Emotional labor is about producing and/or controlling certain types of emotions to fulfill the emotional demands of a job.
It means that one needs to show or alternatively hide both felt or not felt emotions depending on the kind of job occupation. The goal hereof is to succeed in one’s job, that is, one needs to comply with the expectations others have of the service you are supposed to provide.
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To give some examples: receptionists in a hotel are expected to be friendly, helpful, and greet clients with a smile, even if their own mood at the time of engagement with a client may not correspond.
Another example is that of social workers who need to be empathetic, compassionate, and supportive when engaging with their clients, even if they may not feel so or do not like the person they’re dealing with.
Within sex work, emotional labor is often an essential part of the job. One of the main reasons of sex workers to engage in emotional labor is that most sex workers need to play an act, that is, need to engage in extensive roleplay to satisfy the needs or desires of their clients.
The roles they need to assume vary, but as most sex worker’s clients are male, we could say that they would usually strongly express a female gender identity and embody traditional ideas of femininity, friendliness, submissiveness, and affirmation of the client’s masculinity.
Of course, there is also the case of men seeking a dominating sex worker — also known as Dominatrix or Prodomme — in which case the sex worker would explicitly display dominant characteristics.
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Emotional labor in sex work is important because it creates a better experience for clients, which significantly augments the chances of higher financial gain and repeat business for the sex worker. Moreover, within sex work, clients tend to highly value “authentic intimacy” even if only perceived as so.
Good examples of types of sex work in which emotional labor is of extreme importance are offerings of girlfriend experience services and sexual escort services. Perhaps more than in any other role or job within the sex industry, these types of sex workers need to perform a specific role and heavily engage in emotional labor to pretend to be a “genuine girlfriend” or the “interested, lovely dinner date” who willingly, gladly, and naturally provides the client with a “happy ending” afterwards.
In fact, there is a growing group of clients in the sexual services business that demand for “authentic intimacy” and “true emotional connections,” which is thought to originate from a day-to-day world that is increasingly devoid of intimacy and companionship.
All in all, we could say that the absence of emotional labor in most types of sex work would be unthinkable. It is the kind of job par excellence in which both surface and deep acting has perhaps reached its highest expression.
