Susan Strega

Never Innocent Victims Street Sex Workers in Canadian Print Media

Over the past decade, street sex workers and their families garnered considerable media attention through extensive coverage of disappeared and murdered women in Western Canada. The research presented here examines whether recent media accounts differ from past coverage given that families and friends of disappeared and unaccounted for women inserted themselves into media discussions and circulated alternative readings of their stories. We found that coverage was dominated by two discourses: Vermin-victim discourse demonstrates the tensions between historically dominant conceptualizations and more recent ideas promulgated by families; and risky lifestyle discourse is related to neo-liberal ideologies about personal choice and responsibility.

The PEERS Story Effective Services Sidestep the Controversies

This article is based on the findings of three community action research projects conducted by one of the authors (Rabinovitch) in collaboration with sex trade workers in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, from 1996 to 2001. As a result of these efforts, the Prostitutes’ Empowerment, Education and Resource Society (PEERS) developed as a successful programmatic and policy response to sex trade work. PEERS’s success stems in part from the degree to which sex trade workers are involved in the planning, development, and delivery of its programs and services and in part from sidestepping the controversies that destroyed many sex trade worker organizations.

“I Wanted to Feel Like a Man Again”: Hegemonic Masculinity in Relation to the Purchase of Street-Level Sex

This paper examines the narratives of men who purchase sex from street level providers in a mid-sized city in Western Canada. We explore what men’s stories tell us about how masculinity is constructed in relation to street sex work. These men narrated their purchase of sex as attempts to exercise or lay claim to male power, privilege, and authority; at the same time, research reveals how tenuous this arrangement is for men. Study participants drew on conventional heterosexual masculine scripts to rationalize their actions and behaviors. Their stories reveal that their purchase of street-level sex is motivated by a sense of failure to successfully align with classed and gendered norms of hegemonic masculinity in which the purchase of sex was an attempt to “feel like a man again”. In this paper we move beyond the notion that static “types” of men purchase sex, highlighting instead that sex work customers are complex social actors with multifaceted reasons for purchasing sex but that are nonetheless inseparable from socially valorized forms of masculine comportment. We conclude that hegemonic masculinity is not only injurious to some men, but also to the sex workers on whom it is enacted.