Organising in the sex industry : an action research investigation

• Main Author: Lopes, Ana
• Published: University of East London 2005
• Subjects: 363.4
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.532566

This thesis is the end product of an action research project, which has consisted in fighting for sex workers' control and ownership of their own industry. The starting point of the research was rather different from that of most recent work on this topic. In fact, the impetus to embark in this project stemmed from the intellectual environment I experienced as an undergraduate Anthropology student at the University of East London, and in particular from Chris Knight's and Camilla Power's theories of the origins of culture and art. Their model argues that around 100 000 years ago, in order to guarantee cooperation by males, females found a way to prevent them from identifying and targeting menstruating females, that is, those who were approaching the peak of fertility (Knight 1991). Menstruation is a woman's best advertisement of fertility and a big attraction for males. If males were able to identify and target those most fertile (sexier) females, others would indeed have a problem, as they would not receive much needed help to meet the costs of reproduction. Thus, according to this theory, women synchronised their reproductive cycles and formed coalitions at the time of menstruation to force men to hunt and bring meat (Power 1999) - Knight (1991) sees this initiative as a "sex strike".