Men Who Sell Sex: International Perspectives on Male Prostitution and HIV/AIDS. - Review - book review

Journal of Sex Research, May, 2000 by Manuel Fernandez-Alemany

Men Who Sell Sex: International Perspectives on Male Prostitution and HIV/AIDS. Edited by Peter Aggleton. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999, 282 xix pages. Cloth, $59.95; Paper, $24.95. Lila's House: Male Prostitution in Latin America. By Jacobo Schifter. New York: Harrington Park Press, 1998, 132 xi pages. Cloth, $29.95; Paper, $12.95.

Reviewed by Manuel Fernandez-Alemany, Ph.D., University of California at San Diego, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0522; e-mail: mfernand@weber.ucsd.edu.

Two important works have recently made their appearance in the vastly unexplored area of cross-cultural studies in male prostitution and HIV/AIDS. They document male sex work in different parts of the world and raise relevant topics for the study of public health, culture, and sexuality.

One of these works is Peter Aggleton's Men Who Sell Sex, an edited volume that includes chapters dealing with sixteen countries around the world. The volume can be analyzed as composed of several recurrent themes.

The first theme, the need to escape the reductive view that sex work is only work for money, is present in the chapters on France, Canada, the U.S., Mexico City, Santo Domingo, Costa Rica, Brazil, Lima, Thailand, and the Philippines. The relations between workers and clients sometimes blur the imaginary borders between sex as work and sex as more intimate personal, emotional, or romantic relationships. Among certain sex workers, especially in more developed countries such as France, the desire to have sex with men makes, at times, the need for money become a secondary reason for prostitution. When relationships between a sex worker and a former client develop, and the client becomes a partner while still the provider, the project of classifying the relation between prostitute and client as merely sex work becomes evidently reductive, because relationships might evolve in much more complex and dynamic forms which escape the simplistic sex worker/client dichotomy, even though there may still be survival and money issues attached to the relationship.

For instance, in Canada there are young gay men who offer themselves in exchange for money as a way to explore their sexual desires, and in Costa Rica "love" blurs the border between gay and straight. Also, in Peruvian fleteo the borders between emotional relationships and money transaction become fuzzy. In Lima, male prostitution is seen by some as an occasion when people from different socioeconomic statuses and ages can interact in more intimate ways.

Another border-blurring force is AIDS, at least in Costa Rica, where the sexual practices between cacheros and clients have become somewhat homogenized. The active/passive dichotomy in anal and oral sex becomes less clear because many clients avoid playing the passive role, which is more risky for contracting HIV. AIDS has also created a higher demand for monogamy, and many clients lure cacheros into a more permanent type of relationship which destabilizes the cachero/client, work/love, and heterosexual/homosexual dichotomies.

A symbolic, nonmaterialist explanation for sex work is provided for Brazil, where supposedly "For many males the act of `prostitution' may actually be more akin to a ritualized form of sexual transgression than the kind of sex-for-money transaction that occurs commonly among female and transvestite sex workers" (p. 168). There is no reason, however, to think that female and transvestite sex work is less complex than the sex work referred to in this passage. Moreover, prostitution among masculine men is dubiously more transgressive than other forms of prostitution, especially transgendered prostitution. Yet a nonmaterialist explanation for sex work is important, especially because it places ideas about male prostitution at the opposite side of a continuum that starts with reductive assumptions of male sex work as merely based on economic need. It would have been desirable, however, for the chapter on Brazil to provide structural or ideological sources or concomitant factors for a need for transgression on the part of these Brazilian sex workers.

On the other side of the continuum, the chapter on the United States places the sources of male prostitution in structural material conditions that force men to sell sex, stressing the economic motivations for practicing sex work. Sex workers usually have low levels of formal education and their work choices are limited to unskilled labor, which pays them much less than the "easy money" provided by sex work. Also favoring the material base for prostitution is the chapter on Mexico City, where in one day masajistas (masculine men who give massage and also sell sex for a higher price in public baths) can earn the same amount of money they would make in a week of work elsewhere.

In the chapter about the U.S., sex workers are deterministically classified as a risk group for HIV. In many parts of the world, sex workers are evidently under great risk of contracting HIV, the most dramatic example being the cases reported in the chapter on India and Bangladesh. Several chapters, however, including the ones on Canada, Costa Rica, and Santo Domingo, show that sex workers may actually be better educated about safer sex and more effective in avoiding the risk of contracting HIV during sexual practices with their clients than other people. For example, in Santo Domingo, "Condom use is significantly higher among professional and occasional sex workers than among non-sex workers, possibly because paid relations imply a lesser emotional and affective bond between the partners" (p. 137).