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Australian studies in law, crime and justice
The nature of the work
Published in:
Working girls : prostitutes, their life and social control / Roberta Perkins
ISBN 0 642 15877 0
Canberra : Australian Institute of Criminology, 1991
(Australian studies in law, crime and justice series)
In the first Chapter we viewed prostitution as a work-based occupation from the perspective of the prostitute. Whatever sexual gratification or other emotional satisfaction a sex worker might obtain in commercial sex doesn't make it any less work, but simply more pleasant work. Earlier in the present Chapter the reader was introduced to "types" of work undertaken by the "professional" prostitute, including the structure of these "types" and their functions. In this Section we will delve deeper into the work of prostitutes by examining its nature and determining both the benefits and the drawbacks to being a prostitute. For example, how much is earned, how much time is involved, what is done, what workers think of their job.
Prostitution may be work, but it is also a service for men (although occasionally women also use the services of a female prostitute), for which they must pay a fee to the prostitute. This fee forms the basis of the sex worker's earnings, whether it be a portion of the fee in an arrangement with the management of the house in which she works, or forms her gross income from which must be extracted her overheads. Figure 4.7 indicates the average earnings of the prostitute sample of 128 women.
These figures were collected in 1985-86, but since the prices for sexual services have not changed in three years (nor had they for at least ten years prior to that) these earnings may serve as an example of prostitutes' weekly incomes today. If anything, in the wake of much negative publicity surrounding prostitution as a possible source of AIDS, prostitutes in Sydney at present may actually be earning less.
Figure 4.7 : Average weekly earnings of prostitutes (n=128)
Over half of the sample had earned between $501 and $ 1,000 a week on average, before tax, while only a little over a fifth had earned less than $500, and about a quarter had earned in excess of $1,000. A few of the prostitutes were earning between $2,000 and $4,000. The overall average, however, is something like $800. Most people may have thought a prostitute earns more than that, and a few might be resentful that she could earn so much for "doin' what comes naturally". Most prostitutes feel that they are not paid enough, and they are impatient towards those who think they "get it easy".
But, all resentment aside, the fact remains that prostitution is a highly paid occupation, certainly one of the highest possible for women. If the weekly earnings shown in Figure 4.7 are converted to an annual salary, a comparison with the annual incomes of individual Australians would appear as Table 4.6.
From this comparison we can see that half of the prostitute sample earned on average as much as the highest earning two per cent of the Australian population, or as much as the highest earning 0.4 per cent of females in Australia. Over three-quarters of the prostitutes earned as much as the highest earning 9 per cent of Australians. Thus, there is no question that prostitution is an extremely lucrative occupation. Still, while most Australians in the workforce earn their salaries including such benefits as five weeks annual leave, public holidays or weekend double-time, not to mention other fringe benefits, these annual earnings for prostitutes may be considerably less if they do not work 52 weeks a year. Many prostitutes will leave the sex industry if they cannot earn at least twice the salary they would earn in "straight" employment because they have a value on what it is worth to work as a prostitute.
Another misconception about prostitutes is that they do not pay taxes, and therefore not only get "easy money" but "bludge" on the system as well. However, many prostitutes do pay taxes on their incomes, especially "career" sex workers who have been working for many years, otherwise such large capital expenditure and property, dwellings and cars would leave them open to suspicion and likely indictment for tax avoidance. The lesson of Tilly Devine is not lost even today. But numbers of young prostitutes do not pay taxes. Some work only as their economic needs arise, others are so committed to a drug habit that every cent earned goes towards supporting their addiction so that their actual living expenses are negligible and they live like paupers, and there are those who feel resentful at paying taxes to a government which stigmatises them, does not support their demands for improved working conditions, and spends their taxes on paying police to persecute them. Martine compares her situation with that of another taxpayer of equal income rank:
I pay the same kind of taxes that a doctor does. But, I actually receive a lot less because I can't work until I'm 65 like my father can, I get no prestige from my job, and no recognition for what I do.
In recent years taxation agents have approached brothel management to assist them in collecting taxes from their employees. This has especially been successful in Melbourne's legal brothels where the tax deduction arrangement is similar to other places of employment. This is another reason why Sydney prostitutes oppose the introduction of legalisation in New South Wales. They maintain that prostitutes are free agents, even in a brothel where they are not paid a salary but share the service fee with the house on a contractual arrangement. It is not the place then for brothel owners to deduct tax on behalf of the government, but it is up to the individual prostitute to pay her taxes as a self-employed income-earner rather than as a wage-earner. After all, the brothel worker is treated as a hired agent by many owners in that they are not supplied uniforms and are expected to pay for their own overheads. In the case of a bondage mistress this can be exorbitant, as Martine points out:
We have to buy all our own equipment, our own dildos, our own enemas, even our own amyl nitrate as the clients like snorting in a session. We have to buy our own leather clothing, which is very expensive, and our own lingerie, which is also very expensive. So, we do have considerable expenses.
For an independent "call girl" like Laura, who has her own business, her high earnings are offset against the overheads required in a successful operation:
I make between $1,500 and $2,000 a week, minus my expenses. I take home between $1,400 and $1,800. But that depends on how long I want to sit in the apartment. Whatever I make, the deductions of rent, electricity and phones are the same. And then there's the initial outlay for furnishings, linen and such like. I have to consider this apartment as part of my business expenses because I have my own apartment elsewhere. Any expenses I incur in the business apartment have to be considered business expenses.
On the other hand, for the streetwalker, overheads are comparatively minimal, as Kelly assures us:
Apart from rent for a room, cab fares and babysitters, there aren't any other expenses. I don't go out of my way to buy working clothes. The clothes that I wear at work I've had for a while. I don't think it matters what you wear. I've gone in all dressed up and feeling really good and not done very well. Other times I've gone in dressed really casually in a pair of jeans and a top and done better than with a short dress.
Ultimately prostitution is a business of chance, dependent on the whims of customers, the general financial situation (for example the vagaries of stock market or a recession), the time of the year (Christmas and the end of the fiscal calendar are usually slow for business), and media hype on AIDS or police blitzes, which "kill" business altogether immediately afterwards. As Martine notes: "I can go to work for 12 hours and not earn any money at all". So, while it might be a lucrative business, it is also very erratic.
The average number of hours worked by the prostitute sample is shown on Figure 4.8.
Figure 4.8 : Average hours prostitutes (n=128) worked per week
A third of the prostitutes work 25 to 36 hours a week, or, as brothel workers, three to four days a week. Less than a fifth work the "normal" working week of 37 to 48 hours, or, in a brothel, five to six days a week. More than a fifth work 49 to 60 hours a week, although as brothel workers they are probably doing three or four days of double shifts. The women putting in more than 72 hours a week are streetwalkers with expensive drug habits. Compared to the hours actually worked by individuals in New South Wales, the prostitute sample worked less hours per week pro rata. Whilst 82 per cent of the state's employed worked 35 or more hours a week (Australian Bureau of Statistics Census in New South Wales 1986), only 55 per cent of the prostitutes did so. This raises the old thorny morality of prostitutes receiving high wages ("of sin") for little effort. This, of course, depends on one's personal value of one's body, and many prostitutes consider that for hiring out their bodies the hirer must be expected to pay a price equivalent to their value. Unions, of course, argue much the same thing in their struggle for higher wages. But the objection to prostitutes' high wages and short hours often seems to disguise a Protestant work ethic response.
As noted earlier, prostitution is a service, and it is paid for by the customer of the service. It is, then, about servicing customer demands, but not always about sex, for men frequently go to prostitutes as much for company as for sex, and sometimes the sex is superfluous to the actual contact. But, in most cases, sexual pleasure for the customer is the sole purpose. A usual service in a brothel is "part-French and sex", or fellatio to arousal followed by coitus for climax. In bondage houses sadomasochistic fantasies predominate as a service. On the street, it is usually simply fellatio to orgasm or a quick coital intercourse without preliminaries. While street prostitution services finish with the customer's climax in minimal time, in the brothels (parlours) the service depends on the length of time paid to be with a prostitute and therefore in an hour service, for instance, the customer may climax two times. The experienced brothel worker in a session develops a technique of prolonging arousal and foreplay so that actual intercourse time is minimised. Men who have been drinking (but not drunk) are disliked as clients because they take too long during the motion of intercourse.
The number of different services available in prostitution is quite extensive, and each has a colloquial term understood among prostitutes but not always outside the sex industry. A list of the more important of these is provided below:
- B&D: abbreviation for "bondage and discipline".
- Bondage: shortened term for "bondage and discipline", which refer to sadomasochism as practised in the sex industry.
- Buck's Party: all male party in which one or more prostitutes are often hired to liven it up and one is usually presented as a "gift" to the male in whose honour the party is held.
- English: whipping or caning; a term not in much use nowadays.
- Double: involves two prostitutes with one client, or, less frequently, two clients with one prostitute.
- Fantasy Job: scenario suggested by client involving transvestite, infant, school-room, Gothic or other themes and costumes.
- French: fellatio; can also refer to cunnilingus. Full French: specifically refers to fellatio with ejaculation.
- Golden Showers: urinating on client. Greek: anal intercourse.
- Hand Relief: masturbating the client; most often performed in a massage parlour as part of full service; also referred to as hand job.
- Heavy Bondage: involving torture and pain with welts and drawing blood.
- Kissing: extra service paid for by client; but it may also be given freely as a token of affection for a favourite regular client.
- Lesbian Acts: two prostitutes hired by a client to make love in front of him. Although not exclusive to lesbians, if lesbian or bisexual women are on the premises they will agree to do it.
- Light Bondage: spanking but leaving no marks nor involving pain, and may include some tying up but without torture.
- Medium Bondage: caning, whipping, the rack and stocks, including some pain but without drawing blood or leaving welts. Part French: fellatio without ejaculation.
- Sex: coital intercourse; a term used specifically for coitus.
- Sexual Surrogate: medical-therapeutic work in which a prostitute is hired by hospital/doctor to service a handicapped patient.
- Spanish: rubbing client's penis between breasts until climax.
- Submissive Work: where sex worker receives a beating or acts as a slave to client; opposite role to mistress work.
- Threesome: where a client hires a prostitute to join himself and a companion (sometimes his wife) in lovemaking.
- Water Sports: frolicking with basins, bedpans, siphon hoses and enemas often involving urination.
There is a clinical ring to these services, and certainly most prostitutes would view their work in a clinical way, even when this involves the pretence of love or affection with their clients. The reason many experienced prostitutes, once having overcome inhibitions about deriving pleasurable sensations in sessions with clients, seek orgasms at work is to make the job seem less clinical and mechanical to them. Some prostitutes find that the sex they have with their clients discolours the sex they have with their lovers or husbands. The comment by Zoe seems to sum up this disposition:
I had become so well established in my identity and role as a prostitute that whenever I went to show some initiative or assertiveness in my relationship with my boyfriend I saw myself as a prostitute. In prostitution sex is just a job, yet when I was in a love situation I couldn't dissociate the sex from the job situation. So when I made love it was like a job and I felt like a prostitute every time I got into bed with him.
This is certainly not the case with every prostitute, but it may be the reason some prostitutes will not kiss clients, or allow them to perform cunnilingus, since these are reserved for lovers only and serve as the acts in sex which distinguish work from love. Many prostitutes have lovers who are as far from the perceived "typical" client in appearance, mannerisms and attitudes as it is possible to be. For example, these lovers are often much younger than the prostitute, unorthodox in attitude and less conventional looking than most clients. In other words, prostitutes are more likely to be attracted to men as lovers who are least like the client stereotype in a subconscious motive to distance themselves from their work in their private lives. The disposition is probably not too unlike the plumber who loathes having to work on his own pipes.
There exists a common notion that prostitutes are not free agents at work, that they must do exactly what the client expects of them. If that was true once, it is certainly no longer the case today. In some parlours managers insist on no condoms, demand that a client with a suspected disease be serviced, and expect every request by clients be met in a kind of "the customer is always right" attitude. But the experienced prostitute will not tolerate such dictates, and even the less experienced who may be persuaded to take a chance without a condom or with a suspected infectious client would rather leave the job than have to do a sexual act which is personally unpalatable. In this respect work reflects private sexual tastes, for these same distasteful acts are usually also avoided in private or social sex as well. Tables 4.7A and 4.7B contain lists of services offered or rejected by prostitutes in this study.
The services most acceptable to the prostitute sample are "Part French and sex", "sex (coitus)", "hand jobs", "threesomes and doubles" and "full French", while those most often rejected are "Greek", "heavy bondage", "sexual surrogate work", "kissing", "buck's parties" and "medium bondage". Interestingly, up to two decades ago Sydney prostitutes refused to offer French at all. The women expressed disgust at its suggestion and took affirmative action if the subject was raised. Lisa, who worked in the lanes in the 1960s, told me that at that time the guys just asked for straight sex and nothing else, no oral or anything, and if they did they would have got their heads kicked in. One girl got caught doing oral when I was on College Street (1950s) and she was smashed and left lying in the gutter.
There was a general attitude among prostitutes then that fellatio was somehow perverted and dirty. This was a curious response in Australia, for as Kinsey and his colleagues (1953, p. 258) point out for American women generally in the 1940s, two-thirds of the younger better educated females who had extensive coital experience had practised oral sex on men. This recalls Laura's comment earlier (p. 205). But one has the feeling that in private, oral sex with Australian couples was practised much more frequently than was publicly communicated prior to the 1970s. In the early 1970s American researcher Morton Hunt (1974) conducted a survey for Playboy magazine to update the Kinsey data. He found that fellatio had increased among married couples considerably since the 1940s and was performed more frequently in the middle class than the working class. In her study of clients of call girls in New York, Martha Stein (1974) found that 83 per cent requested fellatio. But American prostitutes offer and perform fellatio or "full French" much more frequently than Australian prostitutes, and reserve coitus for special clients or services. By the 1970s oral sex had become a standard practice in the parlours. Since the idea of "massage parlours" as clandestine brothels was imported from America, it is also possible that French came with them as a basic service. The older Sydney prostitutes who had resisted fellatio for so long were forced to conform or go out of business. Sharleen, a worker of 30 years, took a long time before she could cope with offering fellatio, and then did so only to compete with her younger rivals:
It's only recently (1980s) that I've done French. Before that no amount of money would have persuaded me to do it. But, as they say, if you can't beat them then join them.
The same sentiments expressed by the older workers towards oral sex in the 1960s is today expressed towards anal sex. As Table 4.7B indicates, Greek is one of the most abhorred of sexual practices for the women. Yet, according to many prostitutes, the demand for it has increased throughout the 1980s. It is in the same position as fellatio was twenty years earlier, and, as with the women then, prostitutes nowadays view it as degrading, depraved and dirty. Reasons often given for rejecting it are, it hurts, it is exclusively a homosexual act, the rectum is for faeces only, and it is associated with AIDS. But, as with fellatio, if anal sex grows in popularity generally it will spread as a regular service in commercial sex, for, contrary to popular opinion, prostitution follows sexual trends rather than initiates them.
The same might be said of heavy bondage, which, at the moment, is almost exclusively offered by mistresses in bondage houses. If it grows in demand as an alternative to sex which transmits body fluids, it may be offered eventually by the very same women who now find it too repulsive.
I asked some of the women who were not bondage mistresses if they offered bondage services in the course of their work. Kelly, the streetwalker answered:
I'm not into bondage very much at all. I do basics, straight sex and part French. I don't go into very many different kinds of positions. If I don't like doing things I won't do them. I couldn't do B & D anyway. I couldn't see myself being cruel to someone, because it's not in my nature.
Maggie's aversion to bondage was due to its association to a part of her past private life:
I'm not capable of bondage because of the violent undertones in my own marriage. I don't like violence in any form, even as symbolic violence.
Laura is more flexible, but even so she puts a limitation on it:
I get requests for golden showers, for instance, but most simply ask for it on the phone and then not turn up. If somebody did turn up and really wanted it, well, I wouldn't do it on the desk. But I would do it in the shower. I don't do heavy bondage, and I won't do submissive work. I get a lot of calls for B & D, but I'll say to them: "I will do domination on you, but I won't allow myself to be tied up."
Caroline is the exact opposite:
Heavy bondage has never come up, but they can do it to me at $100 a pop. It wouldn't worry me at all if it meant drawing my own blood, but I couldn't draw their blood.
Katherine finds it all a bit embarrassing:
I've tried tying them up but I can't take it seriously. There's one guy around here who likes tying the girls up and that's all a bit of a joke too.
The common belief that prostitutes will do anything if the fee is high enough seems far from the truth.
Of the other services rejected by most of the prostitutes buck's parties are avoided because the drunken, loutish behaviour usually associated with these male social events repel most women. Sexual surrogate work is rejected but not because patients are handicapped (in fact, many prostitutes have physically impaired, paraplegics and quadriplegics among their regular clients) but because this kind of work doesn't pay well and the prostitute has to work in an atmosphere of condescending medical staff.
There is a strong indication in all of this that prostitution is not quite as mechanical as many prostitutes claim, for their personal feelings, tolerances and intolerances appear impossible to separate entirely from their working environment. The outcome is individual responses to the sex industry by the women involved in it. The individual responses from the sample group have been combined into a list of major positive and negative reactions. The women were asked what aspects they most liked about prostitution, and what they most disliked.
Nearly all of the prostitutes thought that the financial outcome working in the sex industry was an aspect they most liked. But freedom and flexibility were also high on the list, as was also the camaraderie between the women. Nearly a third found prostitution important for self-evaluation. On the other hand, popular notions of prostitution as sexually fulfilling for the women and as a sexual meeting ground for developing relationships with men do not rate high as positive aspects among the prostitutes. It is no surprise to discover earning power to be so popular, but the importance of female companionship, as pointed out earlier is a highly underrated aspect of female prostitution by outsiders.
For Caroline, prostitution has developed an improved self-identity:
It was the best thing I have ever done, because it has developed a strong character in me. Before prostitution I was just another clinging, obsessive female. Now, I am my own person, independent.
Martine found it gave her greater confidence and higher self esteem:
When I started working I was actually quite frightened of men. Whenever I found myself in a room alone with a strange man I'd get scared. It was an awful feeling and I think most women have it. To be scared most of the time, to live in fear is not a good feeling. Now I'm no longer frightened of men and I'm learning a lot about them. I mean they are no longer as mysterious nor as revolting as I imagined them to be. When they come into the parlour they tell us these terrible secrets about themselves and sometimes they are extraordinarily honest, so that you really get to know these men on a very intimate level very quickly. I love my work because it has given me confidence to communicate with men and it has taken away my fear of them. I'm not afraid of them any more. It's the best thing that has ever happened to me. It's also given me confidence physically and I'm no longer self-conscious about my body. It doesn't worry me that I'm not perfect and I really do think that I'm attractive to some men but not to others, whereas before I use to have this very bad physical self-image.
Cassandra finds freedom and independence in the East Sydney brothels suitable to her role as a prostitute:
I like my freedom, particularly where I've not had to work for someone else. I don't have to pay protection money, or any shift money as some of the girls do in their places, and I don't have to pay out half my earnings like you do in the parlours. My girlfriend and I share everything: the rent, the phone, electricity and gas. I like the hours and we can come and go as we please. This way I am independent.
Street worker Kelly shares her sentiment about independence:
What I like about what I do now is I can start work when I want to and finish when I want to. I am virtually an independent person. I don't have to put up with half the things I would if I was in a parlour. Not only independence, but the money's better on the street. Overall, prostitution offers me much more money than I could get anywhere else, and the hours are more flexible than in any other kind of job.
For "call girl" Laura, prostitution has given her a jet-set standard of living:
I greatly enjoy my freedom. By freedom, I mean not so much on a daily basis, but on a yearly basis. If I want to go somewhere for a month, I can just go. I am not tied to five weeks annual holiday. I can just choof off and go when I like and for as long as I like. It has allowed me to travel and I've travelled a lot due to prostitution. When I travel to Europe I can go to an apartment with two girls working in it for a week. I only need two days in that place and I've got $ 1,000. If I work there a week I can travel freely anywhere afterwards. That's what I enjoy most about prostitution.
These few examples probably reflect the sentiments of many prostitutes. Martine's discovery that her role as a sex worker enabled her to overcome her fear of men is a common experience with prostitutes. It is the first step to controlling the situation in prostitution. The popular concept that prostitutes are entirely under the control of the clients' demands is another example of the mythology surrounding the sex industry. In the individual interaction of prostitute and client, in fact, it is the prostitute who establishes the boundary of behaviour; the client simply announces his request, and if acceptable to the prostitute, she then sets the limits within her framework of convention. In some respects the client-prostitute interaction is reminiscent of the early stages of ordinary courtship, when social convention demands that the female stabilises the pace of the sexual process in the romance in order to avoid sexual anarchy. Yet, of course, as in ordinary romance, it can sometimes go awfully wrong, resulting in violence. But in the majority of instances the prostitute controls the situation. As Laura expresses it: "I can always rush them if I want to or I can allow them to stay longer". June, a woman with a strong feminist consciousness, discovered where the myths end:
You do have a degree of autonomy in prostitution, which actually surprised me. Within that whole realm of men selecting women with its notion of female passivity, there is a strong input of sexual control by the women.
Zoe is another prostitute with a feminist perspective who found sex work to be very different to gender relations in everyday life:
They are paying for you, so you can demand what you want and don't want; no you can't kiss me, no you can't do that, time's up, whatever. In my personal experiences I found it was a total role reversal to the usual positions of power and dominance by men with women subservient to them. I gained a lot of confidence out of it.
Once more, women in prostitution are seen to have gained from their experience with the result that their relationships with males generally change thereafter; their perspectives of male sexuality becomes more realistic; and their position in gender relations is empowered; or as Maggie summarises: "You can control everything yourself". To return to Martine, in the dungeon her initial loss of fear of men had a very positive outcome for her in her working relations:
I couldn't believe that I would have the opportunity to vent my anger upon men, to harness them, and act violent towards them, as they had towards me in the past. Although men are not subjected to my outrage unwillingly, and the power relations in bondage have false parameters, most of the time it is the inverse of how it operates outside and it gives you an opportunity to be in a powerful position as a woman, which hardly ever happens in straight society.
These are the more positive aspects of sex work. There are also many negative aspects, as Table 4.9 shows.
The highest rated dislike is having sex with men not liked. This, at first glance, might seem to contradict the above discussion on power in prostitution and women in control, because, if a woman has so much control, why does she put up with men she doesn't like? But in the practical transactions of commercial sex, if a woman chose to see only those clients she intuitively liked she would soon be out of business. Pragmatically she must endure disagreeable men to survive, but she can restrict them much more than pleasant men, for whom she might provide privileges such as kissing, staying a little longer, an extra drink, or extending her usual boundaries on behaviour. Of course, in a parlour there is less opportunity to pick and choose clients because of management scrutiny, but even independent "call girls" and streetwalkers have to put up with unpleasant men. But this is usually relative to the level of business, so that prostitutes can afford to be more choosey when business is booming.
A third of the women find it distasteful simply having sex with men unknown to them. Most non-prostitute women would probably find that to be one of the most repulsive aspects of sex work. June agrees with them, but manages by being objective: "I just basically want to get on with it, fuck with them, and get it over and done with."
Boredom and bitchiness are usually associated with brothel work, but in slow times an idle "call girl" or streetwalker might also express boredom as an unpleasant aspect. Staff conflicts in a brothel, as already discussed (p. 241), are destructive to the work environment, often driving a former brothel worker into private prostitution or onto the streets. But the streets are not necessarily devoid of tensions between workers, although a pair of incompatible streetwalkers have a much better opportunity to avoid one another than two women hostile to one another on the same shift in a brothel.
It may surprise some readers, in view of earlier comments, to find that problems with the boss have such a low priority. But this reflects the fact that industrial conflicts are not a frequent experience in the sex industry, and most of the time harmony between bosses and workers prevails. The same might be said of problems with police. This response, however, is made by women in Sydney, where few laws are available to harass them with. This priority undoubtedly would be higher in more legally oppressive climates, and higher still had the investigation been conducted in the midst of a police blitz.
Much more of a concern to most prostitutes are problems with their clients. More than bosses and policemen, clients can make working in prostitution an extremely unpleasant experience, because interactions with customers are much more frequent than with the boss and police, and, it seems, there are many more unpleasant clients than tyrannical bosses. Many men who visit brothels have a deep seated misogyny, or are as much influenced by the negative social attitudes towards prostitutes as the rest of the population. As Kelly remarks:
A lot of people have a tendency to put us down, particularly males who visit us. They're hypocrites because deep down they need us, but won't admit it.
Over a third of the prostitutes demonstrate a high concern for the violence in prostitution. This is not to suggest that all of these women have been victims of violence, but reveals a level of conscious awareness of it as a potential problem. What it does clearly indicate is the extent of violence from men that plagues many sex workers.
Violence, misogyny, hypocrisy are but the outward signs of the social stigma aimed at prostitutes. As Table 4.9 clearly indicates, if it isn't the highest concern of prostitutes, the social stigma is an aspect of prostitution which most of the women dislike. For Laura, it is her only real problem:
What I don't like is that prostitution is not socially acceptable. I feel that is the only thing I dislike about it. I can't tell people what I do as a job without a bad reaction.
So, we see that for prostitutes, sex work is a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant experiences. In a relaxed legal climate such as New South Wales there is one solution to an unpleasant working environment: change jobs. Kelly moved from the little brothels of East Sydney to a parlour, back to the little brothels, and then finally onto the streets in a bid to improve her working conditions:
I left the East Sydney brothels to work in the parlours because winter was coming on and I didn't fancy standing in the open doorway in a short skirt. But I didn't like the parlour I went to work in because their rules and regulations were a bit heavy. It's not that I can't abide by rules and regulations, but when you consider that we girls were doing all the work and the owners were getting half our earnings, having to start at a particular time, finish at a particular time, can't do this, must do that, you have to see everybody, and don't force them to wear a French letter. That was the worst part. I ended up getting gonorrhoea twice because of the doctor visiting the parlour being so slack. I never had a disease in all those years in East Sydney. I had seven weeks off before I started back working in a brothel in Palmer Street. But it was closed down by the City Council a few weeks later. I went into a brothel in Riley Street, but that got closed down a couple of weeks later. Next I went into a brothel in Bourke Street and was there only two months when it was closed down as well. So, the only alternative for me was the streets.
Kelly's response to street working can be seen on page 15. It proved to be the best of her various working environments.
Working in prostitution doesn't last forever. Some women only intend doing it for a limited time, to pay off a debt, to "try it out" or "until something better comes along". The "something better" can be a well-paid job, or "love and marriage". A few women leave the streets or brothel to be supported by a "sugar daddy", but if they think they have stopped prostitution they need to analyse their situation more honestly. Then there are the career prostitutes who have been working for a decade or two. Some of them will retire as prostitutes and then use their experience to get a job as a parlour receptionist. The more frugal among them will have enough capital to open up a brothel or buy an existing parlour business. But very few prostitutes end up owners themselves. For someone like Sharleen, after nearly 30 years as a prostitute:
I'd like to live a normal life and go out to a restaurant every now and again. I've very simple needs really: I just want the house and my husband's business paid off.
Maggie regrets the day she must retire:
As long as I can. I'm now 40 and I thought I would have given up by now, but here I am. I suppose as long as I can still enjoy it. But even after I do give up work I'd like to be involved at some level.
It is likely that Maggie will manage a small private concern in the future since she was acting manager as well as a worker at the time of our interview. For many prostitutes the prospects of losing the pleasure they derive from commercial sex is a sobering consideration. Twenty-six year old Martine is a case in point:
I'd like to think I could work for another ten years. I enjoy it and as long as I continue to do so, and as long as I can cope with management, I don't think I should give it up.
Although the pleasure aspect might be a motive to work as long as they can for some women, others regret having to leave prostitution because it signals the end of youth and perhaps a symbolic decline in male attention. Others aspire for the "yuppie" ideal. Caroline:
I would work until I'm 35 [in seven years]. Hopefully I'll have a terrace house with a sports car out the front, a child, a couple of dogs and cats, and be a housewife. I would provide the sports car, the furniture, the child and the animals. He can provide the house; that's his job.
Laura is undecided about her future, but she nurtures a pragmatic notion of somehow continuing her jet-set lifestyle with or without the sex work:
I don't think it's something you plan, but maybe in five years I'd like to get married and have babies. Idealistically that's what I'd like, but then I don't know how I'll feel when I'm 37. 1 can only know how I feel at 32 looking ahead. But I like my freedom too. Now I can pay for a sudden trip overseas when I want to. I like my little adventure trips. Because I'm used to that and I'm independent, I would find it difficult to tie myself down to one person. The only way I would make a compromise is if he could give me the life I'm accustomed to. Instead of X number of men to get what I wanted, if one man could supply me the same I'd give up prostitution. I'm at a stage in my life when I enjoy travelling and adventure and whether this is achieved through prostitution, a career in photography [an expertise she has] or one man is immaterial.
Laura's reminiscences are a "nutshell" summary of the nature of prostitution. It is the best economic purpose for these women in the pursuit of their contentment and social goals.
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