Self-identity, at the heart of which is sexual identity, is not something that is given as a result of the continuities of an individual’s life or of the fixity and force of his or her desires. It is something that has to be worked on, invented and reinvented in accord with the changing rhythms, demands, opportunities and closures of a complex world.101
So the sexual search, with its experimentations, is considered necessary, and since experimentation is considered perverse and criminal inside western families, it must happen outside. The desire to leave home and relate to other people intimately is deemed positive, and if there were no hegemonic condemnations of promiscuity, infidelity and paid sex, there would be no contradictions here. However, these are all still censured, and those who buy sex rarely admit it publicly (although speaking about it privately can contribute to the construction of heterosexual masculine identity).102 Changes in attitudes about sexual behaviour look different through the lens of gender: girls are denounced for promiscuity, not boys. There is resistance to the idea that women might want to watch others have sex, have multiple sexual partners, engage in public or anonymous sex or pay for sex – as well as be paid for it.103 Eric Ratliff discusses advertising and entertainment messages that ‘effectively communicate the ideals of personal improvement’ as well as sexuality as an ‘expression of self’ for rural women migrants working as hostesses.104
The hydraulic-drive model of sexuality has been the subject of debunking for some time,105 particularly the idea that men have great sexual ‘needs’, which is called a myth oppressing women.106 Nevertheless, the discourse of sexual liberation is still strong, and the contemporary proliferation of sexual images and opportunities is often ascribed to a ‘de-repressing’ of the population – continuing the notion that we are progressing towards complete sexual enlightenment. In this context, commercial sex appears to be part of today’s wide-open, sexy consumerism.
Weeks believes that ‘choice of lifestyles is central to radical sexual politics; choice to realize our sexual desire, choice in the pattern of sexual relationships, choice in our general ways of life’.107 Could this choice on behalf of sexual identities apply to commercial sex? Is being a ‘client’ or ‘sex worker’ an analogous identity to those based on sexual orientation or gender? If identities are multiple, shifting and temporary, perhaps so. In contemporary capitalist markets, objects, experiences and services that not long ago were unavailable now multiply before our eyes; consumers are urged to buy products that enhance their personal lifestyles, and entrepreneurship is celebrated for providing an immense explosion of spaces where we can be entertained and served in new ways. There is nothing economically mysterious about the increase of sexually oriented shows and services on offer.
Urry classifies tourist gazing, a form of consumption, as collective, when the presence of other people adds to the experience, and romantic, when privacy is important.108 Both are available in the sex industry, where clients drink, eat, dance, relax, take drugs, meet friends, do business, impress partners,watch films, travel, and pay for sex.
Everything seems to indicate that sex clubs are little by little becoming places where the role of sexual demand is giving way to a tissue of more complex interactions . . . [These places] are assuming a new role, that of a social place to which groups of men go without specifically seeking a sexual relationship with the women they find there, but rather having fun amongst themselves until early morning hours.109
Elizabeth Bernstein describes this commercial sex as recreation as ‘a reconfiguration of erotic life in which the pursuit of sexual intimacy is not hindered but facilitated by its location in the marketplace’.110 Nonetheless, the question repeatedly heard about this consumption is framed as individual aberration:‘Why do men buy sex?’
The Motivation to Buy Sex
Why is asked about this purchase as it is about few others. In polemics against ‘prostitution’, clients are described as exploiters, colonisers, victimisers, perverts, people with sexual or psychological problems or simply as immoral (the past’s libertines).111 Westerners questioned in Thailand and the Caribbean expressed disagreeable, disrespectful, power-oriented, colonialist and racist attitudes about women to one research team,112 and there is no doubt that men sometimes say these things. But another researcher found tourists who feel victimised by women they paid,113 and tourists’ concerned and affectionate letters to women left behind paint yet another picture.114 The context for such remarks must always be considered: who asks the questions, where, in front of whom – a spectrum of methodological and ethical issues influencing how people react to being questioned that are crucial when sexual issues are at stake.
Studies of client motivation that consider ideas about masculinity in different cultures question the separating of sex industry sites from hostelry and entertainment sectors (taverns, bars, discotheques, cafés, restaurants) and the health and well-being sector (saunas, massage parlours, body therapies). Martha Stein observed more than a thousand clients and 64 call girls, concluding that clients used these occasions for stress reduction and counselling.115 Anne Allison’s study of Japanese middle-class businessmen reveals the importance of homosociality among male work colleagues who spend time together away from rigid workplace hierarchies;116 Alyson Brody questions the Cartesian separation of mind from body as inadequate for understanding Thai notions of maleness.117 In an ethnography with older street workers and their clients in Spain, Angie Hart demonstrates the fullness of their relationships.118 Paul Lyngbye reveals the cognitive dissonance between the conventional denunciation of clients and their own feelings about what they are doing.119 Roberta Perkins, in a study of 1,000 clients of sex workers in Australia, finds them to be no different from everyone else, across age, social, labour, religion and marriage categories.120 In research on gentlemen’s clubs in the US, where dancers offer nude dancing, company and conversation but no touching,Katherine Frank shows how regular patrons want to indulge in fantasies about sex in spaces where gender relations are not like daily life.121
Replies to the question ‘why do you pay for sex?’ are nonplussing.
I didn’t do anything different with my wife from what I did with whores. What was the difference, then? With my wife there was the problem of obligation, the fact that being married we couldn’t go back, [so] the idea of being able to choose was liberation.
It’s something I do as a distraction. To do something different from ...
I don’t know ... going to a film.122
It keeps my marriage together. My wife won’t try anything different, so I go to prostitutes.
I’ve never liked going out drinking with groups of lads, clubbing it, looking for girls. I find it difficult and a hassle to go through all the chatting up and all the trying to get off with them. This is easier.
It’s so exciting partly because I shouldn’t be doing it.123
It’s different to lovemaking. It’s lust and it’s great to have something new and different whenever you want it.124
There are sailors or businessmen who want a quick fuck. Others have matrimonial problems or don’t like lasting relationships. There are people who don’t look good, or who are handicapped. But there are also people who simply like to vary, or who want to enjoy sex in their own way.125
I came to these places occasionally even though we had a good sex life in the sense that my wife was well satisfied and so was I. Like most males, every now and then I have a need, a craving, for a different female.126
Could this be all there is to it? Or is there a problem in the directness of the question, which assumes the interviewee is engaged in doubtful, if not reprehensible, activities? Knowing that so many condemn clients’ desires as the eroticisation of poverty or race, violence, perpetuation of the madonna/whore dichotomy or a need to feel masculine and powerful, it is no wonder that clients are reluctant to talk about deeper desires and fantasies (if they have any). And of course, it may be that most people asked the question ‘why do you – ?’
do not know the answer themselves.
The desire for sex is often compared to the desire for food:
It is said that people who go in for sex without love are missing a lot. That may be true, but it provides not the slightest argument for never having it without love. You might just as well say that because the pleasantest way to eat was with friends at dinner parties, no one should eat in any other.127
Carol Pateman and others dismiss such arguments as reducing commercial sex relationships to contracts, without considering the power structures in which they occur.128 Some say the difference between a demand for most services and a demand for domestic and sexual ones lies in the buyer’s interest in ‘the person’ of the worker – in his or her distinct personal identity and appearance.129 But many consumers think about these when they select other kinds of human service-providers, too.
Then there is the question of the size of demand for sexual services. A French report calculated in 1977 that an average of 40,000 men a day had sex with ‘prostitutes’.130 In 1996, a Spanish NGO speculated that 300,000 ‘prostitutes’ might have three clients a day, making a million men buying sexual services every day in Spain.131 The media, national governments, the European Parliament and the UN continually cite high figures for both ‘trafficking’ and ‘prostitution’, most of which are crude extrapolations from estimates that were unreliable in the first place. The calculations of one Roman street worker in 1988 are more specific:
Rome was known to have 5,000 prostitutes. Let’s say that each one took home at least 50,000 lire a day. Men don’t go more than once a day. That means that for someone who asked 3,000 lire in a car, to arrive at 50,000 she had to do a lot, maybe twenty or so. Figure it out, 20 times 5,000 comes to 100,000 clients. Since it’s rare for them to go every day, maybe they go once or twice a week, the total comes to between 400,000 and 600,000 men going to whores every week. How many men live in Rome? A million and a half. Take away the old men, the children, the homosexuals and the impotent. I mean, definitely, more or less all men go.132
The extent of demand can be presumed also from the probable presence of hundreds of thousands of migrants selling sex in Europe. The point is, given such a large market, that customers cannot be exceptional cases or technically ‘deviants’. Even an attempt to generate a profile for men who buy sex from children found that proper ‘paedophiles’ form a tiny subgroup of conventional social characters (seamen, businessmen, migrants, aid workers) who pay for sex opportunistically and ignore the ages of the people they buy it from.133 The only conclusion possible is that in all cultures and countries, many males consider it permissible and conventional to buy sex.
Buying Services Away from Home
Development workers, international civil servants, representatives of multinational corporations and diplomats, often with large incomes, employ housekeepers, maids and nannies for little money and grant them few rights.134 Some employers treat these employees as chattels, ‘bringing them along’ when they move.135 But despite these widespread abuses, ‘sex tourism’ receives all the attention and alarm. Many paying for companionship and sex in countries other than their own repudiate the term, as do people who provide services.
‘Sex tourism’ causes scandal as the patriarchal, imperialist and racist exploitation of poverty, but this is oversimplified. To begin with, it is impossible to separate this kind of tourism from others; many who seek out interludes of paid sex have other agendas, such as ecotourism or seeing cultural monuments. The activities exist everywhere, not only on sunny beaches.136 Some travellers consciously seek out sex, while others passively let it seek them out.
Many western travellers celebrate the sexual and affective possibilities in poorer countries, complaining that women are too feminist and commercial sex is overly industrialised in the west, where timekeeping and pricing-per-item are the norm.137
It’s by the hour, like a taxi service, like they’ve got the meter running ... Here it’s different. They’re not professionals. They enjoy sex, it’s natural to them ... they’re affectionate ... They even kiss you. A prostitute in Europe will never kiss you. (Canadian man in the Dominican Republic)138
The women reach maturity earlier here ... the very climate makes them behave differently. (Portuguese man in Brazil)139
Oh, the Italians, you can’t say anything to them, everything offends them, the Italian woman has a conflict of identity, they’re full of feminist ideas. (Italian man in Brazil)140
These travellers value the open-ended, ambiguous sexual relations that can be slipped into on holiday, which suggest friendly gift-giving more than contracts.
The foreigners are different, as far as caring is concerned. In the experiences I’ve had, sex wasn’t just sex ... There was caring, that exchange, conversation. (Brazilian woman in Brazil)141
They know how to make a man feel looked after. Squeezing the toothpaste onto the brush so it’s waiting for you when you go into the bathroom in the morning, that’s what I call caring.How many women in England would do that? (Englishman in Thailand)142
Some tourists know that their new friends are only pretending affection but don’t mind, because they see themselves to be pretending as well.143
In the club, they were granted safety from the struggle to attract ‘real’ women, from the necessity to form ‘real’ commitments and from the demands of those ‘real’women on their time and emotions.144
It doesn’t matter if they really like me or not, but if they want to receive drinks or a tip they have to pretend that they enjoy my company and I have to believe it ... I don’t really care to have a long-term relationship at this time, but I do want to believe that such a relationship is possible. (US man in the Philippines)145
Cohen explains how emotional labour is essential to making brief touristic experiences satisfying:
Purely commercial attitudes on the part of the hosts ... rob the tourists’ relationships with them of much of their attractiveness. Pro-fessionalisation in tourism ... finds one of its expressions in the ability of the service personnel to provide ‘personalised service’ – a form of ‘staged authenticity’ in which relationships based essentially on economic exchange are camouflaged to appear as if they were based on social exchange.146
Besides this staged authenticity or emotional labour, those working with foreigners offer flexibility, working as guides, drivers, cultural and linguistic interpreters, sport and dance instructors and protectors against swindles. Touristic sites attract people from other parts of the country, who then make up an informal market in crafts, dance, local sports, religious rituals, typical food and drink, hair-braiding and beach massages, as well as drugs and sex. Many service-providers, as well as their clients, resist being labelled as objects of sex tourism when sexual contact is only one service among many.147
While governments may denounce ‘sex tourist’ practices or native ‘prostitutes’ who bother tourists, host countries generate images of themselves as beautiful, friendly and natural through advertising and through assuring that friendly subjects are actually present in tourist environments. Malcolm Crick’s guide in Kandy sums up the flexible local:
Felix had a short list of addresses of tourists with whom he had been friendly over the years ... Most on this list were women with whom he had been on trips around the island. At the start of such trips, he would state the price of his company, but if he grew to like his companion, he would tell them at the end that they could give him whatever gifts they liked. Of course he would have enjoyed several days’ travel, good food, good accommodation and probably sex, but he made a qualitative distinction between such relationships and a simple business arrangement. As has been recognised in other cultures, such relationships with foreigners can have a profound psychological significance, which terms like ‘tout’ or ‘prostitute’ do not adequately convey.148
Though there has been some attempt to position women tourists’ search as romantic rather than sexual,149 most research rejects this distinction.150
Opportunities open up for male natives, and gay tourism is no different.
Though the boys prefer girls of their own age, they do understand that older women often find themselves in a more secure economic position and of a better purchasing power, which makes them highly attractive as sexual partners promising a ticket to a better life ... 151
The boys had refused money in return for their sexual favours. But since it was assumed that some form of reciprocity other than free lodging was to take place, he and Alexander had decided on the shopping trip, where they would buy their tricks a number of goods.‘Stuff here is so cheap for us anyway. It’s really no problem.’152
The issue of emotional labour arises here, too.
The thing is, it is a particular skill, that’s why they’re in the bars – they can do the necessary play-acting, they can convince the punter that he’s what they’ve been waiting for all their life. And because you are at the centre of your own life, you don’t think ‘Oh she’ll be doing the same thing with somebody else tomorrow or next week.’ You think you’re special or different.153
When I find out what the customer wants, then that is who I am. If he likes someone to talk to, then I can do that; if he wants someone to be like his girlfriend then I can do that too. I am good at figuring out what others want from me. (Filipina in the Philippines)154
Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry Page 10