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Controlling intimacy: Sexual scripts among men and women in prostitution Margaretha J?rvinen & Theresa Dyrvig Henriksen (article published in the journal Current Sociology, on-line May 2020)AbstractInspired by sexual scripting theory, this paper analyses intimacy and control in prostitution. We identify two strategies for maintaining control among male and female sex sellers. The first strategy is to restrict prostitution to relationships with as much sexual reciprocity as possible. The other is to maintain sexual/emotional distance from customers – yet often acting the opposite. The paper questions prevailing stereotypes about male sex sellers being more agentic and autonomous than female sex sellers, arguing that control in prostitution can be achieved (and lost) in different ways. We show how scripting theory – with its differentiation between the cultural, interpersonal and intrapsychic levels of scripting – may be used to understand variations and contradictions in prostitution experiences. The paper is based on 36 qualitative interviews with men and women in escort services, clinic prostitution and prostitution in private apartments in Denmark. KeywordsProstitution, gender, sexual scripts, intimacy, controlAuthorsMargaretha J?rvinen, University of Copenhagen, Department of SociologyTheresa Dyrvig Henriksen, University of Copenhagen, Department of Sociology and VIVE – The Danish Center for Social Science Research IntroductionProstitution has been studied from a variety of perspectives during the past three decades. The most important battle has been between the ‘oppression paradigm’ and the ‘empowerment paradigm’ (Weitzer, 2009). The former relates heterosexual prostitution to patriarchal structures in society, regarding sexual commerce as an expression of male dominance and female objectification (Barry, 1995; Jeffreys, 2009; MacKinnon, 1989). In contrast, the latter paradigm focuses on prostitution as the selling and buying of sexual services, similar to the exchange of other services, which may lead to equal gain for both parties in the transaction (Agustin, 2007; Delacoste and Alexander, 1987; McLeod, 1982). As pointed out by Weitzer (2005, 2009) and others, researchers within the oppression paradigm have been preoccupied with stories of suffering within commercial sex, describing vulnerability, violence and dependence among sex sellers, especially women working on the streets. In contrast, researchers within the empowerment paradigm have tended to focus on more positive examples of prostitution, in order to show that the selling of sex is not instinctually negative but may also be lucrative and self-developing. Criticising both the oppression and empowerment paradigms for being one-dimensional, Weitzer (2009) argues in favour of a third paradigm – the ‘polymorphous paradigm’, which embraces the diversity of prostitution. According to this perspective, prostitution experiences vary between cultural settings and prostitution forms, as well as in accordance with social and individual characteristics of the people involved. This variation challenges the traditional paradigms, according to which prostitution is either always damaging and exploitive or a mutually beneficial exchange of services, associated with empowerment of the sex sellers. According to the polymorphous perspective, prostitution may be oppressive under some circumstances and empowering under others; it may be oppressive and empowering at the same time, and in many cases it may be neither oppressive nor empowering. Part of the diversification of prostitution research – which is especially relevant for the present paper – is an increased focus on male sex sellers. When the oppression paradigm was developed in the 1980s, studies on male prostitution were rare. The studies that existed were framed within a ‘pathology’ perspective, casting male sex selling as a multi-problematic phenomenon consisting of runaway youths, drug users and petty criminals selling sex – who in some sense (because they sold sex to other men) were regarded as even more ‘deviant’ than their female counterparts (Van der Poel, 1992). Since the 1980s, research on male prostitution has increased considerably, showing the heterogeneity of the lives and working conditions of men who sell sex (Bimbi, 2007; Casta?eda, 2014; Ferguson, 2017; Luckenbill, 1985; Vanwesenbeeck, 2001; Walby 2012) – cf. the development in research on women selling sex, above. Within the literature on prostitution there are a few studies that actually compare male sex sellers with their female counterparts. Weinberg et al.’s (1999) systematic comparison of male and female sex sellers in San Francisco showed a strongly gendered pattern of prostitution. Both groups sold sex to men. Female sex sellers were more likely than males to have regular work schedules and to have no sources of income other than prostitution. Furthermore, women more often reported that they sold sex in order to pay for drug use, and this in combination with their lack of alternative income made Weinberg et al. (1999) conclude that women seemed more ‘trapped’ in prostitution than men. One of the few other comparative studies of male and female sex sellers is Ellison and Weitzer’s (2017) research on street prostitution in Manchester, England. Like Weinberg et al. (1999), Ellison and Weitzer found that women were more dependent on prostitution for their livelihood, more at risk of violence from customers and more likely to have drug problems. Other gender differences concerned age and sexual orientation: male sex sellers were generally younger than females, and they often identified themselves as homosexual or bisexual, which was unusual among female sex sellers (Ellison and Weitzer, 2017).In the paper ‘Women are Victims, Men Make Choices’, Dennis (2008) describes research on female vs. male prostitution as reproducing gendered stereotypes. Reviewing 166 articles on prostitution, Dennis shows that studies on male sex sellers often focus on choice, agency and pleasure, while studies on female sex sellers more often involve a discourse of coercion and desperation. Dennis regards the gendered patterns depicted in prostitution research as reflecting a bias in what researchers focus on, rather than actual differences between male and female sex sellers. Our paper contributes to the sparse tradition of research analysing male and female sex sellers in the same study. While research on female sex selling has traditionally been centered on street prostitution, and research on male sex selling on other forms of prostitution, our data give us the possibility to compare men and women who are all involved in indoor prostitution (see methods section below). We agree with Dennis’ (2006) claim that studies, and especially older studies, on female sex selling have been more focused on dominance and ‘objectification’ than studies of male sex selling. By using a specific analytical perspective – sexual scripting theory (Simon & Gagnon 1986) – on prostitution experiences among both men and women, we hope to contribute to a more nuanced picture of gender differences – and similarities – in prostitution. ‘Sexual scripts’ was a term coined by Simon & Gagnon (1986; Gagnon & Simon 1973) to describe the operating syntax according to which people shape and understand their sexualities. According to Simon & Gagnon sexual scripts operate at three levels: the cultural, interpersonal and the intrapsychic level. ‘Cultural repertoires’ specify appropriate objects of desire, legitimate contexts for sexual practice, and how participants should feel and act in different relationships. ‘Interpersonal scripts’ are more situation-specific and ad-hoc, involving the actor as partial scriptwriter or transformer of cultural scenarios into patterns of context-specific interaction. This transformation is also ‘the mechanism through which appropriate identities are made congruent with desired expectations’ (Simon & Gagnon 1986: 99). Finally, Simon and Gagnon describe the employment of ‘intrapsychic scripts’ as a process relating the actor’s many-layered individual needs and wishes to the levels of cultural and interpersonal repertoires. Our paper analyses the interviewees’ accounts as reflecting and elaborating on prevailing sexual scripts on prostitution. We identify two dimensions of the current cultural repertoires of prostitution in Western societies – one focusing on the blurring of boundaries between commercial and non-commercial sex, the other concerning self-control vs. loss-of control in prostitution. We analyse the interpersonal and individual scripts of our interviewees as structured in accordance with these two dimensions, also investigating the connections between them. To a very high degree, control in prostitution is a question of how to manage intimacy: either by insisting on sexual reciprocity or by keeping a professional distance to customers, avoiding sexual and/or emotional involvement in them. Before turning to the analysis of the interviews with men and women in prostitution, we introduce the theoretical frame of the paper, after which we describe the context and methods of our study. Cultural scripts of prostitution Bauman (1998) writes about the separation of sex and eroticism from love (and of eroticism from sex) in postmodern/late modern societies. Paraphrasing Giddens, he talks about ‘pure sexual encounters’ and of erotic consumerism that favours novelty and variety, lightness and impulsivity. According to Bauman ‘the freedom to seek sexual delights for their own sake has risen to the level of cultural norm’ (Bauman, 1998: 21). Eroticism represents sexual forms let loose from commitments but also sexual forms that are elusive and volatile. Late modern men and women are sensation seekers, according to Bauman, constantly on the move and resistant to relational closures, enjoying a freedom of choice and experimentation that people of earlier generations have not had. Reviewing the literature on sexualised cultures Attwood (2006) describes a development where the erotic has become increasingly commodified and where traditional rules and regulations ‘designed to keep the obscene at bay’ have gradually broken down (2006: 78). Attwood identifies a tendency to understand the erotic in terms of individual choice and self-fulfillment, and a development towards increasingly unclear boundaries between the private and the public, and between the representational and the actually experienced in sexual discourse (cf. Plummer, 1995). Like scholars writing about sexuality in general, prostitution researchers have noted that the public-private boundaries between intimacy and commerce are becoming less distinct (Bernstein, 2001; Carbonero and Garrido, 2018; Kontula, 2008; Sanders, 2008). Bernstein (2007) depicts how in late modern societies, commercial sex is dispersed everywhere, covering a broad and complex range of services, all of which do not follow a simple cash-nexus. She refers to the rise of a ‘recreational model’ of sexual behaviour, ‘a reconfiguration of erotic life in which the pursuit of sexual intimacy is not hindered but facilitated by its location in the marketplace’ (Bernstein, 2001: 397). Bernstein describes an ideal form of commercial sexual relations, which combines reciprocity and mutual desire with freedom from conventions and from the burdens of long-term commitments. However, she also stresses that this is a representational image of prostitution that is bought by customers and advertised by sellers, an image that should be related to the fact that many sex sellers – according to the research literature, including Bernstein’s own study – do not receive sexual pleasure from their relationships with customers (Bernstein, 2001: 403; Sanders, 2005). Finally, Brents and Sanders (2010) identify a general mainstreaming of commercial sex linked to wider patterns of change in the night-time economy, tourism and the hedonistic search for relaxation and pleasure. They note that strong ideals of individual freedom and choice now dominate the ethics of commercial sex: ‘Consumption promotes a morality where personal choice is elevated to a moral right’ (Brent and Sanders 2010: 46). Sanders (2008) also describes how buyers of sexual services prefer sex sellers who have entered prostitution voluntarily, who have control over their own life and are not exploited by pimps, landlords or other agents in prostitution. In general – and in accordance with the descriptions of blurred boundaries between commercial and non-commercial sex above – buyers do not want sellers to be distanced professionals, and they prefer erotic encounters that are sexually rewarding for both parties. These ideals are shared by many sex sellers who, according to Sanders (2005, 2008), also use them as part of their business strategy. The freer and more sexually involved in the transactions they appear to be, the more attractive they know they are to the customers. Core to Simon & Gagnon’s (1986) theory on sexual scripts is that sexual behavior cannot be understood independently of social norms and standards that provide prescriptions for identities and patterns of interaction. Norms and standards, however, do not determine sexual behaviour. They are elaborated by individual actors through an interplay between cultural and interactional scenarios and the participants’ ‘intrapsychic’ scripts in a process that links individual experiences to social meaning (Simon & Gagnon 1986: 100). Our analysis will show how sex sellers in Denmark negotiate their experiences in prostitution by interpreting and improvising on general cultural scenarios within specific interactional contexts and in accordance with individual motivational structures. Context and methodIn Denmark, the buying and selling of sexual services is legal, while procuring them or inducing others into prostitution, as well as keeping brothels and buying sex from people under the age of 18 is prohibited. Like other forms of income, money earned from prostitution is subject to taxation, and people selling sex are obliged by law to register as taxpayers. However, prostitution is not accepted as a profession and as a result, sex sellers cannot be members of labour unions and unemployment insurance funds (Danish: A-kasser) and hence are not entitled to unemployment benefits, holiday pay etc. – unless they hold other jobs alongside prostitution (for descriptions of the complex legal status of sex sellers in Denmark, see Bj?nness, 2012; Spanger 2011; 2013). The most important forms of prostitution in Denmark are sex selling from clinics, street prostitution, escort prostitution (sex sellers visiting customers in their homes or at hotels), prostitution in private and prostitution at bars/clubs. According to all available information, MSM prostitution (men who have sex with men) is more concentrated in escort services and private prostitution (and to a smaller extent bars/clubs) while WSM prostitution (women who have sex with men) is spread over all forms of sex selling, with clinics, escort and streets being most important (Kofod et al. 2011; Bjerre 2011). The present paper is based on 36 interviews with Danish men and women who have experience with clinic, escort and private prostitution. We leave out street prostitution because of the specific problems associated with this form of sex selling – such as a large proportion of drug users engaging in it and a higher exposure to violence (e.g. Comack and Seshia, 2010; Sanders, 2004; Kofod et al. 2011) – which make comparison across prostitution forms difficult. The paper is an offshoot from a larger research project which included a survey among sex sellers, qualitative interviews with sex sellers, observations at prostitution venues (streets, bars/clubs) as well as an analysis of police records on prostitution (for a thorough description of the design of this study, see Kofoed et al. 2011). The present paper is based on qualitative interviews alone. While the original mixed-methods project provided us with general background information about prostitution in Denmark and on the living conditions and motives for sex selling in a larger group of respondents, this paper offers a focused analysis of the accounts of 18 men and 18 women describing their experiences with indoor prostitution. Contact with the interviewees was established in different ways: by texting or calling numbers found on the internet and in newspaper and magazine ads; by using internet chatrooms known for sex selling; by posting ads in chatrooms and leaving flyers with NGOs, and finally (and most importantly for the female interviewees) by contacting clinics. Half of the interviews with women were conducted at clinics, five took place at another location chosen by the interviewee and four were telephone interviews. Among male participants, seven chose to be interviewed at the researchers’ work-place or a café while the rest preferred telephone interviews. The project followed prescribed ethical standards for social science qualitative research. Informed consent was obtained from all interviewees. Participants were thoroughly introduced to the project both during the first contact and before starting the interview, and they were told that they could withdraw at any time and refuse to answer questions they did not like. Also, participants were guaranteed full anonymity.The interviews were structured according to seven themes: prostitution debut, general living conditions, sex working conditions, social network, experiences with violence or other offences, contacts with social authorities and finally, potential thoughts about exit from prostitution. The interviews lasted from 30 to 120 minutes with an average length of 65 minutes. All 36 interviews were audio-recorded and have been fully transcribed. When transcribing the interviews, all names of people, locations and other identifiable markers were changed. 30 participants (16 men and 14 women) were active in prostitution at the time of the interview, while two men and four women had stopped. The median age was 35, with the youngest interviewee being 21 and the oldest 48 years old. Most of the men (but none of the women) identified themselves as homosexual or bisexual. Hence, directly asked, 11 men said they were homosexual, four said they were bisexual and three that they were heterosexual. All of the women and most of the men sold sex to male customers, although a few bi- or heterosexual men said they had experiences with selling sex to women. Eleven participants (six men and five women) were married or in a cohabiting relationship, and eleven women and one of the men had children living with them. As regards income, nine male and nine female interviewees received social benefits: cash benefits, early retirement benefits, sickness benefits or state education grants for students. The rest of the men and three of the women reported that they had other employment (typically part-time). The remaining six female interviewees had no other source of income than prostitution. Intimacy and control In the following, we analyse two themes in the interviews (cf. the section about cultural scripts on prostitution above): first, the difference between commercial and non-commercial sexual relations, as described by the participants, and second, participants’ experiences with maintaining control in prostitution. We follow the interviewees’ own conceptions of ‘control’, defining this as a) being able to choose customers and which services to provide, and b) not feeling dependent on the money from prostitution (dependence on prostitution is not necessarily the same as having no other income).As a first step in the analysis, and in order to get an overview over individual variations, we classified the participants in accordance with the dimensions ‘sexual reciprocity vs. sexual distance’ in prostitution and ‘control vs. loss-of-control’ (see Figure 1 in Appendix). This classification indicated that there were more men than women describing blurred boundaries between commercial and non-commercial sexual relations, but also that there was considerable variation in the group of males as well as in the group of females. As regards accounts about control, there were no systematic differences between men and women, or between sex sellers in different forms of prostitution (escort, clinics, private). Hence, most interviewees described themselves as being ‘in control’ and many explicitly differentiated themselves from sex sellers (typically female street walkers and/or foreigners) who are ‘exploited by others’, ‘transgress their own limits’, ‘dump prices’, and/or ‘cannot stop although they would like to’ (expressions in interviews). Blurred boundariesThe interviewees’ descriptions of intimate encounters in prostitution varied from accounts where the boundaries between commercial and non-commercial sexual relations were almost non-existent (cf. Bernstein 2001; Sanders 2005, 2008) to accounts drawing a clear line between the two. We start with an example of interviewees who said they generally receive sexual pleasure from prostitution. Mark, 24 years old, who worked as an escort and sometimes also at bars/clubs, said the following about his meetings with customers: ‘You have to be attracted to these men, at least a bit. I am not a person who can have sex with somebody who doesn’t turn me on; in that case I have to say no.’ This applied to sexual services (hand, oral, anal, SM) where he was the ‘active’ partner as well as services where he was ‘passive’. Mark explained that he loved to go out ‘trying out a lot of guys, receiving money from some and not from others […] payment or not, it’s not always important’: ‘If he is real nice and sexy and I am not completely out of money, then I am like all others, right, just wanting sex.’ He also described encounters where he stayed overnight although this was not planned: ‘If I like him I can easily spend the night. As I told you I am a very sexual person, so getting the chance to have sex several times during the night is just great.’ Furthermore, Mark said that he did not have commercial sexual relationships during periods when he had a steady boyfriend because that would be ‘infidelity’. Yet, for Mark and other interviewees describing sexual reciprocity in prostitution, paid relations were not the same as private, romantic relationships. Frederik (35), another escort, said the following about having sex with his partner, whom he had been with for seven years, and having sex – commercial or non-commercial – with others: With my boyfriend, it’s more intimate and nice and cosy. When I have sex for money, it’s straightforward and raw, with few feelings attached, also with customers I know well. Private sex with people other than my boyfriend is the same as paid sex, more or less. I put very little into it, it’s just sex. Hence, in Frederik’s account, prostitution is ‘more or less’ equated to non-paid causal relationships but differentiated from romantic, long-term liaisons (cf. Bauman, 2003 on ‘pure sexual encounters’). Yet in another part of the interview, Frederik depicted a difference between commercial and non-commercial casual relationships, specifying that few of his prostitution encounters were sexually rewarding, and that he primarily sold sex ‘for the sake of money’: ‘You do the things you need to do, put a filter up, sort of […] and get it over and done with, and then he [the customer] just disappears into the hazy mass of people you’ve been with, right?’ Although female sex sellers in general described less sexual reciprocity than did male sex sellers, many of them said they received sexual pleasure from prostitution. One of them was Karina (42) who ‘often but not always’ enjoyed the sexual encounters with her customers. Karina had been married for 20 years and had sold sex for the last seven years, in periods as an escort with her husband driving her from place to place. At the time of the interview she was working at a clinic three days a week, servicing 7-8 customers a day. When describing the difference between having sex with customers and with her husband, she referred to the lack of emotional involvement in commercial sexual encounters: ‘Here we are performers. This is raw sex, love is at home.’ Yet Karina also sold ‘girlfriend experiences’, simulating personal engagement in her customers. In some cases, customers took these emotions for real and reciprocated by wanting to build a long-term relationship with her; she found these situations ‘a nuisance’. Bernstein (2007) analyses ‘girlfriend experiences’ as an emerging post-industrial paradigm of sexual commerce, in which emotions previously limited to the private sphere are temporarily brought into commercial relations. She uses the term ‘bounded authenticity’ to underline that the physical/emotional connection of the exchange is restricted and temporary. Carbonero and Garrido (2018) on the other hand describe bounded authenticity in escort services as ‘intentional, planned and marketed’ and as different from the ‘private intimacy’ characterising sex sellers’ non-commercial affectionate relationships (p. 12). In our study as well, interviewees used the term ‘girlfriend experiences’ about relationships that may be (but are not always) sexually reciprocal, but do not include emotional attachment. Hence, when Karina’s customers mistook the intimacy of the encounters for affectionate involvement, they overstepped her boundary between private and commercial sexual relationships. For Karina, the display of emotions was part of a business strategy used to optimise customers’ comfort, rather than an invitation to a romantic liaison. A similar strategy was used by Kirsten (46), who explicitly said that she sold ‘illusions’ to customers. Unlike Karina, sexual reciprocity was not a part of Kirsten’s motivation for selling sex, and when asked whether or not she gets sexual pleasure or any other type of enjoyment from being with customers, she said: ‘What I enjoy is to get paid, and also, when customers visit me, they choose my personality and that’s cool and a recognition of me as a person […] Who doesn’t like to be recognised by others?’. According to Kirsten, sex in every encounter – commercial or non-commercial – is an exchange of benefits between the persons involved, and selling sex for money is simply one way to organise this barter: ‘I get paid for having sex, because I provide a good service and that’s what I enjoy, and they like me for enjoying it. But I also enjoy standing with the money in my hand seeing [the customers] disappear out the door afterwards.’These examples from our interviews with men and women in prostitution show the complexity of sexual scripting. Prostitution scripts – here scripts concerning intimacy in commercial sex – are not just cultural blueprints for action, they are enacted in concrete encounters and vary in accordance with customer characteristics and behaviours and with the sex seller’s motivations and personal life situation. The selling of ‘boyfriend’/’girlfriend’ experiences is, in the perspective of our interviewees, not the same as being emotionally involved with customers, not even for the short duration of a sexual encounter (as indicated by Bernstein’s concept ‘bounded authenticity’). In some cases – and more often among men than among women – the boyfriend/girlfriend scripts of the sex sellers involve mutual sexual pleasure. In other cases, there seems to be a discrepancy between the participants’ interpersonal enactment of the boyfriend/girlfriend role and their personal experiences, as described in the interviews. Yet, a general pattern in the interviews is that the distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ sexual relations, and between ‘real’ and ‘feigned’ sexual intimacy is not as clear-cut as it is often thought to be in classical writings on prostitution (cf. Walby 2012 for a critical discussion of this distinction). The dialectic between cultural, interpersonal and intrapsychic scripts in prostitution means that these boundaries are instable and constantly negotiated anew – in sex sellers’ meetings with customers as well as in the interview situation where many participants alternated between describing their sexual involvement in prostitution as ‘genuine’ and as a ‘business strategy’. Control Control vs. loss-of-control was another prominent theme in the interviewees’ scripting of prostitution. As discussed in the first part of the paper, there are influential cultural repertoires at play defining some forms of commercial sex as more acceptable than others. Today’s ethics of commercial sex dictate that prostitution should be associated with freedom and choice and not with subordination of sellers to buyers or with exploitation (economically or otherwise) by third parties (cf. Brents & Sanders 2010). These cultural scenarios also form a background for our interviewees’ accounts. Hence, principles of freedom and choice in prostitution were stressed by most participants, typically exemplified by the ability to leave prostitution when you like, and with the right to choose which customers to serve and which services to provide. Interviewees often used these ideals to differentiate themselves from less successful participants in commercial sex: females if you are a male sex seller; people working at clinics if you are an escort, and vice versa, escorts if you work at a clinic, while most interviewees saw themselves as being more in control than street walkers (see Sanders et al. 2009; Vanwesenbeeck 2005 for descriptions of hierarchies among sex sellers). Yet there was not always a match between the ideals of control and the more detailed accounts on individual experiences provided in the interviews. Jon (22) was one of the interviewees describing a high degree of control in commercial sex: ‘It’s me who chooses who I want to have sex with, it’s me fixing the prices and deciding what services to offer […]. My financial situation is ok, I would never be able to do this just because I needed the money.’ Some of Jon’s friends had told him that prostitution was the same as ‘selling one’s soul’, an accusation that he mentioned several times during the interview. This was exactly what he avoided, he explained, by setting clear rules for what he was willing to do and with whom. For one thing, he did not want paid sex to be reminiscent of love relations: ‘Kissing and licking on the neck, for instance, are intimate and more romantic things… And that would be like selling yourself or selling your soul, because then you get money for love, right’. Furthermore, he was not interested in ‘old customers’ (50+), nor did he accept being the submissive partner in sadomasochistic sex. Yet Jon also said (in another part of the interview) that he was ‘flexible’ and ‘good at abstracting from these things’, ‘especially if they [customers] pay a little extra’; ’then we’ll do it, all the same.’ Male interviewees sometimes dissociated themselves from female sex sellers – especially street walkers but also women working at clinics – feeling more independent than them. For instance, Simon (31) compared his own sex selling with working at clinics: ‘I can pick and choose as I like. I can say yes and no and buzz off, whenever I feel like it. You can’t do that at a clinic, or maybe you can, but anyway…’ However, Simon also said that he had turned down very few customers during his 15 years in prostitution and that he had started to offer more and more services for less money: ‘It’s because at the moment I have no job, and I have no money so I accept more things, let’s say anal for 500 kroner (around 70 euro), which used to be the price for a hand job [laughs].’Female interviewees also stressed the importance of freedom and choice. And also among women we found a tendency to associate the kind of prostitution the interviewee was involved in with more control than other kinds of prostitution. The interview with Barbara (40), an experienced clinic and escort worker, is an example of this. Barbara sold sex on an ‘ad-hoc’ basis, primarily in the form of ‘hard’ sex, where she dominated her customers physically and/or verbally. Being in control was part of the reason why she preferred dominance to other forms of services, because as she put it: ‘[dominance] is a game […] and part of that game is that I’m the strong one’. She said that in the last instance, ‘control lies with the customer, because it’s his game we are playing’, but she nevertheless mentioned several times during the interview that ‘hard’ sexual services leave the seller with greater control: ‘It’s easier for the customers to talk the other girls into specific services, sex without a condom for instance. But you don’t negotiate with a dominatrix. I never even discuss these things with them, I just decide.’ In saying this she also dissociated herself from other women selling sex, a distinction that she underlined by stating that dominance requires another level of skills than ‘ordinary’ prostitution: ‘You can’t walk in from the street and become a dominatrix. But you can walk into a clinic, lie down on your back and be a sweet girl. Dominance requires brains.’ Barbara also showed certain forbearance towards her customers:They are nice but a bit na?ve […] One of my customers was convinced that all the professional girls he had been with enjoyed it. He could hear them coming, he said [laughs]. ‘Well sweet little you [I thought], you pay 2,200 kroner [300 Euro] an hour. We would be real bad hookers if we didn’t send you walking out the door feeling like a superman’. Also Merete (30) described a high degree of control when selling sex. Unlike some of the male interviewees quoted above who felt that selling sex from clinics made it hard to uphold control, Merete preferred this. She regarded the clinic where she worked as a place where she was ‘in charge’ and ‘assisted by the landlady, the telephone operator and others, I am the star in the middle’. She also appreciated the specific ambience at the clinic: ‘There are no taboos here. You just take off your clothes, throw yourself in the sofa, blurt out your thoughts, and laugh at it all. In the ordinary world you have to live up to things, be a nice girl.’ Although Merete put a lot of emphasis on choice and autonomy, she also described a development towards less control: ‘My limits were gradually exceeded. At the start it was ordinary sex and blowjobs and no kissing. But then came SM and anal […] and kissing. It wasn’t that I wanted to kiss, it was just in order to get customers.’ As already mentioned, there were two different strategies for maintaining control among our interviewees. The first strategy – more often described by men – was to restrict prostitution to encounters of sexual enjoyment for both parties. The second strategy – more often represented by women and, in general, by the most active sex sellers in our study – was to uphold control through sexual and emotional distance from customers. As we have also shown, however, the interviewees’ actual performance of the scripts related to control maintenance varied across time and with types of customer encounters and depending on the changing needs and motivations of the sex sellers. Participants adhering to the principle of mutual enjoyment often gave examples of customer meetings contradicting this ideal, just like participants following the principle of distance often talked about prostitution contacts (especially with regular customers) where they were deeply involved personally. This again shows that prostitution scripting is a multilayered phenomenon where cultural scenarios (here, the ethics of freedom and choice) are transformed and improvised by individual interviewees, managing their customer relations in complex and varying ways. Finally, there were interviewees describing feelings of control-loss. Some of them had stopped selling sex at the time of the interview, others considered stopping. One of them was Jakob (24) who lived at a shelter for homeless people. The main problem for Jakob was that he could no longer choose his customers: ‘It’s sheer desperation, I take everybody, more or less […] 70-year-old geriatrics, although I definitely do not want to be with them. I feel bad about it several days afterwards. It’s like an assault.’ Jakob’s life was hard, he had lived at institutions for most of his life, he suffered from serious mental and physical health problems and he was dependent on social welfare benefits that did not cover his expenses – which is why he said he had to continue selling sex, although he wanted to stop. Lise (28) was another interviewee describing a very low degree of control in prostitution. Lise was sexually abused as a child and when entering adulthood she found it ‘natural’ to sell sex despite of ‘a wish not to do it’. She worked as an escort for several years, feeling exploited by customers as well as by her pimp and his friends who ‘forced [her] to continue in prostitution’. Unlike most other interviewees she did not mention money as a motive for selling sex but said that her earnings from prostitution, and the very fact that somebody wanted to pay for having sex with her, gave her a feeling of being ‘worth something’. At the time of the interview, Lise had left prostitution and started in therapy. Discussion We started this paper by introducing two dominant paradigms in prostitution research: the oppression paradigm associating sex selling with subordination and vulnerability, and the empowerment paradigm stressing the positive aspects of prostitution. We also mentioned that these paradigms have been criticised by scholars representing a diversity paradigm (or a ‘polymorphous’ paradigm, see Weitzer, 2009). Inspired by Dennis (2008), however, one may ask if the diversity paradigm has led to new forms of stereotyping, equating some forms of prostitution (typically represented by female sex sellers) with oppression, and others (represented by male sex sellers) with autonomy and choice, without regard for the differences among men and among women. It may seem then, that the two traditional paradigms have not been replaced by a new approach, as is often claimed within the diversity paradigm, but rather, that they have simply been combined and incorporated into an overarching and unnecessarily dualist paradigm. Our analysis challenged such gendered dichotomies by showing that control in prostitution may be upheld in different ways. We identified two primary ways of handling intimacy – and staying in control – among sex sellers. In the first strategy, prostitution was restricted to encounters with as much sexual pleasure as possible. For some participants, males and females, in the group describing sexual reciprocity, the distinction between commercial and non-commercial relations was unclear. They sold ‘girlfriend/boyfriend’ experiences (in their own terminology), encounters that involved sexual engagement on their part but (typically) not emotional involvement. These relations were reminiscent of the ‘pure sexual encounters’ described by e.g. Bauman (1998) and Giddens (1992), and they also match Bernstein’s (2001: 397) notion of a new ‘recreational model’ of sexual behavior. In the second strategy used by the interviewees, control was maintained by keeping a professional distance to customers. Some participants adopting this strategy had started with more reciprocal sexual relationships while gradually moving towards distanced encounters as the number of customers grew and their repertoire of services expanded. According to Bauman (1998: 26), pure relationships, or relationships ‘undaunted and undiverted from other pursuits’ may be liberating but also difficult to retain in the long run. Sexual encounters do not exist in a vacuum, they are dependent on a range of extra-relational factors: participants’ other commitments, their life situation in general, other people’s opinions about these relationships, etc. In Bauman’s (2003: 51) words: ‘No union of bodies, however hard one may try, can escape social framing and cut out all connections with other facets of social existence’. Hence, the degree of reciprocity in customer encounters was associated with aspects of the interviewees’ life situation, such as civil status (having a steady partner was related to less reciprocity in prostitution) and employment situation (full-time sex sellers described less reciprocity). In our analysis we did not treat distance as a sign of alienation on part of the sex sellers, as it has often been interpreted within the oppression paradigm (Barry, 1995; MacKinnon, 1989) focusing on the sexual and emotional damages caused by prostitution. Rather, we analysed distance as a professional strategy, chosen by sex sellers in order to stay in control, a clear and often well considered alternative to the reciprocity strategy. Research on sexual scripts has been criticized for putting too much emphasis on social norms and standards regulating sexual behaviour (Plummer 1982) and for clouding differences between individuals and groups. However, Simon and Gagnon (1986, 2003) make clear that scripting theory is a multidimensional theory, preoccupied with the individual and interpersonal levels of sexual scripting as much as with cultural repertoires, and focusing on change and variation as much as stability and conformity. In our view, this is the strength of the theory, and of the tradition of research inspired by the theory (Escoffier 2006, Dworkin & O’Sullivan 2006; Kimmel 2006; Sakaluk et al. 2014; Wiederman 2015; Bertone & Camoletto 2018; Jones & Hannem, 2018). Contributing to this tradition we have shown how scripting theory can be used to open up for the complexities of prostitution accounts, and to address similarities, differences and contradictions (often in one and the same interview) between levels of scripting. We analysed how interviewees used cultural scenarios as clues in their accounts on prostitution, yet translating and transforming them to accord with their personal experiences and the concrete orchestration of their meetings with customers. In this sense, we tried to show that sexual scripting is an intertwining of cultural ideals, interactional achievements and individual motivations. Another critique of scripting theory is that it puts too little emphasis on inequality and socioeconomic factors influencing people’s lives (see e.g. Brickell 2006). This critique is legitimate and may be directed at our analysis as well. Due to our focus on sexual scripting of prostitution – at cultural, interpersonal and individual level – we have only cursorily mentioned aspects related to the life circumstances of the interviewees. It should be stressed, though, that the dimensions of commercial sex we analysed, and especially control vs. loss-of-control, were related to the social and economic life conditions of the interviewees. The general pattern in our interviews was (although there were exceptions) that severe problems in prostitution came together with a chaotic life situation in general. Hence, loss-of-control in commercial sex was often related to a more general process of social marginalization, including factors such as economic distress, housing problems, and poor and abusive family backgrounds. Although these factors are of crucial importance for participants’ possibilities to manage in prostitution, they cannot easily be incorporated into an analysis inspired by scripting theory. An additional question that deserves consideration is how prostitution scripts may be influenced by specific national contexts, e.g. by country-specific legislations on prostitution. As mentioned, the selling and buying of sexual services is legal in Denmark. There have been intensive national debates on prostitution legislation – following the criminalisation of sex buying in Sweden (in 1999) and Norway (in 2009) and EU discussions of these issues – but the current official position in Denmark is that prostitution should be regarded a ‘social problem’ more than a ‘legal problem’. Hence, prostitution is described as associated with ‘physical, mental and social risks’ and as a phenomenon that should be handled by the social authorities, for instance through the establishment of ‘exit programmes’ for people who want to leave prostitution (The National Board of Social Services 2013). By and large, this ‘social problems’ approach to prostitution is targeted at women selling sex – and not at men selling sex or men (or women) buying sex. It is typically women who are described as ‘suffering’ from prostitution, and it is women who are regarded as vulnerable, damaged (by prostitution or their life circumstances in general) and victimised. These gendered aspects of the Danish approach to prostitution are also reflected in our interviews. When examining all 36 interviews, we can see that women were more focused on the stigma of being a ‘victim’ than men were. Several women mentioned (spontaneously) that they were not ‘exploited’ by others (customers, pimps, brothel keepers), that they did not have social or mental health problems, and that they did not come from dysfunctional homes. Apparently, these interviewees defended themselves against prevailing conceptions of female sex sellers being people ‘in trouble’ and hence, potential candidates for social interventions. In contrast, few men in our study expressed such concerns. Male interviewees seemed to feel that the ‘social problems’ approach to sex selling had nothing to do with them and they showed little interest in prostitution policies or social interventions in sex selling – although a few said that (female) street walkers may ‘need help’. As mentioned in the methods section, the majority of male interviewees (but none of the females) identified themselves as homo- or bisexual, and most of the men sold sex to other men. This complicates the interpretation of our findings: the differences we found between female and male sex sellers – especially those related to prostitution stigma – may be attributable not only to gender but also to differences between MSM (men who have sex with men) and WSM (women who have sex with men) prostitution. It is entirely possible, and some accounts in our interviews indicate this, that stigmatisation of sex selling is less pronounced in some MSM environments than in conventional heterosexual environments. In theoretical terms, we cannot expect sexual scripts, at cultural, interpersonal and intrapsychic level, to be the same for same-gender and different-gender commercial relationships. However, a systematic analysis of this was not possible in our study: there were no accounts on woman-to-woman sex selling in our interviews and relatively few references to man-to-woman sex selling. The question of differences between MSM and WSM prostitution – in terms of stigma, condemnation and marginalization – would be a fascinating theme for further research. Conclusion This paper used sexual scripting theory to analyse male and female sex sellers’ accounts on prostitution, focusing on gender variations as well as similarities. We chose this approach because it gave us the possibility to differentiate between levels of scripting (cultural, interpersonal, intrapsychic) in our interviewees? accounts. The theory represents an alternative to dualist gender paradigms on prostitution that describe sex selling as either representing subordination and suffering or being associated with empowerment and control. We showed how interviewees adhere to current cultural ideals of mutual enjoyment and freedom in commercial sexual relations, yet transforming and adapting these ideals in accordance with their personal experiences and variations in customer relations. 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Her research areas are stigmatized/marginalized groups (e.g. people with alcohol problems, drug users, sex sellers), youth studies, symbolic interactionism, qualitative methods and client and welfare state encounters.Theresa Dyrvig Henriksen is PhD fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and at VIVE – The Danish Center for Social Science Research. Her research primarily concerns vulnerable adults and marginalized groups e.g. sex sellers and homeless people. Her current research focuses on prostitution. ................
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