‘Been There, Seen it, Done it, I've Got the T-shirt’: British Sex Worker's Reflect on Jobs, Hopes, the Future and Retirement

Abstract

While analysis of what takes people into prostitution has been widely documented, this article explores the way adult '30 something' prostitutes consider their futures and the ideas they have about leaving or staying in prostitution. Drawing on contested notions of prostitution as 'work' and the broader context of life-history research with sex workers, it explores the experiences that frame prostitutes' own narratives about their working lives and futures. An illustrative range of ve lifehistory accounts from British sex workers are analysed as 'imagined' curriculum vitae, listing emergent categories of: aliases, education, interests, thoughts on retirement, nancial planning, getting older, hopes and ambitions and fantasy futures. These 'stories' are analysed looking at ways they inform on-going feminist debates about the realities of (voluntary adult) sex workers' concerns. They point again to the relevance for sex workers and feminists of understanding sex work as 'a job'.

Exiting Prostitution: An Integrated Model

“…Barriers to leaving street-level sex work are vast. Many scholars have described the myriad factors that compel women's continued involvement in street-level prostitution (see, for example, Brown et al, 2006;Butters & Erickson, 2003;Rickard, 2001). Yet most researchers have focused on specific barriers only (e.g., drug abuse, mental health, physical injury, or exhaustion); few have attempted to explicate the extensive breadth of barriers on multiple personal and societal levels that challenge a woman's exit success.…”

“…Although researchers have acknowledged that leaving street-level prostitution may be a long, involved process (see, for example, Benoit & Millar, 2001, Brown et al, 2006, Rickard, 2001, few studies have focused solely on this process or described it within any formal conceptual framework. The complexity of the exiting process, however, suggests the need for such a framework to enhance our ability to understand and predict relationships among the variables that challenge exit success.…”

College Women’s Attitudes Toward Sex Workers

“…For the purposes of this paper, the term sex worker will be used to denote anyone who provides sexual services for money or some other material good. Women working in the sex industry adopted this term as an attempt to focus on the profit-generating aspects of their career (Rickard 2001), and as "an effort to remove the social and psychological tendency to characterize an entire class of women" (Brode 2004, p. 6). The term sex worker is also more inclusive and empowering, and therefore less stigmatizing, than other pejorative terms.…”

Squaring Up: Experiences of Transition from Off‐Street Sex Work to Square Work and Duality—Concurrent Involvement in Both—in Vancouver, BC

“…Being confronted with “whore stigma” (Pheterson ) was the greatest challenge to leaving sex work for all participants. Sex work theorists indicate that those who leave hide their biographical information from friend and foe; create new histories cued to build acceptance in nonsex working environments, and deceive others to avoid stigma and obtain the resources for transition (Bowen ; Millar ; O'Doherty ; Pheterson ; Rickard ; Ross ; Sanders ; Shaver et al. ).…”