Louise: Thing is, however much I try to put myself in their
[a prostitute's]
Louise: situation, I don't know how they can bring themselves to do it.
Griff: Well the sociological work on prostitution isn't very helpful either. There's work by Polsky where he's taking a functionalist perspective related to the Parsonian model of functional imperatives and what he's suggesting is that prostitution could be regarded as functional for society, in the sense that it acts as some sort of safety valve, helping to maintain the double-institutionalisation of sex, both within marriage and within a few specified sex acts. Of course, there's all the logical problems with the functionalist model - problem of reification, tautology and teleology. I personally tend to take a phenomenological view, by which I mean that the question that the question that I'm interested in is how prostitution becomes to be seen as a thing in the world. How an act that is seen as prostitution gains the status of something real in a decontextualised sort of sense, when in fact how you could view it would be that the candidate act of prostitution relies upon a reflexivity between the candidate act and the indexical features of the social situation. So in other words, we're talking about doing it for a good degree, or for promotion at work, or for a night out at the pictures and a meal, or any of those things. I mean what is it?
Louise: Have you ever met one?
Griff: What? Well, how would I know? Not as far as I know. I feel a bit silly. What I'm trying to say it that sociologists don't know a great deal about it. Will that do?
