Sporting Girls, Streetwalkers, and Inmates of Houses of Ill Repute: Media Narratives and the Historical Mutability of Prostitution Stigmas
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the mutability of symbolic sanctions— or stigmas—applied to sex industry work by examining newspaper narratives in one medium-sized Canadian city over two time periods: 1870–1910 and 1980–2004. The article's purpose is first to get a sense of what the authors call the ecology of stigmas—their relation to the temporal and spatial contexts in which they are produced—and second to give needed historical context to them and the representational tropes that currently dominate media, policy, and academic discussions about prostitution. This article finds significant continuities and discontinuities between media representations during the two study periods. In particular, prostitution stigmas are constituted out of cross-articulations of narratives around containment, culpability, and contagion across the twentieth century, but the ideational contents and empirical referents of these narratives reflect the intersection of sex industry contexts with historically specific concerns around gender, sexuality, race, and social status. Stigmas of the sex industry, rather than being constant, reveal themselves to be both deeply ecological and accommodating to a range of concerns about female sexuality and normative behavior that are sensitive to historical time.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it