Few sociological subjects excite so much passion – and anger – as prostitution. Having studied in the field for thirty or so years, I know only too well how academic discussions can quickly deteriorate as audiences split into different ideological factions. In much of the urban West, radical feminists who refuse to recognize sex work as a legitimate form of work have become a more vocal contingent in recent times. However, there has clearly always been an abolitionist movement that regards prostitution as an inherently criminal, and perhaps even evil, profession. Against this, there is also a pro-sex work movement that recognizes that while sex working might not be the safest or most desirable form of work, it is among the most lucrative jobs that can be taken by women (and men) who lack other options, and on this basis, needs to be recognized and protected like other (legitimate) forms of working. Though both lobbies might agree on their overall aims – decent wages for women, the end of patriarchal relations, and the reduction of sexual violence – they hold almost antithetical attitudes towards prostitution. The encounters between different factions often produce much heat, but seldom progress our understanding of the matter at hand or offer much hope for reconciliation.
In the twenty-first century, these debates have become more centralized within government and policy circles, with the penalization of the purchase of sexual services having replaced the criminalization of the selling of sex as the default model for regulation (the so-called Swedish or Nordic model). Throughout much of Europe, we have therefore seen a perverse tendency towards a more open acceptance of commercial sexuality (on the Internet in particular), but an increasingly censorious attitude towards those men who purchase sexual services. Such policy fits with the radical feminist take on sex work which sees clients and pimps as exploiters and seemingly allows sex workers to sell services free from risk of punishment. But as Lilian Mathieu shows in this book, these policies have converse impacts: it is sex workers who are effectively punished, because their work has become harder, not easier, with clients seeking to evade arrest by seeking the services of prostitutes in more dangerous spaces. Prostitution is becoming less visible in our major cities – whether Paris or Lyon, or for that matter London, Amsterdam and Brussels – but while that might encourage us to think that the issue has gone away, or that sex work has simply migrated online (into the worlds of Camming and Internet pornography) this clearly doesn’t tell the whole story. Sex work is sometimes underground and on the margins, perhaps, but it persists nonetheless. As long as there is economic necessity, there is supply, and as
How then should the academics position themselves in this debate? This is not an easy question to answer, especially for male researchers whose motives and positionality can be lazily imputed by other parties, whether abolitionists or decriminalizers. But in this book Lilian Mathieu gives us the answer: by pursuing work, which is not dogmatic or mired in ideology, but which begins with grounded ethnography, describing the varied lives of prostitute women, men and trans workers in so much as they exist within a united field of social action. As he usefully notes, there is not one chosen identity within the sex working community, which cannot really be described as a chosen community at all: rather it is an identity which sex workers take on, and which reflects their relegation and subordination within social systems. Indeed, the fact that he talks of prostitutes rather than sex workers is no mere ideological device or slippage of language, but a deliberate and careful description of the way that the prostitute persists as a discredited identity, subject to symbolic violence of various kinds that often informs and encourages real, physical violence. Mathieu’s work on the attitudes of residents to local sex working women is particularly revealing in this respect, and helps trace how stereotypes of clients, pimps and prostitutes enter into the realms of social action, with often devastating impacts on the workers who are displaced in the name of neighborhood well-being and community morality.
Much has been written about sex work and prostitution policy in the twenty-first century – perhaps even too much? But what we lack is the type of grounded, empirical but theoretically informed work which Lilian Mathieu offers in this timely and detailed summary of his research on sex work in France in the twenty-first century. Unlike some writing on the subject, which offers abstraction and high-level theorization, here the theoretical concepts – derived from Boltanski, Bourdieu, Castel, Goffman and others – are used as guiding devices that help us make sense of the complexity of the world, not make it more complex or abstract. What Lilian Mathieu presents cannot be considered as a purely objective summary of the lives of sex workers – how could it be? – but it is an account that does not let its conclusions be informed by dogma or ideology and follows the principles of good sociology throughout (it is analytically rigorous, ethically sensitive and pays important attention to questions of class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality as they intersect in the field). As such, this book needs to be read as more than an expose of the worlds of sex workers in France. It is a sociologically-informed and detailed explanation as to how policy and law impacts on sex workers, pimps and clients, and how this
Professor Phil Hubbard
King’s College London
July 2022