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186 9 Buying and Selling the “Girlfriend Experience” TheSocial andSubjective Contours of MarketIntimacy Elizabeth Bernstein In the back room of a discreetly furnished apartment in a quiet San Francisco neighborhood, I am sitting on a brown leather sofa talking with Amanda, who has just said good-bye to the day’s first customer. We drink tea as the early afternoon sunshine streams into the room, illuminating many overstuffed bookcases, an exercise bicycle, and Amanda herself—a slender woman in her late thirties with dark hair and serious eyes. Smiling slightly, she shrugs when I ask her how the session with her client went. Actually, I spent most of the time giving him a backrub, and we also spent a lot of time talking before we had sex. In the end, we went over [time] by about seven minutes. . . . You know it’s really funny to me when people say that I’m selling my body. Of all the work I’ve done, this isn’t abusive to my body. Most of my clients are computer industry workers—about half. Sometimes I ask myself: what about their bodies? These men spend 40 hours a week hunched over a desk. They live alone, eat alone, drive to work alone. Other than seeing me, they don’t seem to even have time for a social life. Amanda goes on to explain that today’s client was a marketing executive for a prominent Silicon Valley software company. This client is a “regular,” someone she has seen before, who has often complained to her that he is overworked and too busy to meet women. I wonder aloud how it is that he nonetheless has the time to drive two and a half hours on his lunch break to come and see her. Amanda observes with bemusement that for the majority of her client pool—educated, professional men who have contacted her through an on-line ad—such paradoxes are the norm. This chapter is about the ways in which recent transformations in economic and cultural life have played themselves out at the most intimate of levels: the individual *Adapted from Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) Buying and Selling the “Girlfriend Experience” 187 experience of bodily attributes and integrity, and the meanings afforded to sexual expression. The lens through which I examine these transitions is sexual commerce, the exchange of sex for money in the globalized, late-capitalist marketplace. My contention is that experiences such as those of Amanda and her clients reflect and thus offer insight into broader trends at work within intimate life in the contemporary West.1 Once largely restricted to face-to-face interactions and the small-scale circulation of pornographic images, sexual commerce has grown to include a vast and everexpanding range of commercially available products and experiences— fetish clubs; live sex shows; erotic massage; escort agencies; telephone and cyber-sex contacts; “drive-through” striptease venues; sexual “emporiums” featuring lap and wall dancing ; sex tourism to developing countries and within global cities; and all variety of sexually explicit texts, videos, and pictures, in print and on-line—what is purportedly a more than $20-billion-a-year industry, and a mainstay of both first and third world economies (Weitzer 2000; Kempadoo and Doezema 1998; Lopez 2000). By examining this growth and diversification of sexual commerce from the perspectives of the purveyors of sexual services and their consumers, my aim has been to articulate a political economy of sexual practices and desires. By detailing the relationship between money and sex at the “micro” level of bodies and subjectivities, I seek to reveal the relationship between economy and desire more broadly. My argument is that the global restructuring of capitalist production and investment that has taken place since the 1970s has had consequences that are more profound and more intimate than most economic sociologists ever choose to consider .2 The desires that drive the rapidly expanding and diversifying international sex trade have emanated from corporate-fueled consumption, an increase in tourism and business travel, and the symbiotic relationship between information technologies and the privatization of commercial consumption.3 At the same time, the rise in service occupations and temporary work, as well as an increase in labor migrations from developing to developed countries, have fueled the growth and diversification of sexual labor. For many sectors of the population, these shifts have resulted in new configurations of familial life as well as in new...

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