The desire to talk and sex/genderrelated silences in interviews with male heterosexual clients of prostitutes

Autor(en)

Sabine Grenz

Abstrakt

In commercial sexuality, sex is exchanged for money or other goods and the biggest prostitution market is the heterosexual market for men. As such, prostitution is a highly sexed and gendered field. Moreover, the history of sexuality and gender results in an ambivalence of visibility and secrecy of prostitution. On the one hand, the sex-industry is very present in daily social life through, for instance, magazines, sex-shops, and sex-clubs, all of which draw on traditional gendered stereotypes including both that of the strong male sexual drive as well as the division between the ‘holy’ and the ‘whore’. Prostitution is also the daily work and experience of various people working in the sex-industry and/or consuming sexual services. On the other hand, prostitution is wrapped in secrecy for the very same reasons, i.e. traditional assumptions about sex and gender. Usually, sex-workers do not talk about their work to persons outside the industry in order to avoid stigma (cf. Sanders 2005: 116f.; Day 2007). Similarly, clients of prostitutes only rarely talk about going to a sex-worker. Thus, ‘prostitution is still a sensitive social taboo area’ (Kleiber and Velten 1994: 46; my translation). Despite the stigma and the related shame, in spring and summer 2001 I managed to interview twenty-six male heterosexual clients of prostitutes in Germany, mostly in Berlin. These interviews were used for a study aimed at unravelling the secrecy surrounding these men and investigating the ways in which masculine identity is discursively reproduced through (or performed in) commercial sex (cf. Grenz [2005] 2007). Power relations caused by gender as well as other power axes, such as my being the researcher and them being the research object, were complex and fluid (cf. Grenz 2005). Reading about this process, one could wonder how my sex/gender has influenced the answers and whether participants would have been more open if they had talked about their sexual experiences in commercial sexuality to a male interviewer.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Bildungswissenschaft

Seiten

54-66

Anzahl der Seiten

13

DOI

https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203927045-13

Publikationsdatum

01-2013

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

504014 Gender Studies

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Allgemeine Sozialwissenschaften

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/0df9e672-9fee-4b0e-a33f-41cbd93ae061