Laura Agustín

Afghan voters

Masseuse is sometimes a euphemism for prostitute or sex worker: an annoyance for many massage therapists who offer no sexual contact. But given the common misuse, and given the social context of mostly male military personnel, it’s interestingly odd to see a Swedish official advocating that women must be allowed to perform massages on male soldiers - as a logical necessary consequence of a policy of Gender Equality. Of course opportunities to work on government contracts should be gender-equal. And the ‘unequal’ policy is probably grounded in ‘protecting’ women as a general principle, which is no good. I can’t help thinking that some healthy realism is involved in the exclusion, too. I wonder how many female massage therapists there are in Afghanistan who might like to take up this opportunity?

Allow Afghan women to give massages: army adviser

14 December 2009, The Local

A Swedish army gender adviser in Afghanistan has taken the Armed Forces to task for only employing local men to perform massages on troops stationed in Mazar-E-Sharif. In a written internal document submitted from Swedish headquarters at Camp Northern Lights, Gender Field Adviser Captain Krister Fahlstedt of Afghanistan force FS17 took exception to an army contract specifying that on-base massage services should be provided exclusively by men.

“The agreement specifies, with no further explanation, that the physiotherapists (masseurs/masseuses) should be men,” wrote Fahlstedt in his November submission. The captain’s investigations showed that the recommendation was followed to the letter, as two men were brought in to perform massages.

“It is the opinion of FS17 that there are no reasonable grounds for gender to be one of the profile requirements,” he wrote. Fahlstedt further stressed that his force was committed to strengthening the position of women in society by helping create the conditions in which they could become self-sufficient.

“It’s not important as such whether women eventually get the job, what’s important is that there’s equality of opportunity and they are treated on the same terms as men,” Fahlstedt told The Local. “Contracts of this kind must always be gender neutral, and this is actually the only time I’ve seen an army contract worded in this way,” he added.

Fahlstedt, active in both the Centre Party and the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights (RFSL), returned earlier this month to Sweden from service with the FS17 force. He remains hopeful that the army will rectify the situation and begin considering the possibility of employing Afghan masseuses. “I haven’t received a formal response yet but I have been led to believe that the necessary changes will be made to the contract,” he told The Local.

A scholar of medieval Japan, Janet Goodwin, reveals how sexual mores changed from liberal and accepting to disapproving a thousand years ago. The above picture depicts sexual entertainers in a small boat - nomadic sex workers - soliciting passengers in a larger boat. Note how positive perceptions changed to negative, and how the disapproving attitude towards prostitution was accompanied by negativity towards women in general.

Changing Times for Japanese Sex Workers

Ayub Khattak, 13 January 2006, UCLA International Institute

In medieval Japan, sexual entertainers and their customers enjoyed great freedoms until a growing orthodoxy stifled their trade, Janet Goodwin tells a UCLA audience.        An early Heian period painting shows three women in a boat rowing alongside a larger boat carrying male passengers, some dressed richly and some ascetically—aristocrats and monks. The kimono-clad women were asobi, or sexual entertainers, singing their siren song to lure the aristocrats to some temporary pleasure shack.

With the monks in the rear . . . the large boat was probably on its return from some chartered pilgrimage to a sacred site. The asobi knew well the sea lanes for pilgrims who were ready to unburden themselves of their journey’s abstinence. . . weaker pilgrims might have looked for the asobi even on the way to sacred sites.

. . . once liberal perceptions towards sexuality would give way to a conservative sexual orthodoxy in both the Heian (794–1185) and the Kamakura periods (1185–1333) Entertainments provided by the asobi were not exclusively sexual. The women’s high-priced services included folk songs, sometimes lyrically composed of Buddhist sutras, and traditional dances, Goodwin said.

Goodwin drew on such sources as courtier and courtesan diaries, records of judicial cases involving the asobi, and divorce settlements to argue that the Japanese embraced a very liberal attitude towards sex in the early Heian period. Men were polygamous, women serially monogamous, widows sexually active, and divorce common. Prostitution was merely risqué, not shameful, according to Goodwin.

But as time went on, Goodwin said, people began to look on the asobi with distrusting eyes. Celibate monks, their chastity perhaps threatened, began to decry the women as a wicked bunch out to distract and corrupt Buddhist men. . . . Beyond temptations and conflicts, social considerations began to prompt change, Goodwin argued. With the emergence of the shogunate during the Heian period, greater emphasis was placed on a strict patrilinear system. Penalties for adultery grew more strict, in part to prevent feuds among legitimate as well as illegitimate offspring. Women who seduced high-level aristocrats came to be known as keisei, or “castle topplers,” after one lady was sent by one lord specifically to enslave a rival through seduction, finally coaxing him into giving up his holdings.

Meanwhile, the asobi were gaining a reputation as a public nuisance because of their itinerancy. Although some settled in “pleasure districts,” they were largely nomadic, drifting about in search of work. “They live in animal-hair tents and drift from place to place in pursuit of food and water, just like the northern barbarians,” wrote a twelfth-century observer, Ôe Masafusa, in a sharp departure from the tone he had adopted in an earlier description of the asobi. (”Their voices halt the clouds floating through the valleys, and their tones drift with the wind blowing over the water. Passers-by cannot help but forget their families,” Ôe had written.)

Gradually, and as the asobi came under harsh scrutiny from a ministry set up to regulate prostitution, the stigma attached to sexual entertainment prevented many aristocrats from indulging in it. The sexual orthodoxy that reigned in the asobi had broader consequences for the liberties of Japanese women, Goodwin said. Divorce was increasingly frowned upon, and widows were expected to remain unattached and to pray for their dead husbands, perhaps entering a nunnery. Attitudes changed not merely towards physical acts, Goodwin suggested, but towards gender roles, affecting especially the lives of women.

If you’re in New York, try to come to tonight’s event at 66th Street and York Avenue - a lot of fantastic people will be in attendance.

I’m giving a talk at a good evening hour on 10 March, on the East Side in the 60s, and welcome anyone interested to come along. The lecture is part of the Pugwash series of conferences ‘examining the relationship between science and society, to ensure that research benefits humanity.’ This is a good opportunity to consider what social-justice advocates and social scientists consider to be evidence of a problem and what it means when proofs conflict. So many trafficking conversations consist of ideological battles that I don’t wonder most people feel confused about what’s going on.

Trafficking, migration and the sex industry: Framing the questions, providing the proofs

Lecture by Laura Agustín, author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry

Rockefeller University
Weiss Building Room 305
York avenue at 66th Street
New York NY 10065
Enter the campus at 66th Street

Wednesday 10 March 2010

645 pm (refreshments) - 9 pm
Lecture begins 7 pm, Questions 8 pm

Subway: Lexington Avenue Local #6 to 68th Street/Lexington Avenue Station; walk east
Buses: M31 (York Avenue/57th St crosstown) and M66 (68th St crosstown

Contact: pugwash [at] rockefeller.edu

Laura Agustín studies cultural, sexual and postcolonial issues linking commercial sex, migration, informal economies and feminist theory. Her research amongst migrants and social helpers challenges several contemporary myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work; that migrants who sell sex are always passive victims; and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Agustín argues that the label ‘trafficked’ does not describe migrants’ lives and that a Rescue Industry disempowers them. Frequently, says Agustín, migrants prefer to work in the sex industry to their other options, and, despite being treated like a marginalised group, they form part of a dynamic global economy.