Abstract
Despite recent efforts to celebrate and liberate women’s sexuality, it is a common trope that the sex work industry is motivated by (and exists to satisfy) the ‘uncontrollable’ male sex drive, as opposed to being driven by women sex workers’ desire and sexuality. Women’s sexual desire has been socially constructed in a way that stigmatizes overtly sexualized behavior, leading to women sex workers being labelled as transgressive, devalued and ‘victims’ of male desire. This is because sex work research typically focuses on the transaction of sexual services, and not on the desires of sex workers themselves. Drawing on corpus linguistic methods, this chapter addresses this gap through an analysis of a corpus of 255,891 posts collected from an online sex work forum. We examine discourses of motivation, sexual and partner preferences/desire, and advice-giving in sex worker–sex worker and sex worker–client evaluations of sex work experiences. Utilizing corpus linguistic methods offers a number of key affordances, including being able to thematically analyze how sex workers communicate their own desires, and the ability to analyze a larger dataset to develop more thorough insights into the sexual desires and preferences of sex workers of this forum community. This work ultimately contributes to our understanding of why women sex workers might opt to work within the sex work industry despite the associated societal stigma, as well as wider meta-discussion related to sex work, including professionalism and sex work as a consumerist interaction.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Sex Work and Language |
| Place of Publication | Oxon |
| Publisher | Routledge Taylor & Francis Group |
| Chapter | 2 |
| Pages | 24-47 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781003397250 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781032484006 |
| Publication status | Published (VoR) - 27 Feb 2025 |