Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

A 16 minute read.

The sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein did fieldwork with sex workers in San Francisco between 1994 and 1998.[1] By her estimate, 20% of sex workers in the city in 1994 worked on the streets. Four years later, 2% of sex workers walked the streets and 98% worked indoors. The city had been ‘cleaned up’. But there were more sex workers, they were often well educated, they made more money, and they were providing an emotionally different kind of sex.   

San Francisco is a special case, in that the neoliberal changes to sex work starter earlier than in other places and went further. The reason was Silicon Valley. The centre of Silicon Valley is Palo Alto, 3o miles south of San Francisco. But the influence of the new software industries there transformed the larger city.

Silicon Valley was part of an international industry that linked the United States and China. At first sight, it might look as if the US deindustrialized and China industrialized. But what happened was a bit different. The new high-tech industries were global. The most expensive parts, the most high-value, were in designing and developing new machines and in writing the more complex software. This work was done primarily in the United States, much of it in silicon value. Many of the workers were low paid, but many others were highly educated, highly paid and often immigrant professionals.

The other essential half of the industry was building the chips and assembling the hardware. Most of this work was done in the Global South, and in China more than anyone else. So if you looked at the number of industrial workers in high-tech, as usually defined, most of them were in China. But if you looked at the total pay of all workers and professionals in high-tech, a solid proportion were in the United States.

What happened to sex work in San Francisco, and then across the United States, reflected the dominance of the professionals in the American half of the global industry.

With the explosion of the dotcom boom in the 1990s, rents and house prices in the city exploded too. San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area around had long been home to red labour unions, Berkeley student radicals, Height Ashbury hippies, the beats, the Black Panthers and gay liberation. San Francisco is now Upper Class Central. Teachers, plumbers, bus drivers and data entry operatives can no longer rent or buy homes there.

In the 1990s it was also becoming an upmarket tourist destination with expensive hotels. Those hotels were near the Tenderloin and the Mission district, the traditional skid row and red-light areas. The hotel owners wanted to ‘clean up’ and gentrify those neighbourhoods. So did the business owners in the area, the new resident gentry, and the CEOs in Silicon Valley.

The city put together a Task Force that included business leaders, politicians, feminists and sex workers. (This was San Francisco, but the sex workers on the Task Force were educated indoor workers). Everyone was careful to make clear the Task Force was not trying to stigmatise anyone. They were just going to drive sex work indoors.

As the Task Force reported, the police drove the women and men off the streets. About a third of these street sex workers were men. Of course San Francisco has long been a gay mecca, but men have always been a significant proportion of street workers in most big American cities. They are just less noticed, unless you are looking for them, and they figure much less in public controversies.

The police arrested women and men over and over again. Street working women had long been afraid of pimps, and more afraid of clients. But standing on the street with them, Bernstein saw that they were even more afraid of the police, and much more obsequious. Now the pressure from the police was unrelenting.

The neighbours were a big problem too. The 1980s had seen the rise of ‘broken windows’ policing, the idea that cops could clean up a neighbourhood not just by arresting flagrant criminals, but by coming down hard on small infractions like breaking windows. The sociologist James Q. Wilson was the most influential proponent of these ideas. Wilson was clear in his seminal (and we do mean seminal) 1982 article: ‘Prostitutes are among the disorderly – they are among the disreputable or obstreperous people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers . . . loiterers, the mentally disturbed.’[2]

That association between street workers and disorder was already well established by the 1990s on the Tenderloin. Bernstein says that made a big difference because although the whore stigma

was a constant for streetwalkers, it worsened in scope and intensity precisely during the period when ‘quality of life’ campaigns in the neighbourhood were gathering steam. . . Streetwalkers would increasing describe being followed and harassed by organized groups of neighbourhood residents and business owners such as SOS (Save Our Streets), the Polk Street Merchants Association, and the Guardian Angels. They also described being honked at, pelted with eggs, or ‘tailed’ by residents who hoped to shame them away. One woman [was] shoved so hard by a scoffing passerby that she was propelled through a plate glass window.[3]

The police also arrested thousands of men under a new ordinance that criminalised clients. They were not prosecuted for a first offense but had to spend a day at ‘John School’. Bernstein went to John School, and she talked with the men in the breaks. They told her John School was even worse than Traffic School. A succession of different speakers told them in no uncertain times that the penalty for a second offense would be a trial in open court, and maybe jail time. They were told they were sex addicts, and that they degraded women. And they were encouraged to take their habits indoors, to use massage parlours or masturbate in front of the internet, a newly available option just then. Less than 1 in 500 reoffended.

So in practice almost no men actually faced a courtroom. And almost every man arrested was working class, or a routine white-collar worker. After all, the streets were the bottom 20% of the market. There was nothing in this clean up to threaten the top 80% of clients, which was one of the reasons it worked.

All this was accompanied, of course, by relentless arrests and police bullying of ‘bums’, beggars, panhandlers, drug users, alcoholics, and homeless people in the city centre. They too were cleansed. The city looked good.

INDOOR WORK

Once the streets were cleared, some of the street workers were able to move on to work indoors. Some were not. By and large the more disorganised, the more addicted, and the more desperate – the people who practiced what Bernstein calls ‘survival sex’ – could not make the move. They remained among the approximately 2 percent of sex workers in San Francisco who still tried to make a living on the streets under appalling pressure, or they went on to other fates.[4]

The rest worked indoors. The bottom of this market was massage parlours, almost all in the suburbs, usually small ‘Mom and Pop’ operations. But most sex workers now worked in ways that were being transformed by Silicon Valley, in several ways.

First, women and men worked through the internet. They put up ads on Craigs List and other websites. Sometimes they did ‘call outs’ to hotels or the homes of clients. Sometimes the clients came to the worker’s home.

Some sex workers arranged these appointments through agencies which took a cut. But more and more women and men worked for themselves. This did not mean they worked alone. They needed help from webmasters and drivers.  The webmaster helped with designing and laying out ads for the internet. More important, the webmaster knew how to keep the worker’s ad up towards the top of any list on a website, and how to keep the ad up towards the top of Google.[5]

The webmaster was well paid for all these services, perhaps a fifth or a quarter of the worker’s total income. Because one webmaster could work for many sex workers, their incomes were much higher than those they helped. The webmasters were not arranging the appointments and were not managing the women and men.

Women on their own also employed drivers to deliver them to appointments, wait outside, pick them up afterwards, and respond quickly to a phone call in an emergency. These drivers were often friends of the sex worker, and sometimes lovers. But they were employees, not pimps.

This was individuated work through the internet, neoliberalism with a Silicon Valley twist. The Valley also provided a considerable proportion of the clients, and a large proportion of the best payers. Many executives and well-paid technical professionals were working long hours and making very good money. Increasingly, people of this class were living in single person households, and many wanted sex without entanglements.

They also increasingly wanted a different kind of sex, something that felt more like a date. The streetwalkers Bernstein started her research with had traditional ways of defending themselves from damage to their sense of self. They kept a strict separation between home and work. They worked away from home, often far from home. They dressed differently at home and work. They took a long time to prepare themselves for work, in appearance and emotionally. At work they sold sexual release, but they did not sell their feelings or their sympathy, and they did not kiss on the mouth. It was a transaction. Street workers in many parts of the world have long used similar defences.

Women working on their own, with clients from Silicon Valley or similar professionals, were not keeping to these boundaries. It was still a transaction, but they were selling caring. They often had the men in their own homes, they kissed clients, and they sold empathic listening. As the old Hollywood saying goes, ‘Nothing is more important than sincerity. If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.’

This was of a piece with a larger trend in America towards caring work done outside of the family, by nannies, child minders, therapists, cabin staff, care home workers, and a host of others. This is hard work, particularly the ‘deep caring’ of those who have to provide something like love.[6] It is not possible to do that and keep clear boundaries, as every nanny knows to her cost.

Since 2000 there has been increasing demand across the US for GFE – the Girl Friend Experience.[7] A client in an internet discussion forum explains:

A typical non-GFE session with an escort includes one or more of the basic acts required for the customer to reach a climax at least one time, and little else. A GFE type session, on the other hand, might proceed much like a non-paid encounter between two lovers. This may include a lengthy period of foreplay in which the customer and the escort touch rub, fondle, massage and perhaps even kiss passionately. A GFE session might also include activities where the customer works as hard to stimulate the escort as she works to manipulate him. Finally, a GFE sessions usually has a period of cuddling and closeness at the end of the session, rather than each partner jumping up and hurrying out as soon as the customer is finished.’[8]

As income inequality grew steadily in the wider economy, indoor sex work grew more and more stratified too. Earnings at the top could be a thousand dollars a visit, and more. The visits were longer, though, more like a date than a trick.

There were also more educated women working in the trade. Professional men who had been to Stanford or Berkeley would pay top dollar for women who could look like, dress like, sound like, and make conversation like elite women. That required a great deal of prior education and training – a great deal of ‘cultural capital’.

There were also factors pulling women who could do those things into sex work. One was the very large sums such men were willing to pay. Another was the increasing inequality and the hollowing out of the middle ranks of the labour market.

More and more educated people found the only jobs available to them were jobs they thought were beneath them. They had studied English literature, and now they were a barista. There is a great deal of class condescension in those feelings, but there is also real pain and need. In 2011, many people in this situation would be central to the Occupy movement. And they were central again in the wave of strikes and unionization in Starbucks and other employers after 2020.[9]

Moreover, even in elite universities there is a divide between the students who come from elite families and those who are trying to move up. Tuition had increased greatly, more and more careers required graduate school, and the burden of student loans weighed heavy for years. College graduates from elite families had the contacts and understanding to get good jobs after college. The rest did not.

THE GENTRIFICATION OF STRIPPING

One of those women who needed the money as Katherine Frank was a graduate student in anthropology at Duke University in North Carolina. So she supported herself by working as a stripper in several clubs, and used those jobs as the fieldwork for her PhD thesis.[10]

When Frank went to work in the mid-1990s, American neoliberalism was rapidly transforming stripping work. For most of the twentieth century, strippers had worked in bars, dancing to music on a raised stage in front of an audience of men.

In the mid-1990s stripper bars were replaced by gentlemen’s clubs. In these clubs women began dancing on stage, but then moved onto the floor to dance directly in front of one man who offered a rich tip. At any one time there would be several women, each dancing in front of a different man, and large numbers of men around them, watching the dance. The watching men were excited, but also a bit humiliated. The man paying for the dance felt the power of his money over the women, but also over all the other men watching.

Neoliberalism was lengthening and dragging out, the spectrum of inequality. And neoliberalism was turning a joint masculine activity into an individual one, where each man was measured by his money.

The institution of the ‘gentlemen’s club’, with stripping and lap dancing, spread rapidly across America, Britain, and several other countries. It was, above all, expensive. In Britain the spiritual home of the clubs was the financial district around the City of London. In America the clubs fitted easily into masculine corporate culture. White collar and professional men would go in groups from work, often including men who would never otherwise do such a thing. But this was all right – the other guys made you do it.

Katherine Frank’s decision to support herself through graduate school by working at clubs was not unusual in the 1990s. In the clubs where she worked there were almost always women putting themselves through college or graduate school.

Because Frank worked, rather than just observed, she saw things other academic observers had not, and asked new questions. Basically, she saw men. Researchers who observed usually saw the women.[11] And they concentrated on one central question: why do these women do this work?

This was, and still often is, the central question for sociology. It is also, not by coincidence, the obsessive question that every John in America and Britain has asked for the last three hundred years: How did you get into this work, Dear?

The clients’ question also recurs in most public and feminist debates around prostitution. Usually, this is phrased as – Do they have a choice? Is it poverty, or are they forced? The obvious sensible answer is that at this point in their lives this is the job they have chosen. It is not a free choice, any more than anybody else makes a free choice of their job. Sex workers, just like slaughterhouse workers, construction labourers and prison guards, choose the best job they can get at this point in their lives.

But Frank decided the important question was not about women. On the job she spent more time with men than with women. She also saw their desires and needs. So she wrote about them.

Frank’s choice suggests three approaches to understanding sex work. First, for every femininity there is a masculinity, and sex work is a way into understanding the secret lives of masculine fantasy, precisely because men have to negotiate so much less than in the rest of life. Second, when we look at changes in sex work in the last generation, we are looking at change from the top down – in two senses. Obviously, the changes are being driven by the man. But also, they are being driven from the top of society, by the elite of men.

Third, though this is not a point Frank makes, we have to bear in mind the men, boys and trans people who also do sex work. They are a significant minority of sex workers in most countries in the world. Any theory or generalisation about sex work has to include them. To see sex work as only a transaction between men and women is to miss a great deal.

There is another methodological lesson from Frank. The men she listened to in the clubs, and the men she interviewed outside the clubs for her research, almost all came to the clubs as individuals. They were affluent, and sometimes rich. All of them came from the top third of incomes.

As we have discuss in our forthcoming book The Sexual Politics of Capitalism, the experience of marriage in the United States was dividing along class lines from the 1980s onward. [12]Professional men and women with four year college degrees were building companionate marriages focussed on handing on their own class status to their children. That took money, low paid help and two parents.

Up until about 1980, divorce rates had been rising for a generation among Americans of all classes, as they were doing in the rest of Europe and North America. But from 1980 on something happened in the United States that did not happen in Europe. The divorce rate among the affluent, educated third began to fall. By 2000, three quarters of women in the top third could expect their first marriage to last until death. Two thirds of women in the bottom two thirds, without a four year degree, were getting divorced.

People with less money disappointed each other. But even with money, it was not easy to stay married. The men Frank talked to were trying to hold together companionate marriages. And for those men, part of that was going to the clubs where they could fantasize about having sex with other women, but not do it. The clubs in that North Carolina city had fiercely enforced rules against sex, or they would lose their licenses. There were plenty of other places, and other sex workers, in town where these men could have sex. They went to the clubs because they wanted to watch younger women who looked like sluts, but they did not want to betray their wives.

They also wanted to talk, and what they wanted to talk about most was feminism and their wives. They felt unsure, hobbled, made insecure by the feminism shared by most women of their generation. On one level, they agreed with feminism – who wouldn’t? On another level, they were left not knowing what to do, or how to express superiority within a loving relationship. And remember, these were men who dominated at work, and were dominated at work, in complex ways, every day.

            Frank came to understand that in every conversation with these men about her job, there were always three people in the room: her, the man, and his wife. Every time she danced for him, too, the same people were in the room, even if one was a ghost, careful not to ask her husband where he had been.

In public controversies over sex work, those three people are almost present. Public campaigns to suppress sex work or trafficking are often organised and fronted by conservative women from the business and professional classes. Listening to their speeches, watching the tightly controlled fury of their faces and bodies, you can see hovering at the edge of their minds a picture of their husband intimate with a whore.[13] Or their sons, or their fathers. This knowledge is never directly spoken, but it screams through the denunciations of male desire. However, these women are also careful that their campaigns will never expose powerful men, never embarrass their own husbands and fathers. This is part of their bargain with patriarchy, and that can only increase their anger and distress.[14]

It is not hard to understand what those women feel, and not hard to empathise. In their position, we too would dream of flamethrowers and chainsaws. But at the same time, in the triangle between husband, wife and sex worker, it is clear who is more oppressed and who more powerful. If it comes down to a choice between the wife and the sex worker, we are on the side of the sex worker. If you keep this starting point in mind, it is easier to find your way in the debates around sex work.

SIOBHAN BROOKS

Bernstein gives an example of the extent of this change nationally by 2005: ‘A former sex-worker activist and current PhD student in Sociology, Siobhan Brooks, gave a guest lecture in my Sociology of Gender class at Barnard College.’ Barnard is the women’s section of Columbia, an elite Ivy League university in New York:

Brooks began her lecture with a reference to the changing racial profile of women in the local sex industry, referring not to the influx of third world women into sexual servitude but to the whitening of the sex trade, which she attributed to the rise of ‘sex-worker chic’ among the urban middle classes. ‘The new face of sexual labor,’ she explained, ‘looks a lot like the women in this room.’ To illustrate her point, she asked the sixty-some students present (the vast majority of whom were white, class-privileged young women) how many of them had friends who had ever worked in the sex industry. Approximately a third of the students in the room raised their hands.^[15]

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale are the authors of Why Men: A Human History of Violence and Inequality (Hurst, 2023) and The Sexual Politics of Capitalism: A Global History (The New Press, forthcoming January 2026).

Related Post: Racism and the Myth of Trafficking, Anne Bonny Pirate, 2021.

NOTES

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^[1] Elizabeth Bernstein, 2007, Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity and the Commerce of Sex, University of Chicago Press.

^[2] James Q Wilson and George L. Kelling, ‘Broken Windows’, Atlantic Monthly, 1982, quoted in Bernstein 2007, 62.

^[3] Bernstein 2007, 63.

[4] For a picture of how hard this work can be, see Lisa Maher, 1997, Sexed Work: Gender, Race and Resistance in a Brooklyn Drug Market, Oxford University Press.

[5] For a detailed and sympathetic account of this kind of work, see Robert Kolker, 2013. Lost Girls, Harper.

^[6] See Arlie Russell Hochschild, 1983, The Managed Heart: Commodification of Human Feeling, University of California Press; Hochschild, 2003, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work, University of California Press; Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russel Hochschild, eds. 2002. Global Women: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy.

[7] For a careful and detailed picture of American men looking for emotional authenticity with male sex workers in Dominican Republic and Brazil, see Mark Padilla, 2007. Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality and AIDS in the Dominican Republic, University of Chicago Press; and Gregory Mitchell, 2015, Tourist Attractions: Performing Race and Masculinity in Brazil’s Sexual Economy, Chicago University Press.

^[8] Bernstein 2007, 126.

[9] Eric Blanc, 2025, We are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing in Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, University of California Press.

[10] Katherine Frank, 2002, G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire, Duke University Press.

[11] One exception is Angie Hart’s sympathetic but clear headed ethnography of working class men who went to prostitutes in a rather traditional way in Spain – Angie Hart, 1997, Buying and Selling Power: Prostitution in Spain, Westview; and Angie Hart, 2017 (1994), ‘Missing masculinity?: Prostitutes Clients in Alicante, Spain’. In Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, Dislocating Masculinity, Routledge, 46-62.

[12] Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, The Sexual Politics of Capitalism: A Global History, 1980-2025, to be published by The New Press in January 2026.

[13] For examples of this style, see Laura Maria Augustin, 2007, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, Zed.

[14] The phrase comes from Deniz Kandiyoti, 1988, ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy,’ Gender & Society, 2(3): 274-290.

[15] Bernstein 2007. Brooks has since written a good book: Siobhan Brooks, 2010, Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry, SUNY Press.