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On the game: women and sex work

Prostitution has always been accompanied by a social stigma that has marginalised sex workers. On the Game seeks to de-stigmatise sex workers on the various levels in which they are discriminated against by society and by the state in public and in private. In its accounts of women’s agency and aspirations, the book offers an alternative to the mainstream ideology of the prostitute as victim. The book provides an in-depth analysis of sex workers’ lives based on an ethnographic study of prostitution in London undertaken from 1986 to 1993 and during a follow-up study in 1997–2000. Sophie Day is a Professor in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has over 20 years of experience in medical anthropology. She utilises interviews from her fieldwork, legal history, personal observation from her clinical experiences and academic sources to describe how sex workers balance their public and private lives within societal boundaries. In the introduction, the term ‘prostitute’ is placed into context. Prostitute, within the UK, is understood as a (female) person who uses her body for common use and can therefore also be regarded as a ‘common woman’ (1). The common woman, unlike the common man, lacks decency by making a private act a public affair. This introduction takes the reader’s possible biases into account in preparation for an alternative approach to understanding the lives and choices of sex workers. On the Game is divided into two parts. The first five chapters are empirically based accounts of sex workers’ attitudes toward work, the market, law, medicine, the state and civil society. For many sex workers, drawing a clear distinction between work and personal life is a primary difficulty. The concept of ‘simply work’ is explored through sex workers’ rituals of cleanliness that distinguish work from sex – the latter being generally reserved for relationships. Mandatory condom use, excessive douching with detergents, genital inspections and the use of separate towels for clients were examples offered to portray the ultra-hygienic sex worker. Day even refers to sex workers being like health workers in the way that they inspect and educate their clients. A certain lack of an emotional component to the sex in sex work further reveals the commodification of the body in a sale similar to that of blood, sperm, ova or organs; that lack also helps combat the idea that these sex workers are selling themselves. Despite the workers’ attempts to separate public and private lifestyles, Day’s research participants argued that the state makes such a separation impossible. Many participants considered their work as informal rather than illegal and, therefore, they opposed state interference. For example, these sex workers claimed that because they were not victims of a crime, state laws were not created to protect them, but implemented to limit their mobility and force them to conform to the mainstream. They offered as examples the state’s ‘anti-pimping’ law, which prohibits them from living with a partner, and the antitrafficking laws, which result in frequent raiding of their homes. One woman explained