Prostitution and Clients’ Responsibility

Introduction

Prostitute, whore, call girl, escort, courtesan, fallen woman, harlot, hooker, hustler, slut, streetwalker, strumpet, tramp, or sex worker; the latter with a less negative connotation. An abundance of words surrounds prostitution, usually defined as the art or practice to engage in sexual intercourse for money. Although this definition admits only one agent, the action is relational and involves at least another subject: the one offering money for sex. Here the language is poorer and reduced to little more than a word: the client (john or punter in English-speaking countries). This linguistic disproportion is due to a crucial asymmetry in the discourse on prostitution—whether scientific, philosophical, political, or drawn from the media—starting with industrial modernity: while the condition of women who become sex workers had been growingly investigated as a psychological, social, and political issue, the motivations and attitudes of men who buy sex had been ignored for centuries. As the issue of prostitution was targeted mainly at women either as deviants or as victims, the sexuality of male clients was understood mostly through a hydraulic model—which is based on pressure and the need to immediately get relief of a natural drive—confirming the normality and naturalness of a moral “double standard” where prostitution served as an outlet for men’s sexual energy exceeding the boundaries of the monogamous marriage.

Against this background, what happened in the last decades of the twentieth century in the public understanding of prostitution in many countries across the globe marks a major change and overthrows the discursive order, with the focus shifting from the sex worker to the client. The modern industrial discourse on prostitution has been challenged by the emergence of the demand for sexual services out of the shadows which ensured its legitimacy for centuries, and its entrance into the public debate as a moral, political, and social issue. The process has involved on one hand social sciences, on the other hand the political, cultural, and juridical construction of sex workers and clients.

Though still undersized if compared with the parallel extension and proliferation of studies on sex workers, the empirical and theoretical production of studies on clients has greatly increased, shedding light on the irreducibly complex and diverse panorama of the demand for prostitution and outlining sociodemographic profiles and behavioral types as well (Wilcox et al. 2009). On the juridical–political side, between the late eighties and the new millennium a trend toward the criminalization of clients has emerged in the public discourse of many countries around the world. “There has been a repositioning of men who buy sex as ‘the problem’” (Sanders 2008a, 135), that is, the client—primarily intended as a male person—has growingly been depicted as responsible for the perpetuation and proliferation of the sex market and for its oppressive and victimizing effects on sex workers (Kulick 2005; Brooks-Gordon 2006; Bernstein 2007).

Clients’ responsibility is intended in this article both in a philosophical and in a juridical sense. On one hand, it is conceived as the moral capability (and duty) to respond to another or to oneself (from the Latin word responsus, pp. of respondere) accounting for one’s actions and their consequences (the sexual exploitation of vulnerable people, the perpetuation of unequal and oppressive gender relations, the existence itself of a sex market, etc.); on the other hand, in several national contexts, it has been framed as the condition of committing crime, violation, or offence against somebody (the sex worker) who figures as the victim of systemic as well as individual oppression. The assumption behind both conceptions is a radically negative representation of the sex market, as a place where the intimate act of sex is merged with the world of commercial monetary exchange. Thus, the social stigma surrounding clients (as morally deviant) and the statement of their penal responsibility tend to influence and reinforce each other.

In this article, I wish to show how the discourse on male responsibility in prostitution involves the risk of a unilateral interpretation of the sex market, which fails to capture—as in the past—its relationality and its extensive connections to the transformations of sexuality and economy. What I argue is that the turning point of view from the sex worker to the client should be taken instead as a chance to develop new gender-sensitive thinking on prostitution, fully recognizing the agency of both actors involved.

The Rise of a Men’s Issue in Prostitution

Today prostitution is an ever-growing market involving men, women, and transgender people both as purchasers and providers of sexual services. If this market raises an issue concerning male responsibility, it is due not only to the definite predominance of men who pay for sex over women but primarily to the historically conditioned nature of the practice, its rootedness into specific modalities of gender relations branded by material and symbolic inequality between men and women and by the oppression of the “second sex” (Beauvoir 1949). The traditional distinction between two modalities for men to express their sexuality—the conjugal mode and the mercenary mode external to marriage—defines two types of women, the good ones and the loose ones. In the social, political, and cultural organization of the “separate and unequal” society of the past (Giddens 1992)—where public sphere and private sphere, male and female, are quite distinct—men enjoy the privilege to move from one sphere to another while women should not cross the boundary of the public space, otherwise they will be singled out as transgressive bodies, public women, prostitutes (Wolff 1985).

Since the sixties, the Second Wave feminist critique has turned against this dichotomous view of women—wife and whore—and their political and social segregation in the domestic domain. Sex work is now interpreted moving from factors that lead to the more general oppression of women and are likely to be identified in the “sexual politics” of “patriarchy” (Millett 1969, 1976), exercised through social, political, economic, and linguistic institutions. Moreover, the feminist approach reverses the discursive order and investigates prostitution—usually addressed as a women’s issue—by bringing it back to why men demand women’s bodies to be sold in the capitalist market as if they were commodities (Pateman 1988). Male demand for an unconditioned access to women’s bodies in exchange of money, based on an alleged unchangeable physiology, is delegitimized. Commoditization practices are deconstructed as material and ideological effects of an economic, social, and cultural system built on male privilege.

Social sciences, especially from the eighties, have broken down the question “why do men buy sexual services?” into research programs, marking the transition from the recognition of a moral and political responsibility of clients to the production of theoretical and empirical studies, with an effective extension of the field of inquire in the sex market. No wonder those are the same years in which the interest on the male gender started to grow in the academia. Masculinity studies—frequently renamed with the plural Studies on masculinities—have raised primarily as a response to an intellectual and political challenge, the gradual disintegration of a traditional power construct affirming an unquestionable male dominance in the three Hegelian spheres of family, civil society, and State. Pushed and branded since the beginning by the same transversality as women’s studies, they have widespread among several disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences, from history to anthropology, from literary analysis to sociology (Kimmel 2008). Thus, the masculine symbolic order was pulled out of the closet under various inputs and eventually exited a paradox of invisibility, ceasing to be unnamable and untellable, hidden behind the presumption of universality.

Since the new effort to investigate men’s issues, driven by fundamental optimism about the ability to imagine change in masculinity toward new models released from sexism and patriarchy (Kimmel 1994), the interest in the world of prostitution was extended to male participants: male sex workers, pimps, and most of all clients. Studies by Holzman and Pines (1982), Månsson and Linders (1984), McKeganey and Barnard (1996), Campbell (1998), Sullivan and Simon (1998), O’Connell Davidson (1998), Prasad (1999), Weitzer (2000), Monto (2000), Månsson (2001, 2005, 2006), Sharp and Earle (2002), Bernstein (2007), Sanders (2008a, 2008b), Di Nicola et al. (2009), along with other important contributions, prove the growth of a specific interest among scholars for those whom Rosie Campbell (1998) address as the “invisible men” and Elroy Sullivan and William Simon (1998) describe as the “unseen patrons of prostitution.”

Studies on Clients: Making the Invisible Visible

Who are the invisible men emerging from the studies on the demand for prostitution? And why do they pay for sexual services? Since the eighties, studies on clients have abandoned both the paradigm of the early twentieth-century sexology—based on natural male sexual drive—and the psychopathological model proposed in the sixties by Charles Winick (1962) who interpreted the propensity to purchase sexual services as a sign of a mental disorder. The picture of clients drawn by empirical studies is rather that of men of any marital and socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and age.

Besides that, clients can significantly differ from one another. Teela Sanders illustrates the wide range of features belonging to men who pay for sex suggesting five typologies based on patterns and lengths of involvement in the sex market as well as on the trajectories of being a client: “Explorers” (starting at any age according to the desire for sexual experimentation, curiosity, fantasy); “Yo-yoers” (30s+, who stop patronazing sex workers when in a relationship and start again when the relationship becomes dissatisfactory); “Compulsives” (of any age, who enact compulsive behavior toward the planning and arrangement of a sexual encounter with a sex worker, until they find a satisfying relationship or therapeutic help); “Bookends” (who have initial sexual experiences with sex workers and go back to buy sex in later life as the ultimate chance to satisfy their emotional and sexual desires); “Permanent purchasers” (who buy sex sporadically throughout their whole lifetime; Sanders, 2008a, 48).

The representation of this irreducible multiplicity follows the ordinariness of visiting prostitutes, a practice which does not involve only people with specific characteristics, easy to identify and recognize, but is rather widespread across various social groups. Numerical estimates on the population of men who pay for sex in different countries around the world support this interpretation. The first dates back to the 1948 Kinsey report, which showed that two-thirds of the surveyed men (68 percent) had paid for sex at least once in their lifetime and that between 15 percent and 20 percent were regular clients (Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin 1948). More than half a century later, researches indicate a decrease in the use of prostitution, but still register a consisting percentage between 7 percent and 40 percent of the male population taking part to it (Månsson 2005). Impressive figures that, combined with sociopersonal data on johns, define the use of prostitution not as exception, deviance, disease of male sexuality, but as a normal practice or at least one of the possible forms through which contemporary masculinity expresses itself.

The same applies to the motivations of clients. According to Alfred Kinsey and his associates in the postwar United States, the main reason to visit prostitutes apparently resided within the desire to satisfy those practices considered to be perversions by all purposes, even punishable by law, that is, fellatio, oral sex. The years of the so-called sexual liberation, however, have muddied the waters and led scholars since the early eighties to dig deeper into the experiences and self-representations of clients. Answers to the question “why do you do it?” were therefore multiple, highly variable, or even different for each individual. However, the classification of information resulting from empirical research led to the formulation of categories of motivations behind the use of prostitution. Swedish sociologist Sven Axel Månsson proposed to distinguish five types of discourse (2005), which are widely recurrent in the extant literature: “The dirty whore fantasy” (expressions of contradictory feelings of curiosity, excitement, and contempt), “Another kind of sex” (beliefs that certain kind of sex cannot be experienced with a nonprostitute women), “No other women” (self-representations of inability to find another woman, due to shyness, fear, advanced age, physical, and mental disabilities), “Shopping for sex” (Images of sex as a consumer product), and “Another kind of woman” (antifeminist images of a true and natural femininity).

Given the plurality of individual characteristics trajectories and motivations, one must assume that “clients are male, trivially male” (Colombo 1999, 39). In political and cultural terms, this means scholars have to deal with the resistance of models based on patriarchal domination or, more often, on the (compulsive) reaffirmation of masculinity—shaken by the advancement of women’s achievements—within not fully isolable groups of the male population (Giddens 1992; O'Connell Davidson 1998; Kimmel 2000; Månsson 2001). Here is why today scholars and activists feel the urge to suggest directions for a possible transformation of male desire, in keeping with much of the studies on masculinities and male profeminist movements (Holmgren and Hearn 2009).

Public Policies on Prostitution: Criminalizing Demand

The need to recognize the responsibility of clients and to intervene on the demand for prostitution is embraced at the end of the twentieth century by what Bernstein (2007) defines the “Feminist State,” replacing the multifaceted representation proposed by the social sciences with the juridical-discursive construction according to which the purchase of sex is a pathology of desire and a deviant behavior. Over the past twenty years—with reference to the sex industry in many countries around the world, from the United States to some states of Australia, from Northern to Southern Europe—an “unprecedented strategy to channel State intervention in public expressions of heterosexual male desire” (ibid., 114) is profiled, interrupting—at least in appearance—the collusion between clients, law enforcement, and politicians, as denounced by many feminist scholars.

In 1993, Gail Pheterson pointed out as the effective approach to prostitutes and clients, even where states put in place prohibitionist policies, remained highly discriminating, especially in the matter of police interventions to enforce the ban on prostitution. The author explains this is “partly because law officials are either customers themselves or they identify with customers” (1993, 44). Also Italian feminist Roberta Tatafiore denounced in the same year the coincidence of the interests of the clients “with those of the State in all its joints” (1997, 126). As noted by Bernstein (2007, 138), “Pheterson and other critics would never have predicted that, by the mid-90s, municipal and national governments might actually intervene to challenge and reconfigure patterns of male heterosexual consumption, and even mobilize feminist arguments in the service of such interventions.”

During 1998, Sweden was the first country to propose and approve a measure to counter prostitution focused on differential treatment for clients and prostitutes, overthrowing the traditional model that punished those who sold sexual services rather than those who purchased them. The reason to punish only one agent lies in the interpretation of prostitution as physical abuse and an expression of gender inequality: according to the Act (Ministry of Labour, Sweden 1998, 55), “it is not reasonable to punish the person who sells a sexual service. In the majority of cases at least, this person is a weaker partner who is exploited by those who want only to satisfy their only drives.”

Sweden has thus established a model of State intervention on prostitution—which can be defined “neoprohibitionist” (Danna 2006)—based on the reversal of the roles traditionally ascribed to the two actors: “the vision that has been emerging recognizes the client as the only responsible for the existence of prostitution: the demand is the trigger for the supply and the trafficking in women” (ibid., 36). Measures inspired by the Swedish model were introduced in Norway (2009), Iceland (2009), England (2009), and in Northern Ireland (2008). In Italy the last attempt (which remained a proposal) to reform the law on prostitution (Merlin Law) had the purpose to introduce severe penalties for sex workers who solicit in public (the traditional target of right-wing policies) as well as for clients caught in the act. As for the United States, in big cities like New York and San Francisco (where prostitution is illegal) police operations to arrest clients in the streets have intensified since the late nineties. The purchase of commercial sex is therefore problematized across the globe, revealing the client to be the major agent in a relationship based on women’s oppression.

How could the common perception of men paying for sex shift from irresponsibility toward responsibility, from the naturalness of this practice to its being antimodern and opposite to the advancement of gender equality? According to Sanders (2008a), three separate processes may have contributed to the determination of this transformation in the public discourse. The first is the radical feminist agenda for abolishing prostitution as a form of violence against women, where men are blamed for the demand for sexual services perpetuating oppression and abuse. The second is the growth of urban activism against prostitution animated by upset community residents and fuelled by media stereotypes of clients as “sexual predators and perverts warring increased police attention and official policy response” (ibid., 136). The third is the shift of conservative attitudes toward sex and sexuality, away from “deviances” related to sexual orientation (homosexual) toward other “deviances” related to heterosexual behavior “that continue to be cast as abnormal, unpleasant and not to be tolerated but instead controlled” (ibid.).

The tendency to criminalize the use of prostitution is therefore very close to its pathologization (Kulick 2005; Bernstein 2007; Sanders 2008a), implying the possibility of treatment and rehabilitation. In Swedish cities such as Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmo, so-called KAST groups—that is groups of social workers who assist clients through the provision of counseling aimed at launching psychotherapeutic treatment—were activated. “According to the official vision in Sweden, the purchase of sexual services is always problematic. Therapists believe men to be wrong because they sexualize other feelings like mourning, sadness or anger. The alternative would be to deal with such feelings for what they really are” (Danna 2006, 51). In sum, the psychotherapist is willing to replace the prostitute and to begin a process where the patient recovers from alleged pathologies driving him toward the search for satisfaction in paid sex (e.g., sex addiction).

Other strategies of correction and normalization of heterosexual desire can be found among John Schools in the United States, that is, schools for clients (john in American slang) who were arrested for the first time in flagrante delicto (in the negotiation or consumption of sexual service) and may barter a fine or imprisonment by enrolling in paid courses. These classes provide complex information on prostitution and its negative impact on the people who engage in it. The same ratio foresaw the establishment of the Kerb-Crawler Rehabilitation Programmes (KCRP) in the United Kingdom. The purpose of such an intervention is to prevent recidivism and to reduce customer demand, increasing awareness around the more negative aspects of sex work but also claiming what Bernstein (2007, 135) defines a “firm reassertion of the primacy of marital domesticity.”

Both the idea of therapeutic help (counseling) and that of rehabilitation through cognitive processes (school) imply that the men’s demand for paid sex always reveals a troubled personality, the inability to express one’s sexual desire in other relational contexts, particularly in situations of emotional and sentimental investment. Punitive and rehabilitative actions on the demand for prostitution transform the split between love and sex—which is a foundational element in the construction of modern Western masculinity (Seidler 1989)—into pathology. Public intervention addresses, albeit implicitly and with little effect, a culture of masculinity that collides with the values of gender equality. The man who visits sex workers embodies eventually “the sociocultural excess that the discourse of gender parity produces in order to eliminate” (Kulick 2005, 225).

The effectiveness of rehabilitation programs, as that of counteractions in general, is not easy to evaluate (Monto and Garcia 2001; Campbell and Storr 2001); it is quite sure though that countries in which the visible face of prostitution is opposed (especially on the street), many experience the emergence of alternative anonymous and invisible spaces for paid sex across clubs, apartments, and the web. That is, neither the prosecution nor the corrections produce the much desired effect of eliminating the demand for paid sexual services. How should one evaluate this failure in respect of the construction and transformation of models of masculinity, the discourse of men responsibility in the sex trade, the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the market?

For a Critique of “Neoprohibitionism”

Abundant criticism has been raised against neoprohibitionism in countries where it came into force, arguing that such policies are based on a prejudicial understanding of the sex market with reference both to the supply and the demand for sexual services. This causes the anticlients approach to be not only limited in effectiviness but also to produce contradictory effects in respect of gender equality and the protection of sex workers’ rights.

Referring to the KCRP in the United Kingdom, Teela Sanders affirms that rehabilitation programs tend to be ineffective because they do not examine the sexual behavior, sexual desires, and sexual and emotional needs of the clients, therefore essentially ignoring “the root cause of why men visit sex workers” (2008a, 156). In particular, clients’ desire for a (commercially bounded) relationship with sex workers finds no recognition in the legal and moral construction of the sex buyer performed by neoprohibitionism. Not only that, but according to Sanders the enrollment itself in a rehabilitation program— given its negative bias—aggravates the emotional and relational problems which are at the origin of clients’ demand for paid sex. The programs, in short, turn out to be criminogenic: while not affecting clients’ behavior and its causes, they rather discursively produce criminal and sexual deviance.

Although the empirical and theoretical interest about the clients and the political–legal approach targeted at them have grown in parallel in recent decades, within neoprohibitionist interventions there is an apparent disconnect between research and policy, a lack of attention by decision makers to the composite panorama of studies on the demand for prostitution. The “fear of the ‘user’” that has strongly influenced social and criminal justice policies in many parts of the world is the result of a cultural construction based on “distorted information” (Sanders 2008a, 175). Misinformation is, in turn, the secondary effect of a representation of the sex market increasingly compressed on the phenomenon of trafficking and sexual exploitation. Part of the depiction of males as violent and dangerous clients steams from their association with the most degrading and coercive expressions of the sex market. In the case of Sweden, prevention campaigns targeted at clients was often explicitly associated with disseminating information on international trafficking: the buzz around the film Lilja Forever by Lucas Moddysson—the true story of a young Lithuanian forced into prostitution in the Scandinavian country (Danna 2006)—is a clear example of such strategy.

Male responsibility then becomes a rhetorical instrument in a public discourse that feeds moral panic toward sex work (Sanders 2008a; Hubbard and Sanders 2003). The stigmatization of the purchase of sexual services as a behavior heavily biased by gender inequality and the representation of clients as responsible for the most oppressive, coercive, violent forms in the exercise of prostitution, are nothing but the new version of an old habit: the exclusion of prostitution as a legitimate profession from the public sphere and from the access to rights.

The criminalization of the client—despite and perhaps because of the stated goal to protect sex workers and to reverse the secular direction of action on prostitution—holds unilateral positions and partial views on the sex market: sex workers described only through the passive and helpless victim role, with no consideration on the relative size of choice and will—that is to say agency (Hubbard, Matthew, and Scoular 2008); counteractions limited solely on visible prostitution on the streets (Bernstein 2007); persistence of a “hard core stigmatization of prostitutes” (Danna 2006); hidden concern for the protection of national borders from the “invasion” of foreign sex workers (Kulick 2003); clients represented as the direct perpetrators of violence against women forced to lose their bodies in unwanted intercourses by pimps or by their own misery (Agustín 2007).

Thus, it can be argued that the shift of focus from sex workers to clients retains the same stigmatizing lens (pathologization/criminalization) of the past, and the same tendency to focus only on one agent within the construction of prostitution as a social, political, and moral problem. In the end, there is no room for a different interpretation of prostitution moving far away from the traditional one and rather consisting of the relationship between different actors displaying their own needs, desires and rational behavior, resulting in complex geometries among gender, sexuality, and power. Moreover, the neoprohibitionist description of sex trade tends to isolate the purchase of sexual services from the social economic and cultural institutions in which this practice is historically laced, struggling to account for the gap between theory and practice when it comes to the relationship between progress in gender equality and development of prostitution demand.

“For generations of social thinkers, there has been an assumption that women’s increasing partecipation in legitimate paid employment and a decline in the gendered ‘double standard’ would eliminate the social reasons behind the existence of prostitution, as well as other commercial sexual activities” (Bernstein 2007, 2). Yet at a time when women show historically higher levels of participation in the labor market in almost every country in the world and changes in sexual morality undermine the survival of the sexual double standard wife/prostitute, “the sex industry has not ‘whitered away’ as predicted but has instead continued to flourish. Furthermore, it has diversified along technological, spatial and social lines” (ibid.,2-3). Are we to believe that the pace of gender equality goes along with more and more pervasive phenomena of reactionary assertion of male dominance? Or should we recognize that along with male revanchism and men’s research for compensation due to economic/social/sexual disempowerment, the demand and supply of prostitution is fed also by the normalization of a non relationally bound, “recreative” sexuality (Laumann et al. 2004), by the growing compenetration of intimate life and the market (Zelizer 2005; Russell Hochschild 2003), by intensive commoditization of sexuality in a consumers’ society (Baudrillard 1970)?

The prostitution-as-violence-against-women paradigm, where clients figure as perpetrators, is anchored to a transhistorical representation of sex work in general and of prostitution demand in particular; the latter due to a supposed immutable masculinity (Bernstein 2007). Responsibility weighs on men who buy sex as if this was an original sin of their gender. A nonprejudicial view of the sex market should instead extend to people of all gender and sexual orientation engaging in it both as clients and as workers, and call for a rights-aware attitude in consumerist behavior and in relationship with otherness—whether sexual, socioeconomic, or racial.