FREE LECTURE: Virtual Masculinity and Intimacy: Telecommunications and the Changing Spatiality of Male Sex Work

There is increasing attention to the fact that global increases in sex work occur not only among female sex workers, but also among cohorts of male sex workers. However, current research continues to focus predominately on female sex workers, and specifically on street sex workers, despite the existence of large numbers of MSW and significant changes in the geography of sex work from ‘outdoors’ to ‘indoors’. International research suggests that the majority of men who have sex with men meet their partners through the internet. Despite this sex industry research has only recently begun to examine the impacts of technological change on the male sex industry. At a broad social level, telecommunications has increased the numbers of male escort workers, created new spaces for sex work encounters, and has extended the reach of sex work to a wider socio-demographic audience. At the behavioural level, research indicates that the needs, desires and experiences of sex workers and clients and the context of their encounters are different when conducted in cyberspace. With attention to the larger social context of masculinity, power, spatially situated forms of interaction, and the body as commodity, this presentation examines how telecommunications, in changing the structure and organization of sex work, has opened up new spaces for the expression of masculinity and intimacy.