Clean Conscience from ‘Dirty Luxury’: Compliance, Profitable Unhappiness, and the Handwashing of Social Harm and Sexual Exploitation

In Spain, the demand for paid female sexual services is among the highest in Europe. Criminal operations are rampant in this industry and the regulation of such a profitable market is conveniently ambiguous; the sex industry is incestuously wedded to the cultural aesthetics of neoliberal life in Spain. This chapter offers a critique of some of the tokenistic and piecemeal attempts to deal with corruption and organised crime which envelope the sale of sex before zooming in on the off-street trade, centring on a luxury brothel. Grounded in fieldwork in a luxury brother, this chapter analyses a crude example of the brazen individualistic desire to succeed common to neoliberal life, and the ways in which the deployment of ‘special liberty’ (Hall in Theorizing crime and deviance: A new perspective. Sage, 2012) by the manager of the luxury brothel engages a subjective permission for him to inflict multiple harms of varying magnitude on the women, while simultaneously justifying his actions as necessary to the continuation of profit, progress, and prosperity. Considering the pseudo-compliant tactics, the manager employs to defer attention from the State and related authorities, the chapter argues that these translate into a kind of ‘clean conscience’ where he is just another liberated entrepreneur making a system work in his favour.