In a largely forgotten but still telling article first published in 1952, C. Wright Mills vented his famous indignation on rich men who condemned street prostitutes but maintained high-priced mistresses, frequented call girls, purchased sexual services for their customers, and thus lured young women into vice; “American salesmanship and plutocratic demand,” he argued, offered irresistible lures: “In fact, wherever attractive, ambitious girls meet men with the money or power to realize their ambitions, sex will be available at a price” (Mills 1963: 329). For all his radical populism, Mills resorted to a standard hostile worlds conclusion: money corrupts intimacy.
Despite popular awareness of differentiation among types of prostitution, the relation between prostitute and patron looms as the ultimate triumph of commercialism over sentiment. Hostile worlds theorists continue to warn that the introduction of economic transactions into sexual life pushes it toward the corrupt calculating world of the market. Yet the realm of prostitution and other sex work shows us a differentiated social landscape, with its own well — marked boundaries and its own distinctive matching of relation, transactions, and media. Prostitution has of course undergone enormous mutations as American social life has altered. Changes include the rise and fall of the brothel, emergence of the call girl, and the expansion of electronic contacts. The word prostitution, furthermore, covers a wide range of activities, such as brothel prostitution, streetwalking, call girls and more. Here I concentrate on women who offer their sexual services more or less publicly in American urban areas.[24]
During the nineteenth century, brothel prostitution, running from sordid to sumptuous, played a significant part in American public life (see Cohen 1998; Gilfoyle 1992). In the later heyday of taxi dancing and treating, prostitution persisted as a quite separate professional activity. Ruth Rosen studied American prostitutes— women who regularly offered to perform sexual intercourse or closely related services for a fee—between 1900 and 1918. Her historical survey covers the range from low-paid streetwalkers to expensive kept women. She shows that prostitutes made two kinds of distinctions: between different kinds of prostitution and between themselves and other women. Higher-ranking prostitutes, for instance, distanced themselves very clearly from the unladylike “low women” (Rosen 1982: 107). Prostitutes also contrasted their professionalism with the gullibility of nonprofessionals. As Rosen reports, “They joked about the ‘charity girls’ who freely gave away sexual favors, and they derided the ‘respectable’ wives of their customers.
. .. They expressed contempt for the ‘respectable’ domestic and factory workers who worked for subsistence pay. . . and often had to submit to sexual harassment by their bosses” (102).
Similar divisions persist to our own time. Contemporary variants on prostitution in the United States include streetwalkers, call girls, escorts, and brothel prostitutes, as well as male and transgendered prostitution. Within each of these we find further differentiation and hierarchies of prestige, power, and wealth. Although in the extreme, the narrow exchange of sexual services for money does indeed occur, even within the world of prostitution we find differentiation as prostitutes distinguish their income by type of activity or by customer.[25] Streetwalkers, for instance, report differences between what Elizabeth Bernstein (1999) calls “career prostitutes” who exchange sex for cash, and the lower-ranked “crack or heroin prostitutes” who barter sex for drugs. Meanwhile, call girls’ income and prestige are not only higher than that of streetwalkers but also outdo escorts, brothel, or massage parlor workers (Weitzer 2000: 4; see also Heyl 1979; Miller 1986).
Let us look more closely at differences among streetwalkers, call girls, and brothel prostitutes. It would be easy to reduce those differences to degrees of economic complexity; streetwalkers are nothing but the equivalent of street vendors, while call girls are boutique experts, and brothel prostitutes, supermarket salesgirls. It would be equally easy to assume that lurking behind such structural differences, hides a homogeneous moral world of commercial degradation. For all prostitutes, in this view, the ever-present price for sex eliminates any possibility of intimacy. There is, to be sure, some truth in these ideas. In some cases, precisely because of the money to be made in sexual services, these are occupations at great risk of exploitation, degradation, and violence. Furthermore, there are indeed striking differences in the working conditions of different kinds of prostitutes. Nevertheless, all three variants of prostitution exhibit a complex economic organization, and in all three the providers establish a set of contingently negotiated relations, some fleeting but others quite durable, with their clients.
Streetwalkers, who reportedly constitute a minority of prostitutes (Weitzer 2000: 4), typically pick up their dates in public settings for brief sexual encounters in hotels or “car dates.” Bernstein describes three distinct sites within a ten-block radius in San Francisco: the “upper-class” women of Geary and Mason; the “middle-class” women of Leavenworth and Geary, and the “lower-class” women of O’Farrell between Taylor and Jones, each category of women distinguished by race and physical appearance. The largely white, Asian, and light-skinned black women—who stand alone or in allfemale groups—at the Geary-Mason stroll, she notes, “are young, slim and expensively dressed; their tightly fitted suits, sweater sets 1997. For the adjacent world of female dancers in strip clubs, see Frank 1998, 2002. On prostitution, see also Stinchcombe 1994.
and fur or leather coats code them for a relatively upscale market” (Bernstein 1999: 103). Their prices start at $100, while only a few blocks away, African-American streetwalkers, more shabbily dressed, get between $20 and $100. On two other sites (Hyde Street in the Tenderloin and on Capp Street in the Mission) the usually older, homeless “crack prostitutes” exchange sex for either $20 or a vial of drugs.
Bernstein’s geographic divisions represent distinct categories of streetwalkers. Within each category, the women establish their own negotiation with clients, for instance, by discriminating among preferred, acceptable, and rejected partners. Indeed, as Janet Lever and Deanne Dolnick (2000) report, street prostitutes often have regular clients, sometimes long-standing ones. Some clients offer prostitutes gifts of food, cigarettes, alcohol, and occasionally, jewelry or flowers. Street prostitutes further mark the boundary of their relationships with customers by restricting the forms of physical contact they permit, for example, by negotiating which sexual acts they will perform, withholding orgasm, and refusing such contact as mouth — to-mouth kissing (see Bernstein 1999: 105; Brewis and Linstead 2000: 214-21; Lever and Dolnick 2000: 97).
Call girls establish quite different relations with their clients. They contract individually with customers in advance for a rendezvous that typically takes place on the woman’s own premises or in the client’s home. Lever and Dolnick surveyed Los Angeles streetwalkers and call girls in the late 1990s. Compared with streetwalkers, call girls charged significantly higher prices (a median of $200 versus the $30 median for streetwalkers), spent much longer periods of time with the client, and were more likely to have an ongoing relationship with him. Call girls also engaged in a wider range of social interaction with the clients. Interactions included an occasional lunch or dinner, “sleepovers,” conversation, caresses, nonsexual massage, and even kissing. From clients they often received jewelry, perfume, flowers, and champagne. Call girls also formed particular attachments to some of their long-standing clients. One woman explained: “You cannot know someone that long without it being a real relationship” (Lever and Dolnick 2000: 97-98).
What is more, call girls develop distinctive strategies for attracting long-term clients, although those strategies sometimes backfire. One sex worker that Bernstein talked to explained why she no longer offered her favorite clients free sex or cheaper rates:
They pretend to be flattered, but they never come back! . .. There was one client I had who was so sexy, a tai-chi practitioner, and really fun to fuck. Since good sex is a rare thing, I told him I’d see him for $20 (my normal rate is $250). Another guy, he was so sexy, I told him “come for free.” Both of them freaked out and never returned. .. . They don’t believe they can have no-strings-attached sex, which is why they pay. They’d rather pay than get it for free. (Quoted in Bernstein 2001:203-4)
For a much more bureaucratized version of prostitution than either streetwalking or the call girl business, we can turn to high — priced contemporary brothels. Legal brothels bring the state of Nevada a yearly income of $40 million. Take the Moonlite Bunny — ranch, one of Nevada’s thirty-five licensed brothels (Mead 2001; see also Hausbeck and Brents 2000). At the Bunnyranch, the customer picks one of the twelve to twenty girls lined up at the parlor, or else the girls approach him at the bar, for a “tour.” This involves going to a bedroom for negotiation of a service, including length of time and price. Each girl sets her own price, ranging from $150 to many thousands for “fantasy parties.” Once a deal is made, the customers pays the office manager in cash or credit card. Bunnyranch workers receive cash and free food. Dennis Hof, the brothel’s owner, also rewards top earners with special gifts, photo frames, or CD cases. As independent contractors, the women must pay taxes and are supposed to split their earnings fifty-fifty. They must also purchase their own condoms and pay for maids’ services, use of the house’s tanning-bed, adult movies, sex toys, and their weekly medical exams.
Brothel management sets very serious restrictions on client-prostitute interactions: bedroom price negotiations are closely monitored from the office via intercom to avoid cheating, and kitchen timers are used by the office manager to regulate the agreed number of minutes couples spend together. Newly recruited workers must learn the brothel’s printed rules, while the more experienced workers train younger women in negotiating skills. Both the management and workers pride themselves on giving exceptional service. Air Force Amy, one of Bunnyranch’s top earners explained to a reporter:
A thousand bucks is a hell of a lot of money.. .. But half of what you spend here has nothing to do with sex. It goes to the house for providing a nice, safe environment. No one here is going to take your wallet; the police aren’t going to come and raid the place; your name is not going in the paper. I am not calling you in the morning saying, “I thought you loved me, I think I’m pregnant.” (Quoted in Mead 2001: 79)
To be sure, many American brothels have operated under much more dangerous and oppressive conditions (see Clement 1998b; Gilfoyle 1992; Rosen 1982), but in general brothels have organized the provision of intimacy quite differently from other forms of sex work.
Taxi dancing and prostitution are only two cases of commercial sex work. Other varieties include lap dancers, strip dancers, porn stars, telephone sex workers, and masseuses.[26] Clearly, sex work differentiates at least as much as courtship. Throughout the world of commercial sex, we find the distinction of different, well-bounded intimate relations, the matching ofrelation, transactions, and media, heavy involvement of third parties in enforcing those boundaries, and further negotiation of meanings by the parties. We see participants engaging in delicate, consequential relational work.