Based on fieldwork among pimps in an industrial city in Eastern Romania, the paper explores the skills of pimping and what it takes to become a successful transnational pimp. In the pimps’ attempts to recruit sex workers with whom they can set up their business in other European countries, the paper suggests that the craft of pimping depends on capacities in not only seduction, but also in deep understanding of other people.
The paper investigates the pimps’ techniques of being able to ‘read’ the desires, hopes and needs of their prospective sex workers, which involves assessing the skills and economies of the potential sex worker bodies. This opens up to a process of seduction of using “words from the heart” and buying the women gifts. The paper shows how the pimps’ increased social capacities in these domains are highly dependent on the pimps’ own emotional involvement with the women in their business: the intimate process of reading the desires of others demands engaging one’s own emotional body.