From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/07/sex-work-super-bowl-myth
Marquee sports events attract moral panics about prostitution and trafficking – but little genuine concern for sex workers’ welfare
Melissa Gira Grant
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 7 February 2013
For as long as spectators have wanted to crowd around men playing games, so have those who document sports boasted of how many women flock to service all those captive fans. Historians have claimed that along with athletes and the people who adored them, prostitutes, too, poured into ancient Greece for the Olympics, where they could earn a year’s pay working the stands.
Now, the modern sex worker is believed to follow a similar migratory path, though considerably expanded by the reach of global tourism and mega-sports spectacles: the World Cup, the Grand Prix, the Super Bowl – all supposedly draw thousands of women offering paid sex.
It’s an alluring fantasy, the kind of thing you could imagine in a dusty smut book, or serving as winky fodder for escort agencies and strip clubs in their seasonal marketing. The fantasy asks us to imagine the visiting packs of excitable men, engorged by victory or deflated by defeat. Who will celebrate with them? Who will soothe them? Worse, all that running and ball-chasing (or just watching it) is said to stoke a demand for sex so high that it would exhaust a city’s native sex industry.
In headlines alternately titillating and cautionary, we were told that during the 2012 Olympics, London was to be “flooded” with prostitutes, and that for the 2013 Super Bowl in New Orleans, the city would host a “dark underworld” of illicit sex-for-sale. Like all fantasies, the “roving sporting sex workers” trope should be mostly harmless. It tells us about our culture’s deeply-held myths and fears about sex work, but it can do little to spur any real concern for sex workers. In other words, it’s an innocuous fantasy – until seized upon by those who find it threatening or politically useful.
Perhaps unintentionally taking a page from the sex industry itself, opponents of sex work capitalize on the roving-sporting-sex workers-fantasy for their causes. Anti-prostitution charities, called in by the media as experts, enjoy increased visibility. Similarly, law enforcement can stoke fear to garner public support for crackdowns on sex work – and too often, by extension, on those who perform it.
Continue reading at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/07/sex-work-super-bowl-myth
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