Online Boys: Male-for-Male Internet Escorts

Deviant Research: Deception, Male Internet Escorts, and Response Rates

“…Approximately six or seven overseas male escorts and five or six transsexual escorts were removed from the data. Consistent with the findings of Pruitt (2005), I observed that some escorts advertise in more than one state. These redundancies were deleted leaving a final sample of 451 men.…”

“…Following the example of Pruitt (2005), this study (1) used a website that is national (U.S.A.) in scope and (2) compared websites with regard to the number of escorts in key states like Florida and New York in order to pick one of the larger male-escort sites. Because the data were recently collected and the website is still in operation at this time, I do not reveal either the website's name or URL.…”

Touching encounters : the sex and work of male-for-male internet escorts

“…Yet, it is precisely the exclusivity of this sample that makes the story I create in Touching Encounters a unique one, a story that has not been provided much space in the sociology of sex work, perhaps because research tends to focus primarily on female sex work and on-street sex work. There has recently been a big shift in the sociology of sex work to focus on erotic dancers, agency-based workers, and other sectors of the commercial sex industry (see Bernstein, 2007a;Sanders, 2005;Pruitt, 2005;Bruckert, 2002). I hope the story I am creating in Touching Encounters contributes to and enriches the discussion in a small way.…”

“…To better understand the work of sex work, this chapter examines the labour process of male-for-male internet escorting. Escorting as self-employment has been shaped in part by the availability of computer and internet technologies (Phua and Caras, 2008;Pruitt, 2005), which has fused commercial sex with entrepreneurial e-business. Despite claims that work is less salient today as a factor in social life (Beck, 2000;Bauman, 1998a), and questions about the relevance of labour process theory (Lash and Urry, 1987;Storey, 1985), I build on the contributions of other sex work scholars (see Bruckert and Parent, 2006;Jeffrey and MacDonald, 2006) to argue that analysis of labour process can help sociologists make sense of work conditions, work tasks and sex worker relations with clients.…”

“We Get a Lot of Crack Whores”: Official Perceptions of Rural Prostitution in Four Rural Counties

“…The use of the internet is a theme that has emerged in the literature on prostitution (Bernstein, 2007a;Castle & Lee, 2008;Parsons, Bimb, & Halkitis, 2001;Parsons, Koken, & Bimb, 2004;Pruitt, 2005;Sharp & Earle 2002). Although data for these works come primarily from urban areas, our findings suggest an interesting parallel that should be explored further.…”