‘Pimps” Self-presentations in the Interview Setting: ‘Good Me,’ ‘Bad Me,’ and ‘Badass Me’

ABSTRACT

Using a mixed-method approach, we explored how 85 sex market facilitators used neutralization and subcultural discourse to present themselves in the interview setting. We used non-metric, Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) to test discursive themes that resulted in a three-fold model with the themes ‘good,’’bad,’ and ‘badass me’ with externalizing and internalizing approaches. The ‘good me’ subtype focused on fundamentally being a ”nice guy” but blaming acts on oppression. ‘Bad me” focused on being ”innately bad” but blaming outside factors and neutralizing ‘bad me.’ ‘Badass me’ centered on high-status feelings of pimping but also expressing guilt about it. This model may be helpful for researchers or practitioners interviewing or working with sex market facilitators, such as pimps or sex traffickers.

KEYWORDS:

• Pimping
• sex trafficking
• narrative criminology
• neutralization theory
• subcultural theory

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Pandering laws vary across states. The Merriam-Webster legal dictionary defines pandering as ‘The act or crime of recruiting prostitutes or of arranging a situation for another to practice prostitution.’

² Defined in TVPA as ‘sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to such an act has not attained 18 years of age’.

³ The TVPA defined sex trafficking as the “recruitment, harboring, transporting, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act” when “induced to perform a sex act through force, fraud or coercion” (22 US Code 22 USC 7102(8)).

⁴ (a) sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to such an act has not attained 18 years of age.

⁵ A Farrell, C Owens, and J McDevitt, ‘New laws but few cases: Understanding the challenges to the investigation and prosecution of human trafficking cases, Crime, Law and Social Change, vol. 61.2, 2014, pp.139-168.

⁶ ‘Bottoms’ is a slang term SMFs used to discuss their main sex worker. After this mention, we chose ‘main sex workers’ to avoid perpetuating a term that may hurt sex worker populations.