The COVID-19 pandemic has had a collateral effect on marginalized populations, including individuals in the sex trade (IST). In addition, the literature of the past year has documented a significant impact of the pandemic on healthcare providers. However, there is a lack of research on the new challenges and existing hardships facing aid organizations working with IST populations. This naturalistic qualitative study used semi-structured interviews with 33 IST aid organization workers in Israel between May and July 2020 to capture their perceptions and experiences within broader social-relational contexts. Data analysis revealed that the pandemic impacted three different arenas: The assistance systems and the quality of care; The relationship between aid organizations and state authorities; and The intra-organizational and inter-organizational relationship. These findings add to the knowledge about the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on aid organizations, particularly the need for greater collaboration between aid organizations during health crises and governmental support for these organizations. In addition, the study highlights the opportunities that a global and local health crisis can create advancing new knowledge and practices used by aid organizations in their work to assist IST populations.  

Abstract 

This article discusses the sexual script of Israeli sex industry consumers who self-identify as addicts. It argues that the 'addict sexual script' provides both an explanation for out-of-control sexual behaviour and a channel for expressing the individual client's 'right' to be acknowledged for their suffering in the process of buying sex. Thus, the addict sexual script becomes a coping strategy that, while internalising sex consumption as socially deviant behaviour, also serves as a strategic practice for negotiating and challenging masculine hegemonic ideals. It concludes that the willingness to stigmatise and victimise themselves as disempowered individuals becomes a turning point, which, paradoxically, empowers sex consumers as actors in the framework of consumer capitalism. 

Keywords: Addiction, sex industry, consumer culture, hegemonic masculinity, sexual script theory 

Introduction This study explores the recent neo-abolitionist legislation of the Israeli sex industry by illustrating the competing claims of various stakeholders: those leading the legal change and those protesting it. The main question is how Israeli sex workers perceive the public debate over governing the Israeli sex industry. 

Methods This study combines qualitative methods that include ethnographic observations and interviews. The ethnographic observations were carried out between November 2018 and October 2019 in gatherings, protests, and academic conferences where sex workers were the lead speakers. In addition, 16 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with sex workers across various indoor sectors, and four interviews were conducted with political figures to learn about their efforts to adopt neo-abolitionist legislation. 

Results the Israeli legislative proceedings initiated in 2007 deny sex workers a voice and exclude them from the political space and policy debates that have a direct bearing on their working lives and wellbeing. Thus, Israeli sex workers perceive sex work governance as controlling their agency and deepening their stigmatization. In this process, we show how contrasting groups became strange bedfellows in their attempt to protect sex workers by incriminating clients of the sex industry. 

Conclusions We conclude that the binary framings of debates about sex work in Israel do not address the actual needs or political desires of sex workers who are ignored and excluded from the discourse about them. 

Policy Implications Furthermore, we conclude that the issue at hand is not about permitting sex workers to express their views but rather about the need to listen to their critiques to ensure that policy is built on their knowledge and experience. 

Keywords: Sex work policy; Neo-abolitionist legislation; Israeli sex industry; Stigma; Agency 

In this article, I discuss the unique masculine repertoire of Israeli clients of street-based sex work. In doing so, I aim to reveal the deep meaning of sex consumption on the street while reflecting on the way in which universal and local masculine repertoires are negotiated and contested. Based on a discourse analysis of online sexual reports, the article focuses on clients' metaphoric language of themselves as hunters when describing sexual encounters on the street, arguing that the hunting metaphor has become a channel through which a community of "warriors" has been built. The sexual script of the hunter is a mixture of intersecting characteristics from the universal dominant repertoire of hegemonic, heteronormative hyper-masculinity with characteristics from the two Israeli masculine hegemonic repertoires: the combat soldier and the Halutz (pioneer). The sexual script of the hunter thus functions as a platform on which other relations of power, especially between men themselves, are played out and contested. 

Keywords Masculinity · Hegemonic masculinity · Street-based sex work · Clients · Online communities · Israeli society 

In this article, I analyze the role of the Israeli online arena in attempts to challenge attitudes toward sex work and the sex industry. By exploring the short history of the "feminist sex wars" that are being conducted on public feminist Facebook pages, I ask whether online activism can really avoid being drawn into the realm of conventional offline politics. The article argues that while the various Facebook pages aimed to alter the landscape of political and public discourse around sex work and the sex industry, they were in fact sucked into the vortex of the existing public discourse surrounding sex work in Israel, forcing them to choose sides in the dialectic sex wars. I conclude that they nonetheless succeeded in establishing a "narrative of influence" which should be analyzed beyond the disappointment of specific policy outcomes. Online activism thus becomes a key platform for both the construction and contestation between different narratives within the sex industry. 

KEYWORDS: Feminist sex wars; sex work policy; social media; feminist activism 

In this article, I discuss how changes in the economic infrastructure of mass consumption have changed the values and attitudes of consumer culture. By focusing on an online community of Israeli sex consumers and applying the theoretical framework of the prosumer economy, this article suggests its innovative potential for understanding the intersections of cyberspace, capitalism, and sex work consumption. Using the context of the dynamic cultural terrain of prosumerism, the article examines how commercial way of thinking is encouraged, understood, and adopted by sex consumers in the practice of purchasing sexual encounters and sharing them online. The main argument is that the online community of sex consumers has become a collaborative project in which consumers simultaneously produce and consume – that is, they become 'prosumers' and thus occupy positions of power within the capitalist market-place. They, therefore, not only responding to market rules but also producing them. I claim that the change in the nature of the community has impacted both the nature of online writing and the way clients perceive sex workers. 

KEYWORDS: Prosumer economy; sex work; cyberspace; consumer culture; consumption 

For centuries, prostitution was perceived as a normative masculine identity marker, part of the male adolescent's sexual education, something "men do", while the youngsters are taught to remain silent about it. Israeli sex clients who are consumers of prostitution services in Israel and who develop online communities with their peers, have violated the silence surrounding the topic. This article focuses on the unique jargon produced by the clients, who encompass three characters: the consumer, the hunter, and the addict. By means of these three characters, I show how a multiplicity of textual voices is created and serves to consolidate the various dimensions of male identity. This was made possible as a result of the online sphere being used as a carnival space (Bakhtin, 1984 [1968]), thereby enabling the sexual act to become the heart of the debate. The screen carnival reveals rather than conceals the deeper layers of the complex phenomenon of commercial sex consumption, which has remained hidden and marginal in Israeli academic research until now. 

An extensive literature addresses various subcultures in language, but there exists little research into language use by populations involved in prostitution. This paper contributes to knowledge about prostitution by investigating the connection between language, culture and sexuality among young women involved in prostitution in Israel. Based on qualitative research including two years of fieldwork, the paper presents a "pussy language" – a linguistic sexuality which constitutes an ambiguous space and linguistic testimony to their life course. The "pussy language," I argue, is a unique languaculture consisting of a vast variety of intersecting, contradicting and complementary meanings. Although this "pussy language" has a limited vocabulary, their myriad ways of pronouncing just a few words reflects an intellectual richness and linguistic virtuosity.