Sex for Sale~Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry (54 page)

10. I received press credentials for the AEE in 2008 and 2009. These credentials gave me access to all facets of the Expo, including the main exhibition hall where the fans congregate, the B2B Marketplace, and the various trade seminars.

11. Ian Denchasy, “Retail Review: Redefining the Adult Industry,”

www.avn.com, June 26, 2008.

12. “Why has AEE Gotten Smaller?” www.aetoday.com, January, 2008.

13. Adult Video News began in 1982 as a newsletter to educate video store buyers and viewers about the emerging adult video market. Since then, AVN Network has grown into a media conglomerate that includes
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REMAKING THE SEX INDUSTRY: THE ADULT EXPO AS A MICROCOSM

several publications and a popular online presence. AVN also sponsors several adult industry trade shows, including the Adult Entertainment Expo and the Adult Novelty Expo.

14. Paul Fishbein, email correspondence with the author, February 11, 2008.

15. “Buy a Fan Ticket to the 2008 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo and Video Chat with the Hottest Adult Stars,” AEE Press Release, October 31, 2007.

16. “Harmony Films Builds Brand at AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, Company Press Release, January 18, 2008.

17. The AEE is not the sexual free-for-all that people might imagine. There are rules and codes of conduct that must be followed on the convention hall floor by both attendees and participants. For example, there can be no alcohol on the conventional floor, and absolutely no sexual solicitation of any kind. A few otherwise topless women cover their nipples with tape.

18. Greg DeLong, Interview with the author, April 8, 2008.

19. Suki, OhMiBod Press Release, January, 2008.

20. As quoted in “B2B Means Business,”
The AVN Adult Entertainment Expo
Show Guide
, 2008, p. 50.

21. See Feona Atwood, “Fashion and Passion: Marketing Sex to Women,”

Sexualities
8 (2005): 392–406.

22. Candida Royalle, telephone interview with the author, November 7, 2001.

23. Tristan Taormino, telephone interview with the author, November 2, 1999.

24. Rachel Venning, email correspondence with the author, January 24, 2008.

25. Metis Black, telephone interview with the author, April 1, 2008.

26. Cathy Winks, telephone interview with the author, June 27, 2002.

27. Alicia Relles, “What Women Want,” Adult Entertainment Expo, January, 2008.

28. This description comes from Lelo.com, “About Us,” accessed November 1, 2008.

29. See Jenn Ramsey, “ANB Examines Sex Toy Materials, avn.com, January 26, 2007; Tristan Taormino, “Dangerous Dildos, Part 1,”
Village Voice
, January 30, 2007; Tristan Taormino, “Dangerous Dildos, Part 2,”
Village
Voice
, February 13, 2007.

30. As quoted in Ali Tweten, “The Smitten Kitten Talks Toxic Sex Toys,”

University Chronicle
, April 3, 2008.

31. K. Brewer, “How the Mainstream Market is Cashing in on Sex Toys—

and What it Means for Novelty Retailers,”
AVN Novelty News
(January–February 2008): 44–48; Jessica Rae Patton, “Make Love, Not Waste: Bringing Environmentalism into the Bedroom,”
E Magazine
(September–October 2008): 40–41.

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32. See Benjamin Spillman, “Whatever (Sex) Turns (Sex) You (Sex) On,”
Las
Vegas Review-Journal
, January 12, 2008.

33. See “Packaging Abuse of Women as Entertainment for Adults,”
Toronto
Star
, January 26, 2008.

34. For an interesting discussion of men’s relationship to pornography, see Chris Boulton, “Porn and Me(n): Sexual Morality, Objectification, and Religion at the Wheelock Anti-Pornography Conference,”
Communication
Review
11 (2008): 247–273.

35. See Lynn Comella, “Looking Backward: Barnard and Its Legacies,”
The
Communication Review
11 (2008): 202–211.

36. Gail Dines and Robert Jensen, “The Anti-Feminist Politics behind the Pornography that ‘Empowers’ Women,” www.opednews.com, January 24, 2008.

37. Michel Foucault,
The History of Sexuality, Volume 1
, New York: Vintage Books, 1978, p. 33.

38. Stuart Hall, “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies,” in Michael Gurevitch, et al., eds.,
Culture, Society, and the
Media Studies
, London and New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 64.

39. Lisa Henderson, “Slow Love,”
Communication Review
11 (2008): 219–224, at p. 222.

40. On October 1, 2008, I was an invited respondent to a lecture given by Robert Jensen at the College of Southern Nevada. Not once during Mr.

Jensen’s hour-long talk about the pornography industry did he mention that there are women who produce and consume pornography. For a response to his talk see Marisa Christensen, “Pornography Discussion Relies on Generalizations,”
The Rebel Yell
, October 6, 2008.

41. Lynn Comella, “Porn Show Coverage Too Cliched,” Letter to the Editor,
The Las Vegas Review-Journal
, January 17, 2008.

42. Nina Hartley, “Thus I Refute Chyng Sun: Feminists for Porn,”

Counterpunch.org, February 2, 2005.

43. Hartley, “Thus I Refute.”

44. Metis Black, “Playing the Name Game,”
Xbiz
, March 2008.

45. Black, “Playing the Name Game.”

46. Ian Denchasy, “What’s Wrong with Sexual Health?” avn.com, August 5, 2008.

47. Tony Lovett, “Extreme Industry Makeover,” avn.com, March 26, 2008.

48. As quoted in Ilana DeBare, “Good News for Good Vibrations—it’s Being Sold,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, September 28, 2007.

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H A P T E

C

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13

SEX TOURISM AND SEX WORKERS’

ASPIRATIONS

Denise Brennan

I write this chapter during the waning months of the Bush administration. In recent years, the administration’s Trafficking in Persons Office at the Department of State, has crafted policies around the assumption that prostitution always involves coercion and sex trafficking.1 Yet my ethnographic research in the Dominican Republic with adult women who voluntarily choose to engage in the commercial sex industry has become an example of a place the Bush administration claims does not exist: a sex-tourist destination involving women who choose to sell sex, and, who keep all of their earnings.

This chapter explores the development of a political economy of sex in a globalized world and how sex-tourist destinations’ economic and social relations become caught up in this sexual economy.2 By examining women’s paid sexual labor in the Dominican Republic, where women workers have a fair degree of control over their working conditions, we will see poor women take advantage of opportunities in a global economy. Sosúa’s sex workers try to use the sex trade with foreign men not just as a survival strategy but as an advancement strategy. The chapter also considers why sex tourists travel to buy sexual services that they could buy at home. Neocolonial race-based fantasies and stereotypes inform sex tourists’ (and foreign residents’) expectations and experiences in Sosúa.

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DENISE BRENNAN

P O O R W O M E N’S W O R K A N D G L O B A L IZ ATI O N

The proliferation of sex-tourist destinations throughout the developing world reflect global capital’s destabilizing effects on less industrialized countries’

economies. This economic globalization not only shapes women’s work options in the developing world but also forces them into insecure, and possibly dangerous, work. In sex-tourist destinations we find the tremendous effects of global capital: its redirection of development and local employment into the tourist industry, especially women’s work and migration choices; its creation of powerful images, fantasies, and desires that are linked to race and gender; and its generation of new transnational practices from which foreigners extract more benefit than locals. By examining hierarchies within transnational spaces, we meet individuals, particularly women, who are typically left out of conventional accounts of economic globalization—those who keep houses and hotel rooms clean, food prepared, and tourists sexually satisfied. The growth of the sex-tourist trade in the developing world and poor women of color’s participation in it not only are consequences of the restructuring of the global economy but also of women’s central role in the service sector of tourism. Women perform the majority of this kind of service-oriented labor, and since they often are paid less than men, their relatively cheap labor has assured that destinations are affordable for even the most budget-conscious travelers. Yet much of the scholarship and discussion in the media about globalization do not consider the starring role women play in opening up more and cheaper vacation possibilities for those traveling to the developing world.

In sex-tourist destinations we see up close what has been called the “global feminization of labor.” Much of the feminist scholarship on globalization attends to questions of women’s agency—not just women’s “responses” to globalization but also their attempts to make globalization work for them. The daily struggles of women in sex-tourist sites document women’s attempts to overturn the inequities of globalization. Despite the idiosyncrasies of sex-tourist business in different parts of the world, they all allow for examination of key themes in feminist scholarship. What kinds of obstacle prevent sex workers from achieving their financial goals? What does it mean for women’s power and agency in the global sex trade when they work without pimps, but, rather, directly with sex tourists? And what are the challenges to traditional gender relations and ideologies when women out-earn local men? The particular characteristics of sex-tourist destinations allow us to see whether poor women in local places can “leave the worst excesses of patriarchal oppression behind” and find new and beneficial opportunities within globalization.3

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And what of those who travel to these sites to buy sex? European men get on a plane to buy sex that they could purchase in their home towns and cities.

European consumers of paid sex have an array of choices in Europe and the prices are sometimes just as low as they are in sex-tourist destinations in the developing world. Yet sex has become a currency of transnational negotiations and migratory desires. Every sex-tourist destination has specific selling points and attracts particular kinds of consumer for particular experiences with paid sex. The contributors to Manderson and Jolly’s book on sex for sale throughout Asia, for example, present a variety of desires among sex tourists.4 But, what precisely is being transacted in sex-tourist exchanges—beyond the act of sex—

is elusive and depends on the individual and the setting.

Sex-tourist destinations do share some basic characteristics: women’s poverty leads them to migrate internally or internationally to participate in the sex industry, and inexpensive travel opportunities have permitted more (and less moneyed) tourists to circulate the globe. Part of sex tourists’

experiences is not just that the sex is cheap, but that
everything
is cheaper than at home. As sex tourists can afford nearly everything they desire, they can enjoy “feeling rich.” Even though they might find sex workers in their home country who charge cheap prices for sex, there will be other sex workers whose services they could not afford. Sex tourists in the developing world can play at being “big men.” Their money goes much farther, they have much more of it compared to most locals, and they are sexually and romantically pursued by many young, beautiful women. As one analyst noted, “The increase in male demand for paid sex is logical in the sense that privileges which were formerly restricted by class, race, and gender are now available to everybody; there is no need to be rich to exploit women in very poor countries.”5

S E X TO U R I S M I N TH E C A R I B B E A N

Sex tourism not only provides economic opportunities for those selling sexual services, but it also can have tremendous effects on the local economy in which it develops. In the case of Sosúa, the town in the Dominican Republic where I did my research between 1993 and 2003, sex tourism quickly and flamboyantly changed daily life—especially for Dominican women—in different ways than has tourism more generally. Over the span of a few years, beginning in the early 1990s, a range of individuals—Dominican, Canadian, European—flocked to the town. Poor Dominican women were drawn into Sosúa’s sex trade, establishing new internal migration patterns. They continue to migrate from throughout the Dominican Republic to work in Sosúa’s sex
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trade, where many hope to meet and to marry European or Canadian men who can sponsor their migration off the island. In this sense not just sex—but also love—are commodified in Sosúa.

Whether these encounters between foreign tourists and Dominicans emphasize the “exotic” (First World tourists seeking to observe, interact with, and take photographs of the “authentic” Other) or the “erotic” (First World tourists seeking to have sexual relations with the dark-skinned, “authentic”

Other), international tourists often “seek in the margins of the Third World a figment of their imagination.”6 But in Sosúa, Dominicans themselves have

“imaginings” about Sosúa’s opportunities, the tourists, their money, and the tourists’ lifestyles back home. Consequently, the fantasies are often bilateral.

In this economy of desire based on difference, Dominican sex workers and foreign sex tourists forge new practices and meanings of “love” that grow out of the tourist and sex-tourist trades. Sosúans and, increasingly, foreign sex tourists, understand that many relationships that begin in Sosúa are strategic performances by Dominican citizens for visas.

Poor Dominican women (and men) also migrate to Sosúa to work in its tourist restaurants, hotels, bars, and shops. Like prospectors searching for gold, Dominican migrants imagine that once in Sosúa “anything could happen,”