Hanna Shields
Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Hillary Crane
17 November 2018
Tricking and Tripping; an Analysis
In modern society, the thought of a prostitute evokes images of drug-addicted using women who are spreading diseases through the community as they’re selling sex services for money. While some believe that women enter prostitution because they’re either addicted to sex or need money to fuel a drug addiction, others may see it as something that women are forced into and that they are victims who need help. The author, Claire Sterk, claims that her intention in Tricking and Tripping is to “provide the reader with a perspective on street prostitution from the point of view of the women themselves” (Sterk, 15). She is trying to convince the reader that these women are not necessarily the source of crime and drugs in communities but are people who deserve the same resources, rights, and quality of life that any other person does, despite them engaging in careers that are considered deviant by society. Sterk achieves this by including the women’s stories and histories throughout her ethnography, creating subcategories of different types of prostitution, and by writing about the impact of AIDS on the prostitution community.
Tricking and Tripping was written in the late 1990s at the height of the AIDS epidemic. The fieldwork takes place in the Atlanta and New York City metropolitan areas over a ten year period. Sterk, the author, accompanied the women in settings known for prostitution activities and formed relationships with the women by participating in daily activities outside the prostitution setting, such as grocery shopping or doing laundry.
Claire Sterk organizes her ethnography solely around the women she is studying, which serves her well in giving the reader an understanding of life on the street. She uses the women’s stories and experiences in order to draw conclusions regarding entering, participating, and leaving the prostitution scene. The author conducted her research through participant observation “on streets, in hotels, and other settings known for prostitution activity”, and through “in-depth” interviews of 180 women (Sterk, 3). This type of observation was crucial to building her case because without gathering stories from the women, her later claims would have little to no validity. It would be very difficult for the reader to understand the life of prostitution without real-life accounts of prostitutes unless the author had chosen to engage in prostitution herself and could therefore draw from her own experiences.
Another technique that Sterk uses to structure her argument is to challenge previous researchers’ claims regarding the women’s justification for prostitution. The author spends a fair amount of time in her book talking about how prostitutes enter the profession. She begins by relating previous research that sets out to explain why women decide to sell sex for money, such as how past psychologists focused on “personality characteristics”, and states that previous researchers claimed that “women who prostitute themselves have less stable personalities and marginal mental abilities”(20). The author spends the first four pages of this chapter recounting and analyzing previous researchers’ approaches for explaining why women become prostitutes. She then goes to discredit the previous arguments by saying that the “lack of comparison groups in their studies limits the utility of their findings” (21), or that they draw conclusions about the women’s traits without taking widespread characteristics into account. She explains why some arguments lack validity by “[failing] to capture the complex realities of [the prostitute’s] lives”, and “[ignoring] explanations at the individual level” (Sterk, 22 & 23). By using other researchers’ arguments, she is able to contradict and correct their biases with her own interdisciplinary approach, which she claims that other researchers have “demonstrated the need for” (23).
Sterk deduced that the different problems women face- such as past abuse, lack of love, and lack of money- are forces that propel them into different forms of prostitution (2000). The conclusion that the author developed from her fieldwork is that “prostitution is not something that women typically enter voluntarily, but rather a way to stay alive and care for themselves and their families” (166). She found that a majority of prostitutes had earlier experiences of abuse, and she claims that the women felt that their past experiences kept them from establishing “healthy, steady sexual relationships” (23). The way that Sterk addresses how the women got into prostitution is a good technique because it allows the reader to understand situations and paths that led women to the life. The author’s method was effective because by hearing the prostitutes subjective experiences, the reader feels empathy for what the women have gone through in their lives that led to them becoming prostitutes.
Sterk argues that there are four subcategories of prostitutes and that the different forms and perceptions of prostitution impact how the women approach different aspects of “The Life” (Sterk, 2000). Since people do not typically differentiate between types of prostitutes and their circumstances, all prostitutes suffer from the same stigma and stereotypes (2000). Sterk distinguishes between “streetwalkers”,“hooked prostitutes”, “prostituting addicts”, and “crack prostitutes” (2000) and emphasizes the differences among these women. The author was required to create these categories based only on her interviews and observations in the field and did not have previous conventions to base her theory off of. She did, however, connect her theory to Erving Goffman’s concept of deviant occupations in order to develop her argument that prostitution is a career, and there can be different forms of prostitution based on the women’s reasons for engaging in it (Sterk, 43). By drawing from an outside source, she was able to base her categories off of a pre-existing notion of deviant careers, which was useful in validating her theory. However, she made sure to state that there are differences between prostitution and non-deviant careers because prostitution does not allow for “upward mobility” (44). By highlighting what conclusions cannot be drawn based on limited information, Sterk made her argument appear more credible.
She was able to differentiate between prostitutes by basing her subcategories on “the women’s stories” (Sterk, 45). Her interviews provide validity to the claim that there are crucial differences that exist between these women. For example, Sterk writes that streetwalkers are the most likely to engage in safe sex practices because they have the power to turn down certain clients, while prostituting addicts and hooked prostitutes risk losing the potential income necessary to fuel their drug habit and will therefore be less likely to use condoms (Sterk 2000). This background was essential for the author to make her claim that because of this, target programs intended to educate women are going to be less effective with the women who are on drugs, one of the issues that she intended to portray. This is one example of the author effectively using the women’s words to impress upon the reader the varying types of prostitutes and differing situations.
One of the main goals that Sterk intended to accomplish, and subsequently named her book after, was portraying how the AIDS epidemic impacted women on the street. Claire Sterk closely examines the prevalence of HIV testing, prevention, treatment, and education, and asserts that “society has blamed prostitutes for introducing sexually transmitted diseases into the general population” (Sterk, 17). She claims that society has created a “feminization of sexually transmitted diseases”; that women are shamed for the transmission of STDs while men are not. She supports her theory by providing historical precedents dating back to World War I, including how prostitutes were used as educational examples for “sources of venereal diseases” (94 & 95). Sterk often refers back to the subcategories of prostitution during this chapter in order to develop her argument that all prostitutes are stigmatized and are often “scapegoats” for the spread of STDs, despite the fact that her studied categories had substantial differences in infection rates and safe sex practices. She includes figures from the Center for Disease Control to validate her claims, saying that “the results indicated that… [HIV] infection rates were highest (57 percent) among prostitutes who inject drugs” and “lowest (actually zero) among prostitutes working in legal brothels” (Sterk, 95). Since she used a highly trusted and reputable source, Sterk was able to make her claim that drug-using prostitutes were “three to four times as likely to be infected with HIV” (95), thus validating her argument that certain forms of prostitutes will be affected by stigmatized issues such as STD transmission even though they may be less likely to contract these illnesses than others.
Lastly, I make my argument that the author set out to persuade the reader that prostitutes are not the source of the problem, they are just a byproduct of it. Sterk’s use of subcategories develops a variety of differences between the streetwalkers and addicts, especially emphasizing safe sex practices, the use of drugs, presence of pimps or pimp-boyfriends, and clientele (2000). She writes that prostitutes lack the resources or support to get out of the life and find new employment, to come forward about rape charges, or to speak out against their abusive pimps or boyfriends (2000). Men lack any kind of responsibility or accountability for the “abuse and degradation” (90) of prostituting women and drug users, and “women face arrest while pimps and customers remain unchallenged by police” (142). Because of this, prostitutes are often blamed by society for sexually transmitted diseases, as discussed before, and are considered to be the source of drugs and crime to neighborhoods and the community (2000). However, Sterk writes that the prostitutes claim that “prostitution would cease to exist without a demand for it, that married men should be held responsible for their own actions, and that paying customers frequently demand unsafe sex” (93). With these claims, she successfully accomplishes providing the reader with a new perspective on prostitution and the way society treats women who feel that they have no other choice than to be prostitutes. Whether the women’s reasonings are a justification or an excuse, women feel that they have no way out of the life, and that they are often forced into it and kept there by pimps or boyfriends. She tells their stories to share the conditions of these women’s lives.
One thing that is important to acknowledge is that the author of this ethnography has spent time in the field and has developed relationships with the women she is studying. This was a necessary technique that served her well regarding the information that the prostitutes disclosed, but it also gave Sterk the potential to develop a bias and strong opinions regarding the women and their lives. For example, Sterk writes, “prostitutes deserve better than to be labeled as a vector for the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS, into the general population” (Sterk, 167). This is not a good argument technique because she is using her own opinions to try and persuade the reader rather than letting her data and information allow them to interpret it a certain way.
Overall, Sterk’s method for developing and portraying her argument was successful . She included outside information to accompany her findings which was effective since she could use it to strengthen her own argument, either by pointing out flaws in the research or by agreeing with their findings. Her use of subcategories, stories, and the impact of AIDS on the prostitution community allows the reader to understand experiences from the prostitute’s point of view. This technique is indispensable because otherwise it may as well be impossible to enhance their quality of life. The author wants people to understand their stories in order to alleviate the circumstances that caused many women to become prostitutes in the first place.
Works Cited
Sterk, Claire Elizabeth. Tricking and Tripping: Prostitution in the Era of AIDS. Social Change
Press, 2000.