Abstract
The most striking feature of the growing academic literature on sex work is the lack of reliable statistics. Sex workers are a stigmatized and transitory population with an often justifiable allergy to academic researchers determined to study them. This difficulty means that even the most basic of empirical facts—how many are there in a given city? how much do they make?—are little more than conjecture. Further narrow the population in question to male sex workers, and almost nothing is known with empirical certainty. Thus, exasperated social scientists seem to have issued a collective shrug and turned toward the ethnographic and qualitative. Enter Trevon Logan, a distinguished economist, who has written the first authoritative quantitative economic account of the market for male sex workers.
First, a caveat: the title of Logan’s book is a serious misnomer. Economics, Sexuality, and Male Sex Work is about escorting in the United States and makes no claims about male sex work more broadly construed. Readers hoping to learn more about street-based sex workers, hustlers, men working in brothels and bath houses, porn workers, or anyone other than a highly rarified set of American men with access to and knowledge of online platforms will be disappointed. Logan also focuses on a relatively small portion of the sex working population that is professionalized despite many (if not most) sex workers being temporary, seasonal, and part-time participants in this informal economic sector. That said, this book accomplishes everything it sets out to do, and it does so not only convincingly, but eloquently.
Logan’s got his lightning securely in the bottle here. Imagine a hard-hitting page turner of an economic sociology monograph that is essential reading for scholars, but also entertaining and accessible enough for undergraduate students. In fact, this book would be perfect for a unit on economic sociology in a sociology survey course or as a model in a methods seminar. To accomplish this, Logan wisely confines the bulk of his formulas and statistical work to the six appendices, which make up 50 pages of the book where readers ought not tread without an advanced degree in economics, demography, or statistics. The main text, however, is elegantly written, skillfully laid out, and full of interesting facts.
The book begins with a whirlwind history of male sex work beginning in the ancient world before moving on to a chapter on data and methods. Logan chooses to analyze two main sets of data: online advertisements for escorts and client reviews. From the outset, he provides us with firm answers to elusive questions: how many online escorts are there? How diverse are they? How old are they? What do their services cost? (You’ll have to read the book to find out. No spoilers here.) Then Logan sets out to explore why an illegal market functions so well (noting that there are no means to ensure services rendered even match those advertised). The asymmetries of information in the market preoccupy Logan throughout the book and allow readers to puzzle through them alongside him like economic detectives working in cahoots.
The last section of Part One examines the mobility of male escorts who travel from city to city, but then the second half of the book takes a sharp turn toward gender theory. Logan draws on sociological understandings of sexuality (with even a dash of queer theory here and there) to interpret the economic analysis he has undertaken. His footing feels less sure as he wades into these waters, but the journey is invigorating (even refreshing) when compared to other economic sociology literature out there, which as a field has not been attentive enough to contemporary theories of race and sexuality. Logan asks readers to consider how racialized desire, power, and erotic capital can actually be studied empirically and made to relate to theories of supply and demand. But even as he brings social theory to bear on economics, Logan also maintains his explicitly quantitative approach to advance a social science literature that has otherwise been dedicated to qualitative research.
Thus, Logan combines “relational, performance, and intersectional approaches to masculinity and sexuality” while also conceding that “traditional tools of economic analysis are not useful here because socially constructed desire is beyond neoclassical economic theory” (p. 10). The first chapter in this second part of the book uses hedonic pricing techniques to estimate service values. Most importantly, he uses this information to “test” intersectionality, examining how race and other factors correlate with certain sexual acts and behaviors. The next chapter focuses on the role of photographs while the final chapter analyzes safer sex practices before Logan offers up a concluding chapter that looks at implications and echoes of his findings in the broader (non sex working) gay community.
As compelling as the book is, there are some disappointing elements. While the point of the book is to eschew the qualitative, Logan never mentions so much as speaking to an actual sex worker. Consequently, the kinds of research questions he poses don’t always have the full nuance or salience that they might. And while his intersectional approach is groundbreaking within economic sociology, critical race studies scholars may raise their eyebrows from time to time. For example, he never really problematizes the category of “Hispanic” nor acknowledges its complicated and potentially overlapping relationship to both blackness and whiteness. Thus, he finds himself opining at one point that “it is unclear how the Hispanic stereotype relates to sexual behaviors.” A deeper reading knowledge of the literature on masculinity, machismo, and latinidad might have prevented his frustration.
He also fails to discuss color and colorism as a salient feature for analysis even though the anthropological literature on sex work indicates this may be more important to pricing than racial self-identification or phenotype. (On a related note, cultural anthropologists are likely to find the book’s lack of cultural specificity and his desire to generalize beyond his data vexing.) One place where his reach exceeds his grasp is in public health. Sex worker rights advocates and public health scholars will find his discussion of sex workers as “vectors of transmission” troubling. (He later argues this view should be updated such that we can think of sex workers as “vectors of education,” but this was too little, too late.)
He also too easily recycles some dubious statistics (e.g., that 20 percent of gay men in the United States are HIV positive) and could have been more careful with the public health literature. Lastly, there is not enough discussion of PrEP (Pre-exposure prophylaxis), a daily pill preventing seroconversion. PrEP has become central in debates about men who have sex with men and sex working communities. While Logan refers to PrEP fairly often, he never describes how it may already or soon be priced into or accounted for within the sexual markets.
Despite these relatively minor quibbles, Economics, Sexuality, and Male Sex Work is a beautiful piece of economic sociology accessible to scholars and students across sociology, anthropology, and economics. Logan manages to break new ground in economic sociology and is clearly having fun while doing so. The intellectual curiosity he brings to this book is infectious, and readers will be rewarded for every moment they spend in his company.