Male Sex Work in the Digital Age: Curated Lives

150 Pages·2019·1.649 MB·English

by  Paul Ryan

Male Sex Work
in the Digital Age
Curated Lives
Male Sex Work in the Digital Age
Paul Ryan
Male Sex Work
in the Digital Age
Curated Lives
Paul Ryan
Maynooth University
Maynooth, Ireland
ISBN 978-3-030-11796-2 ISBN 978-3-030-11797-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11797-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018968341
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
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Acknowledgements
I was fortunate to receive assistance and support from many people
during the completion of this book. I want to thank all the men who
trusted me with their stories included in this book, particularly at a time
when sex workers remain subject to stigma and criminalisation. Thanks
to Amelia Derkatsch at Palgrave. Thanks to Sex Workers Alliance
Ireland for their support and my colleagues from COST Action IS1209
‘Comparing European Prostitution Policies: Understanding Scales and
Cultures of Governance’ 2013–2017. Thanks to my colleagues in the
Department of Sociology and the Maynooth University Social Sciences
Institute (MUSSI). Special thanks to my family and friends. This book
is dedicated to my brother, Dermot Ryan, and is in memory of Laura
Lee (1979–2018).
v
Contents
1 The Changing World of Online Male Sex Work 1
2 Discipline and Desire in the Pursuit of Physical Capital 29
3 Grindr, Hybridisation and the Life a Pop-Up Escort 57
4 Instagram, Micro-Celebrity and the World of Intimate
Strangers 95
5 Netporn and the Amateur Turn on OnlyFans 119
6 Conclusion: The Governance of Male Sex Work
in Digital Cultures 137
Index 143
vii
1
The Changing World of Online
Male Sex Work
Abstract In this introductory chapter Ryan sets out five developments
that have had a direct impact on the growing importance of new social
media in understanding transformations within male sex work. These
are (1) the normalization of the sex industry (2) the rise of new social
media (3) micro-celebrity and self-branding (4) fetishising and racial-
ising muscular bodies in erotic labour, and (5) the gig economy. The
chapter concludes with a discussion of the historical and political con-
text of sex work in Ireland and abroad.
Keywords Sex industry · Celebrity · Bodies · Gig economy · Male sex
work
Introduction
I was waiting for an appearance on a current affairs television pro-
gramme, when the host, Vincent Browne, came to greet me. After
the briefest of pleasantries, Browne told me that he thought that men
who bought sex from women were clearly pathological. This was, ‘not
© The Author(s) 2019 1
P. Ryan, Male Sex Work in the Digital Age,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11797-9_1
2 P. Ryan
in dispute’ I was told. It was an ominous start. I had been asked on
the programme to discuss a proposal put forward by a parliamentary
sub-committee that would criminalise the purchase of sex. However, a
discussion of the proposal did not happen. The debate, with the chief
executive of an organisation that supports the exit of women from
prostitution,1 settled into a familiar routine. I spoke of the complexity
within sex work and the absence of any carceral, magic bullet solution
that could address the structural inequalities of those lives. I was told,
in line with a neo-abolitionist approach to prostitution (Barry 1995;
O’Connor and Healy 2006), that trafficking and violence were indistin-
guishable from sex work. Consent was deemed irrelevant, men who buy
sex were pathological and those that sold sex were statistically irrelevant.
Men who sell sex are not irrelevant though. I had interviewed male
sex workers since 2009, and there was an existing body of research
that had explored their experiences for over twenty years. I knew the
circumstances of their consent were important and that their removal
from public debate, while convenient politics, may have a detrimen-
tal outcome on the targeted provision of services that addressed their
health and safety. Male or trans sex workers represented 9% of all
commercial sex transactions in Ireland (Maginn and Ellison 2014).
The research I undertook for this book suggested that the impact of
migration and the use of new digital cultures had transformed male
sex work. My interviews with eighteen Brazilian and Venezuelan men
engaged in commercial sex while living in Dublin revealed the extent
of that transformation, through innovative ways in which they have
harnessed their micro-celebrity on new social media to broadcast mon-
etised content on video sharing platforms. These men curate different
digital selves that are tailored for specific audiences on apps like Grindr,
Instagram, Twitter and Tinder. In this book, I concentrate on Grindr
and Instagram. Both offer an insight into two digital lives; one transi-
tory and opportunistic (Grindr), the other a more intimate and per-
manent biography (Instagram). Their involvement in sex work remains
ambiguous across both platforms. My interviewees speak about what
they do, not about who they are. They are not sex work rights activ-
ists. However, they also seek no rescue, redemption or exit prom-
ised by NGOs committed to the abolition of prostitution. Some men
1 The Changing World of Online Male Sex Work 3
strongly dislike sex work. Others are actively shaping a range of online
sex work practices that best suit the circumstances of their lives. There
are no happy hooker tropes here. They are charting a way through the
discourses of coercion and rights. They are reluctant to advertise sexual
services on exclusively escort sites, like rentboy.com and later rentmen.
eu.2 Rather their potential clients read and decipher photos, emoji and
text on Grindr or join thousands of other followers on Instagram, where
they are invited to interact and proceed to access monetised content or
arrange face-to-face meetings.3 It was clear from the outset of this book
that the lived realities and experiences of men in sex work bore little
resemblance to the legal and political discourses that framed the debate.
Five developments have encouraged the movement of male sex work
further within the digital cultures of new social media. These are impor-
tant to understand the structure and stories within this book.
1. The Normalisation of the Sex Industry
This study was undertaken within a context of the ongoing normal-
isation of the sex industry. This development has a number of facets.
There has been a documented increased visibility of adult entertain-
ment industries throughout cities in Europe, driven by local govern-
ance laws and sex-related tourism (Hubbard et al. 2008: 376). This
tourism, combined with a growth in the leisure industry, technology
and changing consumer patterns has contributed to this increased
visibility of sexual commerce, blurring the boundaries between
mainstream industries (Brents and Sanders 2010: 376; Sanders et al.
2018: 2). This normalisation is particularly evident in relation to
male sex work. Later in this chapter, I discuss how the social mean-
ings attached to male prostitution have changed over history, where
it was the association with homosexuality and class transgression that
located the practice within a deviancy perspective (MacPhail et al.
2015: 485). The aspirations of the post decriminalisation gay move-
ment were forged under unique economic circumstances that saw
Ireland emerge as the clearest example of small country liberalism
in Europe (Ó Riain 2014: 9). Pro-market reforms combined with
a leaner government and a ‘privatized economy’ could now coexist
with a politics of identity and equality. In Ireland and other liberal
4 P. Ryan
economies, issue of care and social reproduction continued to be
privatised or to be deemed the personal responsibility of families or
wider civil society. Under such a framework, I argue that liberalism
needed to ‘create’ new families to share the burden of this redistri-
bution of social costs leading to broad political support for gay mar-
riage, successfully passed by referendum in 2015. Male sex work has
been a beneficiary of this legislative success, where men have been
afforded greater agency and respectability for their sexual entrepre-
neurship, in sharp contrast to the exclusively coercive portrayal of
female workers. Male sex work has benefited from the technological
revolution that has dramatically reduced the existence of street work,
increasing the number of middle-class workers attracted by greater
privacy, safety and flexibility from working at home (McLean 2013).
In Chapter 3, I argue that it is within this technology, like the dating
app Grindr that male sex work has become the most visible, blurring
boundaries between economic and physical capital in sex, dating and
relationships. In this reimagining of intimate relationships, distin-
guishing between those who possess agency and power with coercion
and victimhood becomes a more nuanced endeavour.
2. The Rise of New Social Media Applications
New social media has become an important site where individuals
construct, reimagine and perform identities to audiences in late mod-
ern societies. While previously associated with social networking sites
like Facebook, where the impetus was to connect to other users (Van
Dijck 2013), a visual turn in society and social media specifically, has
created platforms less about sharing content, and more about per-
forming identities through consumption (Walsh and Baker 2017).
Social media users communicate taste, cultural capital and self-dis-
cipline through their consumption to an increasingly diverse group
of followers that is maintained and grown through the judicious use
of hashtags (Page 2012). Instagram, the photo and video sharing
app founded in 2010 is leading the way in this visual turn, reporting
1 billion monthly users in 2018.4 I argue that material, especially
self-photography or selfies, uploaded on Instagram and Grindr are
the raw material of digital identities and have become an exchange
currency of both the validation and domination of others who fail