The prosumer economy and the sex industry: the creation of an online community of sex prosumers

ABSTRACT

In this article, I discuss how changes in the economic infrastructure of mass consumption have changed the values and attitudes of consumer culture. By focusing on an online community of Israeli sex consumers and applying the theoretical framework of the prosumer economy, this article suggests its innovative potential for understanding the intersections of cyberspace, capitalism, and sex work consumption. Using the context of the dynamic cultural terrain of prosumerism, the article examines how commercial way of thinking is encouraged, understood, and adopted by sex consumers in the practice of purchasing sexual encounters and sharing them online. The main argument is that the online community of sex consumers has become a collaborative project in which consumers simultaneously produce and consume – that is, they become ‘prosumers’ and thus occupy positions of power within the capitalist market-place. They, therefore, not only responding to market rules but also producing them. I claim that the change in the nature of the community has impacted both the nature of online writing and the way clients perceive sex workers.

KEYWORDS:

• Prosumer economy
• sex work
• cyberspace
• consumer culture
• consumption

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Yeela Lahav-Raz is a sociologist and ethnographer who is researching sex work regulations and politics, mainly in Israel, and the intersection between technology, masculinity and sexuality. After receiving the post-doctoral fellowship from the ISF (Israeli science Foundation), she is currently an honorary lecturer in the Department of Criminology at the University of Leicester. Her post-doc research deal with sex tourism in the Middle East in the aim of expending current knowledge about the global capitalist order; neo-colonialist trends; and the relationship between global elites and local marginal populations.

ORCID

Yeela Lahav-Raz http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1753-3375

Notes

1 These laws include: the prohibition of recruitment advertisements for prostitution (2017); the prohibition of strip clubs (2018); the prohibition of telephone lines used to advertise prostitution services (2018); and the criminalisation of buyers of sex (2017). In addition to these laws, two amendments to existing laws have been added. The first raised the punishment threshold for sexual consumption from a minor from three to five years. The second added prostitution to the restricted access of offensive websites (until then defined as websites dealing with gambling and incitement).

2 This is not, however, arbitrary. The guiding principles are: length of membership, number of posts and their quality, the writer’s credibility, and the writer’s conduct in the forum.

3 A coastal city in central Israel.

4 The Israeli social justice protests were a series of demonstrations beginning in July 2011 involving hundreds of thousands of protesters from a variety of socioeconomic and religious backgrounds, opposing the ongoing rise in the cost of living and the deterioration of public services such as health and education. For an expanded academic discussion on these protests, see: Rosenhek and Shalev (2014).

5 The Green Line, or (pre-) 1967 border, is the demarcation line set out in the 1949 Armistice Agreements between the armies of Israel and those of its neighbours (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria) after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. It served as the de facto borders of the State of Israel from 1949 until the Six-Day War in 1967.