Publications by Year: 2017

2017

Lahav-Raz, Y. 2017. “Screen Carnival: The Development of a Unique Jargon Among Clients of the Israeli Sex Industry”. Israel Studies in Language and Society 10 (2): 36-52.

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.