There are wildly varying estimates available about the scale of the prostitution industry in the world today, although most of these are not obtained by any scientific method. There is, however, general agreement that prostitution is widespread, even in places where it is illegal, and that gender and other inequalities are fundamental factors in the structuring of prostitution. The vast majority of those who obtain their daily needs via sex work are female and poor. Some feminists argue that prostitution is always forced and thus the same as rape; prostitution needs to be seen, then, as a basic violation of women’s human rights and to be subject to strong criminal penalties. Other feminists, however, argue that prostitution should be seen as a form of work; attention then is focused on maximising the labour and human rights of sex workers, including the decriminalisation of prostitution (see Sullivan 2003).
Men are the main participants in prostitution. They are the vast majority of prostitution clients world-wide (although women may also be clients, especially in sex tourism destinations). Men also participate in prostitution as sex workers (mostly seeing male clients) and are major actors in the organisation and managemmt of prostitution.
In 1948 Kinsey and his co-authors reported that two-thirds of all American men had been to a prostitute at least once in their lives. Close to 9 per cent of men in London aged sixteen to forty-four, and 4.3 per cent nationally, have paid for sex in the past five years (Erens et al. 2001), representing approximately 2.5 million commercial sex transactions. Yet remarkably little research has focused on the reasons why men go to prostitutes and what they believe they are purchasing. The vast majority of sex industry research is focused on female sex workers. Research on clients is often seen as difficult to conduct, but perhaps the main obstacle to research on clients is pervasive cultural beliefs about the fixed and biological nature of the male heterosexual ‘drive’; so men who go to prostitutes are seen to be engaged in a largely natural activity (unlike women who are prostitutes). Indeed, if this sexual outlet is not available to men—particularly men without wives—then they are sometimes regarded as more likely to resort to the rape of ‘innocent’ women (i.e. those who are not sex workers).
In the last decade a small but focused literature has appeared regarding men’s motivations and sexual behaviour with prostitutes (Jordan 1997; Monto 2000). Researchers have found that ‘clients sought sex workers not so much for different types of sexual activity as for different sexual partners’ (Perkins 1999:42), and that most clients wanted the same sexual activities they sought in their non-prostitution relations. Most men, whether married or unmarried, said they went to sex workers because they wanted ‘uncomplicated’ sex and because they ‘liked sex with a variety of women/men’ (Perkins 1999:43).
In their more psychological study, Plumridge et al. found that all the clients interviewed ‘explained their motivation in paying for sex in terms of pleasure’. This pleasure involved a clear relaxation of the normal duties and obligations associated with sexual activity in our society, in which the clients ‘rejoiced in feeling free to utilise commercial sex according to their own unilateral needs and convenience’. Perversely, they also endowed their commercial sex transactions with notions of sexual reciprocity and mutuality. So an essential part of the pleasure of paying for sex was a perceived emotional and sexual mutuality (Plumridge et al. 1997:173). The physical and emotional labour of sex workers was clearly invisible to clients.
References and further reading
Erens, R., McManus, S., Prescott, A. and Field, J. (2001) National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles II, 2000–2001, London: National Centre for Social Research.
Jordan, J. (1997) ‘User pays: why men buy sex’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 30 (1):55–71.
Monto, M.A. (2000) ‘Why men seek out prostitutes’, in R.Weitzer (ed.) Sexfor Sale. Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry, New York: Routledge, pp. 67–83.
Perkins, R. (1999) “‘How much are you, love?” The customer in the Australian sex industry’, Sodal Altematives, 18 (3):38–47.
Plumridge, E.W., Chetwynd, S.J., Reed, A. and Gifford, S.J. (1997) ‘Discourses of emotionality in commercial sex: the missing client voice’, Feminism and Psychology, 7 (2): 165–81.
Sullivan, B. (2003) ‘Trafficking in women. Feminism and new international law’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 5 (1):67–91.
