voor kiezen. Niets weerhoudt ze om terug naar Bulgarije of waar dan ook terug te keren. Ze houden er kennelijk toch juist genoeg aan over om het

aantrekkelijk te houden. thamel, Brussels street and windows prostitution, 15/3/2009 (74173) 6 Je vis pour les autres. Même mes clients, je veux leur faire plaisir, leur apporter ce que je n‟ai

pas eu. Les gens sont en manque d‟amour, d‟affection, de tendresse. 7 Volgens mij kun je voor €30 ook niet meer dan een (erg) snel pleziertje verwachten. Als een

Dame zelf €30 aanbied, vind ik het ok, maar als je gaat afdingen op de prijs vind ik toch een gebrek aan respect voor de Dames.

Sub, Antwerp street and windows prostitution, 22/2/2009 (74172). 8 Aan pingelen doe ik in principe niet want een dame hoor je in haar waarde laten. BeauBo, Nijmegen street and windows prostitution, 28/2/2009 (198944). 9 Toen ik wou dat zij op mij zat, was dit normaal 75 euro, maar toen ik wou bedanken en

buitengaan was het plotseling wel genoeg ? Je vraagt 50 of 75 euro aan een klant maar daarna pingel je niet van de prijs af!

Busboy, Ghent street and windows prostitution, 16/2/2007 (81599). 10 Afpingelen is effectief iets wat ik niet doe. Ik vraag de mogelijkheden en bijbehorende prijs en

zal dan wel beslissen of ik het aanbod evenredig de prijs vind. Bru_anom, Antwerp street and windows prostitution, 22/2/2009 (74172). 11 Het is overduidelijk dat ze je niet als nummer zoveel behandelt, maar er iets bijzonder van wil

maken. Ze geeft je niet alleen lekkere sex maar ook een goed gevoel!!! En dat kan je niet door te faken of toneel te spelen. Ik denk ook dat ze enkel werkt of wil werken zolang ze er

zelf ook "plezier" aan kan beleven,... want dat merk je!

Heaven1, Antwerp street and windows prostitution, 10/4/2006 (17444) 12 Faken daarentegen is haar niet onbekend, integendeel ze is er erg bedreven in! Een afknapper

van formaat!! ppll, Ghent massage parlor, 2/9/2007 (86636) 13 is echt niets, fake goed of niet maar van dat geluid krijg je een slappe lul. ladysslaaf, Maastricht brothel, 28/1/2008 (119630) 14 Na een tijdje werd ze zelf ook goed nat (en dat was geen smeerspul) en genoot ze lekker

mee. Faken is voor haar uit den boze. zeven, Ghent street and windows prostitution, 15/3/2005 (44437) 15 Ze heeft me eerst gepijpt wat echt zalig was, nadien ik haar dus gelikt en blijkbaar genoot ze

er verschrikkelijk veel van want ze heeft absoluut geen aanstalte gemaakt om me vlug te laten stoppen. Ze geniette (sic) met haar oogjes toe en kreunde heel lichtjes, absoluut geen

fake hoor.ik denk dat ze echt ver aan het genieten was want toen de madam riep dat het tijd

was verschoot ze zich een bult. voetballerke, Brussels street and windows prostitution, 2/12/2004 (37223) 16 Wat een hoop goedmaakte, was het niet strak op de klok kijken (...) EasyLover, Vlaardingen escort and private, 13/4/2005 (34388) 17 (...) ook maakt ze nooit haast dat ge "moet" gaan komen (...)

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.punternet.com/frs/fr_reject.html


Page 22

Steven_69, Brussels street and windows prostitution, 12/11/2005 (47868) 18 Daarom voor mij geen echte GFE: wel heel lief maar geen echte klik: beetje afstandelijk. P.Paulusma, Bergen op Zoom escort and private, 24/2/2009 (194884) 19 Na enige twijfel mocht ik haar toch zoenen en het werd een heerlijk GFE. Pitch, Alkmaar street and windows prostitution, 5/6/2009 (195529) 20 Ze is voor velen een lekker ding, maar doet liever niet aan (tongen)zoenen en fzc. Tenzij je

dat niet belangrijk vindt, denk ook niet dat ooit iemand als klant zijnde een GFE bij haar zult ervaren.

Mr Breda2006, NLESZN, 4/3/2009, Alicia (194884)

Its all supply and demand': Market fatalism and norm construction by prostitution clients in the...

Documents

Transcript of Its all supply and demand': Market fatalism and norm construction by prostitution clients in the...