Abstract
Is the decision to work in brothels made of free will? Can the work experiences in brothels be transferred to other occupations and, to what degree, can sex workers successfully integrate into society? These are some of the thought-provoking questions explored in the book, Sex, and Stigma: Stories of Everyday Life in Nevada’s Legal Brothels.
This book uses organizational principles and management theories to explore the secret lives of sex workers in the legal brothels of Nevada. A distinguishing feature of this book is that one of its authors (Breanna Mohr) is herself a sex worker. As such, she is in a position to provide first-hand accounts into the experiences of sex workers inside and outside of brothels.
The book uses data collection methods that include life story interviews of five women who had left the industry. Additional interviews were conducted with those currently working as sex workers. This methodological approach made an engaging read with enriching conclusions. For Mohr herself, she acknowledges the emancipatory role this book project played in making sense of her own life. The very prospect of speaking about her life experiences and her career choices helped to remove the deeply embedded fears of disgrace and shame associated with her occupation and aided her in psychologically normalizing her job within the stigmatized profession.
The book is divided into three parts, with three chapters constituting each part. The first part of the book lays the essential theoretical foundation of the prostitution business and the stigma associated with it. Besides offering a historical background of Nevada’s legal brothels, this section addresses the divide between feminism and prostitution. The focus of this section is to nuance the perception of prostitution by showing that all cases of prostitution are not acts of injustice toward women. Prostitution can also be a profession made by choice because, among other things, it generates income while maintaining some balance between work and life. The book provides sufficient research support to clarify the misinformation that sex work can only be an act that is forced, and that entails trauma for those who engage in it. For instance, anti-trafficking organizations carry the unidimensional view that prostitution is, by its nature, exploitative. A career in prostitution can be an informed choice and not always a decision made out of desperation.
The second part of the book is exciting since it has stories of sex workers, including an autoethnography of one of the authors (Prasad, 2019). This section discusses the work-life considerations of the sex workers once they decide to leave brothels and move into non-sex work careers. The skill sets acquired during careers in prostitution – such as selling skills, negotiating skills, social media and promotion skills, communication skills, creative direction (marketing skills), client management skills, event planning skills, and administration skills – are not easily transferrable to other professions. Indeed, the mobility of skills from sex jobs to non-sex jobs is inhibited by the social stigma toward sex work, thus curbing future job prospects.
Even in cases when sex workers can get jobs in non-sex work-related organizations, they face career stagnation and discrimination in the workplace. The authors call these discriminatory practices a ‘thorny paradox’ (p. 143). Namely, if sex workers talk about their past histories (to showcase their skills), they face discrimination at work and, if they do not, then their career progression is delayed for lack of experience. Due to this thorny paradox, sex workers sometimes get stuck in the sex industry, working variously as madams (manage a brothel), bar attendants, adult film directors, or sex-related entrepreneurs. The authors compellingly bring out the point that brothels are one-way entry jobs that do not have exits.
The last part of the book focuses on the constraints applied by society and occupation on sex workers. For example, this section explains the implications associated with selling emotions. While performing acts of intimacy, sex workers need to take care of spillover effects – for example, developing feelings for their clients. Here, the authors also explain how maintaining secrecy from clients often engenders mental fatigue, otherwise known as emotional labor. On this point, sex workers alike have to take care not to carry emotions from professional workspaces with them when they enter their personal home spaces, as any such revelation may lead to ostracization by family, friends, and society. Managing clients’ feelings and family and society impressions at the cost of their own emotional well-being were identified as a significant consequence of working in brothels.
This section also considers how managing work-life commitments brings out the silver linings of legal brothels. The boundaries between work and life activities can be easier to manage and thereby, be more accommodating for those in this profession. Legal brothels provide an opportunity for its workers to lead the lives they choose while earning an income. Finally, this section presents brothels as hidden organizations, which must grapple with the tension to find a middle ground between managing core stigma and maintaining a socially accepted public image. To remain profitable, these shadowed organizations distance themselves from ‘socially undesirable practices’ (p. 213) and keep themselves aligned to community engagement efforts.
The strength of the book lies in the highlighting the difficulties of sex workers from their own account of experiencing stigma. The authors are to be applauded for being able to interview an often inaccessible, hard to reach population and capture their lived experience as sex workers. They also ought to be credited for combining the research scholarship and sex worker experience to provide readers with holistic dives into the affairs of sex workers and their stigmatized lives. The only weakness that I found in the book is that the authors’ scope offers little discussion on the tensions sex workers face while negotiating their individual, work, and social identities. The scope of this book is confined to studying workers only from one locality, which limits the applicability of its findings to the broader segment of sex workers and their societies.
I have to personally thank the authors for a good read that was not only lucid but exposed me to the brighter side of this ‘dark’ industry. At a minimum, this book repudiates the cultural assumption that sex workers are always victims; instead, as this work reveals, many empowered women who consciously decide to work in this industry. This book illuminates the importance of organization scholars to research how marginalized populations are organized (Wasdani & Prasad, 2020). Minimally, this book will be a good starting point for researchers studying the dynamics of untraditional organizations and stigmatized occupations.
