The Infrastructure of the Internet

Social policy as regards internet use must take into account the complex social, cultural, technological and economic issues surrounding access to hardware and software, web infrastructure and so on. Where the internet has become a target for social policy, it has usually been to address the social exclusion that arises from the digital divide (Sinclair and Bramley, Reference Sinclair and Bramley2010), or to address problematic behaviours such as cyber stalking, bullying and child pornography (Oswell, Reference Oswell1998; Adam, Reference Adam2005). Often, such policies take a narrow understanding of technology as abstracted from social relations, and this tends to mean that the technology itself is missing from social policy conversations.

Lessig (Reference Lessig2000) suggests that the architecture of the internet cannot be taken for granted. Using the internet relies on access to hardware (computers) and infrastructure (broadband networks, referred to as Internet Service Providers or ISPs). Running a website means also having a (paid-for) domain name, URL and server (rented ‘space’ on a very powerful computer where all a site's content is stored), and knowing the relevant code to design and operate the site (or being able to pay a software developer). Users must be able to locate a site (so, for example, how a search engine such as Google ranks and assesses the site is very important). Websites cost money. The infrastructure of the internet gives rise to some specific policy questions.

Braman (Reference Braman and Consalvo2011) suggests that the most important dimensions of internet policies are: access to the internet, property rights, content regulation and privacy. Of these, content regulation and privacy demand further discussion when discussing commercial sex, and specifically sex review sites. Internet polices are both global and local, and regulations involve private sector organisations, individual users and nation states. For example, the ‘boundaryless’ world of the internet means content hosted in one country is usually accessible in another, even if it would not be legal to host the material in the second country. This boundarylessness means that local laws are not readily enactable when the violator is based overseas.

Content regulation is an obvious focus for internet policy, and debates around free speech are significant here. ISPs may be responsible for content regulation, for example in not ‘serving’ web pages with content deemed inappropriate by national or regional governments (Braman, Reference Braman and Consalvo2011: 146). Nation states may use complex internet content filtering systems to control access to information (Deibert, Reference Deibert and Boler2008: 143); parents may also install filtering systems. Whilst such control may be more readily associated with authoritarian states than liberal democracies, the UK, like Norway, EU states and the US, limits access to some types of material (child pornography, materials promoting terrorism, racist material and material which facilitates fraud). Content filtering is defended as a legitimate act where it is directed at culturally offensive material, and policy makers may find it productive to discuss whether sex review material counts as offensive, and, if so, on what grounds. Nonetheless, technical as well as cultural complexities make strong regulation difficult, certainly across borders.

For the most part, non-offensive content is carried under ‘network neutrality’ principles, so that websites are served to users without prejudice as to their content (Wu, Reference Wu2003). In the US, network neutrality is being challenged by those wanting to make accessing the websites of politically marginal groups more awkward (Braman, Reference Braman and Consalvo2011: 159); in other nation states some kinds of content are explicitly prohibited without a pretence of network neutrality.

Privacy is the second dimension to internet policy that merits attention when considering sex review sites. Many advocates for the emancipatory potential of the internet see the democratisation of knowledge and the multiplication of sources that characterises this form of media as radical and positive. Different voices can be heard, and in ‘web 2.0’ (the social media web where the strict division between media producer and media consumer is ended), ‘sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or managerial commands’ (Benkler, Reference Benkler2006: 60) is seen as positive.

Whilst web 2.0 seems emancipatory, questions of privacy must be considered. That communications are private, and that users often want to be anonymous seems fundamental to the use of a sex review website. Users sign in with pseudonyms. The ISP, however, does know which sites a user accesses (and the owner of a site is able to find out significant things about that user, such as what they searched for, their IP address and how long they spent on the site). Although sex review sites do not harvest information about users in the same way as global corporations like Amazon, users’ ISPs can be recorded. Users’ registration details are hackable, saleable and may make users blackmailable. Few of us understand how much of our data trails are scraped, mined and sold.

A second dimension to the question of privacy is the more complex question of the privacy of the sex workers and employers who are written about. Internet communities often set store by liberal rights, especially to free speech. However, reviews that judge the performance and personality of the sex worker challenge that worker's privacy. To some extent, this may be positive, as sex workers use reviews to generate new business (Sanders, Reference Sanders2008). Reviews that are negative, rude or even defamatory can cause damage, however. A sex worker who receives a bad review may lose future business, she may be punished by her employer, she may be disturbed and upset to read her body described as ‘not in the peak of fitness’ (one of the less cruel descriptions). Whilst recent high profile court cases, such as the Bercow Twitter libel (BBC, 2013), show that defamation laws apply to social media, it is hard to imagine conditions where sex workers may be able to seek formal legal redress for defamation, not least because of the social and legal status of their work. Critical descriptions on sex review sites are potentially harmful and go against rights to privacy. Discussions of the good treatment of sex workers must pay attention to how web technologies have this shaping function, and this is one of the significant reasons why internet policy makers need gender awareness (Adam, Reference Adam2005: 104).

Grey media and sex review sites

The discussion of privacy cannot be fully developed without a discussion of the varied and specific ways commercial sex appears on the internet. As Jenkins comments, ‘although sex work is now far less visible on the public streets, it is very readily identifiable by almost anyone who searches the Internet’ (Reference Jenkins, Hardy, Kingston and Sanders2010: 91). The old-fashioned separation of online and offline practice is not useful for understanding the complex technological and discursive mediations of commercial sex that are made possible by web 2.0 technologies. User-generated reviews are interventions in public spaces, and, like other media, shape the social and political landscape through shaping how other users understand commercial sex. Review sites bring together (unverifiable) offline experiences in a space of text and talk in such a way as to generate understandings of market and social practices. Policy makers who assume that the direct and physical transaction is the only significant part of commercial sex are missing out on understanding how the markets are mediated by online practices.

Punternet is one such site, singled out by Harriet Harman MP in 2009 as a significant problem demanding regulation (BBC, 2009). Others include Adultwork, Punterlink and The LBB; comparable sites exist covering other countries. These sites are part of what Brents and Sanders (Reference Brents, Sanders, Scoular and Sanders2010) describe as the economic mainstreaming of the wider sex market, which is argued to have brought about a new respectability for male purchasers, despite a growing number of policies directed at the regulation of the market. In the remainder of this article, I will discuss examples from an earlier analysis of Punternet reviews (Pettinger, Reference Pettinger2011, Reference Peppet2013) and draw out policy implications. Punternet was set up in 1999, by ‘Galahad’ (pseudonyms are the norm on the site, although the wikileaks website reveals Galahad's identity, public statements and Amazon review page), and although it focuses on the indoor sex market in the UK, it is hosted in the US. Galahad refers to the First Amendment of the US Constitution to explain this. Punternet is intended only for heterosexual male customers, known as ‘punters’, paying ‘working girls’. The site requires no password to read, but users register to write reviews or comment on the forum. Not all of those who have offline experiences in the indoor sex market that Punternet focuses on use the site, and not all of those who use the site are punters. Those who read and/or write on the site do so to make choices between working girls, to speak to other men, to read about sex and to re-live their own experiences (Sanders, Reference Sanders2008).

There is comparatively little consideration of the presence of commercial sex work on the internet, whether mediated sex work (for example, through webcams) or web marketing of offline commercial sex (Earle and Sharpe, Reference Earle and Sharp2007; Döring, Reference Döring2009, although see Walby, Reference Walby2012). Sex review sites are seen by some as akin to ‘amateur’ pornography (see Paasonen, Reference Paasonen, Consalvo and Ess2011), being written by ordinary men and providing voyeuristic pleasures to their readers, and they may be compared to other ‘review’ sites such as Trip Advisor, where customers reflect on their experiences in hotels and restaurants for an audience of potential customers. They may also show how communities are formed around specific engagements in commercial sex practices, and how customers learn to behave (see Sanders, Reference Sanders2008).

It is important to consider constraining and enabling technologies and the grey media of the searchable database (Fuller and Goffey, Reference Fuller and Goffey2012) in order to understand the complex mediation of commercial sex. Databases and search functions are the key grey technologies that make it possible for someone to locate a sex worker using one of the sex review sites, a different part of the infrastructure to the fora that generate ‘community’ discussions. Databases are constructed through standard forms (‘field reports’) that structure the writing of the men using it. I took a random sample of authors and carried out narrative analysis of field reports from Punternet where database, structure and context were relevant to seeing what understandings of market action are manifested in this site. Analysis recognises that technologies have been stabilised in such a way as to be taken for granted by sex review users. Whilst commercial sex exists without such sites, and in forms that the site does not reference, internet technology is part of how commercial sex has come to take its current form, although neither law nor policy has yet fully acknowledged this (Ashford, Reference Ashford2008).

Standardised grey media forms are one of the most important ways technology frames, mediates and constrains what can and cannot be said. The opening section of the Punternet ‘field report’ (FR) contains information that makes it possible for readers to know how to reach a working girl, detailing location, price and contact details. It is followed by ‘free text’ comment boxes where punters can discuss and assess the environment, the working girl's body and the sex encounter. The field report ends with the questions ‘recommend?’ and ‘return?’. Standardisation limits what is said and makes what is said comprehensible and searchable; descriptions of sex acts too are rather standardised and acronyms are commonly used to denote particular practices. On occasion, authors speak explicitly to each other through FRs. Some condemn, others warn:

Such comments are interventions in the workings of the market, where buyers and sellers struggle over the services on offer. Sex workers described here are able to get some redress against negative comments. This relies on a further part of the standard form, the rebuttal, monitored by the site administrators. The ability to make rebuttals assumes the sex worker is aware of the review, has access to ICT and is comfortable with writing in English. Technological and social constraints combine here, and the structuring of the text through the media device being used matters too for how it can be used by others.

Markets, bodies, work and leisure

Policy makers should note that sex review sites do not passively report events, but are part of the production of markets in commercial sex, laying claim to the right to determine what behaviour counts as good, and what as bad. In this section, I focus on three of the many possible ways that sex reviews can intervene in and mediate commercial sex to shape the social and political context within which paid-for sex operates: the legal and moral context around commercial sex; the brothels, massage parlours and hotel rooms where it takes place; and the promotional material that entices buyers are part of the assemblage of commercial sex, alongside the buyers and the sellers. Market activity is always social and technological as much as it is ‘economic’, so that, for example, clients, like other consumers, are guided and constrained by a complex range of economic, technological, legal, material and social factors, including their understandings of doing gender. My thinking here is informed by Callon's idea of the market device, ‘the material and discursive assemblages that intervene in the construction of markets’ (Callon, 2007: 2). The concept is a useful way of countering simplistic understandings of economic activity that assume that markets can be studied as meeting points between buyers and sellers, and it focuses attention on the complex mediation of commercial sex.

Databases of commercial sex encounters are rich material for understanding some dimensions of the market for sex. Thinking about why the stories are written in the form they are, who the presumed reader is and what the author understands of his own practices and those of others contribute to policy discussions by providing different kinds of insights into sex customers than that gathered by interviewing punters (Sanders, Reference Sanders2008; Coy et al., Reference Coy, Horvath, Kelly and Coy2012), or by questionnaires (McKeganey and Barnard, Reference McKeganey and Barnard1996). Sex review sites act as market devices to temporarily and contingently stabilise actors’ understandings of how they and others should behave. In this respect, Punternet is a judging machine where persons and technologies, customer and field reports, come together to publically assess a sex worker. This serves to structure and order hierarchies of values in markets: to say what counts as good service and what is bad service in general, as well as in this context. Punternet assessors participate in the ongoing creation of hierarchies of position between products: this one works better than that. Punters’ judgements draw on and frame wider discourse around gender relations and commercial sex.

Reviews tell stories of workers’ bodies, assess their appearance and sexual performance and judge them as beautiful or ugly, good or bad. Twigg (Reference Twigg, Lewis, Gewirtz and Clarke2001) points to feelings and bodies as worthy considerations for social policy, even as the traditional tools and techniques of social policy tend to create a distance between good, rational empirical work and feeling. The judging machine is visible, demanding and sometimes cruel. In this extract, we see how a customer defends his desires against implied societal judgements against women with larger bodies:

Workers' bodies are part of how market values are stabilised, including cultural understandings of what counts as an attractive body.

How the field reports discuss paid work shows the interconnections between the specific practice of reviewing paid-for sex and wider discourses. In some instances, punters read the sex workers as fortunate to have work that suits them so well that they would do it regardless of payment: ‘Sharon seems to love her work and does it for the sheer enjoyment of it’ (FR51520), a comment which downplays the market transaction. Contemporary discourses of work encourage us to love and commit to our work, and to be satisfied by it. Although this is a fantasy that does not match many people's experience of work (Ducey, Reference Ducey, Ticineto and Halley2007), it may be part of how the legitimacy of commercial sex is confirmed by practitioners: not only is sex work a free choice, but it is fulfilling. An alternative story about work provides a complimentary insight. Women who let on that they are at work, or who seem interested mostly in money, tend to be judged negatively in the field reports for producing sex encounters that were mechanical and perfunctory: ‘an average punt . . . Rebecca is a slim sexy woman who sees her work as strictly work’ (FR38136). Other negative reports are notable for a refusal to consider why a sex worker might be quiet, passive or miserable. ‘Work’ thereby provides a useful language for judgement, specifically the ‘fit’ between work and its worker (Muirhead, Reference Muirhead2004) and professionalism. Sexual and related services can be performed well or ‘not to professional standard’ (FR37539), so that sex is simultaneously natural (something that women love) and professional (something they can be skilled in). Stories of work figure in Punternet authors' accounts as indicators of what they consider to be both poor and good service, and may reflect the success of campaigns to recognise prostitution as work. Accepting prostitution as work provides the assessing punter with a language of assessment and judgement: discourses of work are notable in references to being a good worker or professional, and to having a career, and in this way earlier social policy discussions and decisions are implicated in contemporary practices of mediation.

How commercial sex is organised by those involved is also of interest. There are many accounts of how to find a sauna or flat, and descriptions of location: ‘I downloaded a map and directions using their postcode from the AA's route finder site which made finding them easy. There is plenty of local parking and the area appears respectable and safe’ (FR58624). It is easy to imagine a similar description starting a review of another consumer experience such as staying in a hotel. Internet technologies and the local infrastructure makes the visit easy and the punter feel safe. Such details point to the need to explore commercial sex not purely as encounter between male and female strangers in abject places, but as an organised and rather mundane activity.

These dimensions reveal the ordinariness of much commercial sex, in contrast to the way policy debates often focus on the deviant sexuality of sex customers as ‘client, punter, pimp, trafficker, and rapist’ (Whowell, Reference Whowell, Scoular and Sanders2010: 127–8). The exploration of how discourses of bodies, work and ordinary leisure are manifest in the market device of sex review sites must encourage rethinking of the oversimplified policy discussions that have been problematised by Scoular (Reference Scoular, Scoular and Sanders2010). Advocates of prohibitionist, regulationist and abolitionist systems too readily disconnect their policy recommendations from local practices (Scoular, Reference Scoular, Scoular and Sanders2010: 12−13). Attention to the complexity of local practices, including what kinds of sex establishments are common and popular in different geographical areas, how different organisational structures influence customers and the power of discourses of ‘good workers’ and ‘sovereign customers’ (both categories being gendered) aid a more nuanced account of how commercial sex operates.