Sex in Cyberspace

Men Who Pay For Sex

Sarah Earle, Keith Sharp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317056881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Sex in Cyberspace offers a bold and provocative, yet sensitively written, account of an under-investigated area of sociological enquiry. While there is a considerable amount of research documenting the experiences of sex workers, very little data exists on their male clientele. The first empirically-based volume on the experiences of men who pay for sex, this work presents a significant new source of data. The book is based upon an extensive study of on-line forums in which both the purchasers of sexual services and the workers themselves can exchange information and views - information which is otherwise extremely difficult to obtain. Sarah Earle and Keith Sharp argue that such sites represent a significant change in the social organization of sex work and those who seek and use the services of sex workers. Shedding new light on men's sexual identity, Sex in Cyberspace makes a major contribution to the study of sexuality.

Chapter 1

Men, Sex Work and Society

Men who Pay for Sex

It is commonly said that ‘prostitution’ is one of the ‘oldest professions’ and if this cliché is to be believed, then there must, also, be a long history of those who have been willing to pay for sex. Whilst not suggesting that sex work is a single trans-historical and trans-cultural activity (Scambler and Scambler, 1997) it seems fair to argue that within contemporary western societies, paying for sex is both a discreditable and a discrediting activity and those involved in selling sex, or indeed those involved in any aspect of the sex industry, are on the whole considered deviant (Sharp and Earle, 2003).

Whilst there is a considerable body of literature dealing with the experiences of female and male sex workers (Walkowitz, 1980; Chapkis, 1997; McKeganey and Barnard, 1997; Sanders, 2005), there exists comparatively little research on men who pay for sex, particularly within the context of the United Kingdom (UK). Indeed, Perkins (1991) has estimated that less than 1 per cent of all studies of sex work focus on men who pay for sex. The reasons for this are obvious.

Firstly, it is the women who sell sex that have been traditionally perceived as ‘the problem’, rather than her pimps or punters. Historical analyses of sex work show that it is women who have been, and still are, subject to surveillance and regulation. As such, female sex workers have become the most visible within both lay and professional discourses on sex work (Weitzer, 2000). Secondly, and with notably few exceptions, paying for sex remains amongst the most discreditable and potentially stigmatising of activities in which men can engage within the modern western world, and elsewhere. Also, although sex workers are easily located – on the streets, in parlours or walk ups, via calling-cards left in telephone booths and, more recently, on the net – in contrast, men who pay for sex are less readily located and it has been difficult for researchers to find men willing to participate in social research. The research that has been carried out in the UK has tended to rely either on self-selecting samples – such as men who answer newspaper advertisements – or those recruited through departments of genito-urinary medicine (GUM). In other countries different methods have been used and these are discussed more fully in the next Chapter; for example, Monto’s (2000) study of men who pay for sex in the United States relied on a rehabilitation programme for ‘Johns’. The limitations of each of these approaches are readily apparent.

The research which forms the basis of this book takes a different approach. Instead of relying on finding samples of men willing to speak of their encounters, it is based on a study of a British internet site – PunterNet.com – containing reviews (or ‘Field Reports’) of men’s sexual encounters with female sex workers. We define this as a type of covert cyber-ethnography and as Fox and Roberts suggest ‘just as a traditional ethnographer would document a community or other cultural form … so cyber-ethnographers will document a virtual social world’ (1999, p.650). PunterNet invites reviews of commercial (predominantly hetero) sex between adults or what Scambler (1997) describes as ‘voluntary adult sex work’. It does not include accounts of sex work on the streets and it must be recognized that there are likely to be considerable differences between so-called ‘indoor’ and ‘outdoor’ sex work (Plumridge, 2001). Previous research suggests that outdoor sex workers are more likely to experience physical and sexual assault from punters, are more likely to be under the surveillance and regulation of the police, and most likely work for lower wages than the majority of indoor sex workers. There is also some evidence to suggest that outdoor sex workers are more likely to practise unsafe sex with clients, and more likely to use drugs. We also acknowledge that other forms of sex work exist including that which is coerced and that involving children. For example, Brown’s (2000) harrowing account of trafficking in Asia depicts stories of sexual slavery in which girls and young women are bought, sold and kept prisoner often until such time as they die of HIV/AIDS, drug addiction, alcoholism or other diseases of poverty. Brown states:

All over the world women are sold, tricked, forced or lured into prostitution. They are incarcerated in brothels and girls who are little more than children are compelled to service innumerable clients. They are unable to refuse the customers and unable to escape from brothels that are nothing but prisons (Brown, 2000, p.1).

Malarek’s (2003) text also describes the experiences of the nameless ‘Natashas’; young women smuggled out of Eastern Europe under false promises of employment as nannies, models or domestics in other countries, only to find, however, that they have been trafficked into sex work and that they ‘owe’ money which they are unlikely ever to be able to repay. Jeffreys (1997) also provides a useful historical and political overview of the global trafficking of women. However, the remit of this book does not extend to such forms of trafficking and sexual slavery, as far as we are aware. The more specialist markets of bondage, domination, discipline and correction are also not represented here although some of the men described within this book do occasionally refer to engaging in role play and uniforms. We also acknowledge that other scholars do not accept the distinction between the different forms of sex work that we have identified here. For example, in a critical account of the role of non-governmental organisations in condemning violence against women, Raymond argues:

The philosophy that prostitution is a human right has been advanced in international forums … by drawing distinctions between forced and free, adult and child, third world and first world prostitution, and between prostitution and trafficking. These distinctions are then used to make some forms of prostitution acceptable and legitimate, revising the harm that is done to women in prostitution into a consenting act and excluding prostitution from the category of violence against women. The sex industry thrives on this language and these distinctions (Raymond, 1998, p.1).

Leaving these debates to one side for a moment, we argue that paying for sex is, potentially, a deeply discrediting activity for men, not only in terms of risk to social identity but in relation to the risk to self-identity. Within this context, ‘risk’ therefore takes one of two forms. First is the obvious risk of being seen in a ‘red light zone’ or caught paying for sex. We know very little about the men who pay for sex – or the punters – in the UK or, indeed, elsewhere. Confidential questionnaires used in the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Johnson and Mercer, 2001) reported that nearly 9 per cent of men in London had paid-for sex and that these were aged between 16 and 44 years, with a nationwide figure of 4.3 per cent. Wellings et al., (1994) have argued that men are more likely to visit a sex worker as they get older and state that over 10 per cent of the male population aged 45-59 years old admit to buying sex. It would also appear that many punters have wives, partners, or girlfriends and would not wish their activities to become known to them (McKeganey and Barnard, 1996). Hester and Westmarland (2004) have suggested that the typical client is married. The second risk threatens a core feature of an assumed hegemonic heterosexual masculinity – namely, that men are sexually attractive to women and capable of attracting women as sexual partners. Rightly, or wrongly, an obvious implication of paying for sex is precisely that a man is incapable of attracting women in this way. Given these considerable risks, the way that men present themselves in cyberspace offers an opportunity to examine the way in which men who pay for sex manage their engagement in deviance and (potentially) deviant sexual identities.

Sex Work and the Regulation of the Female Body

Sex work is unique in that it has been seen both to constitute a social problem and to be the solution to a social problem. Historically, and to date, sex work has been associated with the transmission of illness and disease. It has also been seen as a utilitarian outlet for men’s sexual ‘frustrations’, without which such frustrations would otherwise lead to the rape of ‘innocent’ women and children. Within some contexts it has also served the purpose of the sexual initiation of young men and others with whom ‘nice’, ‘normal’ women would not wish to have sex (for example, the ugly, the impaired or the very old). As Wilton argues, ‘prostitution’ has been described in many ways:

a pathology, a disorder of sexual function … a form of or consequence of intellectual impairment …. a criminal activity … or a form of immorality … as ‘foul sewers’ … ‘seminal drains’ … or bridgeheads of HIV infection (Wilton, 1999, p.189).

The regulation of women’s sexuality, particularly the regulation of the bodies of female sex workers is long-standing (O’Neill, 2001). There are many examples of this in recorded history, some of them in the distant past, such as the regulation of medieval brothels (Mazo-Karras, 1989), others more recent, for example, the regulation of women in tolerance zones in the Netherlands (see, for example, Drobler, 1991).

In an account of women’s sexuality in Somerset, England in the early Seventeenth Century, Quaife (1979) outlines the regulation of women’s sexuality outside of marriage. All but monogamous married women could be defined as ‘unruly women’; these included the ‘wayward widows’, the ‘consenting spinsters’, the ‘adulterous wife’, and the ‘prostitute’. According to Quaife the promiscuous activity of these women was widespread and could fall into any one of four categories. Firstly, there was the ‘vagrant whore’ – a woman of little means who wandered from parish to parish soliciting wherever she could. Secondly, Quaife refers to the ‘public whore’, who operated from a particular inn or bawdy house. The third category was the ‘private whore’ who gave her services to one or two men over a specific period of time, before moving on. The fourth type was the ‘village whore’, ‘who ranged from the slut to the almost respectable protector of the chastity and fidelity of other village women’ (p.146). We can see here some parallels with different forms of contemporary sex work: street work, escort work, and work in parlours, walk-ups and saunas. We can also see parallels with the contemporary double standard of sexual behaviour for men and women. As Holland, Ramazanoglu, Sharpe and Thomson state ‘… the same sexual attitudes, desires and behaviour by men and by women have different meanings, resulting in different sexual reputations’ (1998, p.173). For example, in their study of young people, heterosexuality and power, one young woman is quoted as saying ‘If you sleep around you’re a slag, if a bloke sleeps around he’s lucky’. And, as they rightly note, whilst this double standard distinguishes between what is appropriate both for men and women, it is really the behaviour of women that is harshly judged.

Studies of sex work in the Eighteenth Century also show parallels between women working as ‘prostitutes’ and other women. Henderson’s (1999) account of prostitution in London, for example, suggests that women moved fairly seamlessly between prostitution and other forms of low status work. He details the relentless policing and regulation of female prostitutes, both on the streets and in brothels. For example, around 1735, local watch committees were established with the purpose of regulating street prostitutes. Henderson’s work shows, however, two very distinct images of prostitution in the Eighteenth Century. The first image depicts the prostitute as an agent of destruction who, through her actions, was able to foul society, ‘spreading physical ruin and moral disintegration’ (pp.166-7). In the second image, which is the direct reverse of this, the prostitute is seen as victim and her entry into prostitution and her decision to remain there are presented as involuntary.

In Acton’s (1972) work on prostitution in the late Nineteenth Century, first published in 1870, distinction is also made between two different types of prostitute. The first class of women he describes as the ‘kept mistresses’ – ‘a more reserved class of prostitutes’ (p.1). The second class he describes as ‘common street-walkers’. According to Acton, prostitution was ineradicable and he believed that English society should embrace the prevention and regulation of prostitution.

As part of this prevention and regulation, the Contagious Diseases Act, operating in Garrison towns, allowed a justice of the peace to detain a ‘common prostitute’ (the definition of which was much debated) and subject her to periodical medical examination for the purpose of ascertaining whether she was infected with contagious disease. Beds were secured at the Victorian Lock Hospitals with the objective of treatment, as well as moral and religious instruction. In a visit to one such hospital, Acton concludes that: ‘Their disease appears to be entirely local, both in origin and character. It arises, as I believe, in the great majority of cases, simply from the continual irritation and excitement of the generative organs consequent upon their mode of life, although it may be caused, no doubt, occasionally by direct contagion from urethral discharges in the male’ (p.86). Here we have an example of the way in which the female prostitute was firmly believed to be the source of contagion, and the regulation of female sexuality, rather than male desire, was the norm.

In an account of prostitution during the First World War, a similar picture is depicted. Writing about the increasing dangers of prostitution during this time and the inevitability of male sexual desire and promiscuity, Fischer and Dubois suggest:

Indeed, the only effective way of obviating the danger inherent in casual sexual contacts would have been, as someone has ironically observed, to castrate every soldier before putting him into uniform. But to examine this more or less jocular argument – and this does not mean that we ourselves are treating the subject in that spirit – this solution would have been disastrous, for eunuchs are not exactly ideal warriors. Warriors and male are two inseparable concepts, and the term male necessarily implies sexual activity (Fischer and Dubois, 1937, p.323).

Whilst we have but offered a flavour of the history of sex work here, we can see how sex work has been understood as both a ‘necessary evil’ and a social, legal and medical problem. Public concerns have centred on the regulation of women and women’s sexuality, rather than on male desire and demand. Thus, the men who pay for sex have remained largely invisible within the literature and within the history of sex work.

Prostitution, or ‘Sex “Work”’?

Considerable attention has been given in recent years to the status and definition of sex work. There is extensive literature dealing with this issue, which we believe is best understood and described as the continuum of sex/work/abuse. Three questions are central to this continuum: Is sex work ‘just sex’? Is sex work ‘ordinary’ work? Or, is sex work an abuse of women? Whilst there is no consensus on the nature of sex work, we briefly outline some of the debates below.

Is Sex Work ‘Just Sex’?

It is widely accepted within sex research today that sex is not a ‘natural’ act (Tiefer, 1995) but one that must be understood within a sociocultural context. This context determines what counts as sex and the meanings we attribute to where, when, why, how and with whom one has sex. We could argue that sex work is ‘just sex’, except that women are getting paid for it. This argument has two main advantages. Firstly, it serves to deconstruct the false dichotomy between ‘normal’, as opposed to ‘abnormal’ sexual behaviour and, for this, read consensual non-commercial heterosex in contrast to commercial sex. Consequently, this serves to destigmatize sex workers and the men who pay for sex. Prior research on the dominant discourses around consensual non-commercial heterosex suggests that three discourses are especially apparent: male sexual drive discourse, a permissive discourse, and a discourse of reciprocity (Gavey, McPhillips and Braun, 1999; Braun, Gavey and McPhillips, 2003). These discourses are echoed within men’s accounts of paying for sex.

Secondly, if we argue that sex work is just sex then we recognize the power relations inherent in all sexual contracts. The research by Holland, Ramazanoglu, Sharpe and Thomson (1998), for example, clearly shows the playing out of power and control in the sexual relationships of young women and men. Indeed, it has been argued that sex work is one of the few social contexts in which women, rather than men, are able to negotiate the terms of their sexual encounters (Warr and Pyett, 1999). However, research on sex workers and first person accounts of sex work are mixed. Whilst for some women sex work is just like any other kind of sex, for others sex work is very different to the private sex of their non-commercial intimate relationships.

Is Sex Work Ordinary ‘Work’?

In the 1970s, pro-prostitution prostitutes’ rights organisations began to promote the idea that prostitution was work, and should be seen as such. Organisations, such as the American COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), argued that being paid for an hour of sexual services was no different to being paid for an hour’s typing. The idea of sex work as ordinary work has developed considerable currency since then. Chapkis (1997, p.76), for example, argues: ‘Once sex and emotion have been stripped of their unique relationship to nature and the self, it no longer automatically follows that their alienation or commodification is simply and necessarily destructive’. For Pheterson (1996) the promotion of sex work as work serves to counter the ‘whore stigma’ which has shaped and defined women who sell sex as dirty and bad. More recently, Brewis and Linstead have argued:

Many responses to prostitution have tended to focus on the sex aspect rather than the work aspect, which constructs prostitution as a personal quality, part of the identity of the individual … we view prostitution as a work activity, as a job that people do, alongside many other more ‘normal’ activities which are not held to be definitive of their identity … Sex work is work and needs to be seen as such. It is economically and socially important to all of the societies in which it occurs (Brewis and Linstead, 2002, p.309).

It follows then, that within this context, sex work is just a job like any other and sex workers are like any other employees. Thus, sex workers should be entitled to the same rights and legal protection afforded to workers within other industries. Pyle (2001) notes that increasing numbers of women have migrated domestically and internationally in order to earn money within a largely restructured global economy. In her analysis of gendered global production networks she compares the numbers of women who have become sex workers, maids or domestics and argues that the growth of women in such networks is characterized by considerable risk and lack of security. Moreover, she argues that the development and maintenance of gendered global production networks is in the interests of many governments.

Many writers, activists and researchers would agree that sex work is work. Most importantly, women working in the sex industry use the language of trade and commerce to describe what they do when they exchange sex for money; they refer to sex work as the ‘business’ and to men who pay for sex as ‘clients’ or ‘punters’. Indeed, Mistress L, a London sex worker states:

Sex work is one of the few industries where women can earn far in excess of their male cohorts and this f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• 1 Men, Sex Work and Society
• 2 Researching Sex in Cyberspace
• 3 Bodies for Hire
• 4 Intimacy, Emotion and Romance
• 5 Sexual Pleasure and Erotic Performance
• 6 Doing the Business
• 7 Health, Risk and Sex Work
• Bibliography
• Index