Europeans Confused About Sex,
Say Migrant Prostitutes

From the point of view of many Third World migrant prostitutes, Europeans are confused about sex. At tourism sites away from home, Europeans seem sophisticated about the possibilities of holiday sex and affection, and many invite new friends or facilitate trips to Europe to work. European embassies grant hundreds of visas every day for 'artists' and 'dancers', knowing the work will be in the sex industry. Yet once in Europe, migrants find that, despite abundant opportunities to work--meaning their services are desired--they themselves are despised, pitied and harassed, often more than they would be at home. What is the problem? Why do Europeans help them come over only to demonise, chase and deport them? Why do police harry sex workers and not clients? Why do so many people give out condoms, as if prostitutes didn't know what they were for? Why can't anyone help with what's really important--becoming 'legal' to live and work? Wasn't Europe supposed to be more advanced and sensible than Third World countries?

More working people are making the trip to Europe all the time. For poorer Third World women, the jobs available at home are often domestic and sexual. Since the same two jobs are available in Europe and paid much better, travelling makes sense. Better wages mean the possibility of helping parents, sending a child to school, building a house or starting a business. But economic factors are only part of the story; others include the desire to see famous places, be a dancer, be admired, meet new people, marry. These are the dreams of poorer girls from cultures around the world, including of European girls. Valerie Walkerdine has criticised British middle-class horror at juvenile talent contests, noting that singing and dancing talents are among the few from which working-class girls have not automatically been excluded. This is precisely the situation of women from poorer countries who travel to Europe. Understanding there will be a sexual aspect to their work they also understand they are being granted visas and work contracts as dancers and artists, and they feel themselves to be dancers and artists.

Once they arrive, they are usually overwhelmed with problems stemming from the precious documents that got them here. Illegal or quasi-legal, based on spurious or false information, these papers put migrant workers in the power of entrepreneurs and police. Sex workers talk constantly about how to become 'legal' but they also talk about all normal topics--where to live, what to eat, how to use the metro, where to shop, which hair salon to use, the oddities of other languages, how to get health care for children and the news from home. For most, the way they are making money is not the central issue, whether it is enjoyed, despised or merely preferred to other options. If they are unlucky and their situation turns out to be bad once in Europe, they still want to stay, earn money, pay off debts and make the trip worthwhile. Avoiding the police and looking for better jobs, they often move from country to country. Families, friends, entrepreneurs and criminals offer the services they need: documents, rides, introductions and hiding places. "Prostitution", therefore, is not an interesting or necessarily relevant subject to prostitutes; the important thing is that millions pay for sexual services every day.

Europeans, on the other hand, have focussed for more than a century on prostitution as an isolated, two-party, sex-for-money transaction situated in the social margins. Medical, socio/criminological and psychological discourses have been fixated on prostitutes rather than clients, on women rather than men, on individuals rather than families or communities and on particular body parts rather than whole persons. For Third World prostitutes, the result is that NGOs, feminists and governments relentlessly construct them as objects who are talked about, moved about, pitied and seen as needing 'help'. Clients continue to abound, and businesspeople to facilitate jobs. Yet a competing discourse--that of the social control and exclusion of illegals and other 'undesirables'-- chases and deports them out of Europe. No wonder many migrants say Europeans are confused--they certainly are confusing.

Many Euramerican feminists compete and argue among themselves about how best to help prostitutes. The problem with this impulse to help can be seen as far back as Josephine Butler's famous comment that if she were a prostitute she would be crying all day. Present-day feminist abolitionists continue this projection of their own ideology of sex onto all other women, assuming they know where lies some true, essential, correct pleasure. Prostitutes' rights feminists instead focus on issues of identity, converting prostitutes into sex workers in order to empower them. All these 'helping' strategies involve much talking, writing and trying to influence government policy. But migrants themselves tend to be uninterested in these debates if they even hear about them.

Visitors to European sexwork sites sometimes talk as though migrant prostitutes had been carrying water on their heads only yesterday, while most have lived in large cities in their own countries. 'Pimps' and 'traffickers' are seen as controlling them completely and clients as abusers and 'orientalisers.' Postcolonial feminists have criticised this tendency to infantilise Third World women, to construct them as 'traditional', 'domestic', backward and generally in need of help. Consistently agency and power are taken from these subjects, making them passive victims of imperialism, development and violent men.

But these prostitutes don't usually see themselves as permanent victims until they are taught to by outsiders. Many feel they are passing through a bad moment which they are trying to improve, and not necessarily by getting out of prostitution. Their priority is rather being less vulnerable to people who want to control them. Feminists who insist on telling them they are victims of life's worst experience are assumed to be unfamiliar with other jobs available to poor women, like domestic service, cleaning toilets and caring for other people's babies and elderly relatives. The essentialising of prostitution as a sex act completely overlooks its many other aspects, such as flexible schedules, instant cash, and the possibility of supporting one's own elderly relatives and babies, not to mention pleasures like travel and being admired and desired.

Why aren't migrant prostitutes seen as working class? Why aren't they included in studies of transnational diaspora? The disempowering excuse usually given says it is 'stigmatising' to talk about people as prostitutes at all, which disappears them from discourses where their experiences should be central. And facilitates the continuing construction of migrant prostitution where it's been for more than a century: in the European margins.

Laura María Agustín
Connexions for Migrants

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