Jim C: On the pain of repeating of what has already been said in this discussion: Work conditions vary enormously in the sex industry. Without denying the validity of your Puerto Rico observations, the conditions you describe are general working conditons in underdeveloped countries, rather than specific to sex industry. I suspect that the way people are treated in sweatshops are no different from the treatment of sex workers in those countries. Do you think that sweatshop workers are not desperate, look forward to do their work, and do not want to use their money to get out of the sweatshop? But what is true of the developing countries, is not necessarily true of the developed ones. While I was a grad student at Rutgers, some of my colleagues did ethnographies of sex work (not all of it involved genital or oral sex, there was also "exotic" dancing, or phone sex) -- and what clearly transpired form those enthnographies (based on the reports I heard) was that women who did it, often reported choosing that occupation over other options mainly for two reasons: higher pay and greater occupational autonomy that included the ability to set their own work schedules and the ability to accept or refuse work. OTOH, most of these informants were white women working in suburban New Jersey. I suspect that a Black or Latina sex worker working, say, in the Bronx would report a somewhat different experience. The bottom line is that sex workers tend to be viewed (including by themselves) through the lenses of the social status of their occupation rather than through the objective conditions of their work. That social status, in turn, is rooted in the patriarchal petty bourgeois morality that, as some argue, resents the fact that women have a choice of their sex partners (a choice that women in bourgeois marriages typically do not have) -- and thus stigmatizes these women to ostracize them from the mainstream society. From that standpoint, the social status of sex work is an attempt to prevent a "dangerous example" (women choosing to have sex with men rather than the other way around) from influencing "respectable" women in patriarchal bourgeois society. We should put aside the petty bourgeois notion that "sex for money" is abhorrent, and focus on work conditions in the sex industry. Much if not most of the negative effects of sex work you mention -- disease, drug addiction, abuse, emotional strain -- result not from the "sexual" nature of the industry, but from unsafe or exploitative work conditions. As far as "degradation" or "depreciation" that you mention are concerned, some of it is surely related to work conditions, but I suspect that people tend to confuse it it with role playing that is the main commodity, if not the essence, of the sex industry. Playing a "submissive" role in the sex business is not much different from playing, say, the role of a servant in a theatrical play: both involve a symbolic enactment of unequal power relations for the enjoyment of the audience. Everything else (meaning occupational safety standards) being equal, a sex worker playing a submissive role is no more degraded than an actress playing a maid or a servant in a theatre -- provided that both are remunerated adequately for their performances. To summarize: I am not arguing that there is no exploitation of women doing sex work -- there is plenty, especially of the non-white workers. But that does not mean that sex work work should be abolished (as they did in Cuba or China which -- I strongly suspect-- was an expression of patriarchal petty bourgeois morality than anything else), just as the dismal conditions in the "Satanic Mills" did not justify abolishing textile industry altogether. It means that sex work should be treated and protected in the same way as any other kind of work. cheers, wojtek sokolowski institute for policy studies johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233 POLITICS IS THE SHADOW CAST ON SOCIETY BY BIG BUSINESS. AND AS LONG AS THIS IS SO, THE ATTENUATI0N OF THE SHADOW WILL NOT CHANGE THE SUBSTANCE. - John Dewey
