Another Dimension of Labor: The Gendered Aspects of Emotional Labor Within Sex Work

Another Dimension of Labor:

The Gendered Aspects of Emotional Labor Within Sex Work

By: Rachael Robertson

 

Photo:  A rally advocating for recognizing sex work as work (Source: http://d1o2xrel38nv1n.cloudfront.net/files/2014/09/sex-work.jpg)

Laura Maria Augustin’s book “Sex at the Margins” relies on the assertion that sex work is labor (Augustin 2007).  For her, the rhetoric that argues otherwise misses and devalues much of what sex work actually entails:  the act of sex itself, creating intimacy, and emotional management.  Much of the chapter explains the connection between sex work and labor, as well as reflecting on the ways in which people frame it to ignore its value as labor.  However, she also explores how sex work can manifest itself in many kinds of labor.  I was particularly interested in the heavily gendered labor that sex workers do in regards to emotional management as being an even more hidden and assumed aspect of sex work.  While not all sex workers are women, this labor is part of the unpaid work that women do in addition to labor that is traditionally, culturally, and structurally recognized and valued.

In order to do sex work, the conditions for sex that appeals to clients must be created by sex workers.  Creating the conditions for an emotional space that clients feel is appropriate for sex is also labor intensive in addition to the work of sex itself.  The conversations leading up to sex, the counseling of client’s problems, and ensuring that clients feel emotionally stable and satisfied are all part of the emotional labor that is part of sex work.  To illustrate the many ways that sex workers use emotional labor to negotiate emotional needs (and cultural needs, particularly within migrant sex labor), Augustin used quotes from sex workers themselves to show the different ways that their work involved far more than simply performing sex.  For instance within migrant sex work specifically, Augustin notes that, “many service-providers, as well as their clients, resist being labelled as objects of sex tourism when sexual contact is only one service among many” (p. 84).  Speaking with their clients - many of whom are practically strangers -in meaningful and adapted ways is time intensive and requires emotional energy that often is not accounted for or actively noticed.  Despite how pervasive it is, emotional labor is elusively invisible and disproportionately expected from women.

In order to recognize the emotional labor done by sex workers as another gendered part of their profession, it is important to remember that both in sex work and in sex generally,  intimacy and a certain emotional environment do not occur naturally.   These conditions are created by the people participating in sex, and often the work to create these conditions is unbalanced.  In heterosexual sex, the role of emotional management and filtering is done by the woman.  Within sex work, this labor is done by the sex worker and this work is feminized regardless of the gender of those participating.  The expectations for women to perform invisible emotional labor are so deeply entrenched that often women are characterized as “naturally” better at empathy and intuition.  This assumption dually acts to deflect from the work it takes for people to be empathetic and intuitive (as well as other imbalanced and draining emotions) and excuses men from having to contribute to this labor.  In a lot of ways women are more empathetic, but because we are conditioned into learning it and expected to provide this emotional labor rather than having an inherent disposition for it.

A recent article in The Huffington Post written by Christine Hutchison, a feminist and experienced therapist, talks about the emotional labor of women.  She quotes the sentiments of women who are frustrated by the men in their lives, who feel expected to make sacrifices for others, who are emotionally exhausted, and who express feelings of being undervalued.  She has seen how the frustration of not having their emotional needs taken care of while being expected to absorb, filter, and categorize the feelings of other people result in utter emotional exhaustion.  While this sentiment was common among women generally, Hutchison talks about how sex workers explicitly have expressed how much of sex work is emotional labor; “These women talked about how they get compensated for their sexual labor, but a huge part of their job is emotional work (listening, validating, pretending to feel something for the sake of the other), which is assumed by the male clients to be given for free.” (Hutchison 2016).  Male clients expect to feel good emotionally in addition to being pleased sexually while only paying for the latter half of the service.  These specific sex workers echo part of what Augustin advocates for in her book: to recognize that sex work is undeniably labor and that emotional labor is a huge part of it.  Hutchison gets to the core of this issue when she writes that, “we as a society continue to devalue emotional labor economically, and ignore the ways it is gendered” (Hutchison 2016).  For sex work, we see this devaluing in the assumptions about what constitutes sex work itself and the expectations that are held for sex workers.  These assumptions and expectations reflect broader and often unspoken roles we expect women to fill and services for them to provide, whether it is for payment or not.  

Works Cited:

Augustin, Laura Maria. (2007).  Sex at the margins: Migration, labour markets and the rescue industry.  New York:  Zed Books.

Hutchison, Christine.  (2016, April 6). Why women are tired:  The price of unpaid emotional labor.  The Huffington Post.  Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/psyched-in-san-francisco/why-women-are-tired-the-p_b_9619732.html