Study finds it is an ordinary service business and more like other types of sex work than previously documented. Sex workers who ply their trade on the street perform emotional labor to convert casual clients into safe, repeat customers, finds a UC Riverside-led study published in Work, Employment and Society. Though many studies have examined the role emotional labor plays in indoor sex work, researchers have often taken for granted that outdoor sex work is short-term and strictly transactional.
The authors suggest this emotional labor might help transgender sex workers avoid potentially violent or abusive clients in addition to providing steady income. Emotional labor, the way workers are expected to manage or display emotions while performing their job, contributes to customer loyalty and is especially important in service industries.
The illicit and stigmatized nature of sex work presents challenges for workers who want to cultivate a loyal clientele. Many men report having hired a sex worker over the course of their lives but few report having visited one in the past year, indicating that most men who engage sex workers do so only occasionally.
To convert casual clients into loyal customers willing to brave the legal and reputational risks, indoor sex workers, such as escorts, use various strategies to build a relationship that offers the client benefits beyond sexual pleasure. They identified several popular locations for street-based sex work, known as strolls, and selected two that were not also associated with open-air drug markets.
Most prior research on street-based sex work has focused on drug-associated strolls and found it to be based largely on survival and drug acquisition, which deterred formation of longstanding relationships with clients.
