Male Sex Work in The Digital Age - Curated Lives - Paul Ryan

Male Sex Work
in the Digital Age

Curated Lives
Male Sex Work in the Digital Age
Paul Ryan
Male Sex Work

in the Digital Age
Curated Lives
Paul Ryan
Maynooth University
Maynooth, Ireland
ISBN 978-3-030-11796-2 ISBN 978-3-030-11797-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11797-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018968341
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Acknowledgements
I was fortunate to receive assistance and support from many people

during the completion of this book. I want to thank all the men who
trusted me with their stories included in this book, particularly at a time
when sex workers remain subject to stigma and criminalisation. Thanks
to Amelia Derkatsch at Palgrave. Thanks to Sex Workers Alliance
Ireland for their support and my colleagues from COST Action IS1209
‘Comparing European Prostitution Policies: Understanding Scales and
Cultures of Governance’ 2013–2017. Thanks to my colleagues in the
Department of Sociology and the Maynooth University Social Sciences
Institute (MUSSI). Special thanks to my family and friends. This book
is dedicated to my brother, Dermot Ryan, and is in memory of Laura
Lee (1979–2018).
v
Contents
1 The Changing World of Online Male Sex Work 1
2 Discipline and Desire in the Pursuit of Physical Capital 29
3 Grindr, Hybridisation and the Life a Pop-Up Escort 57
4 Instagram, Micro-Celebrity and the World of Intimate

Strangers 95
5 Netporn and the Amateur Turn on OnlyFans 119
6 Conclusion: The Governance of Male Sex Work

in Digital Cultures 137
Index 143
vii
1
The Changing World of Online
Male Sex Work
Abstract  In this introductory chapter Ryan sets out five developments

that have had a direct impact on the growing importance of new social
media in understanding transformations within male sex work. These
are (1) the normalization of the sex industry (2) the rise of new social
media (3) micro-celebrity and self-branding (4) fetishising and racial-
ising muscular bodies in erotic labour, and (5) the gig economy. The
chapter concludes with a discussion of the historical and political con-
text of sex work in Ireland and abroad.
Keywords  Sex industry · Celebrity · Bodies · Gig economy · Male sex

work
Introduction
I was waiting for an appearance on a current affairs television pro-
gramme, when the host, Vincent Browne, came to greet me. After
the briefest of pleasantries, Browne told me that he thought that men
who bought sex from women were clearly pathological. This was, ‘not
© The Author(s) 2019 1

P. Ryan, Male Sex Work in the Digital Age,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11797-9_1
2
P. Ryan
in dispute’ I was told. It was an ominous start. I had been asked on

the programme to discuss a proposal put forward by a parliamentary
sub-committee that would criminalise the purchase of sex. However, a
discussion of the proposal did not happen. The debate, with the chief
executive of an organisation that supports the exit of women from
prostitution,1 settled into a familiar routine. I spoke of the complexity
within sex work and the absence of any carceral, magic bullet solution
that could address the structural inequalities of those lives. I was told,
in line with a neo-abolitionist approach to prostitution (Barry 1995;
O’Connor and Healy 2006), that trafficking and violence were indistin-
guishable from sex work. Consent was deemed irrelevant, men who buy
sex were pathological and those that sold sex were statistically irrelevant.
Men who sell sex are not irrelevant though. I had interviewed male
sex workers since 2009, and there was an existing body of research
that had explored their experiences for over twenty years. I knew the
circumstances of their consent were important and that their removal
from public debate, while convenient politics, may have a detrimen-
tal outcome on the targeted provision of services that addressed their
health and safety. Male or trans sex workers represented 9% of all
commercial sex transactions in Ireland (Maginn and Ellison 2014).
The research I undertook for this book suggested that the impact of
migration and the use of new digital cultures had transformed male
sex work. My interviews with eighteen Brazilian and Venezuelan men
engaged in commercial sex while living in Dublin revealed the extent
of that transformation, through innovative ways in which they have
harnessed their micro-celebrity on new social media to broadcast mon-
etised content on video sharing platforms. These men curate different
digital selves that are tailored for specific audiences on apps like Grindr,
Instagram, Twitter and Tinder. In this book, I concentrate on Grindr
and Instagram. Both offer an insight into two digital lives; one transi-
tory and opportunistic (Grindr), the other a more intimate and per-
manent biography (Instagram). Their involvement in sex work remains
ambiguous across both platforms. My interviewees speak about what
they do, not about who they are. They are not sex work rights activ-
ists. However, they also seek no rescue, redemption or exit prom-
ised by NGOs committed to the abolition of prostitution. Some men
1 The Changing World of Online Male Sex Work
3
strongly dislike sex work. Others are actively shaping a range of online
sex work practices that best suit the circumstances of their lives. There
are no happy hooker tropes here. They are charting a way through the
discourses of coercion and rights. They are reluctant to advertise sexual
services on exclusively escort sites, like rentboy.com and later rentmen.
eu.2 Rather their potential clients read and decipher photos, emoji and
text on Grindr or join thousands of other followers on Instagram, where
they are invited to interact and proceed to access monetised content or
arrange face-to-face meetings.3 It was clear from the outset of this book
that the lived realities and experiences of men in sex work bore little
resemblance to the legal and political discourses that framed the debate.
Five developments have encouraged the movement of male sex work
further within the digital cultures of new social media. These are impor-
tant to understand the structure and stories within this book.
1. The Normalisation of the Sex Industry

This study was undertaken within a context of the ongoing normal-
isation of the sex industry. This development has a number of facets.
There has been a documented increased visibility of adult entertain-
ment industries throughout cities in Europe, driven by local govern-
ance laws and sex-related tourism (Hubbard et al. 2008: 376). This
tourism, combined with a growth in the leisure industry, technology
and changing consumer patterns has contributed to this increased
visibility of sexual commerce, blurring the boundaries between
mainstream industries (Brents and Sanders 2010: 376; Sanders et al.
2018: 2). This normalisation is particularly evident in relation to
male sex work. Later in this chapter, I discuss how the social mean-
ings attached to male prostitution have changed over history, where
it was the association with homosexuality and class transgression that
located the practice within a deviancy perspective (MacPhail et al.
2015: 485). The aspirations of the post decriminalisation gay move-
ment were forged under unique economic circumstances that saw
Ireland emerge as the clearest example of small country liberalism
in Europe (Ó Riain 2014: 9). Pro-market reforms combined with
a leaner government and a ‘privatized economy’ could now coexist
with a politics of identity and equality. In Ireland and other liberal
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P. Ryan
economies, issue of care and social reproduction continued to be

privatised or to be deemed the personal responsibility of families or
wider civil society. Under such a framework, I argue that liberalism
needed to ‘create’ new families to share the burden of this redistri-
bution of social costs leading to broad political support for gay mar-
riage, successfully passed by referendum in 2015. Male sex work has
been a beneficiary of this legislative success, where men have been
afforded greater agency and respectability for their sexual entrepre-
neurship, in sharp contrast to the exclusively coercive portrayal of
female workers. Male sex work has benefited from the technological
revolution that has dramatically reduced the existence of street work,
increasing the number of middle-class workers attracted by greater
privacy, safety and flexibility from working at home (McLean 2013).
In Chapter 3, I argue that it is within this technology, like the dating
app Grindr that male sex work has become the most visible, blurring
boundaries between economic and physical capital in sex, dating and
relationships. In this reimagining of intimate relationships, distin-
guishing between those who possess agency and power with coercion
and victimhood becomes a more nuanced endeavour.
2. The Rise of New Social Media Applications
New social media has become an important site where individuals
construct, reimagine and perform identities to audiences in late mod-
ern societies. While previously associated with social networking sites
like Facebook, where the impetus was to connect to other users (Van
Dijck 2013), a visual turn in society and social media specifically, has
created platforms less about sharing content, and more about per-
forming identities through consumption (Walsh and Baker 2017).
Social media users communicate taste, cultural capital and self-dis-
cipline through their consumption to an increasingly diverse group
of followers that is maintained and grown through the judicious use
of hashtags (Page 2012). Instagram, the photo and video sharing
app founded in 2010 is leading the way in this visual turn, reporting
1 billion monthly users in 2018.4 I argue that material, especially
self-photography or selfies, uploaded on Instagram and Grindr are
the raw material of digital identities and have become an exchange
currency of both the validation and domination of others who fail
5
to meet benchmarks of popularity, fitness, travel or friendship. They

become a currency that can be traded and converted. It is a currency
that can open new economic opportunities as the self itself becomes a
commodity for online advertising. Social media followers are directed
to Instagram through the use of hashtags and links from apps like
Grindr. In Chapter 4, I argue that this facilitates a new dimension
of intimacy within the client-sex worker relationship, not present in
traditional escort websites, by granting followers access into the men’s
everyday lives. It also transforms our understanding of the online
world, which ceases to be a mere storage depot for data, photos and
chat (Batty 1997) becoming a gateway that places the material body
as central to online interaction. Potential clients of male sex workers
can avail of a real-time and highly choreographed experience facili-
tated by the frequent use of features like Instagram Story that allows
men to post short videos of their daily lives.
Grindr, founded in 2009, for men who seek sex with men is a
mobile app with global positioning technology that facilitates the
interaction and trade of messages and photos (Brennan 2017). In
Chapter 3, I argue that male sex workers are using their personal pro-
files to market sexual services. I argue that male sex workers thrive
on Grindr where the digital visibility and fetishisation of the mus-
cular body bestows a physical and erotic capital. If Instagram pro-
vided a platform for the construction of a digital narrative that was
consistent, Grindr provided the direct opposite. The digital self on
Grindr was transient, where men alternated photos sometimes on
daily basis that ranged between shirtless changing room selfies, holi-
day beach photos or occasionally, a blank black screen. The ease with
which photos and emoji were changed, constantly communicating
different messages to different audiences facilitated the rise of the
opportunistic, pop-escort. Grindr opened new hybrid spaces that lie
between the digital and the physical that, when facilitated by mobile
technology, can reshape space in ways that are transformative and
transgressive (Ryan 2016; Kitchin and Dodge 2011; De Souza e Silva
2006). It allowed sex workers to navigate the city—in either Dublin
or Dubai—creating new opportunities in diverse physical locations
like bars, clubs, gyms, airports or places of worship. The stories in
6
P. Ryan
this book reveal that while this transience brought great freedom to
recreate and tailor the self to diverse audiences, trading exclusively on
the digital visibility of their physical and erotic capital brought with
it the unintended consequence of coercive situations and emotional
distress.
3. Micro-Celebrity and Self-Branding
Self-branding is a form of labour undertaken in late modern, or
post-Fordist economies. I understand it in the context of Giddens’
(1991: 5) reflexive project of the self where the individual must take it
upon themselves to access resources and choose lifestyle options that
are necessary to engage in an active, ongoing construction of their
biographical narrative. This concept of lifestyle gives ‘material form’
to self-identity and becomes expressed as set of practices or routines
most often incorporated into patterns of consumption with habits
governing modes of dress, food and behaviour (p. 113). The body
plays a key role within this reflexive project becoming a visible means
of transmitting identity through the physique (Giddens 1992: 31).
In Chapter 2, I return to these themes, drawing from Bourdieu
(1986) to explore this embodied dimension of cultural capital that
conveys status and power. Using interview data, I argue how the male
sex worker body bears the imprint of social class and communicates
habitus and economic location to social media followers and in real-
time locations like the gym.
With the proliferation of new social media, self-branding has
adopted a distinctive character. A new lexicon has emerged to
describe how individuals construct and manage high-profile pub-
lic identities on social media to gain either commercial opportuni-
ties and/or accrue cultural capital (Khamis et al. 2017); ‘influencers’
and the ‘instafamous’ deploy micro-celebrity (Senft 2008) interactive
techniques to create an illusion of intimacy and trust between them
and their followers. Such direct access to tens of thousands of largely
younger consumers combined with an emotional connection that
fosters trust and authenticity is hugely attractive to advertisers keen
to harness the consumer reach of those bestowed with ‘Instafame’
(Marwick 2015). The political economy of Instafame rests securely
on neoliberal foundations that commodifies the self, turning it into
7
a brand that requires strategic cultivation and promotion to realise its

full potential. Like any brand, injudicious social media posts that call
into question the creditability and authenticity of the micro-celebrity
can damage the commoditised self.
In Chapter 4, I use the concepts of Instafame (Marwick 2015),
celebrity (Van Krieken 2012; Rojek 2001) and micro-celebrity (Senft
2008; Marwick 2013) as mechanisms to understand the social media
use of a number of my interviewees. I explore how these men, with
tens of thousands of followers construct their social media profiles
broadcasting content that speaks to different audiences and how they
navigate the self-branding of their bodies and lifestyles while main-
taining an ambiguity about their sex work. I illustrate how techno-
logical developments like Instagram Story, live streaming, direct
messaging and the polling of followers all foster micro-celebrity inter-
action. These technologies act as gatekeepers, allowing my interview-
ees to manage interaction, guiding followers through the promise of
greater intimate access by purchasing content. My interviewees’ use
of Instagram works in tandem with other digital platforms like the
gift registry site Amazon Wish List and OnlyFans, a site that encour-
ages social media personalities to broadcast content on a subscription
basis to their followers. My interviewees’ use of OnlyFans reveals the
competition of digital self-branding as broadcasters vie with each
other to create and promote personalised and niche content to their
audiences.
4. Fetishising and Racialising Muscular Bodies in Erotic Labour
Late modern societies have placed the body at the centre of a reflex-
ive project of the self (Giddens 1991; Bauman 2000; Featherstone
2010). The body becomes a project that requires constant main-
tenance and alteration, where its value derives more from what it
looks like rather than what it can do, in a context where the physical
capabilities of the body in the labour force have been greatly dimin-
ished in advanced industrial society. The body becomes a bearer of
symbolic value carrying the imprint of social class in how it is main-
tained, treated and shaped (Bourdieu 1986). It also communicates
neoliberal ethics of individual responsibility showcasing the disci-
pline, which has been imposed upon it through diet and exercise.
8
P. Ryan
This has coincided with an increased gaze on the male body across
advertising, film and popular culture within wider society (Patterson
and Elliott 2002). Within urban gay culture, this fetishisation of the
white, muscular male body although not new, is accelerated by the
digital exchange of the body across new social media. This has greatly
increased the value of the physical and erotic capital derived from
this fetishised body.
In Chapter 3, I explore my interviewees’ participation in a range
of body projects, often originating in sport and fitness on the beaches
of Brazil and Venezuela and now relocated within Dublin city cen-
tre gyms. I argue these men recognised early the physical capital with
which their bodies possessed and the ability to deploy them to capi-
talise on economic and social opportunities within the world of dat-
ing, education and work. As newly arrived migrants, my interviewees
faced challenges navigating high apartment rental prices often com-
bined with minimum wage employment while struggling to repay
debts accumulated in their relocation to Ireland. Grindr facilitated
the display and conversion of this physical and erotic capital, drawn
upon as a resource to meet financial needs and to support travel,
social activities and consumer purchases.
The racialisation of desire played an important role in my inter-
viewees’ success in the digital sex and dating marketplace. In
Chapters 2 and 3, I discuss how this became a double-edged sword.
This process of racialisation of their erotic labour was happening
within the context of widespread racism on Grindr profiles com-
municated through a language of ‘personal preference’ that excluded
ethnic minorities (e.g. Daroya 2018). We know that racial hierar-
chies exist within sex work (Mahdavi 2010: 946; Jones 2015: 790).
Technology is also complicit, with profiles constructed drawing
from a drop-down list of ethnicities while in-app filters allow users
to remove profile results that do not match their search parame-
ters, most often excluding Asian men or large or stocky body types
(Robinson 2015: 319). Although identified as Latino, my interview-
ees were born in countries with a rich history of migration and as
such reflected that ethnic diversity, posing a challenge for them nav-
igating clients that wanted an imagined exotic other—brown-eyed
9
that was not too pale, but not too dark. Research on racialised gay
sexualities online found that participants categorised Latinos as sen-
sual, exotic and passionate (Paul et al. 2010), creating parameters
with which sex workers constructed their racial identities online.
5. The Gig Economy
Ireland’s open economy, heavily dependent on foreign direct invest-
ment in technology, pharmaceuticals and medical devices has suf-
fered a roller-coaster ride of economic boom and bust, intensified by
the global recession 2007–2012. It is now staging a dramatic recov-
ery, recording a growth rate of 5.6%, predicted to be the highest in
the European Union in 2018.5 Various accounts of these tumultu-
ous economic events have been told (e.g. Ó Riain 2014; Allen 2000).
The economic consequences of that recession on the labour market
remain. The effect of fiscal austerity, unemployment and rising labour
precarity set the stage for an intensification of the on-demand or gig
economy (Van Doorn 2017: 900). Digital connectivity has seen the
rise of labour platforms where workers and clients can post jobs, rates
per hour and work availability. The gig economy has been heralded
for enabling workers to transcend the limitations of local labour mar-
kets and tap into international opportunities, allowing migrants cir-
cumvent local labour restrictions (Graham et al. 2017: 138, 147).
However, digital labour does reduce bargaining power and increase
precarity, particularly given its racialised and gendered characteris-
tics. This results in a renegotiation of the social contract with work-
ers where they assume all the risks and responsibilities of their labour
(Van Doorn 2017: 902, 906).
Workers in the sex industry are familiar with precarious labour
conditions. The status of the industry has left workers in most juris-
dictions outside the protections of labour law (Berg and Penley 2016:
163). The stories in this book are located within the digital gig econ-
omy and illustrate how migrant workers, restricted under their visa
conditions from working more than 20 hours per week, developed
social media profiles that enabled them to broadcast monetised con-
tent and cultivate relationships with regular sex work clients. They
also had previously worked on helpling.com, an online cleaning plat-
form. These stories reveal how my interviewees remained wary of
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P. Ryan
becoming reliant on their exclusively digital work on OnlyFans and

jettisoning relationships with real-time clients. This digital work did
however recalibrate the balance between their different sources of
income as waiters, sex workers and online broadcasters of content.
The stories in this book were told in specific cultural and historical
moments of time. I want to next outline both the changing meaning
of male prostitution and establish the social and political context of
sex work in Ireland.
Changing Social Meanings of Male Sex Work

The meanings and motivations of those involved in male prostitution
continued to evolve in tandem with the emergence of the homosex-
ual as a scientific category in the late nineteenth century. Male prosti-
tution became institutionalised in most European cities by the end of
the seventeenth century, complete with spaces and language to facili-
tate it (Logan 2017: 22). The rise of sexology brought a scientific lens
to understanding anomalies between the newly ‘discovered’ category
of the homosexual and male prostitutes who identified as heterosex-
ual. As this homosexual identity and personhood emerged, it became
increasingly difficult for these participants—both buyers and sellers of
sex—to remain immune from the new meanings that were associated
with sexual acts previously thought of as mere transgressions of nor-
mative sexuality. These new meanings did not however equally apply
across society. New classifications, typologies and binaries did not
gain traction in urban working-class communities until the 1930s and
1940s, where a belief persisted that ‘inverts’ or effeminates represented
the true homosexuality, as opposed to the more traditionally gendered
‘perverts’ (Kaye 2003: 3–4; Chauncey 1994: 14–15). Chauncey argues
that sexually active men had a gendered identity rather than a sexual
identity at the turn of the century, allowing for a distinction between
conventional ‘masculine’ men and effeminate others known as pansies
or fairies (1994: 48). How the legal or medical professions would treat
or sanction those categories would similarly follow class lines, with the
middle-class ‘invert’ subjected to greater leniency than the ‘perversion’
11
of their working-class counterpart. Many men adopted female perso-

nas through dress, make-up and mannerism to advertise their availa-
bility for sex with homosexual and straight men—with some crossing
between effeminate and straight worlds depending on the safety of the
locale (1994: 51). Fairies, like female prostitutes, had considerable suc-
cess in attracting clients by offering oral sex; a service many ‘respecta-
ble’ women would not conduct, simultaneously making them objects
of desire, tolerance and abuse. Middle- or upper-class fairies that offered
local youth money for sex often became the victims of assault and theft
as men sought to reinforce a traditional masculine dominance through
violence or sexual brutalism (1994: 60). The word fairy would increas-
ingly become used to identify effeminate men who sold sex to ‘normal’
men frequenting bars on the lower East side but also in brothels (1994:
67–68) where services were often easier and cheaper to locate than in
female prostitution. The rise of greater gay visibility would restrict the
numbers of men who identified as heterosexual from engaging in male
prostitution, leading gay identified men to sell sex to each other for the
first time (Kaye 2003: 37).
The Cleveland Street and Dublin Castle Scandals

The intersection between male prostitution and class created fears
within British society about the impact of sexual degeneracy on the con-
tinued dominance of the Empire. The private sexual lives of individuals
would become a microcosm of a wider moral panic at the heart of the
nation and the masculinities within them. The Cleveland Street scandal
in 1889–1890 fuelled a perception of sexually debauched elites largely
immune from criminal sanction. The arrest and questioning of a fifteen-
year-old boy on suspicious of theft led to an investigation that uncov-
ered that he was one of a number of telegraph messenger boys employed
by the General Post Office who worked in a homosexual brothel at 19
Cleveland Street in London’s Fitzroy Square. The work of telegraph boys
placed them in a unique position to cross not just the urban landscape
but also cross class divides as they entered rarefied aristocratic circles
to deliver correspondence at any time, day or night without causing
12
P. Ryan
suspicion (Hindmarch-Watson 2012: 599). An investigation commis-

sioned by the GPO in 1877 into homosexuality and male prostitution
amongst telegraph boys had identified boys from the poorest areas of
Victorian London as being most likely to be associated with such behav-
iour, while lamenting being unable to hire a ‘superior class’ of boy for
the meagre wages offered (p. 607). The report recommended that GPO
officials inspect the homes of prospective telegraph boys to assess their
living conditions, and moral character was part of a wider system of
Victorian surveillance targeted at the poor. Although the report con-
firms that some boys had been dismissed from their jobs, there is evi-
dence of a policy of containment. The investigation had led to just one
prosecution of a worker deemed to have corrupted the younger boys,
illustrating little desire to proceed with criminal charges, although
this was a more difficult task before the passing of the Criminal Law
Amendment Act in 1885.6
In Ireland, the General Post Office was also the centre of sexual
intrigue and controversy involving male prostitution when a scandal
involving high-level members of the English administration in Dublin
Castle was made public. An article published in United Ireland7 news-
paper in 1883 suggested the Crown restrict ‘the life and adventures’
of various employees mentioning specifically James Ellis French, the
Director of Detectives for Dublin Castle. French responded with a libel
suit against William O’Brien, the editor of United Ireland, who in turn
launched a private investigation into the alleged behaviour uncover-
ing further evidence against other English bureaucrats—in particular
Gustavus Cornwall, Irish Secretary to the General Post Office. After
libel cases by French, and later Cornwall failed, the men along with six
others were arrested on charges of sodomy. While Cornwall and a fel-
low accused, Martin Kirwin, a captain in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers,
was acquitted, French was found guilty and sentenced to two years
imprisonment.
The Dublin Castle Scandal associated key elements of the English
administration in Ireland with male prostitution providing cultural and
political nationalism with an opportunity to simultaneously assert the
moral distinctiveness of Gaelic Ireland while illustrating the corruption
and immorality that lay at the heart of colonial rule. It facilitated the
13
construction of a despised colonial ‘other’ where homosexuality would

define the very boundaries of the imagined Irish nation and that of
its citizenship. ‘Sexual respectability’ would be crucial in defining the
nation state (Mosse 1985: 1). The British administration would lay a
similar charge against Irish patriot Roger Casement after the failed
1916 Rising. In publishing Casement’s diaries showing his use of male
prostitutes in his postings throughout the British Empire, authorities
suggested that such exploitation and lack of control illustrated Irish
nationalism’s unsuitability for self-government. It also forced Casement
into a political limbo for over fifty years after his execution, as investiga-
tions into the authenticity of the diaries remained disputed.
The social meanings attributed to male prostitution were taking place
within the context of wider discussion about women, sexuality and
prostitution in Ireland and Europe. In Ireland, in the nineteenth cen-
tury women who worked in prostitution were seen as conduits of vene-
real disease, and as such, they were perceived as a grave risk to both the
military capacity of the nation and the moral boundaries of the fam-
ily unit. This moral panic culminated in the Contagious Diseases Acts
(1864, 1866, 1869) which gave the police and the medical profession
extensive jurisdiction over the female body to examine, to label and if
necessary, to incarcerate (Walkowitz 1980: 1; McCormick 2009: 4).
Male prostitution, by contrast, was seen as phenomena that resided
outside wider society by a minority of clearly identifiable ‘perverts’
(Scott 2003: 181). In the twentieth century too, during both World
Wars, the danger prostitution posed to the nation emerged again lead-
ing to renewed attempts to regulate, punish, classify, rescue or treat
women whose behaviour was seen as culpable (McCormick 2009: 5).
Prostitutes and sexually active working-class women were seen as most
at most at risk (p. 112). Within a society that viewed women as being
of a higher moral standing than men, those that transgressed from
these lofty expectations were more severely punished. Prostitution in
Ireland had been seen as a consequence of having large military garri-
sons of British soldiers based in towns throughout the country (Luddy
2007: 25). Women servicing this demand were seen as sexual traitors
to an imagined construction of Irish womanhood. With the advent of
independence, prostitution, unsurprisingly remained a feature of the
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P. Ryan
independent state prompting Catholic moral purity movements like the

Legion of Mary to campaign for the closure of brothels particularly in
Dublin’s Monto district between 1923 and 1925 (McCormick 2009:
28; Luddy 2007: 214; Howell 2003: 330).
Male Prostitution in the Twentieth Century

The discourse governing male prostitution would again change by the
mid-twentieth century. In urban areas, bars and clubs frequented by
gay men would also include young men who were looking for clients
for commercial sexual encounters. These younger men became charac-
terised often as drifters or hustlers; products of disruptive family back-
grounds where low educational attainment contributed to a precarious
life, leaving them vulnerable to being preyed upon by older gay men
(Logan 2017; Scott et al. 2015). This seduction narrative proved espe-
cially popular in the 1950s when the USA became convulsed with
panic about internal threats to the security and stability of the coun-
try with gay government officials seen as susceptible to blackmail from
Communists (Kaye 2003: 22). The hustler architype became embodied
as a masculine heterosexual ideal popular and desired amongst gay men,
but also by a wider population disaffected by the strict conventions that
governed traditional family life in the 1950s. The desire for a new coun-
tercultural masculinity found voice through the popularity of American
actors like James Dean in his film performances like Rebel without a
Cause, where a disaffected young men vulnerable to the corruption of
urban living was a theme.
Research on male prostitution reflected those themes by locating
commercial sex within a delinquency perspective focusing on the het-
erosexual street hustler as the principle supplier of transactional sex
to gay men (Butts 1947; Ginsberg 1967), documenting a continued
decline on the wider availability of ‘trade’ amongst poorer and other
working-class men (Kaye 2003: 23). Reiss’ (1961) now classic work on
male prostitution in the USA identified the central traits of the social
relations between young men and their male clients that took place
in specific outdoor spaces in the urban community. Both participants
15
understood the expectations that surrounded these social relations with

the younger men socialised in the practice within peer groups that con-
stituted, according to Reiss, ‘lower-class delinquency’ (1961: 109). The
peer groups were socially organised and permitted their members to
earn ‘easy’ income from prostitution but only under strict circumstances
that rejected both the definition of hustler and homosexual (p. 112).
Sexual activity was limited to oral sex and marked by ‘affective neutral-
ity’—a transitory transaction conducted and arranged through gestures
with almost no words spoken. Other studies throughout the 1960s con-
firmed these elements of the social organisation of male prostitution and
the threat of violence that existed if these norms were violated, although
the young men remained viewed as victims rather than perpetrators
(Benjamin and Masters 1964: 291; Scott 2003: 187). Their clients, fre-
quently pathologised within research, were viewed as sex starved, ageing
men who had coerced young men into sex (Hauser 1962: 50).
The emergence of gay liberation across Europe and the USA in the
1970s further shaped the social meanings attributed to male prostitu-
tion. As ‘coming-out’ became a political mantra for the gay movement,
straight identified hustlers that had previously profited from gay men
were increasingly viewed as in denial about their own sexualities. The
ability of straight hustlers to reconcile the performance of their hetero-
sexuality and the limited range of sexual services they offered with, what
Kaye (2003: 36) describes as, the ‘new desires and subjectivities’ of the
gay movement became increasingly untenable. Gay men were casting
off effeminate stereotypes of the past and embracing the hyper-mascu-
linity that only hustlers had previously offered. Gay men were increas-
ingly buying sex from other openly gay men. Some gay men derived
pleasure and power from selling sex to others disrupting the construc-
tion of victim narratives. The meanings and motivations around male
prostitution diversified with a typology of categories of street, escort
and ‘kept boys’ established, while a new victim category of the mid-
dle-class runaway emerged (Weisberg 1985; Scott 2003; Kaye 2003).
The advent of HIV/AIDS located male prostitution within a medical
discourse where it was constructed as a public health concern bringing
the body under the surveillance of government agencies. Through the
institutional links forged between gay and lesbian communities and
16
P. Ryan
government health officials, male sex work emerges as almost an exclu-

sively gay phenomena, benefiting from increased campaigning by the
gay community (Scott et al. 2015: 85). A large body of research has
continued however to emphasise the deviant (Luckenbill 1986) and
pathological (Sargarin and Jolly 1997) nature of male sex work.
Research on Male Sex Work in Ireland

Changes to the organisation of male sex work over the last thirty years
have seen a dramatic rise in the numbers working indoors and online
(Scott et al. 2015: 87). Despite this, scholarly research has continued to
focus on street work, with Ireland being no exception. Greater availa-
bility of research funding towards projects that focus on sex work solely
within a context of drug dependency, sexual abuse or homelessness have
provided useful insights into the experiences of the most marginalised.
There has been, however a neglect of research within the indoor sector.
In Ireland, a number of projects on male prostitution published
between 1997 and 2004 share similar key findings. Firstly, there is a
focus on the clandestine and stigmatized nature of prostitution with the
INMAP (2001: 12, 31, 42) report dedicating a section on the ‘under-
ground nature of male prostitution’. The report, which focused on
service provision (2001: 31), argues there is a reluctance to identify as
someone selling sex for fear of ‘slaggings or beatings’ from their peers,
creating challenges for researchers and service providers alike in access-
ing such a hidden population. There is an additional assumption here,
similar to that of the 1950s seduction narrative research discussed ear-
lier, that many of the men involved in prostitution are in fact identify-
ing as heterosexual. In the McCabe et al. (2011) study, only one out of
12 participants identified themselves as gay while INMAP (2001: 41)
recognised that gay identified services would be off-putting to many
men involved in prostitution. Kearins (2000: 21) similarly asserts that
‘many of the rent boys I met identified as heterosexual and vehemently
denied any homosexual tendencies’. Kearins (2000: 14, 20) also sug-
gests that the ‘underground nature of the profession’ makes it impossi-
ble to accurately determine the numbers involved, which she speculates,
17
based on interviews with service providers, could be anything between

100 and 600 men.
Secondly, these projects reveal remarkably similar backgrounds of
those involved in prostitution. The Quinlan et al. (1997: 28) study
identified homelessness and drug abuse as important influences on
the entry of men into prostitution, also reflected by the McCabe et al.
(2011: 1000) study, that reported on the dysfunctional family back-
grounds of their respondents, many having experienced physical and
sexual abuse as well parental alcohol dependency. Kearins (2000: 23, 27)
similarly identified her respondents as ‘working class’ with most citing
‘homelessness (poverty), unemployment, drug/alcohol abuse, poor fam-
ily backgrounds’ as their motivation for engaging in commercial sex.
Thirdly, there is limited data on the impact of migration on male
sex work during the period 1997–2004, with the exception of Carroll
and Quinlan’s (2004) study looking at six men, characterised as either
migrants, refugees or asylum seekers, who accessed sexual health services
in Dublin. Just one of these men identified as a male sex worker,
claiming it was easier than his experience in the UK, given that there
were fewer non-drug using sex workers in Dublin (p. 12). The tradi-
tional lack of focus on migration in many studies (e.g. Kearins 2000) is
unsurprising. The social and economic transformation of Ireland from
the mid-1990s resulted in different stages of inward migration; from
returned Irish migrants in the 1990s, increased non-EU migration
from 2002–2004 and movement of people from the EU accession states
in 2007 (Gilmartin and White 2008).
The Rise of Neo-Abolitionism

The stories in this book are told against the backdrop of a high-profile
political and civil society campaign to reform existing prostitution laws
in Ireland. The founding of the Immigrant Council of Ireland (ICI) in
2001 with funding from the Religious Sisters of Ireland would mark a
turning point in the institutionalisation of neo-abolitionism in civic and
political life. ICI embarked upon a campaign to introduce a law, simi-
lar to one passed in Sweden in 1999 that criminalised the purchase of
18
P. Ryan
sex (Levy 2015). This campaign would have three dimensions—alliance

building, evidence gathering and parliamentary engagement. Firstly, ICI
lobbied for the support of a wide range of organisations, including polit-
ical parties, state feminist organisations, trade unions and professional
organisations to support their call for a change in the law that would see
the introduction of a sex purchase ban. In conjunction with Ruhama,
an organisation founded by the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters
of Our Lady of Charity, that helps women who are victims of exploita-
tion and trafficking within prostitution, this broad alliance became
known as Turn off the Red Light (ToRL) (Ryan and Ward 2017: 51).
Secondly, ICI sought to provide intellectual leadership to support legis-
lative change, commissioning research framed within a neo-abolitionist
understanding. The report rejected any distinction between prostitution
and trafficking (ICI 2009: 1), claimed that agency and choice were not
relevant concepts and argued that, based on the analysis of escort web-
sites, one thousand women were working in prostitution each day in
Ireland. Thirdly, the ToRL campaign sought political engagement, lob-
bying individual politicians and parties to bring independent motions
for legislative change, forcing the government into a commitment to
establish a review of prostitution policy (Ryan and Ward 2017: 52).
Ward has argued that even before this public consultation by the Joint
Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality (JCJDE) had taken place,
the political debate was in effect over, with the main political parties
accepting ToRL’s definition of the problem and it’s solution (Ward
2017: 87).
Organisations and interested individuals were invited to make writ-
ten submissions to the JCJDE of which a number would be asked to
make presentations in an oral hearing. The dominance of the neo-
abolitionist perspective led to an almost exclusive focus on the Nordic
model of client criminalisation, with civil servants from Sweden invited
to give testimony before the JCJDE committee, while no alterna-
tive policy alternatives were discussed, e.g. decriminalisation in New
Zealand. The JCJDE also embarked upon a fact-finding trip to Sweden
but again failed to visit or consult with officials from any alternative
European country offering an alternative model of regulation of sex
work (Ward 2017: 94). In the public hearings, 13 out of the 15 groups
19
that spoke supported the policy of client criminalisation, with organisa-

tions like the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) conflat-
ing trafficking and voluntary economic migration in their presentation
(FitzGerald and McGarry 2016: 299). The INMO assumption that no
migrant woman from a developing country could give consent for her
involvement in prostitution, as opposed to the ‘voluntary’ sex work of
white, Western women, is central to understanding how knowledge
about the sex industry has been constructed, often through a racialised
lens. It should be noted that the INMO testimony and that of the Irish
Medical Organisation (IMO) ran counter to the advice of global organi-
sations like the World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNAIDS who
have advised member countries not to impose further criminalisation of
sex work (Fitzgerald and McGarry 2016: 296).
The JCJDE findings were no surprise, with the committee recom-
mending the introduction of client criminalisation, increased penal-
ties for trafficking and making the act of accessing websites advertising
prostitution illegal. The testimony of prostitution survivors was specifi-
cally identified by the JCJDE as being persuasive evidence in their final
report. The passage of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2017 saw
the enactment of key JCJDE recommendations, including the criminal-
isation of the purchase of sex. The act did not decriminalise the seller of
sex completely; workers remained criminalised with increased penalties
if they were found to have sold sex together under brothel keeping laws
and were also criminally liable under loitering laws.
The Stories in This Book

The stories in this book are taken from interviewees that were under-
taken with 18 self-identified gay men from Brazil and Venezuela
between March 2015 and September 2017. They were aged between 19
and 27 and were engaged in some form of commercial sexual activity.
This age group was slightly younger than the male sex respondents in
the Sanders et al. (2018: 59) study, where the largest cohort was aged
25–34 years old. All the men, bar one, had entered on a stamp two stu-
dent visa and as such demonstrated access to €3000 prior to arrival and
20
P. Ryan
were studying either at college or university or were attending a recog-

nised English-language school. The study’s sample was recruited pri-
marily through the gay dating site PlanetRomeo, which has a dedicated
escort section, and then through the process of snowball referrals from
existing contacts.
The focus on South American escorts, specifically Brazilian and
Venezuelan, emerged from their prominence on the dating site’s escort
section; out of 84 escorts advertising in March 2015, 41 identified as
either Brazilian or Venezuelan with a further 16 as identifying their
ethnicity as ‘Latino’ though not specifying their nationality. The role
of ethnicity in the construction of the participants’ online self-iden-
tity varied. As countries of inward migration, the skin colour of the
Brazilian and Venezuelan escorts I interviewed often reflected their
mixed race heritage with most choosing—Latin, Black or Mixed from
pre-selected ethnicity categories available on the site. The role of this
racialised construction of the men’s online profile is discussed further
in subsequent chapters. I conducted the interviews by an in-depth
qualitative approach through English, although the information sheet
and consent form given to participants were translated into Portuguese
and Spanish. A payment of €50 was offered to the participants of
which fourteen availed of and four declined. I interviewed five partic-
ipants a second time and continued to follow them on social media.
The names used in the book are pseudonyms. At the time of inter-
viewing, the English-language competency of the participants ranged
from elementary to proficient although the data reveal the difficulties
encountered by them as they entered sex work upon their arrival in
Ireland with limited English-language skills often reliant on applica-
tions like Google translate in online conversations. They were highly
competent using new social media and digital platforms and as such,
their migrant status did not place them at a disadvantage working
in online sex work as suggested in the Sanders et al. (2018: 3) study.
Additional data in the book is drawn from field notes taken during 20
sessions of participant observation in a gym identified by my respond-
ents as being a location where they socialised and had made contact
with sexual partners and clients.
21
I entered into these interviews as a supporter of a harm reduction

approach to sex work and through my role on the board of a sex work
advocacy project, Sex Workers Alliance Ireland. I have outlined else-
where the difficulties faced by researchers of the sex industry in a time
of contentious politics (Ryan and Huschke 2017) and the challenges of
positioning oneself as the researcher within feminist inspired sexuality
research (Ryan 2006).
Once I had established contact with respondents from these online
sites, they directed me to their more frequent use of Grindr and
Instagram. I analysed these profiles by following a number of the men’s
accounts, but I have not reproduced photos from the content of those
accounts, as my initial consent did not extend to the use of photographs
and subsequent attempts to gain consent for the use of redacted photos
was refused.
Notes
1. http://www.ruhama.ie/. I use the term prostitution to describe policy,
historical events or when it is known to be an organisation’s preferred
terminology. I use the term sex work to describe my research respond-
ents as it includes a broad range of activities within the sex industry
including camming, stripping, sugar daddy relationships and face-to-
face commercial sex. See Sanders, T., O’Neill, M., & Pitcher, J. (2009).
Prostitution: Sex work, policy & politics (pp. 5–12). London: Sage for a
good overview of terminology and its uses.
2. Federal authorities in the USA shut down rentmen.com in 2015. Its
chief executive was sentenced to six months in prison for the promotion
of prostitution the following year.
3. While participants in this book discuss how they use Grindr to initiate
the sale of sexual services, it should be noted that Grindr’s Community
Guidelines explicitly state that ‘Profiles advertising sexual services
(including escort or massage services) will be banned’. Grindr’s Terms
and Conditions also ban the sale or advertising of goods and services.
See https://www.grindr.com/terms-of-service/ and https://www.grindr.
com/community-guidelines/ Instagram similarly bans the ‘sale of sex-
ual services’ in its Community Guidelines. See https://help.instagram.
22
P. Ryan
com/477434105621119. Participants in this book discuss ways in which

they attempt to subvert in-app features to market sexual services in ways
unintended by social media networks.
4. http://uk.businessinsider.com/instagram-monthly-active-users-1-billion-
2018-6?r=US&IR=T. Accessed July 26, 2018.
5. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/ireland-forecast-to-
record-highest-gdp-growth-in-europe-this-year-1.3562629?mode=
sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin = https%3A%2F%2Fwww.
irishtimes.com%2Fbusiness%2Feconomy%2Fireland-forecast-to-
record-highest-gdp-growth-in-europe-this-year-1.3562629. Accessed
July 23, 2018.
6. The Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act
1885 outlawed gross indecency between me, effectively criminalising
all homosexual activity made punishable by up to two years hard labour
(Weeks 1996: 48).
7. United Ireland was the leading nationalist newspaper founded in 1881
by Charles Stewart Parnell under the editorship of William O’Brien
where it was the voice of the tenant reform organisation; the Land
League founded by Michael Davitt but had become a fierce critic of
every aspect of the colonial presence in Ireland (Lyons 1990: 173).
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2
Discipline and Desire in the Pursuit
of Physical Capital
Abstract  In this chapter Ryan focuses on the role physical and erotic
capital plays in the lives of male sex workers. The possession of smooth,
muscular bodies correspond to a standardised, global template in many
European societies and are deployed for social and economic gain.
Drawing from Bourdieu (1986), Ryan illustrates how the body has a
symbolic value and communicates discipline, taste and class location to
others. The chapter shows how sex workers navigate body projects like
the gym and how they provide an interface with their digital identities.
Keywords  Physical capital · Bourdieu · Taste · Male sex work · Gym
Introduction
I am waiting in a café for my interview with Luan. He is a twenty-
seven-year-old Brazilian national, who relocated to Ireland two years
ago. Upon his arrival, he is immediately apologetic about his English—
‘when I arrived I spoke nothing, nothing, I learned English in seven
months’ he tells me, blaming his public school education for this crash

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11797-9_2
30
P. Ryan
course in the language he has experienced since his arrival. Luan is

rightly proud of his progress and has funded his relocation to Ireland
himself. He tells me of sitting alongside some of his fellow Brazilian stu-
dents who are financially supported by their parents, who have enjoyed
the benefits of private, high school education and whose English lan-
guage competency extramural classes and trips to Florida improved. It
is often the first time they have sat in a classroom with fellow nation-
als from very different socio-economic locations from themselves. This
diversity continues amongst the men that I interviewed. They grew up
in different parts of Brazil and Venezuela, had a range of educational
and professional backgrounds and arrived in Ireland with varying levels
of financial resources to sustain them until they entered employment.
Their motivations for their entry into sex work are also diverse. Drawn
into the flexible and opportunistic nature of the work, facilitated by
social media apps, their involvement can be either sporadic—to pay a
deposit for an apartment, or more continuous in funding foreign travel,
better accommodation and their social life. Some stories are finite—
their departure date is set, while others hope to investigate means,
which will enable them to remain within Ireland, by pursuing further
educational training or applying for a European Union passport.
These students, who entered sex work, are united by the physical
capital they brought to Dublin’s gay scene. In this chapter, I argue that
while the men may come from different backgrounds, their smooth
and muscular bodies represent a global, standardised template that
has become idealised and fetishised within European gay culture. The
stories in this chapter will trace the realisation of this physical capital
within the men’s lives and the potential it held for conversion into eco-
nomic and social opportunities. The discussion is influenced by the
work of Pierre Bourdieu. I understand the body as a bearer of sym-
bolic value, an unfinished product, which is subjected to self-discipline,
which is gazed upon and has become objectified and commodified in
this advanced consumer society. The body represents an embodied cul-
tural capital—social skills, habits and tastes—accumulated over time,
skills that live within, and die with the holder (Bourdieu 1986: 48).
The body communicates discipline—and desire—to others, in how it
is dressed, fed and maintained. In this chapter, I explore the habitus of
2 Discipline and Desire in the Pursuit of Physical Capital
31
the men I have interviewed—the systematic approach to their diets,

aided by fitness apps to calculate calories, the cultivation of an optimum
body size and the maintenance of the body’s hair and colour.1 I discuss
how the homogeneity of a Western bodily ideal in gay culture may have
largely erased evidence of the class body, but illustrate how the men still
read signs that enabled them to identify class location through, tattoos,
for example. Ultimately, the men learned how the capital they accumu-
lated through body projects like the gym, where the body was show-
cased, could invite conversion into economic advantage.
The Changing Body Within Irish Culture

The body has traditionally played a central role within Irish culture.
Since the foundation of the state in 1922, Catholic social teaching
became woven into the legislative fabric of the nation, leading to pro-
hibitions enacted against contraception and divorce and limiting access
to material deemed sexually explicit, through restrictive censorship
laws (Ryan 2012: 16, 65; Ferriter 2009: 386). Throughout the nine-
teenth century, the body was subject to penance, self-denial and fasting,
becoming an important means by which the faithful highlighted their
religious devotion. It was a process where civility and morality were
embodied to enable the modernisation of Irish society through the disci-
pline of past generations (Scheper-Hughes 1979: 123; Inglis 1998: 157).
Religious orders and their deployment in schools to oversee the segre-
gation of the sexes, impressed upon children the values of modesty and
chastity, where the body became a site of temptation and sin becoming,
in Tom Inglis’ words, ‘an object of private guilt and public shame’ (Inglis
1998: 156). This private, internalised moral code contributed to wider
demographic trends such as postponed marriage, high marital fertility
and permanent celibacy, trends that have become synonymous with an
international reputation that viewed the Irish, somewhat dubiously, as
‘troubled by sexuality’ (Scheper-Hughes 1979: 97).
The Catholic Church’s construction of the body as a site of modesty
and self-denial began to unravel in the second part of the twentieth
century, as Ireland slowly moved from a traditional, rural conservative
32
P. Ryan
society to a more modern, industrial and secular one. A generational

shift in political leadership brought about a challenge to the economic
insularity and social conservatism of the past, ushering in the embrace
of the free market, where state incentives saw American and European
firms establish bases in Ireland (Garvin 2004: 33). This new invest-
ment was fuelled by an expansion within education that was commit-
ted to the creation of a new labour force that could adapt to the needs
of a modern economy (Lee 1989: 326) and take advantage of the sin-
gle market opportunities available upon Ireland’s membership of the
European Economic Community in 1973. Catholic social teaching was
increasingly contested in the 1960s and 1970s. Second wave feminist
campaigns targeted legislation prohibiting contraception both inside
and outside parliament, while gay rights organisations campaigned
against the continued criminalisation of homosexuality. Changing tastes
in music and fashion liberated young people from the formal dance hall
rules of their parents’ generation, allowing them the freedom to move
their bodies to music and in clothing that would eventually bring the
era of modesty and self-restraint to a close (McCourt 1992: 20–21).
A new ethic of liberal individualism started to emerge in Ireland in
the latter half of the twentieth century, encouraged by a growing indus-
trial, urban and secular society (Inglis 2004: 137). Citizens become
autonomous individuals competing against each other in a marketplace
of work and leisure. Sociologists have explored these changes character-
ised as high, late, post or liquid modernity, which have charted the rise
of individualism and consumerism (Giddens 1991; Beck 1992; Bauman
2001). Young people were now freer from the ascribed identities of their
birth—religion, class, family and ethnicity—and led more individual,
autonomous and rational lives. Young people were tasked with the cre-
ation of their own moral compass, to determine right from wrong in
a society where, in Beck’s (1992: 88) words made them the ‘the centre
of their own planning’. Rather than practising self-denial, the self itself
was to become an ongoing, reflexive project. This path to self-realisation
would rely upon choosing from a myriad of resources to advise and
coach, so that the individual could become the author of his or her own
life (Giddens 1991: 5).2 It was this ethic of individual fulfilment that
would become the strongest mandate in late modern societies (Beck and
33
Beck-Gernshein 2002). Bauman argues that seeking these resources,

made readily available by consumer capitalism, would become an
obsessive pursuit in itself. Promising to be recipes for a successful life,
these consumer possibilities would come with a ‘use by’ date as they
are replaced and updated by new and improved competitors (Bauman
2000: 72). For Bauman (2000: 72), in this consumer race, ‘the finishing
line always moves faster than the fastest of the runners’. Life becomes
endless ‘shopping around’ for the skills and possessions that convince
ourselves, and others, that we are reaching our full potential. For
Giddens (1991: 81), these possessions represent patterns of consump-
tion with habits governing modes of dress, food and behaviour that
constitute the ‘material form to a particular narrative of self-identity’.
The body is also representative of these material forms, where indi-
viduals deemed fat, unfit or ageing before their time are, as Featherstone
(2010: 195) argues, seen as ‘not only slothful but as having a flawed self’.
The pressure to embrace this ethic of transformation has become core
to consumer culture and within late modernity itself—where a range
of experts, from personal trainers to stylists, stand ready to support this
‘before and after’ makeover, at a price. There has also been an increased
visibility of the male body in cinema and advertising that has further
accelerated the practice of the body becoming a key site of identity perfor-
mance in this late modern age. For Giddens (1991: 102), we have become
‘responsible for the design of our bodies’, where we can exercise control in
an increasingly individualised and uncertain world. These bodies require
maintenance to stay healthy but also to pursue the more nebulous concept
of fitness. Bauman (2000: 78) suggests that fitness is a subjective or felt
experience, one with no natural end. Targets to achieve fitness are never
ending. The pursuit to achieve them is characterised by ‘self-scrutiny,
self-reproach and self-deprecation’, leading to a state of perpetual anxiety.
The Meaning of Muscles

The pursuit and display of bodily athleticism are not new. The gymna-
sium has had a central role in ancient Greek society (Alvarez 2008: 25),
while concerns over masculinity, fitness and military readiness amongst
34
P. Ryan
European powers in the nineteenth century led to the expansion of school

gymnasiums (Andreasson and Johansson 2014: 95; Bonde 2003: 96).
The rise in popularity at this time of strong-men contests focusing on
brute strength gave way to wider audiences for bodybuilding, focusing
on the body’s aesthetic value (Alvarez 2008: 37–45). Bodybuilders like
Eugene Sandow became famous touring the USA with crowds gather-
ing to see and touch his body, while the advent of photography allowed
his image to be mass-produced around the world, creating a market for
images of the body that defied strict indecency laws (Andreasson and
Johansson 2014: 96). Political and religious leaders also harnessed this
popularity in fitness as a way to stem a moral panic over the perceived
declining physical and moral health of the nation. Diseases like syphi-
lis were associated with medical conditions such as miscarriage, still-
birth and post-natal abnormality, leading organisations like the British
Eugenics Education Society to question the unchecked procreation of the
physically and morally unfit (Hall 2000: 66–69). Bodybuilder Charles
Atlas was also motivated by a similar fear in the nation’s declining phys-
ical health and contributed to the growth of this ‘muscular Christianity’
in the USA (Andreasson and Johansson 2014: 97).
Economic and social transformations throughout the twentieth cen-
tury redefined the embodiment of male workers across class and racial
lines. Labour histories reviewed by Ava Baron reveal how working-class
men incorporated the muscularity of their bodies into protest when
confronted with technological change or by the increasing number of
women in the workforce (Baron 2006: 147). The muscular male body
became valorised as a perquisite for many working-class occupations
like printing, constructions and streetcars, bolstering the creation of a
heroic masculinity, deemed under threat from technology and a creep-
ing feminisation within society. These bodies would also be subject to
the gaze of others. While deriving cultural capital within specific com-
munities where muscular bodies were in public view and in clothing
that emphasised the body, there was also a corresponding trend amongst
the middle classes to conceal it. Kasson’s (1990) study of manners in
nineteenth-century urban America traces the development of the pop-
ularity of suits amongst middle-class men, designed to shield the body
from public gaze. This concealment allowed the middle-class male white
35
body to remain—white—in contrast to ethnic minorities or those that

laboured in the sunshine, illustrating Baron’s (2006: 149) view, that
‘muscularity served to empower or disempower depending upon the
angle of the gaze’. Middle-class men would also embrace muscularity in
the early twentieth century, just as technological developments made its
deployment in the labour market largely obsolete.
By the 1980s, bodybuilding culture would become more mainstream,
popularised by athletes like Arnold Schwarzenegger and the movie
Pumping Iron. Andreasson and Johansson (2014: 99) locate its rise in
a Reagan-Thatcher political era, where culture wars were fought over
the jurisdiction of the body in areas such as abortion and HIV/AIDS.
Controversy over anabolic steroid use and the often disapproving gaze
upon bodybuilders by a mainstream society who thought such exag-
gerated muscularity to be disproportionate contributed to the sport
remaining a subculture (Monaghan 1999: 281). While the meso-
morph body shape may well be the masculine ideal in Western society
(Thompson and Cafri 2007), it must also be developed within a nor-
mative understanding of the emerging fitness industry as opposed to
bodybuilding culture. This fitness industry offered clients gyms or, more
frequently called, health clubs with a wider variety of equipment, from
traditional weights to aerobic fitness machines. This new constituted
gym is associated with increasing female memberships and a move from
being spaces of discipline to, with the incorporation of swimming pools,
massage and nail bars, spaces where the body is pampered (Leeds Craig
and Liberti 2007: 684; Andreasson and Johansson 2014: 104). The gym
has been spatially reconstructed to accommodate these new elements,
while there has been a global standardisation of the bodily ideals, equip-
ment and fitness regimes like BODYPUMP to attain them (Parviainen
2011: 527; O’Toole 2009: 76; Johansson and Andreasson 2016: 150).
Body Projects in a Late Modern Age

While I discussed earlier Bauman’s dire prediction of the consequences
that a lifetime of surveillance of the body’s shape and fitness will
bring, it has not deterred the pursuit of muscularity, which has grown
36
P. Ryan
exponentially. In Britain, the number of 16–25-year-olds going to the

gym has increased from 14.7% in 2006 to 21% in 2013, while the
gym and fitness magazine Men’s Health has become the biggest selling
men’s magazine (Hakim 2018: 232). This has increasingly become a
global phenomenon with the fitness industry generating an estimated
$75 billion in revenue in 2012 (Johansson and Andreasson 2016: 144).
Brazil, from where the majority of my interviewees were born, ranks
second only to the USA in the size of the revenue generated by health
and fitness clubs. In a number of European countries, there has been
a decrease in young people’s (aged 16–29) participation in team sports
and a corresponding increase in individualised sports in fitness centre
settings (Pedersen and Tjornhoj-Thomsen 2017: 431). In Denmark,
for example, 44% of 16–19-year-olds and 40% of 20–29-year-olds had
participated in strength training on a regular basis in the last year. The
development of the body within the newly constituted fitness industry
in the 1990s would have particular resonance for gay men. The images
of bodybuilding and fitness had, since the nineteenth century, operated
as a form of homoerotica with magazines, like Physical Culture, widely
read amongst gay men throughout the 1940s and 1950s, in a time of
sexual repression in the USA (Benzie 2000: 161). This ‘proto-porn’ may
have been recast by the violent hyper masculinisation in the movies of
Schwarzenegger and Stallone in the 1980s, but gay men were about to
re-appropriate the gym as a key source of cultural capital, where the
body would become a central expression of identity.
Emerging from the catastrophe of the AIDS crisis, which continued
to claim thousands of lives throughout the 1990s, the extension of the
fitness industry resonated with gay men eager to embrace the pursuit of
a muscular body and disassociate themselves from the sickness conno-
tation of the thin body (Benzie 2000: 164). The pursuit of this muscu-
lar body would serve a political purpose too, declaring a war upon the
gay effeminate stereotypes that had haunted gay men for generations,
a war against effeminacy that has continued to this day. It was a body
that would be more masculine than those of the straight men who had
taunted those who were gay, or perceived to be (Bronski 1998). Gay
pride had an embodied dimension in which the muscular male body
communicated to the world the discipline and self-control of the
holder, in line with late modern social practices (Duncan 2010: 440).
37
Within these cultural contexts, hierarchies exist in which different

male body shapes have been located—the mesomorph, or athletic build
at the top with the endomorph or larger build, at the bottom. For gay
men, the cultural capital attached to specific body types has, of course
been naturalised much earlier within educational contexts for example,
but become magnified within gay culture where the body both commu-
nicates sexual desire and is a beacon for the desires of others. Drawing
from Bourdieu, I understand gay culture or the ‘scene’ as a habitus,
where judgements about taste are exercised and where cultural capital is
accumulated. The status a man has within gay culture is dependent on
the different forms of capital he has accumulated—for example, having
the economic capital to buy an expensive home or car but also the cul-
tural capital to exercise taste and discernment in choosing the right wine
or indulging in current food trends. This exercise in discernment or the
pursuit of distinction exists not merely in the accumulation of knowl-
edge or objects, but extends to the body itself. Bourdieu (1986: 48)
identifies this embodied dimension of cultural capital (in addition
to objectified and institutionalised), stating that ‘in its fundamental
state, it is linked to the body and presupposes embodiment’. The body
becomes a source of physical capital, the bearer of status and power
which can be converted into other forms of capital, like economic and
social (Shilling 2003: 111). For Bourdieu, bodies bear the imprint of
social class, derived from their economic location and habitus with
its associated development of taste (Bourdieu 1984: 190). I return to
these themes in Bourdieu’s work later in the chapter to use my inter-
viewees’ stories to illustrate how they have converted their physical cap-
ital in diverse ways. I will also argue that contemporary gay culture, in
which these men operate, has facilitated the flattening of the social class
imprint upon the body through the standardisation of consumer body
practices that constitute this habitus.
Fitness 365 Gym

The gym played a major role in the lives of the men I interviewed. Early
conversations clearly identified one Dublin city centre gym as popular
with migrant gay men, particular from South America. I re-joined this
38
P. Ryan
gym in June 2015 (I had previously been a member two years before),
which I have called Fitness 365 in the book, and attended three times a
week over the following year. I have incorporated field notes taken from
a diary during this short ethnographic piece of my research into this
chapter, illustrating how my respondents’ online and offline lives inter-
sected in locations like the gym.3 The gym is accessed through a small
laneway off a busy thoroughfare in central Dublin. Upon entering,
you walk upstairs into a large room, which is furnished with red velvet
curtains, sofas and armchairs and the reception desk and then through
doors to a traditional gym layout of cardio machines, weights and sepa-
rate spaces for fitness classes. Downstairs houses the changing rooms, a
25-metre swimming pool, sauna and steam room, all decorated in black
and gold mosaic tiles. Five lounger style chairs surround the pool with
three TV screens built into the walls. There were nine separate member-
ships available to purchase, including student and off-peak membership,
which was the most common amongst the men that I interviewed.
All eighteen men in the study had previously held gym memberships
prior to moving to Dublin, while for the majority they had joined the
gym within three weeks of their arrival. This interest was motivated for
some by previous experience of physical education at school, although
the availability of sports facilitates like running tracks, swimming
pools and exercise equipment varied greatly across regions and whether
schools were private or public. Gustavo (22), currently taking a year
off from university in Brazil, described the cultural differences in the
importance of physical education stating that—
I used to do gymnastics in school and gym work in school since I was 14

or 15, it is what I do, and I can’t imagine not going to the gym – what do
you guys do in Ireland? (laughs) I mean even the skinny guys are fat in
Ireland, skinny with big belly, uggh it is so weird, I hate to look.
Men that I interviewed, particularly from Brazilian coastal cities, like

Florianópolis and Rio de Janeiro, emphasised the role of the beach
in their lives, where it was both a means to get fit and an incentive to
maintain their fitness. Leo (25) describes the role of the beach in his life
prior to his arrival in Dublin—
39
It was a lot of time, most days; everyday at the beach … in summer it

is high 30s so most days after work my friends would meet there when
it was cooler, still in our clothes from work. At the weekends, I played
volleyball there, every weekend for years. Do you play? You do not need
a gym if you play; I never think about it as ‘working-out’, it was fun and
you got really fit … All my happy times were there [the beach], with my
family and especially with my grandfather. I miss it so much.
Bruno, a twenty-one-year old chef, also felt that Brazilians, particularly

in coastal cities, had different cultural attitudes to the body and the gym
compared to Irish men, which encouraged their investment in body
projects like the gym, tanning and hair removal.
It is different for us, in my city I can walk in a speedo four blocks from
the beach and nobody looks; it’s normal, the Irish in the changing room
are strange, like their body should be hidden more, maybe they are shy?
No? It’s all towels and showering in their underwear … I work hard on my
body and I enjoy showing it off; I wear t-shirts – like this one – that makes
me look good, what problem is this? Guys look at me in the gym, they
come up and talk to me, want to add me to Facebook (laughs ) I like it.
The majority of men recognised that being good looking and having a
muscular body held advantages both in their native countries but also in
Ireland. Luan (27), from Brazil, spoke of having experience from both
perspectives, that of an overweight child and adolescent until sixteen
and then as young adult who committed to attending the gym five days
a week to achieve a dramatic transformation of his body.
It was difficult for me as a child because I was bigger than my friends … I

was fat, I can show you photos, I was 86kgs … being at the beach I always
had a t-shirt on, even swimming, I said I would go red from the sun but
that wasn’t true, I was very ashamed of my body. Now, it is crazy because
I can’t keep my shirt on (laughs) in all my photos! But the gym saved my
life and I feel so much more confident and people know that, I see how
people look at me now, I was invisible and now I’m not, people look at
me, even my college professor I remember, she was always looking at me,
always so friendly, not when I was fat, people buy me drinks in bars now.
40
P. Ryan
Others also identified the ‘bodily dividend’ that was secured in the gym.
Victor (25) told me how he was struggling to find work as a waiter in
Dublin until a friend gave him ‘the list’, which helped him secure work.
The list! Well yes, it was given by a friend in my class to me and it was a
list of restaurants, six restaurants or cafés I think and he told me that the
managers only hire guys that they think are good looking and I should
try and the first one – a week probation and she hires me, after searching
for two months, the first one … and I am really bad (laughs) no really,
I’m not good but they like me, I’m friendly and I smile a lot even when I
make mistakes, then it is good again.
All respondents in the study recognised the value of a more muscular

body in improving their confidence, reflecting a correlation between
realising a stable self-identity through the relationship with their bod-
ies (Crossley 2006: 42). The quotes from the Brazilian men growing up
in coastal cities recognise the role of the beach as a public space where
the body is both trained and displayed to others. This role the beach
as a public space has also been identified in similar studies in Australia
(Johansson and Andreasson 2016: 154). All these accounts recognise
the presence of bodily or physical capital (Bourdieu 1984; Wacquant
1995) where time and energy invested into the building a muscular
body can be later exchanged for economic, social and cultural capital.
There has been considerable research that has identified the importance
of physical capital in specific professions or social fields that value the
body, like modelling (Mears 2011), athletes (Paradis 2012) and per-
sonal trainers (Frew and McGillivray 2005; Hutson 2013). I am argu-
ing, however, that my interviewees reveal the scope of physical capital
and its exchange value to be much wider, located within workplaces,
universities and within the habitus of the gay male social scene. This
embodied form of capital is important within advanced consumer socie-
ties that demonstrate a strong aestheticisation of everyday life, where the
body is validated not for what it can do, but what it looks likes (Frew
and McGillivray 2005: 163). Physical capital only holds this symbolic
value in social settings or, in Bourdieu’s terms, fields, where it is held in
high esteem enabling it to be traded successfully. Victor’s story of the
41
six potential workplaces where management were thought to hire only

good-looking staff reflects the commercial value that employers placed
on aesthetic labour. This form of labour, manifested in physical charac-
teristics, is leased by the holder and commodified by the labour process
to provide ‘a ‘style’ of service encounter deliberately intended to appeal
to the sense of the customers’ (Nickson et al. 2003: 185). Studies do
show that good looks, intelligence and personality do impact on earn-
ing potential for both men and women (Judge et al. 2009). Other
interviews, including Victor, felt that this aesthetic labour was also
appreciated by customers who complemented his smile—‘I do well in
tips, it’s the smile, I just keep smiling … but to be serious, really, it is
the t-shirt, [points to it] never wear a large or extra-large’. Here, Victor
alludes to the t-shirt he wears in the café where he works, the same one
he is wearing when I meet him for his interview for this book, prior to
going to his shift. Indeed, it is smaller and well fitted for a man of his
size.
The Fitness 365 gym was the main site where this physical capital was
achieved for most of my respondents, although some had left to join
cheaper alternatives in the city. The importance of the gym in the men’s
lives was threefold—it was their sole exercise activity since they arrived
in Dublin, most had greater time to attend than their previous lives in
Brazil and Venezuela would permit and finally, it was social, where they
would go and workout with their friends. My field notes from the gym
reveal copious references to this social element of attending the gym,
including this example—
Field notes—Fitness 365—19.30 h
There are three guys now loitering at the rope pull down machine, one
which is using it while the others block the adjacent one – are they using
it? It is busy today and people occasionally stop and look in the direc-
tion of the guys, but nobody has yet asked them are they using it. They
are talking in Portuguese while they are standing there – all three look
remarkably similar, in height and body, muscular guys no doubt. One
is wearing what appear to me yoga pants while the others are in shorts
and singlets, definitely not needed in Spring especially if you are work-
ing out … so one of the guys on reception desk has joined them for a
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P. Ryan
chat, I know this guy well, he is Brazilian he always remembers my name,

though he seems to remember everyone’s name and I’m not so sure how
to pronounce his name, never seen that before, no idea how he does that
remembering trick, he goes back to the reception desk after 5 minutes, he
says hello as he passes by.
This social dimension had also been identified in Denmark by researchers

Pedersen and Tjornhoj-Thomsen (2017: 438) who found that while the
gym is an individual pursuit, members did go with friends or made social
relationships with people in the gym. This created a culture where hetero-
sexual men would support each other in their workouts, looking and com-
menting on the bodies of their friends and finding training solutions to
help their friends reach their fitness goals. The researchers locate this ease
with looking and having your body subject to the gaze of others to the rise
of the distribution of gym photos on social media sites like Instagram, a
topic I return to in detail in Chapter 4. Similarly, research in Scotland by
Frew and McGillivray (2005: 166) found the acceptance of being gazed
upon by others in the gym as ‘openly accepted, even celebrated … in an
apparently asexualized and agendered way’. While this was also obviously a
characteristic within Fitness 365, there is the potential to move this gaze of
admiration amongst gay men, into either a commercial or a non-commer-
cial sexual encounter. I understand this bodily display by male sex workers
in the gym as a platform or as a showroom for encouraging conversation,
social media followers and prospective sexual encounters.
Sexual Encounters in the Gym

The reference in my notes to Portuguese speaking staff was also men-
tioned by several respondents who joked that it was the easiest admin-
istrative task that they completed in Dublin and was a factor in which
gym they chose to join. Although respondents recognised the social
aspect of the gym, they also acknowledged it had the potential for sex-
ual encounters. All 18 men I interviewed said they had been directly
propositioned for sex in either the gym, changing rooms or showers or
43
the possibility of sex had been implied to them. Thiago (21) and Luan
(27) explain this common experience—
I think it is at night mostly, before closing, but it happens, it is not a

problem for me. Guys leave the [shower] door open if they are interested,
or use no towel in the changing room. I’m not shy in the gym, but I con-
centrate on myself, the workout, I see guys watching sometimes or they
come over to talk. One guy came over and chatted but I didn’t talk much
with him and then he say – ‘how much?’ He knows nothing about me! It
upset me – he never would have said that to an Irish person. (Thiago, 21)
I have seen it in the sauna, there is a lot of cruising going on for guys,
they are in the pool, the shower, then sauna and repeat it – it is easy to
find, I prefer this to grindr, in my city [Sao Paulo] you just meet people
on the street or the gym, it is natural, I am really bad on Grindr, face to
face is best for me, No one has their own room here – I share my room
with 3 guys, maybe that’s why they have fun [sex] in the gym? (Luan, 27)
My own field notes confirmed both Thiago and Luan’s experiences in

the gym, where the pool area and sauna were clearly an area of the gym
to see and be seen by others. These areas appeared to be almost exclu-
sively male when I attended, particularly in the evening, and confirmed
the role of muscularity in the ability to ‘pick-up’ men for sexual encoun-
ters (Drummond 2005: 279).
Field notes—Fitness 365—20.00 h
Came downstairs from the gym which was really busy, as is changing
room, 15-20 people, mostly changing and going home, at the pool there
are two guys speaking Portuguese on the loungers, one showering in the
area near the pool, where I am. They are all wearing speedo swimwear,
they disappear for a while, I think to the sauna and later the steam room
which is in my view – the guys on the loungers are on the phones …
about twenty minutes later one of them is taking a photo of their friend
in the open shower which has gold mosaic tiles.
While all of my respondents had been sexually propositioned, directly

or indirectly, few had recruited clients directly or had paid sexual
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P. Ryan
encounters in the gym. An exception was Lucas, a 24-year-old Brazilian

student who described how he had used Grindr and the gym as an entry
to sex work upon his arrival in Ireland. The use of applications like
Grindr has been identified as facilitating sexual hook-ups by gay men in
the gym (Gudelunas 2012: 357), and in the quote below, we see the use
of the app facilitating commercial sex.
I spoke no English really, a few words then and with no job and so much
extra time, I went to the gym six days a week maybe … the first guy I
met was on Grindr when we were both in the gym and we chatted and
another day I met him in reception, I asked him if he wanted some fun
and how much he would give … that time he gave me €50 and we show-
ered together.
Sometimes there was not a direct exchange of money. Renzo (23), a

Venezuelan national described approaching a man who he had observed
watching him on a number of occasions at the gym.
Renzo: I had seen this guy in the changing rooms a few times, I think he
waited around for me because he was so slow getting changed, he was tall,
I’d say in his 40s I think, attractive too but he had a boyfriend. Maybe …
I asked him if he wanted to go for a drink and we went to a bar and then
to a steakhouse on the Green [St Stephen’s]. That was it, just that, I like
dinner and drinks.
Paul: But what if he asked you to divide the bill, how did you know he
would pay?
Renzo: I know and he know. I have never paid anything on a date.
Ever.
As I discuss in the next chapter, Grindr became a means to advertise

commercial sex, as Lucas did, though the use of photos and emojis that
communicated his potential interest. For the majority of the men, the
gym was used to showcase their bodies and cultivate potential clients,
some of whom may have spoken to them directly or watched them
from afar. Rodrigo (24) describes how a number of clients described
how they ‘saw him at the gym’ a number of times before they messaged
45
him while others, like Rafael (26), told how he encouraged meeting
men in the gym through social media posts—
I did write it on my Grindr, telling guys where I worked out, and that
they can come up and say, hello if they saw me, occasionally I put the
times I was there and they do, it is about your profile so that people know
who you are.
Reading the Body for Class Location

While all of my respondents saw gym work as an integral part of their
daily lives to maintain the bodies which they had worked for years to
cultivate, they also recognised them as essential to attract potential cli-
ents. There was unanimous agreement that the possession of a muscu-
lar body was essential to participate in male sex work, more important
than having an attractive face. Furthermore, a majority of respondents
felt that in Ireland this body type was more highly desired than in other
countries, because of its rarity amongst men on the gay scene.
Dublin is different, because there is no club culture you see no fit guys
here, guys keep their shirts on in clubs, it’s different from other places I
have seen … it is good for us [sex workers] because they can’t meet guys
like me every day – on Grindr most gym guys are open to [sex] work.
(Bruno, 21)
The gyms are full here but Irish guys are still have not a good shape,
maybe just foreigners go? In Brazil I’m just an average guy but in Dublin
guys think I’m super-hot because I go to the gym – it’s good for me.
(Rodrigo, 24)
Some men I interviewed suggested that the emphasis on muscular bod-

ies amongst Irish clients had allowed men to enter sex work who other-
wise would be deemed unattractive, especially in home countries.
Irish love muscle guys, we call them Barbies in Brazil, it is not a good,
sometimes the body takes from the face, you understand? I see guys
46
P. Ryan
working here and I am – how do people see it as attractive – a great body,

ok! But with a face of the favela?! Irish don’t see this, but I do. (Rafael, 26)
This reference to the favela by Rafael was one of a number made by

the Brazilian men, which alluded to class and regional differentiation
between them. The men recognised that Irish people tended to homog-
enise the Brazilian community, knowing little about the differences
within the Portuguese language, the ethnic diversity or the regional
disparities, particularly between the north and south of the country.
Bruno (21) joked that he thought some Irish people thought that ‘we
are swinging from the trees’ in Brazil.
Within Bourdieu’s discussion of physical capital, there is an acknowl-
edgement that the body is a site of power, class and social reproduction
and bears the imprint of the individual’s class location. Bourdieu (1986:
188) states that—
It follows that body is the most indisputable materialization of class taste

… It does this in the seemingly most natural features of the body (vol-
ume, height, weight) and shapes … its visible forms which express in
countless ways a whole relation to the body, i.e., a way of treating it, car-
ing for it, feeding it, maintaining it.
There are three determinants on the social formation of the body.

Firstly, the social location or class position of the individual, which
Rafael refers to above, suggests that the experience of poverty and asso-
ciated structural inequalities literally becomes imprinted upon the face.
A life of financial hardship and stress that can be read facially by oth-
ers. Victor (25) goes further, stating that on Brazilian beaches, when the
body is stripped of clothes that can act as cultural signifiers, he reads
social class through the health of men’s teeth. He explains that he uses
it to assess whether ‘I can feel safe, because you need to be watching for
danger’. The premise of his observation is based on the popularity of
expensive orthodontic treatment such as crowns, veneers and whitening,
amongst the middle classes. Victor (25) admitted that his parents had
spent considerable money in correcting his teeth.
47
The second determinant is the habitus; beliefs and attitudes taught

to children to enable them to navigate social life where they become
embodied in taste and consumption. For gay men, these skills are
learned in peer groups, strongly influenced by digitally mediated adver-
tising within a wider consumer context. For Bourdieu (1984: 190), how
people treat their bodies reveal ‘the deepest depositions of the habitus’.
Four features emerge from the men I interviewed that give an insight
into elements of this bodily habitus, which reflect class location and
the social field of gay culture. Firstly, bodily size. While clients desired a
muscular body, my respondents were conscious of an ideal size that was
proportionate to their height and most desirable amongst their peers.
Crucially, following Bourdieu (1986), I argue that while some treat-
ment of their bodies does reflect class location, this ideal size was not a
determinant of social class. The men I interviewed came from a range
of social backgrounds, some had attended private school, others public,
while they had all pursued further training and education, from prestig-
ious universities to training colleges. While others, like Johansson and
Andreasson (2016: 149) have argued that a global standardisation of the
ideal body shape and the equipment used to achieve it has occurred, in
what they describe as a McDonaldization process, I am suggesting that
this standardisation is incredibly pronounced with mainstream gay cul-
ture.4 In the eighteen men I have interviewed, there is remarkably little
difference in their body size. As Gill et al. (2005: 40) describe—
We are witnessing an extraordinary fetishization of muscles and mus-

cularity in young men at precisely the moment that fewer traditionally
male manual jobs exist, and those that do require less physical strength
than ever before. Highly developed muscles have become ‘semiotically
divorced’ from specific class connotations, and are no longer indexical of
participation in manual labour.
Unlike Bourdieu’s (1984: 211) statement below, there was, in fact agree-
ment on all three ‘profits’ that the men in my study, irrespective of class
location, were achieving. It is to these extrinsic profits that I return to in
the next chapter.
48
P. Ryan
It can be easily shown that the different classes do not agree on the profits
expected from sport, be they specific physical profits, such as the effects on
the external body, like slimness, elegance or visible muscles and on the inter-
nal body, like health and relaxation; or extrinsic profits such as social rela-
tionships a sport may facilitate, or possible economic and social advantages.
Thiago (21) describes how at just 1.68 cm, he is afraid of getting too

big—‘my friends say if I look at weights [dumbbells] I gain muscle, it
is very easy for me but too easy if I overtrain I get too big and it looks
bad … if I post these photos, a few love them but more hate, in my
[sex] work guys won’t choose me’. Rodrigo (24) also felt that being too
big was undesirable and describes how he previously lost perspective on
the size of his own body—‘You see the results and you want more and
more, then a guy comes up in a bar and says ‘fuck you are huge’ but his
face is not one that wants you, he thinks you are weird, not good for
my [sex] work’. Monaghan’s (1999: 279–280) bodybuilding respond-
ents had also felt conscious of an alternative gaze from the general
public when they left the gym which saw them as looking ‘ridiculous’.
Achieving and maintaining this optimum size became a challenge for
most of the men in my study.
Secondly, body hair. All of the men, bar one, I interviewed removed
body hair on a regular basis. This primarily involved shaving chest hair,
highlighting particularly the abdominal muscles, although a minority of
respondents also removed hair on the legs and buttocks.5 Hair removal
is identified in other studies of male escorts (e.g. Walby 2012: 153),
although niche markets exist for escorts with body hair that identify as
‘bears’. While Walby (p. 152) stresses in his study of Internet escorts in
the USA that there is no one ideal body type, I argue that there was
an overwhelming uniform body type advertising online during my
research, which was Latin/white, muscular and hairless.
Gustavo (22): I used shave my chest and ass but with razor, it is not
always so good … I did laser treatments, which are good but expensive …
€500 each for six times.
Lucas (24): Before I would not shave in winter in Ireland but for [sex]
work, you need to shave all year, guys expect it, so I do it.
49
Thirdly, tattoos. The use of tattoos has been identified as a means to tell
stories and to ‘speak’ to others about the values and identity of the bearer.
While tattoos have a long history within criminal and countercultural
movements, they are one of a number of body modifications increasingly
embarked upon by individuals in late modernity as they seek to construct
their biographies, often using the medium of their own bodies to do so
(Kosut 2000: 80). The public visibility of many tattoos holds the poten-
tial to influence our social interaction as they are also read by others as we
navigate everyday life. A majority (12 out 18) of my respondents had, at
least one tattoo, and these ranged both in size and their visibility. Some
men expressed judgement about the tattoos of others, suggesting certain
designs indicated a lower class location, while others told how they feared
their tattoos were off putting to potential clients.
Luan (21): I love my tattoo, it is on my back, you can see here [lifts up
his t-shirt] but it is big isn’t it? … I was always interested in India and the
spiritual culture so I decided on Ganesh [the Hindu God] … some peo-
ple love it, one guy told me I was being rude and it was not a good thing
to use … In my photos I never show my back because I think some guys
[clients] won’t contact me if they see it.
Bruno (21): These guys with the star tattoos and the three birds’ ones,
you know, they are so bad, so bad, when I see them I know I step back
and these guys are working in Ireland? Maybe the men they meet, the
Irish don’t care or don’t know?
Finally, skin colour. The men I interviewed often commented that they
were now, unsurprisingly, paler since their arrival in Ireland from Brazil
or Venezuela. They lamented the loss of their darker skin, which they
saw as embodying health, showcasing their bodies and making them-
selves more sexually desirable to potential clients and to partners for
non-commercial sex and dating. Skin colour, and to a lesser degree eye
colour, was a key point of differentiation for the men I interviewed.
They all believed that this was central to their popularity on both the
gay dating scene and amongst sex work clients, a belief confirmed by
their success when they travelled on ‘tour’ to cities like Zurich and
Vienna.
50
P. Ryan
Guilherme (27): Everyone wants the opposite, right? I love blue eyes, they
[Irish people] love brown eyes, they want what is different and strange to
them – they are pale and hairy and so they want smooth, darker guys, fit
guys. You give them what they want.
Leo (25): They [clients] also say oh you have beautiful eyes; oh, your
skin is so beautiful. In Brazil, nobody says this, everyone has dark eyes
… being dark is OK, but not too dark, you know, my friend worked in
Dublin and he is from Salvador and is a dark, mixed guy and he says guys
don’t like, the nordestinos [north easterners] aren’t as popular.
Gregory Mitchell’s (2015: 57) study of straight-identified male sex

workers in gay saunas in Brazil also found that the process of raciali-
sation was uneven and context specific. Local Brazilian, and some
Western clients, often rejected black sex workers in favour of lighter
skinned or moreno [brown skinned] ones. All sex workers were part of
a discourse of hypersexuality but black men often had to perform an
exaggerated macho persona to attract clients (2015: 34). Similarly, I
interviewed a man who had advertised his nationality as Venezuelan,
who during the course of the interview admitted that he had in fact
being born in Romania. Given that he could speak Spanish and had
some family members living in Madrid, he changed how he advertised
himself online, attracting more clients as a result. ‘No one wants to fuck
a Romanian’ he told me.
The third determinant on the social formation of the body is taste.
This refers to lifestyle preferences that impact upon the body and are
located within economic constraints. For Bourdieu (1986: 187), food
is a clear example of how taste impacts upon the ‘strength, health and
beauty’ of the class body. Drawing from his extensive study of class and
food tastes in France, Bourdieu suggests that the working classes have
a greater concern with the strength rather than the shape of the body,
eating cheap and nutritious food as opposed to the more health-con-
scious middle classes. Again, there is evidence of a standardisation in
the food consumed by the men in my study, unsurprising given the
reliance on social media and global magazine chains like Men’s Health
for nutritional advice. The preparation and consumption of food
51
displayed an extraordinary discipline. Most men I interviewed, utilised

an application like MyFitnessPal which enabled them to calculate and
weigh their nutritional needs for the day, broken down into protein,
carbohydrates, fibre, sugar and fat. While foods from their native Brazil
and Venezuela did feature, these were often referred to nostalgically,
associated with family meals, most often cooked by their mothers or
grandmothers.6 Within an Irish context, they were foods that were
reserved for a special occasion, given they were often time-consum-
ing to prepare. The Brazilian dish of feijoada was the most commonly
referred to; a beans, beef and pork dish that requires many hours to
cook and didn’t feature in the everyday food diaries men kept on their
phones.
Gilherme (28): I miss feijoada so much, it is not the same taste here, there
is a restaurant here that I tried, I have never made it at home … a girl in
my class started to make coxinhas and bring them to class, it was money
for her, everybody loved them and her … thinking about food makes me
want to go home, I miss home.
Thiago (21): I buy my food every weekend, I try and make food for
every day but I have many guys in my house and the kitchen is small …
this week I made food at 1am because it was quiet – like chicken, tuna
and beef dishes.
Renzo (23): I use plastic boxes for my food during the day so I can
eat three times during the day, I don’t want to eat bad when I am here
[Dublin].
Hakim’s (2018: 235) study of gym work and social media also revealed
respondents who, like Renzo spent an hour each morning cooking
nutritious individually boxed meals to be eaten during the day. While
the gym has been discussed as an individualised body project (Gill et al.
2005: 57; Crossley 2006: 42), the preparation of food was no less indi-
vidual, with men rarely eating collectively with their flatmates, except at
the weekends. Increased food costs, which in addition to the purchase
of supplements like creatine and whey protein, constituted a significant
financial commitment each week.
52
P. Ryan
Conclusion
This chapter used the stories of gay men recently arrived from Brazil
and Venezuela to argue that the cultivation, maintenance and dis-
play of the body within spaces popular with the LGBTQ commu-
nity, yielded a physical capital. The dividend was accrued, because the
men embodied an idealised shape that has been gazed upon, fetish-
ised and commodified in Western consumer societies. Upon arrival in
Ireland, these men realised their bodies had a higher physical capital,
and potential exchange value, than they had in their countries of ori-
gin. Their bodies, the product of fitness regimes started within schools
and honed in sports played with family and friends on beaches in
coastal cities, were considered more exceptional than their paler local
counterparts.
Drawing from Bourdieu, I have argued these men internalised pref-
erences in eating, exercise and fashion that have become a habitus
which is both a way of living for the men I interviewed and crucially,
becomes an aspirational handbook for other gay men. This desire to
achieve a similar muscularity or covet those who possess it, opens up
opportunities for sexual encounters, both commercial and non-com-
mercial. While habitus maybe class-based, I have argued that the
homogenisation of the desired body type within LGBTQ communi-
ties and the global standardisation of workout plans, diet and supple-
ments have greatly reduced the imprint of class upon the body. This is
exaggerated in the stories of men I have interviewed because the gym
has overwhelming become the sole form of sport and exercise that the
men have engaged in since their arrival. Even still, within these sto-
ries, men tell of ‘reading’ each other’s bodies for indicators of class
through tattoo design, accent, dental work and facial appearance. In
the next chapter, I focus on how these bodies become digitally medi-
ated through dating applications like Grindr, exploring the selection
of photos and how they are read by others to invite commercial sexual
opportunity.
53
Notes
1. Following Bourdieu (1986: 241), I am using capital to refer to those
resources that ‘are accumulated human labour’ and hold the potential
to produce forms of reward. Types of capital include economic (income,
monetary assets), cultural (skills, knowledge), social (connections) and
symbolic (status).
2. Lash (1994: 120) is critical of Giddens over the extent to which people
can reflexively construct their lives without acknowledging the influence
of the person’s socio-economic location. Bagguley (1999: 72) similarly
argues there is a neglect of power and social inequality in Giddens’ work
with his concept of reflexivity being too individualistic.
3. I drew upon field note taking guidelines from Emerson et al. (2011).
Loic Wacquant (2007) has written, perhaps, the most famous gym eth-
nography. See also Trimbut (2011) and Crossley (2006), for examples, of
gym ethnographies.
4. The McDonaldization thesis is associated with George Ritzer (2011)
The McDonaldization of Society. London: Sage. On the impact of glo-
balisation on habitus see A. Appadurai (1997) Modernity at Large.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
5. Mitchell’s ethnographic study of Brazilian garatos or ‘straight’ escorts
working in gay saunas also show a preference for shaving to showcase the
muscular body (Mitchell 2015: 11).
6. Food memories are a central theme identified by Cairns et al. (2010:
600) in their study on food, gender and class.
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3
Grindr, Hybridisation and the Life
a Pop-Up Escort
Abstract  Ryan explores how the gay dating app Grindr provides a digi-
tal platform to display the male sex worker body. Self-photography pro-
vides the raw material for Grindr profiles that facilitate the construction
of a transient and opportunistic pop-up escort that communicated to
potential clients through a new genre of photos, text and emoji. These
regularly changed and targeted specific audiences. Ryan shows how
Grindr creates new online/real time interfaces that generated both
opportunities and dangers for sex workers.
Keywords  Grindr · Pop-up escort · Hybridization · Male sex work
Introduction
Bruno worked as a chef in Brazil before coming to Ireland in 2015. He
is twenty-one years old. As we settle down to talk in a city centre café,
he places his iPhone on the table beside us, the screen bright with a
series of online notifications. In the course of our conversation, he tells
me of a habit, he has acquired of taking shirtless photos of himself in

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11797-9_3
58
P. Ryan
the changing rooms of clothing stores. Not all changing rooms are the
same, he assures me. Some have better lighting. Some are larger than
others. ‘So where do all these photos end up?’ I ask. Most are deleted
he tells me, but some are sent to followers on Snapchat and Instagram
Story or are chosen for his Grindr profile. The stories of the body pro-
jects, which I discussed in the previous chapter, now seek a platform, a
showcase, a digital embodiment. This is at the heart of what I address in
this chapter, focusing on the use of Grindr, although the men I inter-
viewed do use multiple online applications. The photos that Bruno and
other men have accumulated form the raw material of their digital iden-
tities. While people may admire them in the gym or in a bar from afar,
these digital identities have a global reach. They traverse the city, open-
ing up hybrid spaces, created by the interface of the online and real-
time worlds in new neighbourhoods, new workplaces and new cities, as
my interviewees travel for work or for pleasure. Their choice of photo,
text or emoji are read by fellow users who decipher the hidden mean-
ing that suggests either their availability as sex workers, or an ambigu-
ity that suggests a potential exchange of sex or companionship for some
economic gain.
I argue that it is the ease with which their photos can be uploaded
and deleted which enable the emergence of this pop-up sex worker. My
interviewees represent these workers, slow to embrace a sex worker iden-
tity, even slower to advertise on mainstream escort websites like rentboy.
com, lest it confirms such an identity. In this chapter, the men’s stories
reveal how they draw upon sex work as a resource, facilitated by the
subcultural prestige with which their bodies are held both by residents
and visitors to Dublin. It is a resource that is deployed intermittently to
solve short-term problems in housing and employment. It is deployed
at specific times and durations to fund foreign travel, to purchase con-
sumer durables and facilitate their attendance in clubs and parties where
drug use is prevalent. Sex work is also a resource that contributes to the
pursuit of long-term goals, to enable a new life in Europe or to support
a return to the countries of their birth.
3 Grindr, Hybridisation and the Life a Pop-Up Escort
59
Gay Men, Dating and Sex

The Internet has revolutionised how gay men meet for sex, dat-
ing and relationships. The desire for men to have sex with other men
has, however, created a landscape of spaces throughout history where
sexual activity has taken place. Public spaces, like parks and lavato-
ries, have played a significant role in bringing men who have sex with
men together, facilitating brief sexual encounters that often trans-
gressed age and class (Chauncey 1994: 179). For men who resided in
cramped housing, public spaces offered the only available privacy—a
feature common amongst working-class communities where much
social life occurred on the streets. In New York City, Central, Battery
and Prospect Parks became familiar cruising grounds at the turn of
the twentieth century, where men would seek sex, but who would also
socialise and develop friendships with men they encountered there
(Chauncey 1994: 182). While police authorities responded with plain-
clothes surveillance and harassment, sexual activity persisted moving
to beaches like Coney Island in the hot summer months where men
found others like themselves, seeking sex or companionship, on sands
that were already heavily ethnically segregated. A complex of subcultural
codes emerged to help men identify and make contact with each other
in spaces throughout the city (p. 189). Movie theatres also became a
popular location for men to meet, with one theatre on Sixth Avenue
in Manhattan recording forty-five arrests for homosexual solicitation
in 1921 alone (p. 196). The bathrooms of the city’s expanding subway
system, dubbed tearooms, also became a central meeting point for men
and initiated further plain-clothes surveillance operations that resulted
in prosecutions and imprisonment in a workhouse for thirty to sixty
days (p. 198). The sexual activities of tearoom trade would become
more widely understood, at least within academic circles, following the
publication of Laud Humphreys’ (1970) study of casual sexual encoun-
ters in a public bathroom in St Louis, Missouri. The book gained
notoriety for its apparent breaches of ethical standards that exposed
Humphreys’ research participants to dangers of disclosure, although the
use of deception in research was widespread at the time of the book’s
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publication (Lenza 2004: 32). Within the Irish context, I had previously
interviewed men coming out in the 1970s, who also documented the
role of sexual encounters in public bathrooms as they grappled with
their emergent sexuality (Ryan 2003). In Ireland, where there were
limited gay social venues, public sexual encounters remained a feature
of gay men’s lives. One interviewee, Micheal, described that experi-
ence (Ryan 2003: 80)—‘People don’t really understand it, certainly not
younger people, you can’t see cruising for sex in toilets in today’s light
where guys are doing it for some sexual thrill … when I was growing up
there was literally no other place to meet guys’.
Edwards (1994: 99–102) identifies two public sex contexts—the
informal, like a public toilet that is ‘converted’ into a site for sex, and
the formal site of a bathhouse or sauna. Bathhouses have been a dom-
inant feature of the gay community for over forty years. These spaces
were created to cater for the erotic and social needs of men, providing
public, semi-public and private spaces that offered men seeking anon-
ymous encounters an environment that brought them protection from
assault and harassment (Holmes et al. 2007: 275). Much of the earlier
academic research has focused on the role bathhouses played as symbol
of gay liberation (Delph 1978; Lee 1976; Styles 1979). Allan Bérubé’s
(2003) history of the bathhouse in the USA also identifies them playing
a more central role than anonymous sex, in overcoming the isolation
that was endemic for gay men and contributing to the legal protec-
tions that the civil gay rights movement would ultimately secure. The
development of the gay bathhouse occurred at a time of rapid urbani-
sation in the early twentieth century that saw the slow transformation
of formerly gay tolerant Turkish or Russian baths, co-opted into a new,
exclusively erotic role (p. 34). Gay bathhouses emerged when there were
few exclusively gay social venues available to gay men, and there was a
steady decline in their use by the general population (Chauncey 1994:
211). There was little prostitution within bathhouses, with the entrance
fees often being a disincentive for hustlers (p. 220), which facilitated a
more social environment amongst cliental, than an exclusively sexual
one. Law enforcement authorities were often ambiguous in their sur-
veillance of bathhouses, seeing them as a preferable alternative in their
fight against public sex, although police raids did occur, especially
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throughout the 1950s (p. 41). Often the lack of raids was the result of
payments made to the police from what were successful commercial
establishments, rather than any policy of non-interference (Chauncey
1994: 215).
The surveillance of bathhouses would return once again in the advent
of the HIV/AIDS pandemic as public health officials (Holmes et al.
2007: 276; Woods et al. 2003: 57) targeted them. Bathhouses closed
in large numbers in the USA, at least temporarily. In Canada however,
no major city embarked upon a policy of bathhouse closure, following
advice that these locations could be a site for HIV prevention and edu-
cation (Woods et al. 2003: 67). Although contemporary research has
been dominated by the correlation of bathhouse use and HIV trans-
mission, studies like Binson et al. (2010: 586) do support findings that
show a high proportion of safer sex practices. There has also been dis-
cussion of the disparity between HIV transmission rates amongst Latino
and Black communities, compared to white men who have sex with
men, although studies like Reisen et al. (2010: 702) didn’t find a higher
a likelihood of unprotected anal intercourse in bathhouses compared
to private homes. Indeed, Woods et al. (2013: 84) found little interest
amongst bathhouse staff to monitor the sexual behaviour of clients in
public areas of the premises.
In the contemporary world, filled with sexual possibility, gay men are
drawn to such public or semi-private spaces like bathhouses by fetish,
rather than the necessity to seek sexual gratification. Even gay bars and
clubs, not unlike the high street, have struggled to keep a loyal cliental
in the face of online ‘shopping’ for dates and sex in city centres eager to
gentrify older red light districts. These ‘infrastructures of intimacy’, as
Kane Race (2015a) describes them, have enabled gay men to seek out
sexual and romantic connection through a digital sexual revolution that
has re-imagined historical understandings of community. Smartphone
applications like Grindr, and other websites that offer geo-location
capacities, have, however, been heavily critiqued for their suspected
links to increasing rates of sexually transmitted infections (Rice et al.
2012; Burrell et al. 2012). The days of men seeking out spaces desig-
nated to be gay or ‘gay friendly’ with the explicit intention of meeting
others has greatly reduced. These spaces have largely become locations
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to meet and socialise with friends, with the erotic potential remaining
optional. Studies, like Rosenfeld and Thomas (2012), show that same-
sex couples are overwhelming more likely to meet online, with 70% of
their respondents having done so.
Location-based dating applications like Grindr, Scruff and Manhunt
play multiple roles in the lives of gay men. These apps, like Grindr, offer
men an online space that is layered upon a physical place as they move
through the urban environment creating, in Blackwell’s et al. (2014: 9)
terms, a ‘co-situational’ experience. As gay men move through the city,
a new community of men opens up to them that reflects a diverse class,
age and ethnicity profile of different neighbourhoods. Grindr’s infrastruc-
ture allows the user to choose from predesignated ethnic categories—
or to choose none—or ‘other’ to circumvent the racial profiling of users
(Jaspal 2017: 194). The mobility of users when they check in on their
apps as they travel or commute, digitally turning neighbourhoods gay
throughout the city, has been identified as a central feature of the tech-
nology (Stempfhuber and Liegl 2016: 61; Ahlm 2017: 369; Batiste
2013: 123). Although apps like Grindr are largely perceived as facili-
tating casual encounters, there is now a body of research which shows
a more nuanced use of the technology. In fact, in neoliberal socie-
ties the advent of gay marriage and the valorisation of domesticity in
an age of heteronormativity has resulted in a stigmatisation of those
involved in casual sex (Jaspal 2017: 196; Ahlm 2017: 372). The stigma
felt by research respondents encouraged them to change how they pre-
sented themselves on their online profiles and forced them to abide
by ‘interactional rules’ when communicating with fellow users, down-
playing their immediate sexual intentions. This tension in the pres-
entation of the online self has been identified in Thompson-Bonner’s
(2017: 1661–1669) work, who has categorised Grindr profile pho-
tos as either hypersexualised—emphasising a muscular and toned body
and—lifestyle, communicating to other users an interest in travel or
culture, for example. An exception to this more nuanced understand-
ing of gay dating app usage is Tziallas (2015) who believes the sexual
motivation, rather than being downplayed, is in fact the key driver
of Grindr’s success. Tziallas (2015: 761) rightly believes the success of
Grindr as an amateur porn platform is predicated upon the desire of
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users to share naked photos and to receive others in return in a process

decidedly different from accessing thousands of such anonymous photos
online. The difference is the proximity of the user in which this photo
exchange takes place, but also I would add the context of ‘knowing’ this
user and the potential to realise a sexual encounter based on the inter-
action. The motivation of this exchange goes beyond the pursuit of sex.
The demand for validation from other users of the discipline and time
invested in the body is a strong driving force in the willingness to share
photos of it digitally. It is the desire to exchange and seek validation
of the body through an exchange of photos that has enabled male sex
workers to so effectively navigate Grindr, drawing in potential clients
who want to see more, and accumulating physical capital through the
gaze of other users.
Male Sex Work Online

Male sex workers have been beneficiaries of apps, like Grindr that use
geo-location capability. Ten years earlier, most sex workers were using
sites like Gaydar, established in 1999 by a company called QSoft
(Light et al. 2008: 305), that offered a gay dating and social network
forum. It was hugely successful, with 4.2 million members worldwide
in 2007, drawing in diverse advertising revenue keen to target new
consumers. Male sex workers were charged a commercial membership
rate to advertise their services and use escort-specific chat rooms (Light
et al. 2008: 307). This mode of engagement with men selling sex was
largely disembodied, where potential clients sat at their desktop com-
puters perusing static photos of the available men (Roth 2014: 2115).
Research by Lee-Gonyea et al. (2009) similarly seeks to explore the
use of the ‘personal computer’ when reviewing male escort sites in the
USA, although she does recognise the advent of instant messaging used
by some agencies to facilitate real-time communication between clients
and escorts. Pruitt (2005: 195) also offers an analysis of 12,262 escort
profiles which revealed the work to be populated by overwhelming
white men (89%), spread evenly across different age groups from eight-
een to fifty, with 67.2% of men providing face photos in their profiles.
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Using such methodologies to analyse escort profiles can be problem-

atic, with double counting (men having more than one profile targeted
at different client audiences) and inactive profiles rarely controlled for.
McLean’s (2013) qualitative interviews with 23 male sex workers are
more revealing. They show how working independently online on sites
like Gaydar reflected the recognised decline in street work and brothel
and agency work amongst men and the preference for clients ‘to come
to them’ rather than having to solicit for business (McClean 2013: 8).
The escorts all cited greater levels of anonymity, autonomy and safety
from their online work, while it was economically more profitable
without having to deduct agency fees (p. 9). Similarly, in Parsons et al.
(2004: 1025) study, men who had previously sought work offline in
bars or agencies spoke of the advantages of attracting a different cliental
that was less likely to be drunk or high and more likely to spend more
time over dinner or on an overnight. Escorts still had to negotiate safer
sex limits on or during the visit with some acting in the role of sex edu-
cators, warning their clients of unsafe sex practices.
Grindr
All major gay dating sites now have a GPS application similar to
Grindr, including Hornet, PlanetRomeo and Scruff. Grindr was the
most popular app amongst the men I interviewed, although many had
profiles on other apps that they would use discontinuously or delete and
then reinstall. Upon downloading Grindr, the screen opens to a cas-
cade of the nearest hundred profile thumbnails dominated by a photo,
organised according to their proximity to the user. Clicking on a profile
opens to a screen displaying the photo which scrolls down to a head-
line text and age (e.g. looking for sex), then to a longer biographical
text and finally to physical characters (Brubaker et al. 2016: 376). These
include height, weight, body type, ethnicity, position, tribes, relation-
ship status and looking for.1 There is also a ‘social links’ facility which
enables users to add their Instagram, Twitter or Facebook usernames to
their profile. Since this study was completed, Grindr has introduced an
option asking users to identify a gender and appropriate pronoun and
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also their HIV status and the date of their last test.2 There is also facility
to chat, favourite chosen profiles as well as to block and report them to
an administrator. The chat function allows users to send text (or a voice
note on the advertisement free subscription version), photos and their
location. There are rules (no nudity, no sex toys, no advertising, no mar-
keting sexual services and no revealing clothes) governing what consti-
tutes an appropriate photo which is moderated before being approved.3
Showcasing the Body: Digitally Mediated

Photos on Grindr
In choosing photos to place on their Grindr profile, the men I inter-
viewed were bringing their bodies into ‘digital being’ (Thompson-
Bonner 2017: 1612). The process of choosing photos was the subject
of deliberation as it was the principle vehicle with which to perform
sexual identity to others. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the
men quickly learned the potential their muscular bodies held in cap-
turing the attention of other men either, in the gym or in nightclubs,
but also in accumulating a large following on social media. The men’s
use of Grindr facilitated their entry into sex work on their own terms by
creating ambiguous profiles that suggested, or could be read by poten-
tial clients, as commercial sex availability. This reliance on other users to
read one’s profile to identify a more nuanced meaning was not exclusive
to those advertising sex work, rather a common feature for all Grindr
users. You can’t explicitly say, ‘I’m looking for sex’ one of Blackwell’s
et al. (2014: 11) respondents tell them of their experience using Grindr,
leaving it to the viewer to discover the real intention. While users
have to learn to read photos and the text, often these can be ambigu-
ous and contradictory (Ahlm 2017: 369). Even if that true intention
is revealed, the exchange of photos using private messaging can suggest
both a front- and backstage performance of online identities. My inter-
viewees, like the respondents in Jaspal’s (2017: 194) study, also played
with Grindr’s categories, sometimes choosing ‘Latino’ from the ethnicity
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preferences, especially when looking for work but other times clicking
‘white’, ‘mixed’ or ‘other’.
The ambiguousness of users’ intentions allowed my interviewees to
evaluate and ‘screen’ the responses they received before confirming they
were in fact available for sex. Just how ambiguous the choice of the pho-
tos, text and the use of emoji deployed in their profiles correlated to
their financial needs at any particular time. For example, several men
told a similar story where upon arrival in Dublin they had to wait for
their PPS or social security card to be processed before seeking employ-
ment. This time lag and unanticipated high accommodation costs when
they arrived were cited as a key entry point to their involvement in sex
work.
Luan (27): The money I had went when I arrived, it went back [€3000 in
funds to show immigration authorities] so I had no money and was living
in a hostel so I would go on Grindr and use photos of me on the beach in
my city, sometimes I would put the $ sign, but it was enough to get busi-
ness, I saw a lot of guys in this time, I didn’t want to do it.
Gilherme (28): The agency, it lied to me, they did everything in Brazil
and told me I could get a place by myself for €500 [in Dublin], they lied
and there is nothing I could do, I could not go home … I met guys on
Grindr who contacted me, offering €60 or €80 [for sex] I was desperate
and I took it … It was easy, I choose a photo from the gym, I wrote XXL,
it was easy but they were bad guys I think, things weren’t good for me
then and they knew, now I choose the guys I meet.
The use of emoji described by Luan above had become a popular way
in which men advertised there availability without inserting words like
‘escort’ in their profiles. It also meant that emoji could be removed and
reinserted easily without changing the photo. The most recognisable
emoji used was the diamond—popular because it was perceived to be
only known amongst men who sold sex and their potential clients, thus
remaining anonymous. In a relatively small gay community, some men
were conscious of the potential stigma that being exclusively associated
with sex work would have on their long-term ability to make friends,
date and work in Ireland. Rafael (26) describes how many Irish gay
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men didn’t like Brazilians and would not meet them—‘I see it on pro-
files [on Grindr] ‘no Brazilian, no Asian’ they think we have orgies and
take drugs all the time (laughs), like we are the same … Brazilians that
are escorts make that worse, we all become whores … I would like to
meet an Irish guy and have a relationship’. The ethnic screening that
Rafael refers to is part of a wider online culture of no—no couples, no
hook-ups, no poz, no fem, no fat, no chems—that dominate user pro-
files (Tziallas 2015: 768).
The photos men like Rafael chose reflected a tension between com-
municating sufficient ambiguity about their online sexual motives so as
not to acquire a sex worker identity, but also being suggestive enough to
secure escort enquiries.
Gustavo (22): I choose a pic from holidays, a beach one, or a photo from
after the gym, any photo without my shirt guys will offer money, some
joking, time wasters some not … if I have another normal photo – almost
nothing! I don’t like photos that are too filtered or you are looking like a
model – guys [clients] don’t like that, they want – a struggling student
looking to make money – I think if they see you being too professional
they are not interested, for me anyway.
Screening messages from users that are ‘joking’ or are ‘time wasters’
is time-consuming. The men I interviewed agreed that they instinc-
tively knew real enquiries from bogus ones, with warning signs such
as demands for more photos or endless conservation about sexual pref-
erences, with Lucas (24) describing how ‘guys who want you for sex,
get to the point pretty quickly … others are just wankers’. An una-
voidable consequence of posting photos of their muscular bodies on
Grindr is the large volume of messages that need to be filtered. Some
men, like Rodrigo (24), occasionally removed his face or body photo
entirely—‘sometimes I need time to look through messages, or delete
or block, I can’t do this with new messages coming in all time … for
this I post a photo of my dog, but then even guys that like dogs message
to say ‘cute dog’ – ah leave me alone’. It would be incorrect to think
that Grindr is solely about performing an erotic identity; my inter-
views illustrate that men were involved in the performance of multiple
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identities through the choice of their photos. If we return to Rafael who

expressed the desire to find a relationship, we see that there is often a
disjuncture between what is performed and communicated to others
and the ‘real’ self. He describes how he changes his photo to attract dif-
ferent types of guys.
If I am not looking for [sex] work I use a regular photo, like how I am
to you now, the muscular guy photos get you a lot of messages but they
aren’t guys that I want to date, the guys I want to message are smart guys,
ordinary guys and when they see this [shirtless] photo of me they think I
am arrogant or stupid so I don’t like to use all the time.
He continues to explain how his photos communicate a persona to

potential clients that doesn’t reflect his own desires and intimate needs.
I put up photos and I am a big guy, so guys want me always to be top

[sexually active] always and I do, but it is different when I want someone
to date, that is not really me but it keeps it [work] separate because I can
do it, but it is not what I want, when I am with someone I like, I want to
be held and cuddled, I want to feel safe.
In this way, Grindr’s interactive categories struggle to accommodate

both the complexity of motivation that brings users online and the cor-
porate restrictions placed upon the company that emphasise the ‘dating’
dimension of the app (Tziallas 2015: 763).4
Online, Real Time and Hybrid Space

Grindr allowed the men I interviewed traverse the city creating an
interface between the online and real-time dimensions in their lives.
The concept of hybridization recognises that the online world is no
longer distinct and independent from the physical one and the role
new technologies have in creating this connectedness, particularly in
the online performance of sexual identities (Ryan 2016: 1714; Kitchin
and Dodge 2011). Depending on the cultural context, the online
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Grindr community may just offer an anonymous platform to connect

with other gay men, to discuss and explore sexual identities (Valentine
2006: 379). Alternatively, it enables the online world to come alive in
real time. I argue that this extra layer of online interaction over physi-
cal space facilitated and mediated interactions that would otherwise not
take place. These interfaces, or hybrid spaces (De Souza e Silva 2006:
271), are utilised by my interviewees to connect the physical and the
online to facilitate entry into sex work. I have identified three interface
locations where this occurs regularly in the men’s lives.
1. The Commute
The majority of my interviewees lived in central Dublin or within a

2-km radius of it, where they also studied English, but six men trav-
elled to the suburbs for work by bus or tram. These 30-minute journeys
were an opportunity to log onto Grindr as they travelled from the city
centre, into suburbs usually less ethnically diverse. Logging on as the
tram or bus moved brought the men into contact with users who would
have been unable to see their profile due to the increased distance. It
was also brought users into contact with men beyond the familiarity
of those users within the radius of their homes and workplaces (Batiste
2013: 125–126; Ahlm 2017: 369). All six men reported meeting clients
in this way, clients that represented a different cohort than would have
contacted them in the city centre. Leo (25) and Joao (27) describe these
encounters.
Leo (25): It is different, I travel to work and guys message me asking if I

am local to them but I am nice and say ‘only travelling through’, some-
times the same guys talk to me and ask me to get off [the tram] at their
stop to meet, it would be the third or fourth time that they suggest that
they would pay, I can’t remember sometime I have the diamond emoji
on, sometimes not. So I meet some guys like this but I don’t like – I don’t
know the areas and I’m always more nervous maybe it’s a joke or I’m
going to get beaten up or something. I have been lucky, I think these guys
married, men and women, I think, I know from the houses.
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Joao (27): In the city I meet guys in hotels, they are visitors for work,
when on the tram people message in the area and ask if I am an escort or
they message with just – €100? I have met guys this way but one time I
was in his bedroom and I heard someone downstairs and I was scared –
you don’t know who it was or what will happen so I prefer hotels, I feel
safer.
Unless a Grindr user is living in a central urban location, one that has
a continual traffic of other users, travel and movement are an essential
part of the app to discover others beyond one’s immediate surround-
ings. Stempfhuber and Liegl’s (2016: 66) respondents also stress this
necessity for movement to keep Grindr ‘working’ by creating new erotic
landscapes.
2. The Gym
The gym played a central role in the lives of the men I interviewed.
I have discussed in the previous chapter how the gym became a plat-
form and a showcase for the men’s physically, illustrating their self-dis-
cipline and determination. Life in the gym was lived out both online
and offline. Many of the photos chosen by the men in their Grindr pro-
files were taken at the gym. In the following chapter, I discuss how their
Instagram stories are populated with videos of them working out at the
gym or preparing food afterwards. Grindr allows men to communicate
when they will be in the gym, as we saw with Rafael (26) in Chapter
2, encouraging men to ‘come up and say hello’. The men also receive
messages from other users, telling them that had seen them in the gym
and was it OK to come and talk with them. These interactions provide
clients with a way of ‘knowing’ the men they meet for sex. Other mes-
sages are more direct requests for sexual services. Bruno (21) offers an
example of this type of request, similar to what other men I interviewed
have also received.
Bruno (21): I get a lot of messages about the gym, about working out,
exercises and diets, guys are looking for advice, sometimes they ask can
they work out with me … I have done that for €50 and there is no sex,
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we work out and it is easy, they [clients] decide what we do and some-
times they ask me to wear some shorts or a t-shirt that they have seen me
in the gym in … I have a Superman t-shirt, you know? It is the logo in
red, this guy asks me to wear that and it is cool … Sometimes guys ask to
massage me after the gym, this is funny because I wrote massage on my
other profile [PlanetRomeo] but I said I would do it, but I can’t (laughs)
and now they want to do it, it’s strange, no?
It is unsurprising given Bruno’s experience that four of the men I inter-

viewed now work as personal trainers. The interface between gym and
sex work has allowed these men to recast their online personas promot-
ing the cultivation of the body in a health and fitness frame, rather than
an exclusively erotic one. It also legitimatises the construction of their
Grindr and Instagram profiles which showcase their bodies for a pro-
fessional purpose, however suggestive the material. As personal trainers,
their bodies symbolise the ‘embodied labour’ of health and fitness clubs,
creating a consumer desire amongst the membership to train harder to
achieve their goals (Frew and McGillivray 2005: 171). However, rather
than acting as inspiration, the bodies of personal training staff often act
more as a mirror to remind the membership of their own undisciplined
bodies.
3. Club Nights
Dublin’s gay scene has continued to evolve in tandem with the city,
responding to economic boom and bust, migration and a demand for
more diverse club nights. The oldest and traditional bar and club, The
George, have recently seen competition from a range of weekly and
monthly club nights operating from different venues. Here, there is a
rejection of commercial pop music in favour of house, in an atmos-
phere that seeks to replicate circuit styles clubs—or parties—popular
in Barcelona and Ibiza. These clubs have offered theme nights complete
with go-go dancers and theatre. It is within this environment that dig-
ital identities come alive in real time. Four men I interviewed found
work here, as both dancers and as a door host. Erick (22), a Venezuelan
student, had previously worked in a straight city centre club working
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as a server on weekly Spanish and Brazilian nights, an experience he

described as the ‘worst of his life’, being forced to be shirtless wearing
cut-off jeans while being subject to more harassment than his female
colleagues.
It gets worse the later it gets and the more they [customers] drink, you
have people touching you, they grab … your ass, your cock, they squeeze
your nipples and you have to be polite because it’s all joking … I hate it, I
really it hate and it’s only €12 an hour.
Experiences like Erick’s reveal that whatever satisfaction male sex work-
ers gained in having their bodies admired and gaze upon, it was highly
dependent on the level of control the men were able to exercise over
the encounters. Scull’s (2013: 571) study of male strippers also revealed
men having their genitals grabbed and being scratched, bitten and left
bleeding by ardent female patrons. Moving to work in the gay club
night as a dancer, although less frequent, was a more positive experience
that, in turn, benefited Erick’s sex work. However, the sexual harass-
ment wasn’t over, as Erick explains –
I got the job as a dancer which is funny because I can’t really dance,
not all Latin men can dance you know? It was more moving than danc-
ing, but I had to meet the guy that runs the club before and it was hor-
rible, really, I don’t want to talk about it, he was so sleazy, horrible, but
when I got the job, I loved it, good people, you were on a stage so people
look at you but nobody touched you … On Grindr a lot of people would
message and say – oh I know you – It was good for [sex] work too, guys
knew you and that you were not going to be some crazy bitch (laughs).
Disposable Bodies? Converting Physical Capital

The men’s stories clearly show the successful conversion of their physi-
cal capital into economic opportunities in sex work, personal training
and waiting staff. It has opened social opportunities for them to join a
more vibrant club scene where some acquired work. These conversions
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do, however I argue, go beyond physical capital. Catherine Hakim’s

(2010) concept of erotic capital, although much derided by feminist
scholarship, provides some useful applications to the men’s lives. It is
clear when analysing these stories, the men in my study see sex work as
neither a career, nor a job (although there are references to work) rather
a resource to be drawn down at times when it was most needed. I argue
that we need to understand male sex work as less about career as it is
shown to be discontinuous, defying simplistic ‘entry and exit’ models.
As I argue later in this chapter, most men see sex work as a resource that
can be utilised over a longer time period, should the market allow them
to do so. Hakim (2010: 500–501) identities her six (or seven) elements
of erotic capital. The culturally contingent concept of beauty and sexual
attractiveness extended across the men’s lives. I discussed in Chapter 2,
where men commonly spoke of how they were ‘considered more attrac-
tive here than at home’. A racialisation and fetishisation of specific
bodily characteristics by Irish gay culture had secured a space for those
bestowed with them to accrue benefits across a range of social locations.
Hakim further identifies a social dimension, charm and grace, along
with liveliness, style and presentation and sexuality itself. Hakim (2010:
501) describes erotic capital as ‘a combination of aesthetic, visual, phys-
ical, social and sexual attractiveness to other members of your society’.
While Hakim’s analysis is largely of heterosexual relationships, her
view that women have greater levels of erotic capital because they work
harder on presentation and the performance of sexuality draws paral-
lels with the experience of gay men, particularly the stories of those told
in this book. Particularly when Hakim (2010: 506) identifies the role
that erotic capital plays in the lives of those with diminished capital in
other areas, including ‘young people, ethnic and cultural minorities, and
working class groups’. Hakim argues that patriarchal society’s denigra-
tion of erotic capital is most obvious in the stigmatisation of female sex
workers. By contrast within marriage and mate selection, beauty, along
with educational credentials, are identified by Hakim (2000: 162) as
influential.
The conversion of the physical and erotic capital accrued by my
interviewees was at time challenging. There were differing levels of com-
mitment to remaining in Ireland, with eight men acknowledging their
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desire to stay. They speculated on how to achieve this, mostly through

enrolment in a recognised third-level educational institution, or pursu-
ing a European passport through relatives in Portugal and Italy. It was
their precarious lives that made it more difficult to form relationships
with other Dublin residents—who felt that their stay in the city would
be temporary.
Lucas (24): Meeting guys is not easy for me, especially Irish, they think
we [Brazilians] are here for nine months or a year so we are just some-
thing for fun [sex], that’s all they want. They all want fit guys but when
they had sex with you they are gone.
This view that the time spent developing their bodies was actually a
disadvantage in meeting men that they sought relationships with was
shared by many. The interviewees felt that they were often unfairly ste-
reotyped as brainless party boys, with a proclivity for G—the most pop-
ular drug in the gay community. Rafael (26) describes his last dating
experience.
I was with this guy, I liked him, he was Irish and we dated for four
months maybe, five and it was good … after two months I knew that he
knew all my friends and I knew no one, none of his friends, I was like –
what is this? He thinks I’m stupid? He is embarrassed of me? He thinks I
am too young and his dentist friends will be all … you know. I was really
sad about it, I felt like shit. He was so nice and good to me but he was
afraid of these people, his friends.
Thiago (21) also spoke similarly of his experience dating an Irish guy in
his thirties who ended their relationship by telling him that an older Irish
guy dating a younger Brazilian was ‘too much of cliché’. Thiago was ada-
mant it would have been different if he was French or Spanish national
and that he was ‘thrown away’ by his boyfriend. Most interviewees spoke
similarly about how, although they were desired and coveted, their bodies
were also disposable. In this regard, their stories of dating and sex work
were remarkable similar, often describing how they were picked by guys
who had no interest in any conversation with them, either before or after
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sex. ‘It’s the same [for dating & sex work] when they cum, they want you
to go away so fast’ Rafael (26) recalling an experience with a man who he
had an ambiguous causal relationship with that involved occasional pay-
ments to him. He describes—‘I was on my knees looking for my socks
[after sex] and he was standing over me saying ‘do you really need them?’
and I thought it is February you asshole, yea, I need my socks’. Rafael
suffers what Bauman (2003: 65) describes, as ‘termination on demand’,
an unfortunate consequence of when sex moves into the digital world.
In this world, dating resembles browsing through a catalogue with ‘no
obligation to buy’ ensuring that human connectedness will increasing be
more frequent and shallow (p. 62).
Sex, Money and Intimacy

In sex work encounters, there was a law of diminishing returns, where
the significant numbers of young Brazilian and Venezuelan men on dat-
ing apps reduced their perceived exoticness, which was once the key to
their success. This resulted in clients’ willingness to negotiate and hag-
gle over prices. It was also the consequence of deploying a transient
sex work identity online, communicating to viewers that they could
be available to you for sex, at the right price. That price is, however,
open to negotiation. Sometimes, there was not cash price but the pay-
ment of goods or services. This occurred in three of the men’s stories
where a lump sum was paid to ensure continuing access, sexual and
companionship, although the terms seemed nebulous and were far from
contractual.
Joao (27): I ask for €150 always, but [clients] sometimes say – I only want
this or that or something like I’m not old so here’s €50 – really? Or some-
times they are want it free … it is always a really bad sign, a warning for
something bad later.
Renzo (23): When I first came here I was dating this guy, well was it
dating? We were getting to know each other and he paid for my English
course, I remember it was really soon and there was no talk about
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anything, if it meant anything, he just did it and I learned that you don’t
ask for things, they are given … It was a lot of money, it was a big deal
for me. We lost contact but met again, my mother was not well, she was
having a hysterectomy and he paid for my ticket home, it was so generous
to get so little in return.
Joao’s suspicion of potential clients who haggle over the price is shared
in other accounts from male sex workers’ online (e.g. McClean 2013:
10), where those in a financial position to refuse such clients, do so.
This movement of sex work beyond the traditional exchange of money
for sex in Renzo’s account is a significant feature of all the stories in this
book. Although these exchanges took place, online identities had facil-
itated a growing ambiguity around the boundaries of sexual encoun-
ters and the levels of intimacy within them. These relationships could
be characterised as ‘friends with benefits’ or ‘fuck buddies’ where an
exchange occurred of economic benefits for sexual and intimate com-
panionship. This concept is not new. The concept of the ‘kept-boy’ had
been categorised in the scientific literature on male prostitution in the
1970s, representing the face of ‘private’ as opposed to public or street
prostitution (Scott 2003: 189). Hall’s (2007: 467) ethnographic study
in Prague also explored this relationship between a younger Czech and
an older, wealthy German businessman. While both expressed love for
each other, the boundaries of their sexual fidelity were unclear, leading
to feelings of jealously, while the younger man felt excluded from his
boyfriend’s circle of close friends, amid gossip that he had previously
been a sex worker. This scenario was very similar to that recalled by
Rafael’s relationship in the previous section.
The ways in which men can be compensated for either sex, com-
panionship or online content have become increasingly diverse, and I
return to discuss some of these platforms, like Amazon Wish List and
OnlyFans, in Chapter 4. Renzo’s quote about receiving free flights
home also highlights the role of intimacy within sex work encounters.
Walby’s (2012: 133) interviews with male sex workers reveal varying
degrees of intimacy with clients, particularly those they have met on a
number of occasions. These stories tell of clients’ emotional demands to
be held and touched as opposed to other forms of sexual activity. The
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escorts tell of encounters with clients where they are enjoying sex, where
there is no faking and no performance of a feigned intimacy. Intimacy
becomes recast in these sexual encounters beyond concepts of monog-
amy, love and long-term commitment (p. 115). There is evidence in my
interviews of a desire for intimacy and an emotional contact motivat-
ing some clients when they arranged sex worker dates. I say this tenta-
tively because this book does not draw upon the perspective of clients
and their diverse motivations to seek paid sex, but clients who booked
sex workers more than once, did often enter into encounters that
were more intimate. Consider Rodrigo’s story, one reflected in other
accounts.
One of my first clients was an older guy … a big guy who was very emo-
tional … I had taken my clothes off and he was crying and I’m not sure
what’s happening, he was just saying that I was beautiful, again and again
and we did not do much, he looked at me for ages … It was me, or not
maybe, for him maybe I was him much younger and that made him feel
sad but he always treated me like I was this God to him
Rodrigo continues by telling the story of another client who he met on

a number of occasions:
We did have sex once but then he messaged me to go for coffee, it was
around 3pm, I was not sure about his [family] situation, he wanted to
talk, I never understood it, it is easy for me, the best but sometimes it is
stranger than sex, you know? What does he want from? Advice?
(Paul - interviewer): So he paid you in full for those coffee dates?
Rodrigo (24): He did, he paid me €150 each time. I was as surprised as
you. I think there is some strange therapy thing here, sometimes during
sex they say it too – like ‘I could never be this free with an Irish guy’ like
they are exploring sex or something?
There are similar accounts given by male sex workers in their experi-
ences with clients who are married or uncomfortable with their sexual-
ity and where escorts can become a source of comfort in such situations
(Parsons et al. 2007: 233). They are also similar to relationships between
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regular male clients and female sex workers who told of receiving emo-
tional support and friendship from the women they met over a pro-
longed period of time (Sanders 2008: 409–410). These encounters with
clients were identified by my interviewees as the most favourable; they
had met them before, they had paid as agreed, and they felt comfort-
able with them. This was often in sharp contrast to first time encoun-
ters with clients, where the men almost unanimously, sought to remain
in control of the meeting. This was achieved through the construction
of their profile and in initial conversations with potential clients. They
overwhelming choose the category—top—indicating they were solely
sexually active, irrespective of whether they were or not. The initial con-
versations conveyed that their natural preference was to be dominant in
the sexual encounter, and this enabled them to maintain the focus on
their own bodies rather than their clients, a useful strategy with those
they found less attractive. In these encounters, the traditional gaze on
the sex worker’s body is subverted as explained here by Thiago.
I do enjoy the sex but only when I am in control of what is happening,

this is easier with older or fat guys who don’t want it about their bodies,
they want it about mine so I love that … watching them enjoy my body
and I get paid, it’s easy for me …
It illustrates that the possession of physical capital also is embedded

within power relations, where those who possess it, use it to symbol-
ically dominate those that do not (Bourdieu 1984). This also creates
what Boden (2007: 130) describes as a ‘subcultural prestige’ within
the gay community where their youth, beauty and muscular bodies
transform them into the most desirable men available. The experience
of being the object of such attention and sexual desire proved to be
almost addictive to some male escorts who returned to work after ini-
tially deciding to leave sex work (Parsons et al. 2007: 235). While the
excitement of being desired is identified by my interviewees as being
important, so is the actually physical pleasure of client sexual encoun-
ters. A majority of the men reported that they had a heightened inter-
est in sex and continued to have a large number of partners, even at
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times they were not engaged in sex work, in line with previous studies
(Vanwesenbeeck 2012).
Touring
A majority of the men I interviewed were involved in touring—or trav-
elling to other cities to for sex work, a common practice identified in
sex work studies (e.g. Sanders et al. 2018: 63). Again, there were many
different experiences. For some, it was a pit stop to earn money before
continuing to travel but for others sex work was again, a resource which
they drew upon as they travelled abroad to fund the trip. Decisions
about which cities to visit were made on economic criteria—how much
clients were prepared to pay and also their perceived sexual desirabil-
ity in those cities. Zurich and Vienna were the overwhelming favourite
destinations for the men I interviewed to visit. The men used profiles
on both Grindr and a profile on the escort site, rentmen.eu when they
travelled.
Renzo (23): A friend suggested Zurich to me, I had no idea about it, I was
told it was more expensive than Dublin but that people earned a lot more
money there … it was really nice to visit but not to stay longer, I worked
there for a week and it really is great, even with hotel and plane, you
do very well … You have to understand that it is like Grindr for every-
one, the new person gets all the messages, there are only some people in
Dublin and then the visitors but in Zurich when you visit you are the
new face, I met two or three guys a day when I was there, on some trips I
made over €3000.
Joao (27): It was good for me to go [Vienna] it is better, in Dublin you
can wait and wait for work but here when you go you just work every day
and try to see many guys, it is better for me, I feel that I am a stranger
there, my photos what I write I don’t care there – this is me, I am work-
ing now come get me! (laughs) I like that it is apart from my friends and
life in Dublin … Last year I went [Vienna] before going to the Circuit
party in Barcelona so I could pay for the tickets and have a good holiday.
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Barcelona’s Circuit party is an eleven-day gay dance festival held in

August. Spread over different venues in the city, it has become synon-
ymous with the display of muscular bodies, drug use and sexual excess.
It was identified, by my interviewees, as one of the social highlights
of their year, for which they trained harder in the gym in the preced-
ing months to be in the best physical shape. The relationship between
Circuit parties, sexual inhibition and drug use has been explored in
both the USA (O’Byrne and Holmes 2011) and Europe (Gaissad
2013). Other interviewees told me how they financed longer trips
abroad through sex work. Victor (25) travelled to Thailand last year and
decided to work for a week in Singapore before his holiday.
I checked online and to find somewhere that would be good to work,

Singapore is expensive and you need somewhere OK and nice and clean
if you are working and want guys to come but it was good for me to go
… I think that the white guys won’t have sex with the Asian guys so you
have these Asian guys with money that want white guys – or guys like me
– but they can’t get them so there is a lot of guys who want to meet up, I
worked every day and people give tips and are polite
Coercion
The men reported no accounts of physical assault or acts of violence
against them by clients in the course of their work. They attributed this
to both their physical size, often much larger than their clients, and how
they negotiated the initial encounters. However, there were numerous
accounts of coercion perpetrated against them that sought to exploit
their precarious position in the state. The most serious of which was a
client known to many of my interviewees, who purported to be work-
ing for the Irish immigration service. The men’s stories were remarkably
similar telling how he had arranged to meet them, and then refusing to
pay, he threatened them with deportation.
Gilherme (28): I never knew if it was true but I was scared, maybe because
in my country you do not want trouble with the police so I let him walk
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away … friends told me this guy was well known and it was not a secret
and he did work for immigration.
Erick (22): We all knew him, I remember my friends writing in a
WhatsApp group warning us to avoid him … it was hard, he got guys
in the office building and contacted us on Grindr threatening us with all
things.
The lack of availability of good quality and affordable housing also

made the men’s lives more precarious, particularly upon their arrival
in Dublin. Often living with a host family or a hostel for a number of
months, pressure mounted to secure accommodation. The options were
limited. Stories revealed early months of living in shared rooms with six
other men in houses accommodating up to twelve people. Others fared
relatively better sharing a room in an apartment, but few had a private
room in which to accommodate clients, the revenue from which could
only ensure them an escape to a better standard of accommodation.
Lucas (24) told of his attempts to rent a room in a home owner’s house
from an advertisement he saw on Grindr, which ended badly.
I knew it was a bad idea but I was in a bad place and I did it, it was awful
from the start, he [the owner] would make jokes about me cleaning the
house in my underwear and then in my room I saw things that moved
and I knew he was there … one night he approached me for sex, it was
just easier to have sex with him than say no, so I did … two weeks later
I brought someone home [for sex] and he heard us and the next day he
kicked me out with nothing, no notice, just get out now
Often unable to provide landlords with work references and bank

account statements, men were reliant on existing networks with their
own communities alerting them to apartment vacancies. The men were
living in a range of different accommodation, some sharing a two-bed-
room apartment and receiving in-calls, others remaining in shared
accommodation and doing out-calls, mostly to hotels. Gustavo (22)
describes his current apartment, a modern two bedroom apartment in
the city centre which he shares with another sex worker that was secured
with fake work references, common amongst the men I interviewed.
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It has a small balcony that overlooks the gate entrance which Gustavo
checks to see whether the client enters alone. There are two bedrooms,
the larger one he shares with his flatmate, and the smaller one where
they both use to see clients. It is sparse; a double bed covered in a white
sheet with no pillows and no duvet. A small bedside table has wet
wipes, lubricant and poppers. It is here that I interview Gustavo, sit-
ting on the bed, after which I pay him our agreed €50 and leave. He
describes living here.
This place I share with a friend, he had it first, it is a really good place in
a good location and it is big enough [complex] to be not noticed by any-
one. My flatmate is a little crazy that’s the only problem, he had an injury
and was not at the gym and now he is using steroids and he is getting
huge but he gets angry and shouts a lot – sometimes I hear shouting in
the work room and I’m like – is he killing them? (laughs) They must like
it because he does better than me.
Being online necessitated dealing with a large volume of messages. This

resulted in the interviewees either refusing offers of sex, sex for money
or leaving a large number of messages unanswered leading to abusive
messages. Sometimes this abuse was racial, frequently telling the men
to ‘go home’ or physical, where they were told they were ugly or con-
ceited or messages of general profanity. These messages did not pose any
real concern to my interviewees, who saw it as an everyday part of dig-
ital life. However, there were two examples of where this abuse became
more problematic. Leo (25) describes how after two conversations on
Grindr, he declined an offer to meet a client only to subsequently meet
him in a bar the following week. He said ‘oh you think you are all that
don’t you? You are nothing but a whore’—Leo tells me as they came
face to face in a crowded bar. He described the man expression—‘he
was really angry, I didn’t remember him and he knew that, I talk to a
lot of people, but I remembered his face, it was so angry, like he really
hated me’. The second example of online abuse, which almost all the
interviewees reported, was that of catfish—or people who steal photos
and impersonate you online (Drouin et al. 2016). There were different
83
experiences of being catfished, most of which were benign. Renzo (23)

describes:
There are photos of me everywhere I think, I see on different sites and

guys message and tell me that they were talking to me for six months and
I say – sorry – that wasn’t me but these guys are stupid, it is easy to test
and see if it [profile] is for real or not and the guys that do this, it is so
sad that I cannot get angry for it, I think these are old, fat men at home
wanking asking men for photos and sending mine, it is really sad.
The majority of interviewees felt resigned about the likelihood of their

photos or identity being stolen by others believing it was an avoidable
consequence of socialising online, and believing like Renzo above, users
have to use ‘checks’ to screen authenticity, like connecting to Instagram
or exchanging phone numbers for WhatsApp. This concern about the
misrepresentation of personal information and the fear of having one’s
own identity and photographs stolen by others was a fear that generated
mistrust and was shared by users of Grindr (Corriero and Tong 2016:
133; Tziallas 2015: 769; Sanders et al. 2018: 109). The geolocative fea-
tures of Grindr and the heightened expectation users have of connecting
with people in real time did not mitigate their fear of deception and
misrepresentation. Not all catfish experiences were harmless. Bruno (21)
explained how he was alerted by friends to a fake profile using his pho-
tos on Grindr that was asking people to engage in unsafe sex. ‘I saw the
profile once, a friend had took a photo of it and it said that I was HIV
positive which is a lie … they reported it but nothing happened’. Bruno
had no idea who the person was, but suspected it was someone who he
had rejected sexually who now had embarked upon this campaign to
damage his reputation.
GHB
While the use of steroids was uncommon, just two interviewees admit-
ting usage throughout their lives, the use of the drug G (GHB) was
commonplace. GHB, or gamma hydroxybutyrate, is a depressive agent
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which, given in the right dosage, creates a euphoric high that stimu-
lates the libido (Nicholson and Balster 2001). My interviewees reported
using GHB with their friends, during sex and also with their clients.
Despite their knowledge of unpleasant and potentially dangerous side
effects amongst their friends, these did not dampen their enthusi-
asm for the drug, of which they felt competent to use. ‘Everyone has
a G story’ Gustavo (22) tells me, recalling times when his friends had
passed out from the drug at home, in clubs and on public transport.
‘We were going to the centre on the bus from a party somewhere out-
side and my friend took too much, or thinks it is not working and he
takes another spoon, but was asleep on the bus, unconscious and we
could not wake him … we went to the bus station and carried him off,
we told the driver he was drunk …’. Luan (27) also had similar sto-
ries of the drug, of novice users’ projectile vomiting from an incorrect
dosage to couples starting to have sex on the floor of their apartment
while they had guests over dinner. Increased satisfaction was a key moti-
vator for the use of G by my interviewees. This desire also blurred the
boundaries between their recreational sex and sex work, a situation
which often saw clients brought into the men’s personal lives. More
than half of the interviewees admitted to having sex with a client while
on G, or another drug, while seven men told of having invited clients
or potential clients to house sex parties. The drug, along with mephed-
rone and crystal methamphetamine or Tina, has been identified as more
prevalent amongst sexually active gay men and also constitutes what
has been described as chemsex (Bourne et al. 2015: 565). The Bourne
et al. (2015) study describes the use of these drugs during sex parties,
usually held in private homes over a long period of time; this reference
by respondents to ‘chemsex marathons’ does correspond to Rafael (26)
description below.
Gilherme (28): I don’t do drugs with guys [clients] that often, but if they
offer G, I will because I know it and I have taken it many times, it is good
with clients that you don’t like [physically] because it makes you so horny
but it is all over in an hour and you can get to your job or do things.
Rafael (26): I take it too much I think, sometimes alone if I am bored
and in my house but more with friends or at a party … we take it at
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a party [club] and then go to a house of my friend and it goes on and

on … sometimes it is a little crazy because we are on Grindr asking guys
to come to and if they have G or something I’m saying – please come,
please come … there is trouble sometimes with neighbours because there
is much noise, and coming and going, sometimes a guy [client] who I
have met will ask to come and it is ok for me … I will have sex with that
[points to a waste paper bin] when I’m on G, it does not matter to me
Race (2015b: 267) has also examined how Grindr users advertise for
others to join extended chemsex sessions, while taking a combina-
tion of crystal methamphetamine, GHB and Viagra. These sessions
are motivated by sex, but are punctuated by chill out periods, chat-
ting and going online to make contact with others, usually in private
homes. While previous research has suggested differing motivations for
taking GHB, like relaxation for example (McDowell 2000), my inter-
viewees were overwhelming using it within a sexual context. Palamar
and Halkitis’ (2006: 26) sample of gay male users similarly found that
all had reported that it had increased their desire for sex, lowered their
inhibitions and increased the prospects of greater sexual promiscu-
ity. They further reported that the preference for GHB, as opposed to
other drugs, was that the recovery time from the effects were shorter.
This time motivation is reflected in Gilherme’s quote above, in which
he suggests it is more suitable for male sex workers by increasing desire
but enabling workers to resume their lives with little side effects after-
wards. All my interviewees agreed that the use of GHB did not impair
their ability to conduct safer sex with their clients on a one-to-one basis,
although many did become more circumspect about describing occa-
sions of unsafe sex during private parties with their friends and other
guests.
Exiting Sex Work—The Long Goodbye

Policy makers throughout the European Union have embraced the con-
cept of ‘exiting’ as a key, and often sole, strategy in the governance of
prostitution, moving women into regular employment (Scoular and
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O’Neill 2007: 767). These exit strategies, almost exclusively directed

towards women, often ignore the complexities of the social exclusion
experienced by sex workers which make these transitions unrealistic for
many. Academic research has followed suit, with a greater interest in
exploring exit, rather than entry to sex work (Cusick et al. 2011: 146).
I have cast doubt on the usefulness of exit models from prostitu-
tion when describing the lives of my interviewees in this chapter. Like
Cusick et al. (2011: 147) argue, exit is not one event, but a sequence
of events. Rather, I have suggested that sex work exists in their lives as
neither a profession nor a source of activism, but rather a resource with
which they have drawn upon throughout their adult lives. This lack of
involvement within sex work activism has also been identified in recent
surveys with only a minority of those involved (Sanders et al. 2018: 45).
The motivations that brought them to Ireland were diverse and while
my interviewees’ lives remain precarious in terms of career and migra-
tion status, the likelihood of the men continuing to draw upon sex
work remains high. Some fear there is a little to return home to in either
Venezuela or Brazil, due to economic or family reasons, with Erick (22)
describing how his family ‘are happy that I am here and that I am safe
… there is nothing in my country [Venezuela] for me or my family, it is
breaking down and I’m so scared for them’. Joao (27) told of his com-
mitment to work in Ireland as a personal trainer and that he had ‘no
home in my country [Brazil] my mother has moved from my city with
her new husband, so my house is gone, my room is gone’. For others,
the income from sex work is contributing not just to everyday living,
but to a specific purpose in their lives. For Victor, whose grandfather is
Italian, his extra money from sex work will fund his living costs when
he moves to Italy, a necessity when applying for his new passport.
Renzo’s (23) plans are even more ambitious—as he is saving to pay for
flight school in the USA to secure his pilot’s licence—which he suggests
will take ‘another five years’. I discuss Renzo’s use of social media to gen-
erate income in more detail in the next chapter.
Unlike so much of the literature on male sex work in Ireland, there
is no evidence that this income is exclusively funding problematic drug
use. However, as we saw in this chapter, the men do spend income on
drugs like GHB, a habit they see as less detrimental to their health, than
87
the copious amounts of alcohol consumed by other gay men in bars and
clubs every week. A closer comparison to the earlier body of research
on male sex work in Ireland would be the impact of homelessness.
While none of the men I interviewed described themselves as home-
less, a number did tell stories of moving from couch to couch, staying at
friend’s houses, which were often already overcrowded. Income from sex
work played a vital role for men in this situation to save for deposits or
secure a shared room in a house.
The law governing prostitution in Ireland changed in 2017. The
Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act makes the purchase of sex ille-
gal and continues to criminalise sex workers who work in pairs under
brothel keeping laws (Ryan and Ward 2017). At the time of my inter-
views, this topic was being contentiously debated in the parliamentary
committees and on television and radio current affairs programmes.
Although these debates exclusively focused on female sex workers, the
men I interviewed had little or no knowledge of the law, nor would any
change in the law influence their decision to stop selling sex. When I
told the men of the impending legal change, several expressed confu-
sion about how the sex purchase ban would work in practice. Leo (25),
for example, wondered ‘do [the police] they come into your bedroom
… how would that happen? They break the door of your bedroom and
look at the sex that you are having, if there is money? How would that
work?’ Renzo (23) similarly wondered if the law was for the transfer of
cash only and whether the flight home he received from a client would
be included—‘Who would decide? I don’t understand how they would
know how my flight or my English classes were paid by someone that is
not me but also how would they know what I did so they would pay?
Do you understand?’ The men are right to question the enforcement of
the law. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) cast doubt on
whether the law could be enforced to investigate consensual commer-
cial sex given scarce police resources in a study undertaken prior to the
introduction of a similar law in Northern Ireland (Huschke et al. 2014).
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P. Ryan
Conclusion
This chapter has explored how Grindr is a platform used by the men
in this study to display their bodies, to accrue physical and erotic cap-
ital and deploy and convert that capital into economic opportunities.
It has traced the evolution of casual sexual encounters amongst men,
from public space to cinemas and saunas into the digital era where iden-
tities are constructed and performed online that seek to connect with
others. These online mobile identities travel with the user, opening new
possibilities of connection in diverse neighbourhoods and social envi-
ronments of the city, where they map onto the existing physical space
becoming a hybrid of online and real-time interaction. This chapter
explored different interfaces where this occurred—in their commute,
the gym and in clubs—to create new opportunities for sex, dating and
sex work.
The ease with which photos and profile text can be changed facili-
tated the men in my study to tailor their identities to specific audiences
at specific times. The judicious use of photos showcasing their bodies
communicated the potential for sex work, in addition to the use of par-
ticular emoji’s that confirmed that availability to the potential clients
that read them. These online profiles travelled abroad, as the men in
this study travelled to cities like Zurich and Vienna for sex work ‘tours’
or were used to generate income that permitted further travel. I argued
that sex work existed in the men’s lives as a resource which could be
drawn down in situations where income needed to be generated quickly
and often for a specific purpose. Grindr is used to create these possibili-
ties, in ways that are opportunistic and transient given the context. The
stories that contributed to this chapter are diverse. Men had different
educational background and plans to pursue careers either in Ireland or
in Venezuela or Brazil. Their use of sex work was drawn upon to solve
urgent short-term problems like housing, but also contributed to the
realisation of long-term dreams. It wasn’t a resource that came without
risk or exploitation. While avoiding the prospect of physical assault,
their precarious migration and work situations left them vulnerable to
other forms exploitation as they struggled to secure housing and work.
89
Notes
1. Options include—Body type: do not show, toned, average, large, mus-
cular, slim, stocky; Ethnicity: do not show, Asian, Black, Latino, Middle
Eastern, Mixed, Native American, White, South Asian, other; Position:
do not show, top, vers top, versatile, vers bottom, bottom; Tribe: bear,
clean cut, daddy, discreet, geek, jock, leather, otter, poz, rugged, trans,
twink; Relationship Status: do not show, committed, dating, engaged,
exclusive, married, open relationship, partnered, single; I’m Looking
for: chat, dates, friends, networking, relationships, right now.
2. Grindr’s announcement that had shared users’ HIV status with third
parties in 2018 without permission created controversy for the company
who argued that sharing was ‘standard practice’ in the industry.
3. https://www.grindr.com/profile-guidelines.
4. The interactive categories are—chat, dates, networking, friends, relation-
ship and right now.
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4
Instagram, Micro-Celebrity and the World
of Intimate Strangers
Abstract  Ryan explores how Instagram offers a platform to perform

strategies of micro-celebrity to cultivate and grow followers online.
These strategies create intimacy, trust and authenticity. Ryan shows how
through in-app technology like Instagram Story, polling and direct mes-
saging, followers form para-social interactions with the micro-celebrities
they follow. Instagram acts as a gateway to encourage followers to seek
greater levels of intimacy through the purchase of monetized content.
Keywords  Instagram · Micro-celebrity · Para-social interaction ·

Intimacy
Introduction
Instagram offered male sex workers a platform with which to construct
and showcase their digital lives. If Grindr, as I have argued, offered sex
workers a transient and opportunistic means to ambiguously adver-
tise sexual services that were decoded and read by potential clients,
Instagram offered entry into a more permanent and intimate digital

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11797-9_4
96
P. Ryan
biography. On Instagram, sex workers moved from abstract disembod-

ied muscularity, to men located within a context of their friendships
and family relationships but also, crucially, through their consumption
of food, travel, clothes and fitness. These profiles communicated the
lives of men with a lifestyle, a personhood and an identity. These pro-
files offered intimate access, a view backstage into the everyday practices
that had shaped, not just their bodies, but their lives as newly arrived
migrants in Ireland. I argue that my interviewees carefully choreo-
graphed these lives, deploying strategies of micro-celebrity interaction to
create an illusion of intimacy and of knowing. The in-app features facil-
itated this. Instagram Story, allowing daily video updates that brought
followers through their lives, from morning to night.
This chapter focuses primarily on the lives of three of my interviewees
with the largest social media following; Renzo, a 23-year-old full-time
student from Venezuela with over 60,000 Instagram followers, Joao, a
27-year-old student from Brazil who worked part-time as a waiter and
a personal trainer had over 40,000 and Victor, a 25-year-old also from
Brazil had over 35,000 followers. The chapter explores how these men
navigate the world of social media to maintain and grow their follow-
ers, avoiding the challenges of context collapse (Marwick and Boyd
2011), as they broadcast material to diverse audiences while engaging in
micro-celebrity interaction that created gateways to further intimacy. I
argue that while followers of Renzo, Joao and Victor have open access to
the uploaded material on Instagram, this only serves as the entry point
into accessing monetised content by offering a passage through different
spheres of intimacy that will provide ever more personalised (and paid)
content through sites like Amazon Wish List and OnlyFans. The success
of my interviewees in getting payment for content rests in their ability
to cultivate followers—or fans—through their own self-branding (Page
2012). With platforms like OnlyFans offering everyone the chance to
broadcast content to paid subscribers—it is those with the greatest abil-
ity to self-brand that stand to reap the benefits of this ‘amateur turn’
within the sex industry.
4 Instagram, Micro-Celebrity and the World of Intimate Strangers
97
The New Digital Age

The rise of the visual in contemporary society continues una-
bated. The affordability of smartphones facilitating the taking and
dissemination of photographs combined with the popularity of
social media platforms, particularly that of photo-sharing sites like
Instagram and Snapchat, has consolidated the visual turn in soci-
ety (Walsh and Baker 2017: 1185). While the motivations in join-
ing sites like Facebook remain complex, its popularity has been
premised upon the accumulation of social capital through social
networking. User profiles were platforms for self-expression (Van
Dijck 2013), fostering different types of sexual or ethnic identity
(Bouvier 2012: 42) or more commonly communicating identity
through lifestyle and commodification (Doyle 2015). It heralded a
more participatory, more democratic style with consumers active in
the creation of content, reshaping the balance of power in a digi-
tal era (Page 2012: 182). Since the launch of social media sites like
Facebook in 2004, the attention economy has grown unabated,
rewarding those who strategically use their visibility and influence
for economic gain.
There is little dispute that newer social media sites, particularly
Instagram have accelerated this process and become more about
self-promotion and leveraging social capital present within wide social
networks into commercial opportunity. This shift in how individuals
seek to use social media sites to construct their identities has contrib-
uted, I argue, to a greater choreography in the managed presentation
of their digital lives. This has a number of consequences. It has led
to the emergence of a spatial self (Schwartz and Halegoua 2014: 2),
where lives are not just documented through visual representation,
but also now through the user’s mobility through space and place
recording locations at hotels, restaurants and bars, both locally and
throughout the world. It has also led to the rise and fall of the selfie—
linguistically at least (Senft and Baym 2015). Selected as the word of
the year in only 2013 by the Oxford English Dictionary to convey
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P. Ryan
the spontaneous photographic self-portrait at arm’s length, it is now

greeted with derision and fatigue (Tiidenberg and Gomez Cruz 2014:
78), particularly by a younger generation but who routinely invest
time and energy into staged self-photography, often enhanced by filter
technology. It is a practice that has established itself as a genre, com-
plete with visual conventions and techniques shared amongst fellow
users (Marwick 2015: 141). It is a practice that has divided academic
opinion as either a sign of narcissism1 or holding the potential to be
a vehicle of empowerment, especially for women in regaining control
over the production of their images (Gomez Cruz and Miguel 2012).
Ordinary users of Instagram would draw upon the use of self-
photography within celebrity culture which sought to bypass tradi-
tional intermediaries like managers and publicists and speak directly
to their fan base in an unmediated communication that offered an
uncensored insight into their lives.
Celebrity
The increased interest in the study of celebrity provides some useful
concepts to understand the relationship between male sex workers’ use
of Instagram and the relationship between their followers. My inter-
viewees are heavily socially networked individuals, living out lives for
an audience of thousands on a range of social media applications.
They are the authors and curators of their own lives, embodying a late
modern demand placed upon the individual to continuously reflect
and recast the construction of their own identities, drawing upon
resources of modern capitalism as they do. Crucially, these men are not
just consumers of resources, they are the authors of their own content
(Marshall 2014: xxxiii), broadcasting their consumption of commod-
ities, travel and fashion to a diverse and global audience. They have
become ‘micro-celebrities’ or celetoids (Rojek 2001: 20) living their
short lives in the spotlight, as influencers, often receiving endorse-
ments to promote particular products in their profiles. They use social
99
media to perform celebrity, enabling the construction of identities,

building and maintaining their audience. This has been facilitated by
camera and video mobile phone technology that has transformed how
these sex workers communicate to their diverse followers, including
their potential clients.
The origins of celebrity have been traced to the establishment of the
court of Elizabeth 1, and the subsequent transformation of London
into a centre of consumerism in the eighteenth century (Inglis 2010: 6;
Van Krieken 2012: 16). The World Exhibition in London in 1851
and in Paris four years later, provided a showcase for consumer prod-
ucts that filtered down into newly established department stores
(Inglis 2010: 65). The mass production of entertainment, like theatre,
created new stars of the stage, made famous through mass-produced
newspapers, who would also use them as fodder for gossip column-
ists. Writers like Chris Rojek (2001: 13) see the emergence of celebrity
within this ‘democratization of society’ where rising literacy amongst
the public at large and the growth of a regional press, beyond London
contributed to the mass circulation of printed material and saw the
‘rise of the public face’. The exponential growth of celebrity could be
understood within a more modernist framework, where the mass circu-
lation of television, news and magazines would create an environment
where celebrity endorsement would infiltrate every aspect of society,
from politics to the economy. Celebrity would also simultaneously
mirror the institutional decline of religion and monarchy, filling the
vacuum they left in their wake. In this way, celebrity was contribut-
ing to a new integrative function within secular societies (Rojek 2001:
13–14). Finally, celebrity culture would also grow in tandem with the
rise of consumer capitalism, where new methods of production and
distribution, would create new means for showcasing individuality and
group alliances becoming markers of class distinction (Van Krieken
2012: 24, 53). Celebrity culture itself would fuel commodification
through its embodiment and humanising of desire (Rojek 2001: 187).
The advent of new social media applications has elevated this humani-
sation to a new level.
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P. Ryan
Intimate Strangers
Late modern societies are characterised by an increasing number of
relationships that can be termed as ‘weak ties’ as opposed to ‘strong’.
Sociologists like Goffman (1963), Granovetter (1973) and Milgram
(1992) all wrote of the need societies have for a combination of strong
and weak ties to ensure sufficient, but not excessive integration and
cohesion. These ‘familiar strangers’ (Milgram 1992: 67) that are part of
our daily lives remain in a form of stasis, that occasionally spring into
life, often at times of emergency and crisis when people experience or
witness a traumatic event. Our use of social media has greatly expanded
our network of weak ties, when we digitally connect, though not nec-
essarily communicate with, a wide range of individuals than expand
outwards from the core relationships of our lives. Bringing ‘intimate
strangers’ into our digital lives, for example, friends of friends, and indi-
viduals that are visible within the wider public sphere, from politicians,
musicians, actors and authors has become a defining characteristic of
how we conduct our new online lives. Horton and Wohl (1956: 215)
coined the phrase ‘para-social interaction’ to understand this relationship
between the viewer and a television presenter or performer in the 1950s.
Although non-reciprocal and ‘not susceptible of mutual development’
(p. 215), the performer’s presentational style is crucial in creating an
interactive experience in which viewers cultivate an emotional relation-
ship they understand to be personal to them. Performers’ acts of emo-
tional disclosure strengthened this bond with their viewers who felt they
had come to ‘know’ them as they would in a real interactive relation-
ship (p. 216). Later research that has utilised the concept of para-social
interaction has identified that the perceived attractiveness of the pre-
senter or performer is crucial in creating this more personalised experi-
ence (e.g. Schramm and Hartmann 2008). This insight is important as
I explain the relationship between the young men in my study and their
thousands of followers.
Celebrities have been at the vanguard of social media practices that
have sought to create new public intimacy while leveraging follow-
ers for self-branding and commercial opportunities. This has involved
101
rebranding traditional and highly regulated celebrity management

to embrace a more interactive engagement with fans where intimacy,
authenticity and access are all performed for a wide audience and mar-
ket (Marwick and Boyd 2011: 140). Social media like Twitter are used
by celebrity to communicate to fans, and other celebrities, to address
rumours and allegations and to ‘strategically manage self-disclosure’,
creating an illusion of intimacy and closeness (p. 147). Twitter hashtags
are also used to promote corporations, products and slogans and have
become a widespread celebrity practice (Page 2012: 198).
Micro-Celebrities
Micro-celebrities embody a range of presentational strategies to con-
struct an online profile, giving access to intimate parts of their digital
lives to build up, communicate with and sustain their followers. Senft
(2008: 25) defines it as a ‘new style of online performance in which
people employ webcams, video, audio, blogs and social network-
ing sites’ to achieve communication with a networked community. It
involves a ‘strategic and concerted cultivation of an audience through
social media’ (Khamis et al. 2016: 6) in the hope of achieving a celeb-
rity status that can lead to sponsorship and monetised content. Their
relationship with their followers is different to regular users of social
media whom they see primarily as fans rather than friends or follow-
ers (Marwick 2013: 115). Success within the world of micro-celebrity
is dependent on creating intimacy with fans through the disclosure of
personal information that creates an impression of closeness in a similar
way of achieving para-social interaction identified by Horton and Wohl
(1956). It is the ‘celebrification of a private self ’—suggesting a back-
stage view into a public life. Marwick (2013: 117–119) identifies some
key elements that have defined the practice of micro-celebrity; firstly
a self-commodification where the profile is constructed and marketed
towards achieving a larger audience, secondly demonstrable intimacy
by communicating and interacting with fans and thirdly, this interac-
tion has to take place in a manner in which fans deem to be ‘authentic’.
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P. Ryan
Authenticity is, of course, largely subjective but Marwick’s (2013: 119–120)

study reveals it is identified by consistency—is current material con-
sistent with material that has been previously posted online? Finally,
micro-celebrities have to incorporate a form of ‘aspirational consump-
tion’ to fans—through mimicking the more glamorous lives of ‘real’
celebrities. Often there is a crossover between sponsored and non-
sponsored content, with Ruan’s (2016: 187) study of trans vloggers
revealing an uneasy relationship between activism and monetised con-
tent, with fears that being perceived as economically motivated would
push viewers away. Companies utilise micro-celebrities to build a more
direct connection with consumers, hoping that endorsements will trans-
late into increased levels of trust associated with their brands (Djafarova
and Trofimenko 2018: 3).
Instagram
Instagram is a free, photo-sharing mobile application launched in 2010
that allows users to upload photos directly from their phones. There are a
variety of edit and filter functions—many replicating a nostalgic and retro
style format (Marwick 2015: 144)—available to users before they finally
decide to upload the photo of their choice. In 2016, Instagram Stories was
launched, allowing users to upload a displayed photo or video for one min-
ute which disappears after 24 hours, mirroring the capabilities of Snapchat.
Stories allow users to continually add content throughout the day, creat-
ing a daily ‘story’ of the user’s life. Instagram profiles can be either private,
requiring permission to see the content, or more commonly open to the
public, who can follow a user by simply clicking the follow button. This
allows users to scroll through recently uploaded photos of their follow-
ers of which they can choose to like or comment. Instagram’s popularity
has been dramatic, achieving 400 million active users in 2016 (Schwartz
and Halegoua 2014: 8; Giannoulakis and Tsapatsoulis 2016: 115),
and 1 billion monthly users in 2018, far outstripping growth rates of
Facebook and Snapchat.2 The home display screen has space to write
a short biography and shows the number of posts a user has uploaded,
the numbers of followers and the number following the account.
103
Users can connect to others through a search function for a specific profile
or through the use of hashtags, which were added to Instagram in 2011,
that connect users globally who are interested in the same topic. Since
2015, emoji can also be used as hashtags. Hashtags, first introduced by
Twitter, and now popular across social media including Instagram, serve
two purposes—they label a photograph for search purpose and also provide
some explanatory or contextual information to a photo (Scott 2018: 58;
Giannoulakis and Tsapatsoulis 2016: 116).
Instagram and Male Sex Work

All of the men I interviewed were active users of Instagram. Their stories
revealed different strategies to accumulate followers and publicise their
profiles as a platform for soliciting clients. Just as their Grindr profiles
were often ambiguous of any sex work intention, relying on other users
to read and interpret photos and emoji, their Instagram profiles simi-
larly give no indication of any involvement in sex work. While it would
appear judicious to separate the use of Grindr and its association with
transient photos and casual sex—paid or otherwise—from Instagram,
which provided a more permanent digital record of their lives, a major-
ity of the men (12 out of 18) I interviewed were happy that followers
were directed from one profile to the other. Grindr profiles facilitate
links to other social media—Twitter, Instagram and Facebook—should
users choose to use it. The motivation in allowing viewers migrate
between their profiles was complex. Drawing from the men’s stories,
I outline below three advantages Instagram offered over other social
media applications.
1. Consuming Identity and Personhood

Social media profiles offered the men platforms with which to show-
case their bodies and their lifestyles, connect to and manage a wide
network of followers or fans, some of which could be leveraged for
economic gain. Grindr offered limited opportunity to cultivate a
following and deploy the micro-celebrity practices I spoke of earlier
in this chapter, to achieve a status of sufficient visibility to attract
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commercial opportunities. Grindr, offering users just one photo,

which is regularly updated, on an app itself that is frequently deleted
and reinstalled by users, created a transient community of follow-
ers. As I outlined in the previous chapter, this transience allows male
sex workers to connect with clients in Dublin and when they travel
abroad. It remains largely one-dimensional. Directing potential cli-
ents and other users to Instagram opened the door to a multidimen-
sional world of their lives, inviting viewers inside to see their friends,
vacations, workouts, nights out, often in real time with Instagram
Story. This use of Instagram developed organically. Leo (25) describes
how his early Instagram posts were ‘me and my friends, at the beach
and parties … I’m not sure when it became more about me, there is
more [photos] of me now’. Victor (25) also saw his Instagram as a
platform that had evolved over time, also unable to pinpoint when
he started to post more strategically to gain additional followers and
potential income. Instagram allowed men to create a personhood
and identity beyond the caricatures so commonly associated with sex
work and mostly frequently denied to female workers in particular.
This personhood is achieved through what is conceptualised as con-
text collapse, where users speak and deliver content to a diverse range
of followers (Marwick and Boyd 2011; Kaul and Chaudhri 2017).
Sex work remains the known unknown on Instagram.
2. Creating Desire Through ‘Knowing’
While the Internet is awash with free and anonymous naked male
content, why would social media followers of sex worker profiles pay
to see content that is often merely sexually suggestive? I argue that
my respondents have cultivated desire amongst their fans through
selected self-disclosure that creates a sense of ‘knowing’ that increases
sexual desire. Rather than fixating on an anonymous object of sex-
ual desire, my respondents’ profiles draw followers into an ongoing
social media relationship which takes them on their journey with
these young men on their adventure in Europe. Desire is created
through layers of knowing—seeing the men in routine photos with
friends, photos of them at the gym and through more revealing pho-
tos on Instagram Story, where users can target a list of viewers while
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hiding the stories from others. The strategic and measured access to
sexual content also plays a key role in heightening this desire, draw-
ing followers into social media relationships that promise continually
greater intimate access to their lives.
3. Facilitating Sponsorship and Paid Content in the Attention Economy
Instagram facilitated my respondents’ engagement in self-branding
through the cultivation of a public image. This was achieved through
building a fan base by communicating a distinct public image and a
willingness to engage with and meet the needs and expectations of fol-
lowers that will in turn attract the interest of advertisers (Sanders et al.
2018: 39; Cunningham et al. 2018: 52; Khamis et al. 2016: 190).
These opportunities arise within a strong culture of neoliberal
individualism, which encourages self-branding as a means to assert
independence and control at times of economic precariousness.
Companies offering sponsorship in return for product endorsement
approached Renzo, Joao and Victor, all of whom were, so far, dissat-
isfied with the deals, which offered them a substantial discount on
the products and a discount code of 15% for their followers. This was
deemed not worth the potential negative impact a sponsored profile
might have on their ability to retain followers. Later in this chapter,
I explore alternative means with which these men generated income,
without adopting sponsorship.
Communicating Intimacy
Given the high level of daily usage reported by Instagram users, the
site offered the men I interviewed the potential to reach their follow-
ers on a regular basis. This communication had traditionally been direct
private messaging or posted comments underneath uploaded pho-
tos, but Instagram Story has revolutionised interaction, increasing the
number of direct messages to users. The use of Instagram Story, intro-
duced at the time I was doing this research, allowed my respondents to
update followers on their daily activities, without it becoming part of
their permanent digital record. These Story photos were chosen more
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spontaneously because of this transiency and also were more likely to

contain a more suggestive sexual content, although they were moder-
ated by community guidelines that prohibited naked photos. They also
encourage a chronology of photos—some of which later appear as a per-
manent photo on their profiles.
#Iwokeuplikethis
The Instagram Story feature has allowed users to accelerate the

micro-celebrity potential of the site, by facilitating a quicker turnover of
content, create more interactive opportunities and an enhanced level of
intimacy. This capability was further enhanced in 2018, when followers
were allowed to ask questions directly of those that they were follow-
ing, which could then be posted as a Story for others to read. Those
men that I interviewed who were the most regular users of this feature
favoured bookending their days with photos taken in bed.
Renzo (23): Sometime it is when I have the most time to post, when I
wake up and I’m trying to get out of bed and when I’m listening to music
in bed before sleeping, I would post then … I use the #iwokeuplikethis
because guys see that photo first when they wake up, doesn’t everybody
check it [Instagram] in the morning?
Leo (25): The morning and night is good and I post them in bed,
when can you post photos without your shirt and they think you are not
showing it off – in bed (laughs) … guys message more too, I think other
people look at this time too, well in Europe.
During the day, the most common photo posted either on Story or
on their profiles were from the gym. I outlined in the previous chap-
ter the level of time and energy invested in body projects like the gym,
and the photos reflect different aspects of this work. The most com-
mon photos were selfies taken in gym mirrors, photos or videos taken
by their friends of them working out or post workout photos taken in
the gym changing room. The purpose of these photos was less clear.
Undoubtedly, these photos contributed to ‘creating desire’ amongst
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followers directed to their profiles from Grindr and/or who were inter-
ested in meeting sex workers. It was common for those men I inter-
viewed, to suggest that these gym photos were essentially for their
private consumption, although public to others, in order to track their
fitness progress. Making the photos visible was suggested as an incentive
created by the men to help them achieve their goals.
Victor (25): It is good for me when I am training and before summer and
Circuit3 [festival] to post a photo before I start and then when I finish,
everyone sees it and I feel I have to do it and achieve my goals. I tell my
fans what I am eating, so people can do it with me, sometimes they send
me their photos too, it is good, and we are in it together.
These photos are accompanied by a range of fitness-related hashtags like

#gaybrazil #follow #fit #body #6pack #sixpack #flexing #flex #sweat-
pants #gaylatino #instagay #instamale. The body transformation photo
is often accompanied by Stories showing food purchases, cooking and
Tupperware boxed food for the day ahead.
#Aboutlastnight
These photos or stories were usually posted and hashtagged the day
after a night spent in bars or clubs with friends. Renzo (23) had taken
a series of these photos over the last two years in club bathrooms—
the format of which remains the same—he is shirtless staring into
the mirror at the sink. The composition differs slightly; sometimes he
is alone, others there are other nightclub patrons washing their hands
on either side or walking inconspicuously behind him. Some are hash-
tagged #fans and show other club patrons with their arms around him
staring at the camera. While the fellow patrons are invariably flushed
and sweaty from the club, Renzo always remains composed, groomed
and in control—reflecting the ‘official accredited values of the society’
(Goffman 1959: 23)—youth, beauty and muscularity. Across the inter-
viewees, the photos have a more conventional format, with the men
pictured with their friends enjoying their nights out.
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#Takemeback
These photos and the accompanying hashtags allowed vacation photos

to be sporadically posted throughout the year, particularly in winter and
facilitated the use of shirtless beach photos on their profiles outside the
summer months. Travel photos focus heavily on transit, rather than tra-
ditional sightseeing photos of the destination. The most frequent Story
photos included printed boarding cards and passports, with Renzo (23)
who frequently flies business class showing a 1A or 2B seat allocation,
photos of boarding gate departure screens and luggage. When Renzo
and Joao are on tour there are photos of them on trains, most often
connecting between Zurich and Vienna. All three men have a near
identical photos of themselves working on beach front gym equipment
in Barcelona. The focus of these photos is nearly always themselves.
Renzo, who uploaded a number of photos from a trip to South Africa
with his then boyfriend, included no photos of him from the trip. This
permits viewers to have an undistorted gaze of sexual and romantic
availability upon Renzo, than photos with his boyfriend would per-
mit. The construction of Renzo, Victor and Joao’s profiles are formulaic
where there is little deviation between these three photo themes I have
outlined above. There are similar silences across the profiles too, there
is no reference of politics, for example, at a time when their countries
were going through considerable political turmoil.
Managing Micro-Celebrity Interaction

Managing social media profiles like Instagram constitutes a form of
affective labour. In addition, eleven of the eighteen men I interviewed
also had a Twitter and Snapchat account, spending on average 21 hours
a week uploading content, checking other user content and replying
to and managing interaction with followers. This investment of time
was deemed necessary to maintain existing followers and gather new
ones. Choosing content that met the expectations of followers, espe-
cially those most likely to pay, was the priority, over other audiences.
Inadvertently, some content did alienate existing followers:
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Joao (27): Do I get it wrong? Sometimes, I care, I don’t care, sorry not
sorry … I was at a party at Pride and I posted a Story of me wearing a
drag queen’s shoe, high heels and it cost me around a 1000 followers – it
was a joke, I don’t wear things like that but fans really don’t like it.
Renzo (23): I posted from Tel Aviv Pride last year and I definitely lost
some followers, I had guys message me with links to what was happening
in Gaza and building houses on the land of the Palestinians and some
messages from Irish guys that I should be ashamed … they think I’m stu-
pid though, a South American Barbie that does not know the world. I
know, I chose to go.
Renzo, Joao and Victor, as ‘actors within networked publics’, have to

navigate invisible audiences, blurring boundaries between private and pub-
lic and context collapse (Kaul and Chaudhri 2017: 2; Marwick and Boyd
2011). Rather than pitching their content, as in a face-to-face interaction,
when they know the language and cultural context, when online they have
to understand this imagined audience (Marwick and Boyd 2011: 115).
For example, Renzo, Joao and Victor very rarely attach Spanish or
Portuguese messages or hashtags to their posts—their imagined audience
in this regard is global and is communicated to through English. Their
online content is also viewed by a wider, invisible audience that may often
not want to leave a digital trace by following or liking photos of a specific
profile, but may connect directly to pay for content. Looking through the
follower lists of the three men, reveals an indication of the audience—fit-
ness gym guys in Sydney to teenage girls in Ohio—but not in its entirety,
as all three accounts are open to the wider public. Knowing ones audience
and speaking strategically to it is a key micro-celebrity interaction.
Scholars have previously tried to understand social media users
imagined audience when they tweet or post online to avoid context col-
lapse (Marwick and Boyd 2011). Litt and Hargittai’s (2016: 7) analysis
of social media users found they had both an abstract imagined audience,
but often became focused upon the self-presentation of the act of posting,
rather than a real consideration of the audience. There was also a more
targeted audience, where users posted to specific audiences. Renzo, Joao
and Victor also alternated posts between specific audiences; for exam-
ple, they all recognised that food posts discussing protein, calorie and fat
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content were niche to their fitness followers who sought (and paid for)
detailed diet plans, compared to generic photos of their bodies at the gym
that were viewed through an erotic lens by a wider audience. Maintaining
the balance was crucial in retaining followers. My respondents also had to
navigate the potential for context collapse, a term drawing from Goffman
(1958) to explain how social actors tailor their performances and later
used within journalism to illustrate the consequences of addressing multi-
ple audiences with diverse ideas (Kaul and Chaudhri 2017: 4). Currently
adopted by scholars of social media (Wesch 2009) to explain how social
media flattens multiple audiences into one and ‘makes it impossible to
differ self-presentation strategies, creating tension’ (Marwick and Boyd
2011: 122). Joao and Renzo’s stories about Tel Aviv Pride and the use of
drag speak to this difficulty in managing audiences. Similar to Marwick
and Boyd (2011: 125), my three respondents did self-censor, in subtle
ways, with Renzo describing that ‘you don’t want to be too sexy, guys
won’t like this stuff cause their followers can check [who they have liked]
so you have to be sexy by accident or is it accidentally sexy?’ Joao also
described the experience of changing his Instagram content and the
impact on his followers when he started dating someone:
It was not a big change, it was slow, I just didn’t want to have to keep
playing the sexy Latin boy, so I stopped posting some photos, like when
I was at the pool, I post the gym photos but it was different … I did lose
some [followers] but not many, most people stayed
All three of my respondents felt that there were some expectations

governing interaction that they observed. Responding with @replies
to a public message of appreciation left under an uploaded photo on
Instagram was deemed necessary to signal to other followers a will-
ingness to interact and answer questions, although all felt this was
time-consuming. Also time-consuming was removing inappropriate
messages left under photos with Joao stating ‘you always have to look
after you get a notification, just in case they have said something bad
or something about sex and then you can delete’. Responding to com-
ments on Instagram Story was deemed different because their messages
were private and could be easily ignored:
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Victor (25): It is not possible really [to answer Story messages] there are
too many and they are just a flower or a heart or something so I ignore
them … I only reply to a question like if they ask me my travel sched-
ule, when will you be in Singapore or something like this or a message
that want to see more or they ask ‘how do I see more of you?’, I reply to
this too
There is the option to turn off the ability to send messages to Story,
but the men felt that this again signalled a lack of willingness to engage
and, Renzo describes, ‘play by the rules’. These rules seem rather opaque
and deciphering them seems to illustrate an intuition amongst my
respondents to identify ‘time wasters’ early, then ceasing to communi-
cate. Like in the previous chapter on Grindr, screening for ‘time wasters’
is based on recognising a type of questioning that is either too sexual
or too demanding of interaction. Renzo felt that men who would ulti-
mately pay for extra content would not demand it—‘they are polite,
always, and I think talk with respect and talk to get what they want to
see, not just chat, chat, chat’. This screening of interaction is similar to
those exercised by gay users of social media, including male sex workers
(McLean 2013: 80; Race 2015: 260).
Some men following my respondents’ Instagram profiles become avid
fans. These types of fans were often the most financial lucrative in their
willingness to purchase online content and the interaction remained
largely unproblematic. Their communication was, however constant,
replying to every Story and every uploaded photo often expressing
love, admiration and friendship. My respondents struggled to maintain
boundaries between public and private digital selves, particularly with
men who had purchased their online content. Renzo (23) describes here
his ‘public’ Instagram profile and the extent to which a fan can ‘know’
him from it:
It’s about me but you don’t know me from looking – what do you know
from photos? A guy with abs that likes Louis Vuitton (laughs) it’s nothing,
not me, my fans don’t want that anyway, they want to see my body, my
trainers … I don’t need them [Instagram] to get business but guys get to
see new photos … I’m on their phone when they wake up in the morn-
ing, on their bus and some guys will turn from watchers to meeters
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And later describing his efforts to conceal this private self:
They know that my Instagram is only part of me, they know it isn’t where
I talk to my school friends or my cousins, this guy keeps asking me for
my ‘real’ Instagram but I say I only have one and this is true but I have
Facebook for my family and close friends but I changed the name a little
so guys wouldn’t find it … it’s boring actually … my grandma’s birthday,
I don’t know why they want to see it so badly
Enguix and Gomez-Narvaez’s (2018: 121) respondents, in their

study on Instagram, also reported the use of this constructed charac-
ter rather than the true self. This transformation of private and public
boundaries within photography is interesting here, particularly in the
light of digital photography. Goffman’s (1979: 10) original formula-
tion of photography remains largely intact, albeit slightly inverted,
where private photos ‘are designed for display within the intimate
social circle’ celebrating family occasions and events like birthdays and
graduations. Walsh and Baker (2017: 1187) rightly point to the contra-
diction of ceremonial events taking place in public, labelled as private
which in turn furnish the domestic sphere. For Goffman (1979: 11),
public photos are then destined to become the most widely distrib-
uted becoming official representations of individuals, finding their
way into magazines and newspapers. Digital photography has trans-
formed this. For Renzo, as illustrated in his previous quote, the pho-
tos of his grandmother’s 80th birthday party represent for him private
photos he is unwilling to share with a wider public. It is the quintes-
sentially private act of being photographed partially naked in a chang-
ing room mirror that becomes the ‘public’ photo because for Renzo,
his body is indeed public and represents a physical and erotic capital
that he has traded upon since he was a teenager. These changing room
photos are constituted as public, also because the intention behind
the photo was never a private one—the photos were taken with the
intention of the widest possible dissemination. It is false to view these
photos exclusively as an expression of Renzo’s narcissism—they are
interactional—to be traded, admired and ultimately to dominate oth-
ers who have not yet achieved the prescribed standards of youth, beauty
113
and muscularity. Separating audiences and tailoring content on social

media according has been recognised as a strategy particularly amongst
LGBTQ communities (Duguay 2016: 900).
Other messages from these fans alternated between personal ques-
tions about my respondents’ lives, work and relationship status and
darker questions about their willingness to engage in financial domina-
tion with them. Renzo, Joao and Victor had all received messages asking
them to engage in the fetish of financial domination where men would
pay tributes or gifts to others while assuming a submissive relationship,
a practice made popular under hashtags like #paypig and #cashwhore.
I discuss in more detail in the next chapter the financial opportunities
derived from having micro-celebrity status on social networking sites
like Instagram. Like I discussed in Chapter 3, my respondents were
also subject to abuse on Instagram when they refused or ceased to inter-
act with fans or when they were asked to pay for content to advance
their interaction with my respondents. Renzo, like the others, remained
sanguine about this abuse suggesting that there ‘was many crazy peo-
ple online, you have to deal with it, or get offline and go do yoga’, a
view shared by Jones’ (2016: 245) interviews with webcam models who
believed that, ‘trolls come with the job’. Even when there has been an
unauthorised distribution of photos he circulated to select followers,
he remained resigned to the lack of control he could expect to exercise
over the distribution of such material he created, although he does go to
great lengths to conceal his face in certain photos and videos. Although
Renzo, Joao and Victor demonstrate the entrepreneurship that the neo-
liberal gig economy demands, their belief that they have contributed to
their own online harassment is depressing and suggests a victim blaming
culture so prevalent in the wider sex industry.
This resignation and lack of sympathy reflected a wider societal
response to leaked celebrity nude photos, where responsibility was seen
to lie with the producer of the images, rather than those hack and dis-
tribute them (Marwick 2017: 185). There is also a gendered dimen-
sion to the authorised and unauthorised disclosure of nude photos,
with Slater’s (2016: 2730–2733) research showing a loss of reputa-
tion attached to the practice for women as opposed to men. Deploying
micro-celebrity practices to generate intimacy often led to the danger of
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revealing too much personal information subjecting sex workers to har-

assment. Victor described how on a trip to Galway in the west of Ireland,
he had uploaded photos and Stories to Instagram, including the location
of his hotel, when he received a number of messages from a follower ask-
ing to meet him which he declined. An hour later when he opened his
door he found the man who had messaged him standing there:
It was crazy, I was so angry and I felt stupid … this guy had come to the
hotel and told a guard that he was staying here, it was 1am in the morn-
ing and he needed a key, a card to go and he told the woman at the desk
he was my friend and she told him my hotel room, he said ‘I’m Victor’s
friend’ and she checked my room and gave him the number at 1am? Can
you believe that? And he’s knocking at my door! He was drunk and I
talked to him for 5 minutes and said I would meet him for breakfast to
get him away from me … I shouted at the woman at the desk after and
she said she would call the police if I didn’t stay calm.
This example of doxxing, where individuals or clients research or hack

for identifiable information about a sex worker has been identified as a
danger of online work (Jones 2016: 245; Henry and Farvid 2017: 120;
Sanders et al. 2018: 109).4 Evidence of the practice which has been used
to harass and stalk sex workers reinforces the challenge of creating inti-
macy while maintaining distance and anonymity at the same time.
The examples of Renzo, Joao and Victor juggling different online
audiences suggest the extent of the impression management they
undertook in performing their digital lives. This process described by
Goffman (1959) of tailoring interaction with ‘front stage’ and ‘back
stage’ components complicates social interaction, particularly in a
social media age of simultaneous audiences. Goffman (1959) provides
a framework to understand how social actors navigate front- and back-
stage areas of their lives as they perform social interaction with each
other. Drawing from a tradition of symbolic interactionism (Blumer
1969), this approach illustrates how the self and society are created in
interaction with others. Goffman (1959: 37) reminds us that for most
115
social roles ‘a particular front has already been established for it’ includ-
ing ‘size and looks; posture; speech patterns; facial expressions; bodily
gestures’ (p. 55). Renzo, Joao and Victor inhabit many social roles—
including fitness expert, struggling student, dominant cash master and
as I discuss in the next chapter, amateur adult stars.
Conclusion
This chapter illustrates how the use of Instagram by male sex workers
offered an alternative and complementary digital platform with which
to build a large social media following. Used in conjunction with the
gay dating app, Grindr, my respondents filtered a diverse range of fol-
lowers to their Instagram profiles, where they were offered access into
a choreographed online world. The chapter focused on the experience
of three of my respondents who had amassed tens of thousands of fol-
lowers. Deploying micro-celebrity strategies to foster intimacy amongst
their followers, Instagram became a key platform with which to brand
the digital self, offering advantages over more transient social media sites
like Grindr. In-app features like Instagram Story allowed my respond-
ents to open access to different spheres of intimacy—what was available
to all followers of the profiles but also more niche and bespoke content
broadcast on a monetised basis.
The construction of a personal brand on Instagram was labour inten-
sive. It necessitated broadcasting content that resonated with the major-
ity of an increasingly diverse group of followers, avoiding material that
would alienate those who maybe most likely to purchase content. It
necessitated navigating online communication that was often abusive
or sought to impersonate or distribute my respondents’ images without
their consent. Instagram did however serve as a platform that created
the intimacy necessary to entice followers to make purchases on both
Amazon Wish List and OnlyFans platforms, which I discuss in the next
chapter.
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Notes
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/
of-course-selfies-are-narcissistic/355432/. Accessed October 5, 2018.
2. https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/20/instagram-1-billion-users/.
Accessed June 22, 2018.
3. See Alvarez (2008: 181–200) on Circuit festivals and gay gym culture.
4. Jones (2016: 243) recognises different spellings of doxxing/doxing.
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of PNP practices among gay men. Sexualities, 8(3), 253–275.
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5
Netporn and the Amateur
Turn on OnlyFans
Abstract  Ryan explores how male sex workers use netporn to convert

their social media profiles into economic capital. There is a focus on the
use of Amazon’s gift registry site, Wish List and how it has enabled sex
workers to receive gifts for online content on Instagram. Ryan explores
how OnlyFans, a subscription based digital platform allows followers
to view uploaded content from broadcasters. This has streamlined the
manner in which sex workers communicate with their followers, allow-
ing access to further monetised content that promises greater levels of
intimacy. Ryan concludes by discussing how this site, which currently
benefits those with large social media profiles, affects their relationships
with face-to-face clients.
Keywords  Netporn · Male sex work · Intimacy · Amazon Wish List
Introduction
In this chapter, I explore two online platforms—Amazon Wish List
and OnlyFans—through which the male sex workers converted
the strategic cultivation of their digital lives into economic capital.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11797-9_5
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P. Ryan
These digital lives have been showcased on different social media plat-
forms—each offering varying degrees of intimacy—from the tran-
sient pop-up escort of Grindr to the choreographed lifestyle identity
of Instagram, inviting followers and fans into their world of fitness,
travel, shopping and nightlife. I argue that these spheres of intimacy
are managed by a series of gatekeeper interactions with fans, in which
Amazon Wish List—a list of consumer items that can be purchased
anonymously by a benefactor—has played a central role in monetis-
ing access to content. OnlyFans, launched in 2016, allows people to
join as either creators or subscribers of content revolutionising digi-
tal sex work by creating easy access and payment for those who want
to broadcast sexual content.1 OnlyFans terms and conditions do state
however that users may not upload content that ‘promotes or advertises
escort services’.2 They represent what Sanders et al. (2018: 47) describe
as ‘content delivery platforms’. While those that pay for premium con-
tent remain small (Edelman 2009), I argue that the rise in micro-ce-
lebrity interaction and the desire for intimate engagement have led to
an increasing number of followers and fans willing to pay for more
bespoke sexual broadcasts, often considerably less explicit than which
is available for free online. This arrival of netporn—pornographies on
online platforms and networks (Paasonen 2010: 1298)—has contrib-
uted to a democratisation of the adult film industry where the removal
of agents, producers and other intermediaries has allowed those with
micro-celebrity followers to monetise sexual content. The traditional
porn industry has had to adapt to online piracy and the dramatic rise
in amateur stars which have created a smaller ‘professional’ market,
but with more people willing to take those jobs (Berg 2016: 164).
Creators of pornography now set the terms under which they work and
become the principle beneficiaries of their work. This development has
been built upon the interactional trade in sexualised photos and vid-
eos online on apps like Grindr and Snapchat, by financially rewarding
those with the greatest physical and erotic capital (Hakim 2018). It is a
trade that capitalises on the desire for authenticity and intimacy from
the viewers of adult content that has led to a large number of newcom-
ers entering this segment of the market redefining the traditional terms
associated with the sex industry (Van Doorn and Velthuis 2018). These
5 Netporn and the Amateur Turn on OnlyFans
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newcomers are drawn to digital sex work for the recognised benefits
including flexible work schedules, promoting physical safety and limit-
ing contact with police (Jones 2015: 785). In my study, it is those with
the greatest number of Instagram followers, Renzo, Joao and Victor
that have been early adaptors to the technology that has turned them
into adult stars.
Pornographisation of Everyday Life

The rise of digital platforms to share and sell sexual content is part of a
wider process where the sex industry has become mainstreamed within
the economy and society throughout Europe. This process has been
understood as reflecting both the size of the sex industry but also the
movement into other areas of the economy, for example, hotels bene-
fiting from adult pay-per-view services (Brents and Sanders 2010: 42).
Neoliberal economic policies have deregulated local economies and
privileged entrepreneurship where values of individual responsibility
and the free market are sacrosanct (p. 46). The increased social accept-
ance of the sex industry is a by-product of this entrepreneurship, where
the use of sex to market and sell consumer goods has become ubiqui-
tous across the economy. The changing class profile of both consumers
and workers within the sex industry is also contributing to this accept-
ance, with stories of university students (Sanders and Hardy 2015) and
graduates in the industry challenging a more dominant coercive narra-
tive of homelessness or drugs.
Significant changes have also taken place in the understanding of
masculinity, where male bodies have become erotised across cultural life,
including advertising, fashion and film (MacPhail et al. 2015: 486). As
I discussed in Chapter 3, the taking and exchange of naked photos by
gay men on dating sites like Grindr have become an indispensable part
of how the app is used. It has allowed the body to be showcased and
admired, where physical and erotic capital is accumulated to be traded
with others. The movement towards the payment of those men with
the greatest capital to see their photo and video content is an inevitable
consequence.
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P. Ryan
Netporn and the Search for Authenticity

Passonen (2010: 1299) identifies the defining features of netporn as chal-
lenging conventions of traditional pornography targeted towards a male
heterosexual audience with both a new political and ethical sensibility.
This has privileged a nuanced queer understanding of sexual acts and
desires within a framework that aims to challenge exploitative practices in
the industry. However, both sides of the sex industry are interrelated. Berg
and Penley (2016: 161–162) argue that satellite industries like netporn
have long supplemented the earnings of porn stars offering great auton-
omy, flexibility and control over work schedules. With the porn industry
increasingly casting amateurs to meet growing demands for authenticity,
wages become depressed, forcing more professionals into the netporn
market, competing with new entrants (p. 163). Whether an established
or amateur performer, building a personal brand and following on social
media are seen as a necessity to survive in the industry (p. 167).
Netporn is also building upon technological developments that are
facilitating a more interactive user experience, establishing itself as an
alternative medium that is redefining the meaning of pornography. This
alternative medium offers a bespoke porn experience—interactive and
crafted to individual needs as opposed to traditional mass-produced
and passively consumed pornography (Passonen 2010: 1330; Berg and
Penley 2016: 168). Sites like the adult webcam platform, Chaturbate,
founded in 2011, have been a leader in this field, offering an interface
that supports both the broadcast of webcams and allows users to modify
and extend applications that can be used on it (Van Doorn and Velthuis
2018: 180). Customers buy tokens used to tips models who later
redeem them for cash, while Chaturbate withholds 50% of the income
generated to cover administration costs (p. 180). A similar platform,
FlirtCam, demands the same 50% of tips received, suggesting it is an
industry standard (Weiss 2018: 736; Mathews 2017: 165; Sanders et al.
2018: 29). Competition between models is a key element of Chaturbate
and other sites like AsianPlaymates (Mathews 2017: 167), with models
ranked on its placement board.
This competition encourages, Van Doorn and Velthuis (2018: 182)
argue, a ‘race to the bottom’ with models vying to become the most
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extreme to attract a larger number of viewers and tokens or the use

of viewbots to artificially increase their viewers, raising their visibility
on the platform. Offering a more personable and entertaining perfor-
mance, although identified as being labour intensive, set models apart
from those that did not have the communicative or English language
skills to compete for viewers on this basis. It also facilitated the entry of
people into sex work who had been rejected by the sex industry, on the
grounds of size, looks or age, and were now offering a niche physical
appeal (Berg 2016: 161; Berg and Penley 2016: 168). This competition
invariably impacted upon the customers who felt they could tip very
little but still place specific demands on the models, causing a number
of them to close their accounts (Van Doorn and Velthuis 2018: 188).
Similarly, models also gave out details of their Amazon Wish Lists to
supplement their income, but they have increasingly become a sub-
stitute for tokens leading to an overall devaluation of digital sex work
(Berg and Penley 2016: 165; Van Doorn and Velthuis 2018: 183).
Webcam models who broadcast longer shows and derived most of
their income exclusively from camming were more likely to divulge
personal information about themselves, creating an illusion of inti-
macy with their viewers (Weiss 2018: 738; Mathews 2017: 167). This
has become a dominant feature of netporn as it seeks to create a niche
identity in opposition to large adult studios. In Weiss’ (2018: 739)
cyberethnography of male and female models on FlirtCam, there was a
willingness to partake in a digital ‘girlfriend experience’ with customers
to achieve this intimacy. Models also regularly deferred their own desires
to engage in cam sex that was exciting to their customers, shaving body
hair for example, in line with their clients’ desires.
Amazon Wish List

Wish List is a public gift registry available to users on the Amazon
website. Amazon, founded in 1994, is now the world’s largest digi-
tal retailer, with its founder Jeff Bezos currently holding the accolade
of the world’s richest man with a fortune of $151 billion.3 Users of
Amazon can construct their own Wish List profile, listing a range of
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P. Ryan
consumer products that they would like to own, in a manner similar

to a wedding gift registry. The name and postal details remain anony-
mous to viewers and benefactors when they purchase an item from the
list. The use of Wish List is identified within the sex industry, with Van
Doorn and Velthuis’ (2018: 183) webcam respondents sending their
lists to customers to supplement income. Sex workers have long com-
plained that Amazon has targeted their accounts deleting them for ‘bar-
tering’ which is against its terms and conditions.4 Berg’s (2016: 169)
research shows how porn performers use Wish List to ask fans to buy
clothes like lingerie used in their scenes to offset wardrobe costs not
supported by studios. These clothes were often resold online by per-
formers afterwards.
A majority of my respondents (13 out of 18 men) had set up a Wish
List account, although the extent to which it was frequently updated
and circulated to potential clients varied between them. Respondents
like Renzo, Joao and Victor, who had the largest number of social media
followers made the greatest use of their Wish List accounts, using them
to permit clients to access bespoke material that remained unseen by
other fans. Wish List accounts acted as a gatekeeper, permitting clients
passage through various spheres of intimacy with the men I interviewed,
culminating with nudity. There was some discrepancy in how each
man constructed their Wish List in choosing what to include—again,
those with the greatest fan following included some high value products
tapering down to products worth €20. Renzo and Joao describe how
they construct the Wish List.
Joao (25): I think there has to be something that you want but that they
[clients] want to see or think about you so I have some Andrew Christian
swimwear on mine, so buy it and they can see me in it, everyone is happy
… I have trainers on mine, I put a pair of Yeezys on them as well, they are
more than €200, I think you have to be not crazy or ask for something
crazy but you can’t be too cheap, no one likes crazy but no one follows
you because you are cheap.
Renzo (23): I put a lot of different things there, I think the most
expensive is a mac book, because I want to upgrade so maybe that will
happen … mainly its gym stuff – shorts, tops, underwear, I put a wallet
on too – it was a lot but you never know
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Other men chose to construct a Wish List that was more niche.
Daniel (24) who was studying to become a personal trainer placed
exclusively fitness related products on his Wish List. He felt that he
didn’t ‘want to look like a greedy queen obsessed with labels’ and
thought that his Wish List was more authentic, as it offset some of the
high cost of protein supplements:
This is so expensive, if you drink it a few times a day when you are train-
ing and when you are not, there is one before gym, with caffeine. It’s like
Red Bull before you train and after another and then Creatine and other
supplements like Omega so it is expensive but I feel if guys want me to
look good and look at me well they should pay some of it no? My prob-
lem is that it is boring, you know it looks boring, guys want the sexy stuff
and what they can see, I also put some Under Armour shorts, they are my
favourite but guys always buy these first – how many shorts do I need?
(laughs) Buy the protein please!
Daniel’s experience of Wish List represents some of the identified prob-

lems with operating in this pay to view sexual market. While broadcast-
ers do get to choose how they are portrayed, they are also subject to
what viewers and subscribers want to see and what they are prepared
to pay for (Henry and Farvid 2017: 121). When exactly during an
online interaction, the men gave prospective clients their Wish List var-
ied—although nobody advertised it openly on any of their social media
accounts. Wish List was deployed by male sex workers at a stage of
interaction when fans were demanding to see extra content than what
was available to all on their profiles.
Levels of Interaction on Instagram

Most interaction between the men I interviewed and their fans con-
sisted of liking of photos and videos and leaving comments. This most
basic of interactions was also the most crucial in gauging the contin-
ued engagement of their fans with the content they were broadcasting.
As holders of an Instagram business profile, Renzo, Joao and Victor
could check the provenance of those likes, whether they were drawn
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from existing fans or from an invisible audience (Kaul and Chaudhri

2017: 2; Marwick and Boyd 2010; Litt and Hargittai 2016) and the
country of origin. This information did impact on which hashtags they
chose to use or drop and which content connected with a larger audi-
ence but crucially, the act of liking photos was a source of vindication
for the men and an affirmation of their self-discipline in diet and train-
ing. Renzo describes that a photo ‘might get a few hundred likes – I
love likes, when I put up a new photo I get crazy checking watching it
go up’. Renzo’s almost obsessive pursuit of more photo ‘likes’ illustrates
what Race (2015: 498) describes as a gay identity that ‘takes the form
of a compelling mode of everyday distraction, personal validation and
social recognition’. Similarly, Hakim (2018: 236) understands photo
‘likes’ as a measure of accumulated social capital. The professional fit-
ness respondents in his study saw social media validation as essential for
economic capital and the progression of their careers. Non-professionals
did not see their engagement with social media contributing anything
tangible with one interview suggesting that it ‘doesn’t equate to any-
thing really for the future, for building yourself as a person’ (p. 237).
The quest for this social recognition intersects with the sexual entrepre-
neurship (Lane 2000) skills displayed by sex workers like Renzo, who
heavily invest in photos and services that adapt and target clients online
and offline. For Victor, the feedback ‘made it worth the effort’ and was
‘inspiration to keep going’. However, for Joao these messages, whether
in private or public, soon got repetitive—‘nice body, nice body, nice
body – I just respond to one of this type of message’ he told me.
Often messages were more specific, with fans asking more detailed
questions about workout programmes and diets. Renzo describes these
enquires as ‘how can I look like you?’ messages:
Guys message looking for information about what I am eating or what

programme I am doing, it is cool, sometimes they try to create this con-
nection and then they are ‘show me your cock’ so I usually stop chatting
or block, but most want to know about the gym and want more photos
… I tell them that I send the diet plan and workout but only for a Wish
List purchase and guys are OK, well OK some tell me to fuck off (laughs)
but most buy something cheap – it’s cool.
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When receiving a request for more photos or specifically nude photos,

Renzo, Joao and Victor again deploy the Wish List as a means of getting
compensated, using Instagram Story to send a photo or a video that can
only be viewed within a limited timescale. All three men agreed that
being more sexually suggestive than explicit was the key to maintaining
interest and followers. Victor told me that:
You don’t want to show too much, enough but not everything, if they
see everything right away they lose interest quickly and they can see
everything online you know? They can watch anything they want, they
are watching you not for that, it is hard to explain, and they want to pay
you not to show them all of you – does that make sense?
Responding individually to such messages and sending photos or vid-

eos was time-consuming, especially given that the financial rewards
were slim. Renzo, Joao and Victor all did tell of examples where they
exchanged photos with fans who did later become real-time clients.
Using online platforms to screen clients for real-time meetings has been
well established by sex work scholars (e.g. Jonsson and Svedin 2014).
The goods secured through Wish List, in line with other research on
precarious netporn labour (Berg and Penley 2016: 165; Van Doorn and
Velhuis 2018: 183) only constituted a supplementary income for the
men I interviewed, necessitating them to continue to work in cafes and
restaurants. The launch of OnlyFans in 2016 would change all that.
OnlyFans—‘Where Selfies Pay’

This platform targets the creators of content (bloggers, influencers, fit-
ness models, personal trainers and bodybuilders) to register and broad-
cast to users who pay a monthly subscription fee to view the uploaded
material. The platform takes advantage of a number of developments
which I have discussed in this chapter. It is marketed as offering
bespoke content that suggests greater authenticity to users—no pro-
duction studios, no poorly designed sets or rented apartments, rather
subscribers are brought directly into the homes of content producers,
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P. Ryan
more specifically, their bedrooms and bathrooms. It represents a redis-

tribution of power within the sex industry, with broadcasters setting
the price of their monthly subscriptions and OnlyFans taking 20% of
the income created to cover administrative costs, compared to webcam
hosting platforms regularly seeking 50% of all income. The broadcast-
ers that benefit the most from OnlyFans are those that already have a
large personal following on social media, or can acquire one—success
is premised on the ability to self-brand and promote the digital self
(Khamis et al. 2016; Marwick 2013; Page 2012). To facilitate this, the
platform is currently linked to Twitter and soon to other social media
sites and will retweet updates like new followers and new posts on the
broadcaster’s profile. It encourages broadcasters to ‘place your OnlyFans
profile link in ‘About Me’ fields on your social media profiles’ to pro-
mote their profile and grow their followers. OnlyFans also builds upon
the proliferation of the visual society (Walsh and Baker 2017: 1185),
encouraging broadcasters in online advertising that promotes the site
as—‘Where Selfies Pay’.
OnlyFans’ twitter account also reminds broadcasters, that unlike
other social media platforms, ‘we would like to confirm that sexually
explicit content is allowed on #OnlyFans and will not be prohibited’.5
While sex workers heavily use the platform (Twitter replies to the mes-
sage above were exclusively by sex workers), the advertising of escort
services remains prohibited by their terms and conditions. To open an
account, broadcasters have to upload a scanned copy of their passport
or driver’s licence and add their bank account details if resident in the
USA, Canada, Australia and the European Union while the availabil-
ity of e-Payments facilitates citizens from other countries to receive pay-
ment. Broadcasters set the subscription fee themselves, the minimum
allowed being $4.99 per month, while there is no upper limit $12.99 is
the average monthly subscription charged.
OnlyFans was launched at the time I was conducting this research.
Those with established social media profiles, especially Renzo, Joao and
Victor who form the basis of this chapter, were early adaptors to this
technology. It was a topic I returned to interview them about again as
the number of their subscribers grew over 2016–2018. I was curious
to discover whether an increasing number of subscribers and income
129
derived from them would affect the frequency with which they met
face-to-face clients. The success of OnlyFans did cause them to re-eval-
uate their use of Twitter, for which they had only used for personal use.
Victor: I had only 2,000 followers on Twitter at that time, I didn’t spend
time there, it was where I watched other guys, porn stars and other guys,
it was where I watched and was a fan but I never had my face but I am
getting more followers now and I am posting there, I put the [OnlyFans]
link there and it is growing there and on Twitter but I tell you that four
accounts on social media is too much for me, I can’t do it and give all his
time.
Joao: I put it [the OnlyFans link] on my Instagram and it worked,
I was surprised because you don’t tell people what you will put there so
guys messaged and say ‘what’s there?’ and I’d just say ‘more’ … when I use
it now sometimes I put the [OnlyFans] name on a [Instagram] Story so
it’s like – ‘you like this? Well pay the 12 euro and see more’
A number of other interviewees were dissuaded from using OnlyFans

because they did not have a Twitter account and felt that they did not
possess the critical mass of followers necessary to make the manage-
ment of a profile worthwhile. As a result, other interviewees placed the
OnlyFans link in the bio section of their Instagram profiles, although
this did risk context collapse as diverse audiences are given access to a
link for niche content (Kaul and Chaudhri 2017: Wesch 2009). The use
of Twitter is not widespread within the sex industry. The Cunningham
et al. (2018: 52) study of sex work and digital space founded that
only just under 30% of respondents had a Twitter account, which was
skewed towards younger workers and those that were involved in the
provision of indirect services like web camming.
Content
The photographic and video footage that Renzo, Joao and Victor
uploaded on their OnlyFans accounts was similar to the material that
they had used on Instagram Story. This material was now stored per-
manently on their OnlyFans account and was available to all new
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P. Ryan
subscribers, offering greater time efficiency in how they responded

to individual messages. All those who messaged were now referred to
the OnlyFans link, largely bypassing Amazon Wish List where access
to additional content had previously been negotiated. Advertising
OnlyFans accounts did publically locate my interviewees on the spec-
trum of digital sex work for the first time—although the marketing of
OnlyFans does allow ambiguity as to the content. The platform did
allow adult film stars to use their notoriety to gain income through
subscriptions and escorting that far exceeded the rates they were paid
in the traditional porn industry (Berg 2016: 167). Adult film stars
used their personal brand as a marketing tool to leverage more income
from satellite sex industries. My interviewees were in a different situ-
ation. They occupied a nebulous position in sex work’s gig economy
balancing discretion with a public social media profile to capture
enough subscribers to compete with other broadcasters. They are typi-
cal of a new middle-class cohort of male and female performers drawn
to netporn by the ability to earn money, minimise risk while main-
taining flexible work schedules (Jones 2015: 785: Jones 2016: 231).
There is not always a connection however between netporn work and
face-to-face sex work (see Mathews 2017: 174).
This income, as I discussed in the previous chapter, often went to
realising future goals in work, education or training or with a view to
return to graduate careers in Brazil or Venezuela sometime in the future.
The quotes from Renzo, Joao and Victor below illustrate how they were
all navigating their way around the platform in different ways, broad-
casting material they thought was consistent with the digital selves they
had spent years carefully creating and keeping sexually explicit content
private for a select few through the paid message function.
Renzo: It is hard for me to be private, which I need for my job and being
very well known on social media and having many fans … I decided
what works for me, everyone is different. It is [OnlyFans] a good oppor-
tunity for me, I would be stupid not to do it, especially when I see the
guys that do … my videos are all different, some, OK a lot (laughs) of
me in the gym, working out and then changing in the gym and in the
shower, but they are nudes, there is nothing sexual, I’m not shoving
131
my ass in someone’s face or jerking off, it’s just nude. I think they are
of great taste; I printed one and have it framed in my bedroom … of
course I do send some less tasteful ones too (laughs) but you have to pay
more
Joao: I think a lot of mine are the gym. It is hard because if you do
similar things people don’t re-subscribe so you are trying to be new and
showing something different. Have you seen the piano videos? People
love them and I need to get a piano for me because my mother she says
‘ah I’m going to rid of that thing, nobody uses it’
Interviewer: Tell me about the piano videos – how did they happen?
Joao: You have seen them man, I play the piano naked … I did it in
my house when I visit [Brazil] last year, I play four pieces that I know but
now I need some more … I put one up a new one after some months so I
need to practice more (laughs) But I tell you the truth, they are so popu-
lar, guys love them, it’s crazy, I think it’s my thing … It is what I get most
[private] messages about but I can’t do anything personal because I don’t
have the piano? Do you have one? (laughs)
Victor: For me, I try to link it to [Instagram] Story to bring people to it
[OnlyFans] because I don’t have enough followers on Twitter but it works
… I can choose who to send it to on Story so not everyone gets it …
I’m using the polls now [introduced in 2017] to ask my fans to choose,
like what underwear should I wear, what shorts in the gym should I wear,
what swimwear and then they can see it on [Only] Fans, people like it …
I show more too but I don’t show my face when I do that. I use [paid]
private messages to send more sexy stuff … jerking off mostly but maybe
more if I get a good offer
In telling his story of using the polling feature on Instagram Story,

Victor offers another means to which to connect with followers in a
manner identified by scholars of micro-celebrity where there is strategic
cultivation of the audience in a way deemed to be authentic (Khamis
et al. 2016: 6; Marwick 2013: 117–119). Polling offers a direct way
for fans to influence future posts of the account they are following.
Similarly, Joao’s strategy is also central to this cultivation of followers.
His piano playing does represent a niche self-branding (Berg and Penley
2016: 168) in a crowded marketplace that has the potential to attract
a loyal core following, while speculating that—‘I think it’s my thing’.
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P. Ryan
These videos are also clearly a source of pleasure for Joao, with his fol-
lowers sending him photos of video clips of themselves playing musical
instruments naked, creating a situation where ‘the performers and the
audience are the same people’ (Shah 2007: 35).
Income
The earning potential from broadcasting content on OnlyFans does
seem to be considerable. Those that have a large social media following
are best placed to unlock this potential but even for Renzo, my inter-
viewee with the largest following, persuading those to migrate from
Instagram or Twitter was challenging. Renzo has been trying to direct
some of his 60,000 Instagram followers to subscribe since opening his
OnlyFans account in 2016. I have remained in contact with him over
the last two years where his monthly subscription income, including
tips from private messages, has ranged from $350 in 2016 to $6735
in 2018. There is no guarantee that this 2018 income figure can be
maintained. Renzo describes his subscribers as made up of ‘hard-core
fans’ that remain followers over consecutive years, and those that can
be described as ‘floaters’—people that move from different broadcast-
ers every month. The challenge for all broadcasters, including Renzo,
is to persuade some floaters to stay subscribed while attracting new
followers to replace the lost income from cancellations. When I asked
him how this extra income has affected his face-to-face client work, he
remained cautious—‘I don’t want to lose clients that I have known for
a long time, regular work with good people is so important, but I have
definitely stopped seeing more new people’. Both Joao and Victor also
earned an increasing monthly subscription income throughout 2016
and 2017 earning a maximum of $2500 and $1600, respectively.6 All
three men told me that they were also cautious about placing sexual
online content that had a more permanent digital life than photo-shar-
ing capabilities in Instagram, for example. Operating online does not
remove all risk, and I discussed some of those challenges of imperson-
ation and unauthorised distribution, a common experience for all sex
133
workers (Sanders et al. 2018: 109), in previous chapters. These same

concerns exist with the use of OnlyFans.
It remains too early to predict the long-term impact of OnlyFans on
digital sex work. The platform is successfully filling a vacuum in host-
ing the explosion of micro-celebrities that has amassed huge follow-
ers on Instagram and Twitter by offering them and their subscribers’
easy payment solutions to view content. Crucially, it is allowing for
the broadcast of sexually explicit material at a time when the commu-
nity guidelines of sites like Instagram have become more restrictive.
OnlyFans continues to develop technologically, now offering broadcast-
ers live streaming options at a more competitive rate, challenging more
traditional webcam sites by introducing a real-time dimension to the
platform. The marketing of OnlyFans to a broad church of Instagram
influencers, bloggers, athletes and models provides a new digital space
for sex workers whose successful self-branding facilitates the conversion
of not just their bodies but also their everyday sexual lives into monet-
ised content. My interviews reveal that social media users investing time
and energy in devising new and innovative content to maintain and
grow subscribers can generate an alternative income stream that allows
them restrict the number of appointments with face-to-face clients.
This does remain the privilege of those most successful at harnessing the
platform.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have argued that changes within the sex industry
have facilitated the rise of amateur content broadcast on platforms like
OnlyFans. My interviewees revealed how they have been beneficiaries of
this amateur turn by leveraging large numbers of social media fans on
Instagram and Twitter into paid subscribers on OnlyFans. This devel-
opment, although experienced only by the most prolific social media
users, was influencing the number of face-to-face clients they were see-
ing expanding the scope of satellite sex industries. The growing popu-
larity of OnlyFans illustrates the trend towards mainstreaming male
134
P. Ryan
sex workers on broadcast platforms that include a diverse range of gay

and straight users including personal trainers, models and influencers. I
locate income derived from the use of sites like OnlyFans and Amazon
Wish List within the gig economy as male sex workers combine income
as waiters, face-to-face meetings and new opportunities within the
growth of netporn.
This chapter revealed the potential dividend of self-branding within
social media and the cultivation of followers through micro-celeb-
rity interaction to foster intimacy. While followers and fans demanded
greater access and intimacy, my respondents carefully navigated these
requests promoting a public profile with photos and videos that offered
choreographed insights into vacations, family and friends while main-
taining a backstage private life on an alternative social media profile for
family and close friends. These attempts were often not enough. While
digital sex work is routinely seen as safer, my respondents did tell of sto-
ries where divulging too much information about their lives and where
they lived, did open them to harassment by followers.
Notes
1. Objections to the rise of digital pornography have largely mirrored
those of early anti-pornography feminists like Dworkin (1989) and
MacKinnon (1987) who see pornography as a violence against women as
opposed to recognising it as a new public sexual culture (Paasonen 2010:
1298) or part of the gig or gift economy.
2. https://onlyfans.com/terms/. Accessed November 18, 2018.
3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2018/07/17/jeff-bez-
os-net-worth-hits-record-151-billion-after-strong-amazon-prime-day/#e-
aed1182e802. Accessed July 3, 2018.
4. https://www.dailydot.com/irl/amazon-sex-woker-wish-lists. Accessed
November 23, 2018.
5. https://twitter.com/onlyfansapp?lang=en. Accessed July 5, 2018.
6. I had completed some interviews in 2015 prior to the launch of
OnlyFans in 2016. I did manage to follow-up with a number of these
interviewees about the site, so I have only a partial insight into their sub-
sequent use of the platform.
135
References
Berg, H. (2016). ‘A scene is just a marketing tool’: Alternative income streams
in porn’s gig economy. Porn Studies, 3(2), 160–174.
Berg, H., & Penley, C. (2016). Creative precarity in the adult film industry.
In M. Curtin & K. Sanson (Eds.), Precarious creativity: Global media, local
labor (pp. 159–171). Oakland: University of California Press.
Brents, B. G., & Sanders, T. (2010). Mainstreaming the sex industry:
Economic inclusion and social ambivalence. Journal of Law and Society,
37(1), 40–60.
Cunningham, S., Sanders, T., Scoular, J., Campbell, R., Pitcher, J., Hill, K.,
et al. (2018). Behind the screen: Commercial sex, digital spaces and work-
ing online. Technology in Society, 53, 47–54.
Dworkin, A. (1989). Pornography: Men possessing women. New York: Penguin.
Edelman, B. (2009). Red light States: Who buys adult entertainment. Journal
of Electronic Perspectives, 23(1), 209–220.
Hakim, J. (2018). ‘The spornosexual’: The affective contradictions of male body-
work in neo-liberal digital culture. Journal of Gender Studies, 27(2), 231–241.
Henry, M. V., & Farvid, P. (2017). ‘Always hot, always live’: Computer-
mediated sex work in the era of ‘camming’. Women’s Studies Journal, 31(2),
113–128.
Jones, A. (2015). For black models scroll down: Webcam modelling and the
racialisation of erotic labour. Sexuality and Culture, 19, 776–799.
Jones, A. (2016). “I get paid to have orgasms”: Adult webcam models negotia-
tion of pleasure and danger. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
42(11), 227–256.
Jonsson, L. S., & Svedin, M. H. (2014). ‘Without the internet, I would never
have sold sex: Young women selling sex online. Cyberpsychology: Journal of
Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 8(1), 1–14.
Kaul, A., & Chaudhri, V. (2017). Do celebrities have it all? Context collapse
and the networked publics. Journal of Human Values, 24(1), 1–10.
Lane, F. (2000). Obscene profits: The entrepreneurs of pornography in the cyber
age. London: Routledge.
Litt, E., & Hargittai, E. (2016). The imagined audience on social network
sites. Social Media and Society, 1–12.
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MacPhail, C., Scott, J., & Minichiello, V. (2015). Technology, normalisation

and male sex work. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 17(4), 483–495.
Marwick, A. E., & Boyd, D. (2010). I Tweet honestly, I Tweet passionately:
Twitter users, content collapse and the imagined audience. New Media &
Society, 13(1), 114–133.
Mathews, P. W. (2017). Cam models, sex work and job immobility in the
Philippines. Feminist Economics, 23(3), 160–183.
Mackinnon, C. A. (1987). Feminism unmodified. Discourses on life and law.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Paasonen, A. (2010). Labors of love: Netporn, web 2.0 and the meanings of
amateurism. New Media & Society, 12(8), 1297–1312.
Race, K. (2015). Speculative pragmatism and intimate relationships: Online
hook ups devices in online life. Culture, Health and Sexuality, 17(4),
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Sanders, T., & Hardy, K. (2015). Students selling sex: Marketization, higher
education and consumption. British Journal of Education, 36(5), 747–765.
Internet sex work beyond the gaze. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Shah, N. (2007). PlayBlogs: Pornography, performance and cyberspace. In K.
Jacobs, M. Janssen, & M. Pasquinelli (Eds.), C’Lick me: A netporn studies
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1185–1203.
Weiss, B. R. (2018). Patterns of interaction in webcam sex work: A compar-
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6
Conclusion: The Governance of Male Sex
Work in Digital Cultures
Abstract  Ryan offers a brief conclusion highlighting the significance of

greater social media use by male sex workers on the sex industry in gen-
eral. It also examines some of the implications of this transformation on
the governance of sex work in the fields of law, health and safety.
Keywords  Governance · Sex work · Internet
This book set out to explore the greater visibility of male sex work
within new social media and understand how sex workers navigate
these digital cultures. It was motivated by a desire to reconcile this vis-
ibility with a public policy silence that seemed incongruous at a time
of heightened debate about the future of prostitution policy during the
years 2015–2017. Was the retreat by gay-identified male sex workers
deeper within social media servicing the LGBTQ community a local-
ised response to new forms of governance criminalising sex work clients
in Ireland or part of a global trend of mainstreaming on new digital
platforms? There are undoubtedly local factors. The domination of dig-
ital male sex work by South American migrants reflected the political
economy of the state’s migration policy which, when combined with the
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11797-9_6
138
P. Ryan
visa’s work restrictions and the high cost of accommodation in Dublin

created conditions that could, theoretically at least, foster entry into
sex work. While the stories of the central protagonists were not born
in Ireland, this book is a new chapter in the history of Irish sexuality.
This new chapter tells us about the continuing evolution of the LGBTQ
community in Ireland as it integrates newly arrived migrants and how
they in turn transform the very fabric of that community—from its
club scene, music and technology—to the transformation of desire, sex
and intimacy. It provides us with an understanding of the challenges
too, telling stories that cast light on casual racism and stigma, a housing
crisis, recreational drug use and rising rates of HIV infection. It builds
upon and extends previous work on male sex work when different chal-
lenges were being grappled in Ireland.
This is a book about desire. It is about how we communicate that
desire to others. I do not mean sexual desire exclusively, although it has
played a central role in understanding sex worker lives. The stories in
the book tell of cultivating sexual desire through the display of bodies
that endure punishing fitness regimes and the intake of nourishing foods
delivered with militaristic precision throughout the day. While the sto-
ries tell of generating sexual desire, it is also the deployment of that body
as an agent of consumption in travel, food, friendships and music that
commodifies not just the body, but the person themselves. Social media
provided the platforms to showcase these bodies to communicate one’s
taste through consumption and realise a profile and personality worthy
of following. Social media would offer versatility in communicating these
multidimensional elements of male sex work that would prove increas-
ingly attractive over traditional escort sites, although success would hinge
on the self-branding and interactive and promotional strategies the men
brought to bear. The book set out to understand the parameters of this
interaction and the new conventions which governed it, building on
the analysis of digital male sex work beyond a focus on advertising. This
analysis would focus on how income is generated by virtue of having a
high profile social media presence, in direct face-to-face meetings but
increasingly through broadcasting monetised content.
The stories told in this book problematise our understanding of sex
work based on existing scholarly accounts, where a disproportionate
6 Conclusion: The Governance of Male Sex Work …
139
energy has focused on entry and exit points to sex work. While I have
outlined a political-economy context within Ireland that set in motion
my interviewees’ engagement with sex work, these men had long being
the beneficiaries of physical and erotic capital in Venezuela and Brazil.
The engagement in intimate relationships that yielded economic and
social advantages continued when the men re-located to Ireland, blur-
ring the boundaries between sex work as is commonly conceived as the
exchange of cash, to more open-ended beneficial arrangements. While
these arrangements have historic precedents, the emergence of new
social media and the presumed intimacy with which they can create
with followers has made these beneficial arrangements easier to conceive
and sustain. I have argued in the book that sex work appears more as
a resource which is drawn down by men at specific times, rather than
understanding it as a career or identity. Similarly, there is no distinct exit
from sex work, rather a commitment to remain open to what the future
held in terms of challenges and opportunities.
The near domination of the digital sex work market by South
American men can be partially explained through migration policy but
that success was also related to the value of their physical and erotic
capital within the sexual marketplace. This was intertwined with their
racialisation, which bestowed a range of imagined sexual and emo-
tional characteristics upon my interviewees, which they integrated into
the outward construction of their digital selves. This process of racial-
isation, which was potentially advantageous for some, also acted as a
straightjacket for others. With Brazilian workers featuring prominently
on escort sites and across dating sites like Grindr, interviewees admit-
ted to changing their advertised nationality to Portuguese, to offset
what they perceived as a damaged and overexposed Brazilian ‘brand’.
Similarly, Venezuelan nationals admitted to placing [Not Brazilian] text
on their social media bios for the same reason, revealing the complexity
of possessing racialised identities that are simultaneously desired and the
bearer of stigma.
The men I interviewed for this book lived their lives on social media.
Each social media account—Grindr, Instagram, Tinder or Twitter—
portrayed a slightly edited version for different audiences with differ-
ent motivations. Those most successful in adapting social media for
140
P. Ryan
the purpose of generating income through face-to-face meetings or the

broadcast of monetised content had already established profiles with
significant followings. This success combined digitally mediated photos
and using strategies most commonly associated with micro-celebrity.
The development of in-app features on both Instagram and OnlyFans,
like video uploads, polling and live streaming facilitated the creation of
intimacy and knowing, important for the maintenance of self-branding
that could secure monetised content. In-app links in Grindr connected
followers to Instagram and OnlyFans, with each platform promising
to unlock greater intimacy. Instagram and OnlyFans supported my
interviewees’ sex work ambiguity and enabled them to retain a flexi-
ble presentation of the digital self. Even on Grindr, renowned for ena-
bling fast sexual encounters, sex work remains communicated through
a new genre of emoji, to avoid the suspension of accounts for commer-
cial advertising. This enabled my interviewees to retain multiple digital
identities and resist sex work stigma which they felt would impede upon
the realisation of their employment, education or relationship goals.
Achieving micro-celebrity status on social media also presented chal-
lenges. The lack of anonymity brought my interviewees face to face with
followers who were disappointed or angered by recent or no interaction.
It made them more vulnerable to the experience of having their photos
and videos reproduced and used without their consent by people cre-
ating fake accounts. It presented challenges in maintaining a bound-
ary between a public/private life when that very dichotomy became
inverted as family public events became private and private intimate
moments became public. Trading heavily on physical and erotic capi-
tal on social media left my interviewees open to coercion by those who
sought to take advantage of their precarious position in the country. It
also became an impediment in forming relationships with those who
remained cautious about their sexual histories, drug use and HIV status
and their motivations to enter into permanent relationships with Irish
nationals.
This book raises some important issues as we continue to understand
male sex worker lives. The stories told here reveal diverse experiences.
Eighteen men arrived in Dublin, each with different resources availa-
ble to them—financial, educational, peer support—and united by the
6 Conclusion: The Governance of Male Sex Work …
141
ability to convert their physical and erotic capital into economic oppor-
tunities. The success with which each man capitalised on their social
media profiles was uneven, demonstrated by my concentration on just
three accounts to illustrate the process. These three accounts represented
the early adaptors of technology, like OnlyFans, recently launched in
2016, which requires considerable promotion on social media to trans-
fer and broadcast monetised content here. Apart from these accounts
in the book, scholars have little knowledge to assess the impact of
OnlyFans on the sex industry, but there is no doubt that more sex
workers will be drawn to this platform. These different accounts of sex
work require us, as a society to remain vigilant to diverse needs. The
embedding of male sex work within dating apps like Grindr, while
offering flexibility and a beneficial ambiguity to workers, will make it
increasing difficult, for health promotion agencies, for example, to tar-
get specific groups within a context of increased drug use and rising
rates HIV infections (MacPhail et al. 2015: 491). This is compounded
by the greater individualisation within social media-based sex work
where not only is there is a lack of peer support, there is active competi-
tion and some hostility between workers. Safer sex, HIV testing and the
use of PREP were topics that my interviewees were the least comforta-
ble talking with me about.
Similarly, this further movement of sex work into social media makes
the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2017, which criminalised the
purchase of sex, almost impossible to enforce within the complexity of
the intimate relationships recounted in this book. The regulation of sex
work has traditionally targeted publicly visible street work, often moti-
vated by nuisance complaints or brothels. Sanders et al. (2018: 122, 127)
found little evidence of a coordinated police strategy to regulate
Internet sex work in the UK. There is little to suggest this situation
would be any different in Ireland. The surveillance of digital sex work
was not just an issue for local authorities, however. A number of my
interviewees advertised on Dublin.cracker.com, an affiliate of the US
Backpage.com, which the FBI closed down in 2018. The signing of the
Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) 2018 into law by President
Trump erodes the ‘safe harbor’ rule, making website providers liable if
third parties were found to be advertising prostitution, leading to the
142
P. Ryan
closure of well-known sites like Craigslist’s personal ads. This has raised
fears over the ability of sex workers to continue to work safely indoors.
A series of attacks on Brazilian trans sex workers in Dublin in 2017 gave
rise to fears of the impact the sex purchase ban may have on the safe
negotiation of sex work.1
The lives of the men whose stories contribute to this book have con-
tinued to change. Migrant sex work lives are transient. Six men chose to
stay in Ireland, undertaking further education and working, five moved
abroad—to the US, Italy, Portugal and the UK and seven returned
home to Brazil. Their social media profiles developed so carefully during
their time in Ireland continue to document this next stage of their lives.
Note
1. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/dramatic-rise-in-attacks-
on-sex-workers-since-law-change-1.3208370. Accessed May 4, 2018.
References
MacPhail, C., Scott, J., & Minichiello, V. (2015). Technology, normalisation
and male sex work. Culture, Health and Sexuality, 17(4), 483–495.
Index
A Bourdieu, Pierre 6, 7, 30, 37, 40, 46,

Amateur 62, 115, 120, 122, 133 47, 50, 52, 78
Amateur turn 96, 133 Brazil 8, 19, 30, 36, 38, 39, 41, 45,
Amazon 7, 76, 96, 115, 119, 120, 46, 49–52, 57, 66, 86, 88, 96,
123, 124, 130, 134 130, 131, 139, 142
Amazon Wish List 7, 76, 96, 115,
119, 120, 123, 130, 134
Attention economy 97, 105 C
Capital (erotic) 5, 6, 8, 73, 88, 112,
120, 121, 139–141
B Capital (physical) 4, 8, 30, 37, 40,
Bauman, Zygmunt 7, 32, 33, 35, 41, 46, 52, 63, 72, 73, 78
75 Catfish 82, 83
Body 2, 5–8, 13, 15, 16, 30, 31, Catholic Church 31
33–37, 39–42, 45–50, 52, Celebrity 7, 98, 99, 101, 113
62–64, 67, 71, 78, 87, 107, Celebrity (micro) 2, 6, 7, 96, 101,
111, 112, 121, 126, 138 103, 106, 109, 113, 115, 120,
Bodybuilders 34, 35, 127 131, 134, 140
Body hair 48, 123 Chauncey, George 10, 59–61
Body projects 8, 31, 39, 51, 58, 106 Circuit parties 80
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 143

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11797-9
144
Index
Cleveland street scandal 11 Followers 3–7, 42, 58, 96, 98–110,

Client criminalization 19 113, 115, 120, 121, 124,
Clients 3, 5, 8–11, 14, 15, 18–20, 127–129, 131–134, 139, 140
35, 43–45, 47, 49, 50, 61, 63– Food 6, 33, 37, 50, 51, 53, 70, 96,
71, 75–82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 95, 107, 109, 138
99, 103, 104, 114, 123–127,
129, 132, 133, 137
Coercion 3, 4, 80, 140 G
Commuting 62, 69, 88 Gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB)
Consumption 4, 6, 33, 47, 50, 96, 83–86
98, 102, 107, 138 Gay bathhouses 60
Context collapse 96, 104, 109, 110, Gaydar 63, 64
129 Gay liberation 15, 60
Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act Gay movement 3, 15
2017 19, 87, 141 Gay pride 36
Gaze 8, 34, 35, 42, 48, 63, 72, 78,
108
D Giddens, Anthony 6, 7, 32, 33
Dating & relationships 4, 59 Gig economy 9, 113, 130, 134
Doxxing 114, 116 Goffman, Erving 100, 107, 110,
Drugs 67, 84–86, 121 112, 114
Dublin Castle Scandal 12 GPS 5, 64
Grindr 2–5, 8, 21, 43–45, 52, 58,
61–72, 79, 81–83, 85, 88, 95,
E 103, 104, 107, 111, 115, 120,
Emoji 3, 5, 44, 58, 66, 69, 88, 103, 121, 139–141
140 Gym 5, 6, 8, 20, 31, 35–45, 48,
Escort 3, 5, 15, 18, 20, 21, 48, 53, 51–53, 58, 65–67, 70, 71,
58, 63, 64, 66, 67, 70, 77–79, 80, 82, 88, 104, 106–110,
120, 128, 138, 139 124–126, 130, 131
Escort (pop-up) 5, 120
H
F Habitus 6, 30, 37, 40, 47, 52, 53
Facebook 4, 39, 64, 97, 102, 103, 112 Hakim, Catherine 73
Fans 96, 101–104, 107, 109, 111, Hash tags 4, 5, 109
113, 120, 124–127, 130, 131, HIV/AIDS 15, 35, 36, 61, 65, 83,
133, 134 138, 140, 141
Index
145
Homosexuality 3, 10, 12, 13, 32 N

Hornet 64 Neo-abolitionism 17
Housing 58, 59, 81, 88, 138 Netporn 122, 123, 127, 130, 134
Hustler 14, 15, 60 Nightclubs 65, 107
Hybridization 68
Hybrid space 5, 58, 69
O
OnlyFans 7, 10, 76, 96, 115, 119,
I 120, 127–134, 140, 141
Immigrant Council of Ireland (ICI)
17
Influencers 6, 98, 127, 133, 134 P
Instafame 6, 7 Para-social interaction 100, 101
Instagram 2–5, 7, 21, 42, 64, 71, Personal trainers 33, 40, 71, 127,
83, 95–98, 102–106, 108, 134
110–115, 120, 121, 125, 129, Pornography 120, 122, 134
132, 133, 139, 140 Prostitution 2, 3, 10–19, 21, 60, 76,
Instagram Story 5, 7, 58, 70, 96, 85–87, 137, 141
102, 104–106, 110, 115, 127,
129, 131
Intimacy 5, 6, 61, 76, 96, 100, 101, R
106, 113–115, 120, 123, 124, Racialization 8, 50, 73, 139
134, 138–140 Rent 16, 81
Intimate strangers 100 Rojek, Chris 7, 98, 99
Ruhama 18
L
Late modern societies 4, 7, 32, 100 S
Luddy, Maria 13, 14 Self-branding 6, 7, 96, 100, 105,
131, 133, 134, 138, 140
Selfies 4, 5, 106, 128
M Senft, Theresa 6, 7, 97, 101
Male strippers 72 Sex industry 3, 9, 19, 21, 96, 113,
Marwick, Alice 6, 7, 96, 98, 101, 120–124, 128, 129, 133, 141
102, 104, 109, 110, 113, 126, Sex work 2–4, 7–10, 16–21, 30, 44,
128, 131 45, 49, 58, 65, 66, 69, 71–76,
Migration 2, 8, 17, 19, 20, 71, 86, 78–80, 84, 86–88, 103, 104,
88, 137, 139 120, 121, 123, 127, 129, 130,
Muscles 47, 48 133, 134, 137–142
146
Index
Sex work (criminalization) 19, 137 Twitter 2, 64, 101, 103, 108, 128,
Sex work (exiting) 85 129, 131–133, 139
Sex work (governance) 3, 85, 137
Skin colour 20, 49
Snapchat 58, 102 V
Social class 6, 7, 37, 46, 47 Van Krieken, Robert 7, 99
Sponsorship 101, 105 Venezuela 8, 19, 30, 41, 49, 51, 52,
86, 88, 96, 130, 139
T
Tattoos 31, 49 W
Tinder 2, 139 Web camming 129
Touring 34, 79 Webcam models 113, 123
Turn off the Red Light (ToRL)
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What is the book about?

What is the book about?

What topics are discussed in the book?

What topics are discussed in the book?

Male Sex Work

in the Digital Age

Male Sex Work

ISBN 978-3-030-11796-2 ISBN 978-3-030-11797-9 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018968341

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

Cover illustration: © Harvey Loake

I was fortunate to receive assistance and support from many people

1 The Changing World of Online Male Sex Work 1

2 Discipline and Desire in the Pursuit of Physical Capital 29

3 Grindr, Hybridisation and the Life a Pop-Up Escort 57

4 Instagram, Micro-Celebrity and the World of Intimate

5 Netporn and the Amateur Turn on OnlyFans 119

6 Conclusion: The Governance of Male Sex Work

Abstract In this introductory chapter Ryan sets out five developments

Keywords Sex industry · Celebrity · Bodies · Gig economy · Male sex

© The Author(s) 2019 1

in dispute’ I was told. It was an ominous start. I had been asked on

1. The Normalisation of the Sex Industry

economies, issue of care and social reproduction continued to be

to meet benchmarks of popularity, fitness, travel or friendship. They

a brand that requires strategic cultivation and promotion to realise its

becoming reliant on their exclusively digital work on OnlyFans and

Changing Social Meanings of Male Sex Work

of their working-class counterpart. Many men adopted female perso-

The Cleveland Street and Dublin Castle Scandals

suspicion (Hindmarch-Watson 2012: 599). An investigation commis-

construction of a despised colonial ‘other’ where homosexuality would

independent state prompting Catholic moral purity movements like the

Male Prostitution in the Twentieth Century

understood the expectations that surrounded these social relations with

government health officials, male sex work emerges as almost an exclu-

Research on Male Sex Work in Ireland

based on interviews with service providers, could be anything between

The Rise of Neo-Abolitionism

sex (Levy 2015). This campaign would have three dimensions—alliance

that spoke supported the policy of client criminalisation, with organisa-

The Stories in This Book

were studying either at college or university or were attending a recog-

I entered into these interviews as a supporter of a harm reduction

com/477434105621119. Participants in this book discuss ways in which

Brennan, J. (2017). Cruising for cash: Prostitution on grindr. Discourse,

Marwick, A. E. (2013). Status update: Celebrity, publicity and branding in the

Weeks, J. (1996). The construction of homosexuality. In S. Seidman (Ed.),

Keywords Physical capital · Bourdieu · Taste · Male sex work · Gym

© The Author(s) 2019 29

course in the language he has experienced since his arrival. Luan is

the men I have interviewed—the systematic approach to their diets,

The Changing Body Within Irish Culture

society to a more modern, industrial and secular one. A generational

Beck-Gernshein 2002). Bauman argues that seeking these resources,

The Meaning of Muscles

European powers in the nineteenth century led to the expansion of school

body to remain—white—in contrast to ethnic minorities or those that

Body Projects in a Late Modern Age

Abstract  In this introductory chapter Ryan sets out five developments

Keywords  Sex industry · Celebrity · Bodies · Gig economy · Male sex

Changing Social Meanings of Male Sex Work

The Cleveland Street and Dublin Castle Scandals

Male Prostitution in the Twentieth Century

Research on Male Sex Work in Ireland

The Rise of Neo-Abolitionism

The Stories in This Book

Keywords  Physical capital · Bourdieu · Taste · Male sex work · Gym

The Meaning of Muscles

Body Projects in a Late Modern Age

Sexual Encounters in the Gym

Reading the Body for Class Location

Thiago (21) describes how at just 1.68 cm, he is afraid of getting too

Keywords  Grindr · Pop-up escort · Hybridization · Male sex work

Gay Men, Dating and Sex

Online, Real Time and Hybrid Space

Sex, Money and Intimacy

Abstract  Ryan explores how Instagram offers a platform to perform

Keywords  Instagram · Micro-celebrity · Para-social interaction ·