Immoral Geographies and Soho's Sex Shops
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Immoral Geographies and Soho’s Sex Shops: Exploring Spaces of Sexual Diversity in London Erin Sanders-McDonagh* School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research University of Kent, Cornwallis East, Canterbury CT2 7NZ United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland [email protected] Magali Peyrefitte Department of Criminology and Sociology School of Law Middlesex University The Burroughs, London, NW4 4BT NW4 4BT United Kingdom Email: [email protected] Ackn: N CN: Y Word count: 7328 Immoral Geographies and Soho’s Sex Shops: Exploring Spaces of Sexual Diversity in London Abstract London’s Soho, situated in the urban heart of the city has long been understood as both a cosmopolitan and diverse space where transgression and deviance, particularly in relation to the sex industry and sexual commerce, are constitutive of this area. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, we add to some of the existing debates on sexual spaces in Soho by documenting the changes to the social/sexual landscape of sex shops in this area, and look to geographers interested in the spatial politics of gender and sexuality to understand the importance of this particular place. Looking at two particular sex shops in Soho, we argue that the spatial practices in this very specific part of the city encourage a disruption of traditional hierarchies that often govern gender and sexed practices, and invite women, LGBTQ and kink communities to inhabit more inclusive spaces of sexual citizenship. Keywords: BDSM and kink; erotic retailing; LGBTQ; London; sex shops; Soho Introduction For centuries Soho has been an important part of London’s urban life, attracting a diverse group of people to a place known for its unique character. French Huguenot’s fleeing persecution from Catholic France arrived in the seventeenth century, with other Europeans following well into the nineteenth century. While some of these migrant populations were attracted by the employment opportunities presented by the burgeoning culinary and tailoring trades, others escaping religious or political persecution found refuge in this cosmopolitan urban area in the heart of central London (Walkowitz 2012, 18-22). Perhaps because of its diverse and cosmopolitan nature, by the early twentieth century Soho had a reputation for encouraging dissidence, deviance and transgression (Royle 1984, Walkowitz 1992, Thompson 1994, Smith 2007, Mort 2010, Walkowtiz, 2012). In his work on the history of London, Mort (2010) describes the emergence of what he terms the ‘pleasure economy’ of Soho in the early 1900s, and he highlights the emergence of risqué nightclubs and cabarets that ‘brought together many of the contemporary themes of West End nightlife: upper-class rituals of heterosociability, modern dancing, drugs, same sex encounters and discreet prostitution’ (Mort 2010, 221). Houlbrook’s (2005) history of queer London has also highlighted the uniquely naughty nature of Soho noting that ‘As an enduring locus of immigrant, underworld, and working-class sociability, Soho represented a nocturnal space in which the contraventions of respectable urbanity could be discarded’ (2005, 87). He argues that Soho allowed for a ‘distinctly queer urban culture… Different modes of queerness – different ways of understanding sexual difference – converged at the same sites’ (2005, 266). The lurid nightlife and the transgressive character established in this distinct urban zone continues to be associated with non-conformity and deviance; Soho is still well-known for its notorious sexualized past and the history of sexual commerce in the area, to such an extent that many have argued that its sexualized qualities help constitute its inimitable sense of place (Kent 2005, Kent and Berman Brown 2006, Mort 2007, Tyler 2012a and 2012b). Soho’s enduring reputation contributes to a racy night-time economy, as Melissa Tyler notes in her study of Soho in 2012: ‘Binge drinking and drug dealing are rife; there are many sex shops remaining… and the area continues to be associated primarily with commercial sex, the iconography of which shapes Soho’s “social materiality” (Tyler 2012a, 903). It is clear from even this brief history of Soho that the area has a tawdry past – drawing in a range of people who would normally have been considered licentious, deviant or even dangerous, yet Soho has allowed for transgressive expressions of sexuality to live and thrive – the unique, cosmopolitan nature of Soho is still, we argue very much a part of its current character. In an attempt to understand the distinctive enduring character of this London area, we focus on one particular element of Soho’s sexual economy that we argue contributes to its transgressive quality: sex shops. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, sex shops had a significant presence in this part of London, and these venues were well known for their seedy, smutty, masculinized air (Royle 1984, Thompson 1994, Tyler 2012a, 2012b). Thompson notes that ‘between 1976 and 1982, almost anything was available in Soho, at a price determined by the customer’s shrewdness. There were 54 sex shops, 39 sex cinemas and cinema clubs; and 12 licenced massage parlours’ (1994, 44). From 1982 things changed significantly when the Miscellaneous Provisions Act came into effect; anyone wishing to open a sex shop had to apply for a license, and later amendments to the Act gave Councils the right to determine what might constitute an ‘appropriate’ number of shops in the area. While the number of shops reduced significantly (there are now 12 licensed sex shops in Soho), there is still a high concentration of sexual retailing, with most of the sexual commerce located in the north and eastern quarters of the area; this means that almost all of the sex shops, erotic boutiques and strip clubs are located within half a mile of one another. This dense concentration of sexual activity sits in contrast to other parts of the UK, where much of the licencing legislation and moral concerns about respectability has relegated sex shops in to peripheral locations far away from main shopping areas (Royle 1984, Tweksbury 1990, 1994, Thompson 1994, Hubbard et al 2009, Coulmont and Hubbard 2010, Hubbard 2016). We argue that the transgressive nature of Soho has allowed sex shops to thrive in ways that are unique to this area. We are particularly interested in the ways in which sex shops in this part of London have moved away from being masculine, seedy spaces, to places where new possibilities emerge for a wide range of people seeking out sexual pleasure. In the next section, we outline some of the literature around sex shops (in both the UK and the US) to explore the extent to which retailing strategies have changed in relation to sex shops, and how this shift has, in some cases, opened out sexual commerce to a wider range of people, including women. We then provide our own empirical evidence from our ethnographic study of Soho to argue that the co-location of sex shops in Soho and the attendant history of the area allow sex shops to appeal to a diverse, heterogeneous group of people. We argue that these shops push back against heteronormativity and ‘respectable’ norms, in ways that most other sex shops do not (and indeed, cannot), and as such offer new possibilities to the people who live, love, visit, and inhabit Soho. What counts as a sex shop? A sex shop in the UK is defined by Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982, Schedule 3, Paragraph Four as: ‘any premises, vehicle, vessel or stall used for a business that consists to a significant degree of selling, hiring, exchanging, lending, displaying or demonstrating sex articles or other things intended for the purpose of stimulating or encouraging sexual activity or acts of force or restraint which are associated with sexual activity’ (cited in Coulmont and Hubbard 2010, 193). We suggest that this legal, technical definition ignores the affective politics that complicate such a neat categorization. Lynn Comella’s (2017) work on feminist sex- toy stores highlights the ways in which definitions of ‘sex shops’ are complicated by the meanings we attach to certain items, objects or practices, and argues that the social construction of sex needs to be considered when thinking about how we might understand what counts as a ‘sex shop’ outside of a narrow legal framework. Comella (2017) argues that common understandings of ‘sex shop’ are often associated with dark, dingy, seedy shops that sell unsavoury, smutty things to (heterosexual) men. The foil to the ‘sex shop’ is the relatively new ‘erotic boutique’ based on a retail model that is ‘wholesome and women-friendly, not sleazy and male- oriented; clean, not dirty; classy, not crass’ (2017, 92). The US model is based originally on shops like Good Vibrations, a feminist, sex-positive erotic retailer that opened its doors in San Francisco in the late 1970s and focused on selling vibrators to women. Comella argues that the feminist entrepreneur who started the shop ‘was convinced there needed to be a sex shop for people who hated sex shops, a place where women in particular could get the vibrators they wanted without the feeling of distaste that often accompanied their visits to more conventional adult stores’ (Comella, 2017, 44). The model for this new sex-positive, women-friendly shop (a shop that did not originally sell lingerie, dildos, or pornography) spread to other cities, creating a ‘sex positive diaspora’ (2017, 84) across the US. Licensing laws that regulate the number and location of sex shops and erotic venues are predicated on gendered ideas about sexual desire, and Comella (2017) notes that women-friendly erotic boutiques often rely on aesthetics to help make these spaces more palatable for local residents who might object to seedy sex shops. By creating glamorous spaces with high quality merchandise, these spaces are less likely to be objectionable to local planners.