Sex Composition,Masculinity Stereotype Dissimilarity and the Quality of Men's Workplace Social Relations

Previous research suggests that the quality of men's work group social relations varies depending on the sex composition of the work unit. Previous studies also suggest that men derive different benefits from working with other men than with women and that the higher status associated with men and masculinity advantages men in their relations with women workers. Previous sex composition studies tell us little, however, about the extent to which the quality of men's work group social relations with women and other men depends on how well a man fits dominant masculinity stereotypes. Drawing on sex composition and gender constructionist approaches to gender and work I investigate in this study the effects of men's individual similarity to masculinity stereotypes on the affective quality of their social relations with coworkers, given the sex composition of their work groups. The data for this study consist of male, mostly white, non‐faculty employees of a public university in the northwest United States. I discuss my results in terms of both individual outcomes and implications for understanding sex and gender inequalities in work organizations.     

‘It's Just Acting’: Sex Workers’ Strategies for Capitalizing on Sexuality

This article reports on an ethnographic study of female sex workers in Britain who work in the indoor prostitution markets. The empirical findings contribute to the sex‐as‐labour debate and add to the sociological literature regarding the gendered and sexualized nature of employment, particularly the aesthetic and emotional labour of service work. Grounding the empirical findings in the theory of identity management and emotional labour and work, the article reviews some of the existing examples of how sex workers create emotion management strategies and describes an additional strategy, that of the ‘manufactured identity’. I argue that sex workers create a manufactured identity specifically for the workplace as a self‐protection mechanism to manage the stresses of selling sex as well as crafting the work image as a business strategy to attract and maintain clientele. Drawing on comparisons between sex work and other feminized service occupations, I argue that sex workers who are involved in prostitution under certain conditions are able to capitalize on their own sexuality through the construction of a manufactured identity. The process of conforming to heterosexualized images in prostitution is conceptualized as not simply accepting dominant discourses but as a calculated response made by sex workers to manipulate the erotic expectations and the cultural ideals of the male client.     

Doing Gender Well and Differently in Dirty Work: The Case of Exotic Dancing

This article explores how a group of exotic dancers do gender and manage the stigma associated with their work and identities. We draw upon stigma management strategies from the dirty work literature and illuminate the doing of gender in these strategies. We also contribute to the debate that gender can be done well and differently through simultaneous, multiple enactments of femininity and masculinity. We consider the experiences of 21 exotic dancers working in a chain of UK exotic dancing clubs and conclude that in order to be good at their job, exotic dancers are expected to do gender well, that is, perform exaggerated expressions of femininity. However, we also theorize that for some dirty workers, specifically exotic dancers as sex workers, doing gender well will not be enough to reposition bad girls (bad, dirty work) into good girls (good, clean work). Finally, we propose that doing gender well will have different consequences in different types of work, thereby extending our findings to other dirty work occupations and organizations in general.     

Disability and sex work: developing affinities through decriminalization

This article argues that strong policy frameworks are required to support the health and well-being of sex workers, disabled people, and disabled sex workers. Through an examination of the context of sex work in Canada, we articulate the flaws of sex work criminalization and the persistent barriers that criminalization creates. Our analysis of the intersection of disabled sexuality and access to sexual services identifies how the sex industry can aid in the flourishing of the erotic lives of disabled people. The article culminates in a discussion of the benefits of sex work decriminalization for sex workers, disabled people, and disabled sex workers.     

Sex work: constructing ‘families’ with community of practice theory

This article examines the construction and maintenance of fictive kinships within a street-level sex work community. The analysis is supported by interviews of 14 street-level sex workers regarding everyday language use within their community. Utilizing community of practice theory to demonstrate how peripheral participants of the sex work community are socialized to understand and participate in fictive kinships, a primary finding is that language use within this community operates as a discursive framework which creates a metaphorical family where kin terms are used as an identity-making strategy. The implications of this research suggest that familial structures impact sex workers' sense of agency in relation to other members of the community. Finally, this article discusses the implications for understanding the discourse of a street-level sex worker community in the context of relationship formation and maintenance.     

“They wouldn't get away with it at McDonalds”: Decriminalization,work, and disciplinary power in New Zealand brothels

New Zealand decriminalized sex work in 2004 with the passage of the Prostitution Reform Act (2003), which sets an explicit intention to prevent exploitation of sex workers and improve their welfare. This has demonstrably improved conditions for sex workers and provides a necessary context for addressing exploitation. However, little research has looked at how this works for brothel-based sex workers in New Zealand. This paper responds to that gap by examining how brothel operators in New Zealand exercise power and control and how sex workers experience that. The study draws on in-depth interviews conducted across New Zealand with 33 participants. These include staff from the New Zealand Sex Workers' Collective (2), brothel-based sex workers (18), operators (8), and sex worker/operators (5). We use a Foucauldian framework and Foucauldian Discourse Analysis to examine how disciplinary power informs brothel management, prompting the production of normative discourses of work that destabilize sex workers' safety at work. We conclude that decriminalization nevertheless provides an essential framework by which sex workers are able to resist disciplinary control (W/C 171).     

How College Men Understand Unwanted Sex with Women

Recent studies have shown that heterosexual college men report unwanted sex at higher rates than one might expect. And yet, college men’s perceptions of unwanted sex with women have been studied infrequently. This study examines how men understand unwanted sex with women and the impact of these experiences. Thirty-nine men, aged 18–25, were interviewed using open-ended questions related to their unwanted sexual experiences. Our findings demonstrate how men frequently minimize unwanted sex by framing it as either funny, unimportant, or something that happens to women. However, we find evidence that men's attempts at minimization are not always successful and that some experiences are indeed upsetting and/or hurtful. Rather than treating all men as a homogeneous category, our analysis details the circumstances associated with more or less troubling experiences. We find that there are particular circumstances (e.g. incapacitation), as well as personal characteristics (e.g. virgin), that position men to be more distressed by unwanted sex. This heterogeneity of men’s experiences explains some, but not all, differences in effects. Our analysis reveals that in experiences described as mild to severe, men talk about unwanted sex in highly contradictory ways. We argue that these contradictions are evidence of broader cognitive and emotional work done by men to convince themselves that unwanted sex does not matter to them. Our findings raise the possibility that when men use hegemonic notions of masculinity to understand their unwanted experiences, these interpretations serve to minimize the emotional damage that men might otherwise report.     

Student involvement in the UK sex industry: motivations and experiences

The Student Sex Work Project was set up in 2012 in the United Kingdom (UK) to locate students who are involved in the sex industry, to discover their motivations and needs, and in doing so provide an evidence base to consider the development of policy and practice within Higher Education. As part of this initiative, a large survey was undertaken comprising students from throughout the UK. Reporting on the findings from this survey, the article sheds some light on what occupations students take up in the sex industry, what motivates their participation and how they experience the work. The study also offers a much‐needed empirical input to the ongoing academic debates on the nature of sex work. The results suggest that there can be little doubt of a student presence within the sex industry in the UK. The motivations and experiences of student sex workers cover elements of agency and choice as well as of force and exploitation and it is suggested that student sex work is best understood from a polymorphous framework which leaves room for a wide variety of experiences and challenges.     

Knowing cows: Transformative mobilizations of human and non‐human bodies in an emotionography of the slaughterhouse

This ‘emotionography’ of the slaughterhouse elucidates how the identities of both human and non‐human individuals are constructed by line and lairage workers. Hegemonic masculine ideals that underpin slaughterhouse work mean that the emotions of workers as well as the emotional experience of cattle are either denied, diminished or repressed. Based on fieldwork in an Irish slaughterhouse, I articulate how the industrial slaughter of animals entangles human and non‐human life in metamorphic processes that seek to diminish the emotionality of individuals, maintaining the boundary between human/non‐human animals. These transformations simultaneously pacify the emotional toll of killing non‐human individuals and reinforce perceptions of cows as sellable, killable and edible in the commodification of bovine bodies. Amidst the relative absence of emotions in slaughterhouse ethnographies, this article reveals how emotions emerge, erupt and confound the act of slaughtering cattle for slaughterhouse workers unsettling categorizations of masculinity and ‘animals as food’.     

The Performance of Desire: Gender and Sexual Negotiation in Long-Term Marriages

We integrate theoretical traditions on the social construction of gender, heterosexuality, and marriage with research and theory on emotion work to guide a qualitative investigation of how married people understand and experience sex in marriage. Results, based on 62 in-depth interviews, indicate that married men and women tend to believe that sex is integral to a good marriage and that men are more sexual than women. Moreover, husbands and wives commonly experience conflict around sex and undertake emotion work to manage their own and their spouse's feelings about sex. We refer to this emotion work as "performing desire" and show how it is linked to gendered experiences in marriage and to competing cultural discourses around gender, heterosexuality, and marriage.     

You Catch More Flies With Honey: Sex Work,Violence, and Masculinity on the Streets

Violence among inner‐city men is a pressing social concern, and the central focus of much academic research. Many frame it as a phenomenon that certain men perpetuate—those who inhabit disadvantaged, impoverished communities—and argue it is linked to performances of “street” masculinity. In this article, I examine male street‐based sex workers’ willingness to become embroiled in violent exchanges. In a departure from theoretical predictions, my findings reveal these men expend considerable effort to remain nonviolent with others immersed in the sex trade, a decision based upon their desire for the acquisition of capital as well as their calculation of risks. In doing so, they construct and perform a nuanced version of masculinity, which I call pacifist masculinity. Few studies analyze peaceful and conciliatory interactions among men in these contexts, an absence that only serves to reify assumptions about rampant hostility and aggression. I draw on interviews with 19 men involved in street prostitution in Chicago in 2012. This article contributes to a clearer understanding of male–male violence in high‐risk environments, examines the prominent factors that inform decisions to assault others, and explores how such actions challenge hegemonic masculinity.     

How Does a “Risk Group” Perceive Risk?

Abstract

Throughout the HIV/AIDS epidemic, female sex workers have been identified as a “risk group” and interventions developed to reduce their behavioral risk-taking. Both individual and structural level programs continue to target “risks” such as multiple partners and lack of condom use. Sex workers themselves, however, are likely to view their experiences more holistically, perceiving a range of risks within their work. This paper presents qualitative data from a participatory study conducted with brothel-based migrant Vietnamese sex workers in Cambodia, illuminating one community's perceptions of the sex industry. It argues that design and implementation of effective HIV prevention activities must be based on sex workers' own interpretations and responses to risk, using them as a realistic entry point for effecting change. Actively engaging with sex workers through participatory research and projects offers the first step in shifting the current epidemiological focus toward identifying feasible, context-specific risk-reduction strategies.     

Social workers’ opportunities to work with safer sex

The purpose of this study is to increase knowledge about social workers’ opportunities to work with safer sex among at-risk adolescents and young adults. To investigate this issue, a survey has been sent to outreach work and non-institutional offices whose work focuses on alcohol and drugs to some extent. The survey was sent to 89 workplaces distributed throughout 33 municipalities in the region of Skåne in southern Sweden. Altogether 229 responses were collected, a response rate of 60.1%. The study shows that social workers have limited opportunities to work with safer sex issues and that the organizational resources to support this work are weak. Michael Lipsky’s theory of street-level bureaucrats was applied to the data, with the analysis indicating that knowledge and organizational resources are key to enabling work with safer sex. It is also important that the personnel are interested in the subject and that they feel comfortable working with safer sex. The factors found to have the strongest direct effect on the personnel’s work with safer sex are: having the possibility to set aside time to work with safer sex, experiencing that safer sex is discussed at the workplace and being personally interested in the subject.     

Just one of the guys until shower time: How symbolic embodiment threatens women's inclusion in the US military

The military constitutes a complex occupational field for women — one in which embodied masculinity is legitimized and rewarded, and women's bodies are often perceived as problems to the extent that they deviate from this masculine standard. Drawing from 33 in‐depth interviews with men and women who served on active duty in the US military between 2005 and 2015, we ask: How does female embodiment raise barriers to the full incorporation of women as equal workers in a total institution? Our analysis focuses on three primary aspects of what we call symbolic embodiment (female bodies as physically weak, as leaky/unclean and as sexually distracting), as they are rooted in the cultural imagination more than in any biological or experiential reality. We show how the symbolic embodiment of female workers effectively undermines individual claims of honorary masculinity by reasserting the pre‐eminence of naturalized capacities over individual performance and experience, and constructs women as second‐class workers within the masculine culture of the military. Our results extend the literature on the embodied self at work and reveal potential limits to Bourdieu's theory of the gendered habitus.     

Risking safety and rights: online sex work,crimes and ‘blended safety repertoires’

It has been well established that those working in the sex industry are at various risks of violence and crime depending on where they sell sex and the environments in which they work. What sociological research has failed to address is how crime and safety have been affected by the dynamic changing nature of sex work given the dominance of the internet and digital technologies, including the development of new markets such as webcamming. This paper reports the most comprehensive findings on the internet‐based sex market in the UK demonstrating types of crimes experienced by internet‐based sex workers and the strategies of risk management that sex workers adopt, building on our article in the British Journal of Sociology in 2007. We present the concept of ‘blended safety repertoires’ to explain how sex workers, particularly independent escorts, are using a range of traditional techniques alongside digitally enabled strategies to keep themselves safe. We contribute a deeper understanding of why sex workers who work indoors rarely report crimes to the police, reflecting the dilemmas experienced. Our findings highlight how legal and policy changes which seek to ban online adult services advertising and sex work related content within online spaces would have direct impact on the safety strategies online sex workers employ and would further undermine their safety. These findings occur in a context where aspects of sex work are quasi‐criminalized through the brothel keeping legislation. We conclude that the legal and policy failure to recognize sex work as a form of employment, contributes to the stigmatization of sex work and prevents individuals working together. Current UK policy disallows a framework for employment laws and health and safety standards to regulate sex work, leaving sex workers in the shadow economy, their safety at risk in a quasi‐legal system. In light of the strong evidence that the internet makes sex work safer, we argue that decriminalisation as a rights based model of regulation is most appropriate.     

Masculinity and Class in the Context of Dirty Work

Through an ethnographic study of ‘dirty work’ (refuse collection and street cleaning), this article explores how masculinity and class intersect — how, in a mutually constitutive sense, they produce attitudes and practices, strengths and vulnerabilities, which are shaped by shifting relations of privilege and power. We find resistance to class subordination through adherence to traditional forms of masculinity and through esteem‐enhancing social comparison (e.g., with women; with migrant workers). Men also mobilized powerful nostalgic themes around the loss of traditional jobs as well as trade union power. We argue that displays of masculine resilience in the face of devaluation are less indicative of a culture of masculine dominance but more an expression of vulnerability and social dislocation, serving both as a source of resistance whilst simultaneously reinforcing anchors of social disadvantage that characterize forms of dirty work. We suggest that combining social comparison with intersectionality can potentially highlight how categories of difference are strategically deployed in response to varied and unequally valued social positionalities.     

Privileging work not sex: flexibility and employment in the sexual services industry

We present findings from a study of sex workers recruited in indoor licensed premises in Victoria. While the study addressed regulation, enforcement and working conditions, we focus on the value of flexible well‐paid work for two particular groups of female workers (parents and students). We link this issue of flexibility to broader gendered employment conditions in Australia, arguing the lack of comparable employment is crucial to understanding worker decisions about sex work. Debates and regulation focus on gendered inequalities related to heterosexuality much more than they recognize gendered inequalities related to labour market conditions. The focus on criminalization, harm, exploitation and stigma obscures the centrality of work flexibility and conditions to women's decision‐making. A more direct focus on the broader employment context may produce better recognition of why women do sex work.     

But the kids are okay: motherhood, consumption and sex work in neo-liberal Latin America

Although sex work remains highly stigmatized around the world, its relatively high value (when compared to other kinds of work available for low-income women) allows sex workers to attain some level of economic, if not social, mobility. This article challenges the idea that sex work in 'third world' settings is always about mere subsistence. Instead, it suggests that sex workers in Costa Rica's tourism sector work to survive, but they also demonstrate significant personal ambition and aim not only to increase their own consumption levels, but crucially to get ahead. Women are clear about what sex work enables for their families and themselves: not the maintenance of the status quo, but rather a level of consumption otherwise unavailable to them as low-income and poor women. Sex work offers an opportunity to consume and to get ahead that these women have been unable to attain in other kinds of employment, primarily domestic and factory work. Furthermore, sex work allows women to think of themselves as particularly good mothers, able to provide for and spend important quality time with their kids. The article argues that survival, consumption, and motherhood are discursively deployed, in often contradictory and conflicting ways, in order to counteract the effects that stigma has on sex workers. It also suggests that sex workers may very well be the quintessential subjects of neo-liberalism in Latin America, in their embrace of entrepreneurial work and consumption.     

Women Constructing Masculinity in Voluntary Firefighting

Within gender studies, research and theorizing have used archetypal ‘masculine’ occupations to explore how masculinity is accomplished and practised in social interaction. In contrast, little work has explored how masculinity is constructed in the voluntary sector. In this paper, we address this gap by exploring how masculinity is constructed and experienced by women volunteers who are active firefighters in rural and regional Victoria. Firefighting is widely recognized as a non‐traditional occupation for women and they are underrepresented as volunteers as well as paid employees. We explore masculinity from the perspective of women volunteers because this can enhance our understanding of masculinity as a relational achievement as well as help to identify practices that they experience as problematic. Our research shows how voluntary work can afford a distinct range of resources for the ‘doing’ of gender and how this reflects the specific organizational and geographical contexts in which such volunteering occurs.     

Sexual Risk,Behavior, and HIV Testing and Status Among Male and Transgender Women Sex Workers and Their Clients in Lima,Peru

Objectives: To determine the socio-demographics, sexual practices, and HIV prevalence of male sex workers (MSWs), transwomen sex workers (TSWs), and their male clients in Lima, Peru. Methods: Following ethnographic mapping of sex work venues, the authors revisited randomly selected venues to survey MSWs, TSWs and their clients. Results: MSWs and TSW clients are more educated than MSW clients and TSWs. Only 50% of TSW clients have received HIV testing. Self-reported HIV positivity is highest among MSW clients and TSWs. Conclusion: Notable differences exist between MSWs and TSWs and their clients that can affect the health of these groups and warrant intervention.