Research

"No place for a lady"

One of London’s most bohemian villages famed as the centre of the capital’s sex industry is being targeted as part of a clean-up operation ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games. But what impact is the so-called clean-up having on the people who work in Soho’s licensed sex shops? Is it spreading the dirt instead of neatening the streets? Amanda Overend met with Dr Melissa Tyler from the University’s Business School to find out.

"This is no place for a lady." The irony of a comment made to Melissa during an interview with an employee of one of Soho’s few remaining unlicensed sex shops is not lost on either of us as she explains the nature of her surroundings – there are explicit images on the walls, on the television screens and pasted across the hundreds of DVD covers cramming the shelves in the dingy back alley store.

This memorable one-to-one was one of the final interviews Melissa conducted as part of a five-month study into the sex shop workers of Soho. A member of the Business School’s Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour group, Melissa’s research interests lie in aesthetic and emotional forms of labour – where people’s emotions, the way they look, how they style their body and the physical setting they work in are all part of the customer experience and what is being sold.

"There is an ethos of tolerance, and shared set of values that characterises the retail sex community in Soho, namely that anything goes between consenting adults, but people who violate that ethic are effectively cast out"

Whilst there have been numerous studies into sexualised labour and sex work, Melissa was keen to explore the blurred area in between – where there is an obvious sexualisation of the product, but not of its workers. Understanding the physical setting was also key to this research – how did Soho the place, its history and community, influence workers’ experiences?

"I started by thinking about the experience of doing the work, the emotional labour involved, the aesthetics involved and working in Soho as a place,” explains Melissa. “Assistants get asked such incredibly intimate, graphic questions but they are considerate, polite and thoughtful in their responses.

"They’re not judgemental and they don’t seem amused or in the least bit phased. I wanted to know how they did it and how it felt to work in that environment, and especially what it meant to work somewhere that has such a longstanding global association with a particular area of work – in this case commercial sex. Soho has such an incredible reputation and I was really interested to find out more about how that shaped the everyday experiences and identities of the people who work there."