Inara-inspiraatiossani olen innostunut lukemaan taas seksityöstä.
C Harcourt & B Donovan: The many faces of sex work. Tiivis koonti erilaisista suoran ja epäsuoran seksityön tyypeistä (25 kpl) ja niiden riskeistä.
Halusin erityisesti tietää, miten kalliimmat seksityön tekijät suhtautuvat itseensä ja muihin alan ihmisiin. Löysin Ann M. Lucasin artikkelin “The work of sex work: elite prostitutes’ vocational orientations and experiences”. Tässä joitakin pointteja:
- kokemus siitä, että tavallisissa töissä on joutunut sietämään miehiltä enemmän seksuaalista ahdistelua; “Moreover, sex work may enable its practitioners to resist sexual harassment, in that it can make clear when a woman is appropriately treated as a sexual being, and when her sexuality should be irrelevant to any interaction. “
- “Having engaged in many kinds of work, these women expressed a clear preference for prostitution. Despite its risks or deficiencies, prostitution enabled them to avoid some of the disadvantages of more traditional work, particularly those associated with regimented or hostile workplaces, or poorly paid service work that involves demanding, unsatisfied customers.”
- “Over and over again, my interviewees emphasized wages and freedom as the primary attractions of prostitution.”
- “Indeed, asked what a bad work day is like, nearly all of my informants said a typical bad day was a day when no one called, when those who called seemed like bad risks, or when some other circumstance prevented them from working.”
- “Among my subjects I found three basic attitudes toward work and money: One group worked as little as possible, just enough to support themselves at whatever standard of living they preferred (from minimal and ascetic to fairly lavish); another group worked more diligently, usually due to specific financial and personal commitments; and the third group were particularly savvy businesswomen who approached the work as a profession or trade and thought strategically about ways to increase business, to invest, and to insure their futures.”
- “I think it’s important to have a strong positive vision why you do this work. Because if you don’t, and I see this all the time, you’re in danger of internalizing society’s stigma, and then that can be destructive to oneself, and also to the clients. And I think you have to care about what you’re doing and the quality of the servicethat you’re providing, and you have to see it as a business.”
- “– they want someone to talk to—that’s why it takes an hour. No man takes an hour [for sex]. No man. If he takes twenty minutes he’s doing pretty good. But there’s time to talk, to get to know each other, to have a glass of wine. . . . “
- These women’s references to an hour of their services as a vacation or a treat, and their perception of sex as the ‘‘excuse’’ or the ‘‘icing on the cake’’ suggest that, from the women’s perspective, the services they provide are more than purely physical. Although sex seems to be completely absent from very few prostitution encounters, it seems undeniable that for some women it is a small part of the services they offer .
- Women like these embrace prostitution’s out-law status, in this regard, because it enables them to make an overt political statement, or to support themselves in a way that comports with their beliefs, challenges the status quo, and rejects gender-based constraints.
