Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business (8 page)

Clients who seek emotional intimacy and companionship present a challenge to the notion that commercial sex necessarily involves cold objectification. A study of call girls and their clients conducted decades ago concluded, “It would be an oversimplification to say that the men saw the call girl simply as a sex object. They wanted not a sex object, but a sex partner. … It was extremely important to them to like the woman they were with and to feel that she liked them.”
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When 438 clients in another study were asked if they would marry a prostitute, half said they would, which suggests that these men view at least some sex workers as more than sex objects.
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And a British study concurs: indoor clients were “respectful of sex workers as women and as workers rather than simplifying their identities as Others”; sex workers were not viewed “simply as bodies” or as “targets of sexual conquest” but instead as persons with whom one could have a meaningful personal connection.
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The men also sought providers who were independent entrepreneurs and had control over their work, and they avoided those who they sensed might be subject to third-party exploitation.
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This evidence clashes with the oppression paradigm’s depiction of all customers as callous or predatory misogynists.

Clients’ testimonials indicate that some of them, and perhaps large numbers, have had very good experiences with sex workers and feel that such activities have enhanced their lives. On The Erotic Review website, where clients rate their providers on a scale of 1 to 10, most of the ratings are at the high end: 8–10. This offers some quantitative evidence of the frequency of satisfaction, at least among patrons of the escorts who advertise on this site. But given that paid sex is both culturally transgressive and personally intimate, clients can and do experience it negatively. Some harbor fear of discovery, shame for engaging in disreputable behavior, guilt for betraying their wives or girlfriends, or dissatisfaction with the encounter itself (e.g., the sex was rushed or impersonal, performance problems for one or both parties, feeling manipulated or economically exploited).
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They complain that a particular sex worker engaged in the bare minimum of conversation, watched the clock, did not look at them during sex, became argumentative, or otherwise detracted from the experience. Some say that they were victims of false advertising, that is, that the provider they met did not look or behave as advertised. Yet others fear contracting a disease, feel embarrassed about paying for sex, regret spending time cruising online advertisements or prowling the streets, or feel they have “cheated” themselves by not pursuing a conventional relationship.
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Negative experiences are more common among first-time clients than among regulars; for the novice, engaging in this stigmatized activity can produce feelings of anxiety, embarrassment, nervousness, and disappointment.
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From the client’s perspective, therefore, a lot of things can “go wrong” physically or emotionally in a paid sex encounter, whether on the street or indoors. But it can also be a very satisfying experience.

For the workers, providing a comprehensive GFE has both advantages and disadvantages. One benefit is that time spent in nonsexual pursuits reduces wear and tear on the body, but the downside is that one has to feign intimacy with some clients who are not especially likable. The GFE can be quite draining for the provider, who must work hard to ensure that customers are comfortable, relaxed, and happy and to remain pleasant, witty, and attentive—while at the same time working to maintain behavioral rules and emotional boundaries. This tall order makes enacting the GFE “extraordinarily stressful work. … It calls for emotional labor of a type and on a scale which is probably unparalleled in any other job.”
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“Part of the art of prostitution is using sex to create a feeling of trust and intimacy, to bring people in touch with their own self worth,” writes Dolores French. “Regulars are sometimes hard to do because each time you see them you have to go deeper, you have to give more.”
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As one famous provider quips, “There’s a lot of talk in
escort circles of the Girlfriend Experience. That’s because it is by far the most requested thing we offer. I have been cuddled to within an inch of my life by well-meaning chaps whose only previous acquaintance with me was via a website.”
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Stress is amplified when a client violates the provider’s expressed boundaries, reveals unpleasant or troubling details about his personal life, begins to expect free sex, wants a date on demand, becomes obsessed, or falls in love.
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Street workers are largely free of these strains and are clearly not interested or equipped to engage in such extended emotion work, which is disdainfully called “honeymooning” by those on the street.
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Indoor providers’ views of their clients are predictably mixed—just as for any service occupation whose workers spend an extended amount of time with clients. Martha Stein’s research found that clients ranged from individuals who were disliked to those who were beloved.
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While some customers are demanding, disputatious, or hard to please, this does not appear to be the norm among clients of upscale sex workers. The call girls in Stein’s study liked most of their clients,
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and the researchers in an Australian study found that “most call girls have not had bad experiences, and more often than not they have positive things to say about their customers.”
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One British escort writes, “Compared to real relationships, these men [clients] are absolute pussycats, and easily pleased pussycats at that.”
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Natalie McLennan, who worked for the now-defunct NY Confidential escort service, states that most of her clients were looking for companionship and were “well-groomed, very well-mannered, well-educated” lawyers and businessmen who “work really, really hard and don’t necessarily have the free time to go out on dates. I didn’t hold back from finding things about my clients that were really attractive and really endearing to me. As a result, I definitely developed feelings for them.”
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Providers become quite fond of some of their regular customers, as two escorts confide:

The only way I can sustain regulars is if I actually like them and I may like them for different reasons. … Most of my regulars know who I am, so I can be myself, and I try to enjoy myself sexually too because I really hate wasting time doing things that I don’t want to do. … A number of my clients are intelligent men who are well informed and can carry on a stimulating conversation.
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To me they’re friends and I’ve never talked about them as “johns” or “jobs.” … I get as much pleasure from them as I like to think they get from me, and I’m not just talking about the sex but [also] building up a real rapport with them. … I treat them as I would a boyfriend.
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If the GFE is nothing more for some providers than “counterfeit intimacy”—a manufactured emotional connection with a client—other sex workers, like those just quoted, develop “authentic (if fleeting) libidinal and emotional ties with clients, endowing them with a sense of desirability, esteem, or even love.”
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The GFE may be precisely what the buyer desires—a brief but rewarding human connection free of the strains of a conventional relationship.

The GFE experience is most emblematic of the work of call girls and escorts and somewhat less common or elaborate in brothels or massage parlors. For the former, “a show of affection is offered their clients because the nature of their business depends on a ‘love nest’ scenario to attract clients, in contrast to the more obviously mercenary sexual services found in most brothels” and the limitations imposed by their managers.
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Nevertheless, the GFE is not monopolized by escorts; emotional bonds can grow between the regular patrons of a favorite masseuse or brothel worker as well. Another example is the sex workers that tourists meet at vacation spots, especially when the two parties end up spending days or weeks together, as discussed in the following section.

People buy sex when they travel abroad, including those who make special plans to visit a particular red-light district that caters to tourists. Some of these settings offer the possibility of a protracted engagement between the parties rather than a single, brief encounter. In many bars in Thailand, the Philippines, and the Dominican Republic, for example, men pay a bar fee to leave the club with a dancer or hostess and spend a night or several days together, perhaps visiting tourist sights, during which the man pays all expenses. Bar workers see these longer engagements as a means of securing upward mobility; hence, the sex trade is “a way not just to solve short-term economic problems but to change their lives.”
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But such relationships are not limited to material benefits; in Thailand, for instance, they also confer
status
on the women (from their peers) because foreign men are perceived as being more respectful toward women than traditional Thai men are.
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A minority of the foreign men become boyfriends and enter into long-term or serial relationships—sending email, gifts, and money from overseas and reuniting on return visits. Many of the women and some of the men are consciously seeking a long-term relationship, and some end up marrying.
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In this context, prostitution can be a precursor to prolonged and possibly permanent attachments.

Data are lacking on the number of male tourists who become involved in this open-ended kind of arrangement with a sex worker, but one study compared male tourists’ relations with prostitutes to their activities in their home country. Researchers interviewed 530 clients of prostitutes in Germany and 661 German sex tourists in Thailand, the Philippines, Brazil, Kenya, and the Dominican Republic. The length of the sexual encounter was a few hours or less at home in Germany (79 percent less than one hour, 21 percent one to two hours), whereas the sex tourists spent extended periods of time with a prostitute away from home (21 percent spent two or more hours but less than an entire day, 13 percent an entire day, 45 percent several days).
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Such protracted, noncontractual relationships—coupled with the indirect material compensation given to the women (rather than payment per sex act)—allow the men to view themselves as boyfriends rather than as clients and allow the women to view themselves as “having a string of individual relationships with men who just happen to pay her bills and support her family.”
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A similar dynamic occurs among gay tourists and male sex workers, for whom the contact begins as paid sex but can evolve into a romantic relationship. This dynamic is nicely illustrated in anthropologist Mark Padilla’s three-year study of the Dominican Republic.
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While some of the sex workers in the study wanted only short-term encounters, to avoid potential emotional complications, others were looking for more lasting associations because they are more lucrative, including gifts sent by the tourist after he returns home. Only about a third of Padilla’s Dominican respondents believed that they could fall in love with a foreign client, yet many did so, especially with clients who offered the greatest material support. Many clients were looking not just for sex but also for an authentic emotional relationship with a local man, and most of them held eroticized fantasies about “exotic” Caribbean men. Their racial and sexual stereotypes of the Other mirror the way many heterosexual male tourists view female sex workers in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. The women are stereotyped (and market themselves) as more compliant and nurturing than “demanding,” liberated women back home.
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The bonding phenomenon also has been documented in other places where foreigners have extended contact with local sex workers. Such settings include mining towns, military bases, and the harbors where foreign sailors spend rest-and-relaxation time. Many of the workers in waterfront bars develop multifaceted relationships with the sailors whose ships dock there and later revisit the place. Henry Trotter’s ethnographic study of nightclubs in the harbors of two South African cities explores this distinctive dockside
bar prostitution.
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For sailors who are interested in sex, it not
just
sex that attracts them to the bars: the bars also offer opportunities for binge drinking, playing pool, singing karaoke songs, watching TV, and dancing. Having been denied contact with women for so long at sea, the men seek their companionship through prolonged conversations and flirtation, while others are looking for sex as well. The women use the conversations to make the men care about them, holding out the hope of forging a serial relationship with a man or (even more prized) marrying and relocating to his country, which a few succeed in doing. The bars are rich geocultural intersections that broaden the workers’ horizons: “Through their continual interactions with foreign seamen, [the women] become major traffickers in culture, ideas, languages, styles, goods, currencies, genes, and diseases.”
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What is remarkable about these sites is the extent to which the women adopt multiple cultural toolkits and learn foreign languages, which they acquire through numerous conversations with the men. They are adept at using their international cultural capital to present themselves in a way that other local women cannot. Similarly, for bar workers in Thailand,

the work develops the emotional and practical knowledge and practices necessary to function in a variety of settings in a foreign language with foreign customers of higher status. … [When the sex worker spends days] accompanying foreign tourists, the sex worker sees a wider array of middle-class venues and tourist sites and partakes more often in leisure and consumption practices of the relatively well-to-do than do middle-class Thai women, let alone fellow villagers working in factories or private homes.
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