1
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: [email protected]
Nelli Kambouri
Centre for Gender Studies,
Dept. of Social Policy, Panteion University
136, Syggrou ave., GR-17671 Athens
Email: [email protected]
Matthieu Renault
Université Paris 13, Pléiade
99 Avenue Jean Baptiste Clément, 93430 Villetaneuse, France
Email: [email protected]
Iztok Šori
The Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies
Metelkova 6, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
Email: [email protected]
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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
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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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