Love and Sex with Robots_The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships

by David Levy

  In many parts of Europe, it has long been common practice for young men to receive their sexual initiation from a prostitute, though the numbers might be declining due to changing moral values that no longer place such stringent constraints on the sexual behavior of young unmarried women. A study carried out in Lisbon found that 25 percent of men in their sample of 200 had lost their virginity to a prostitute, while in a study in France some thirty years earlier, 47 percent of men who were practicing Catholics similarly had their first sexual experience in this way. Given that these particular statistics do not include those men whose first visit to a prostitute came when they were no longer virgins, it would appear that the overall figures for men who have had sex with a prostitute is significantly higher in these strongly Catholic countries than one might otherwise expect.

  Estimates from other developed countries vary considerably. From a national study on sexual attitudes and lifestyles carried out in Britain during the early 1990s, out of 19,000 households surveyed, only 1.8 percent of men responded that they had paid for sex during the previous five years. A second survey, published seven years later, noted an increase to 4.3 percent, but the authors questioned whether this was a genuine increase in numbers or whether it was because those surveyed for the later report were more willing to admit to their peccadilloes. Other studies include a 1991 national telephone survey in Switzerland, which estimated that 12 percent of men between seventeen and thirty years of age had visited prostitutes, and a study at about the same time by Cecelie Hoigard and Liv Finstad in Norway, that estimated the figure to be 13 percent. The difficulty in obtaining accurate estimates, even nowadays when people are more willing than in the past to discuss their sexual habits, is shown by the results of a survey in Holland: Only 3 percent of heterosexual men aged eighteen to fifty were willing to admit to having paid for sex in the previous year, whereas calculations based on the estimated number of prostitutes and the average number of clients that they serve per day put the figure at 16 percent. On other continents estimates are significantly higher, particularly in developing countries such as Thailand and the Philippines. In 1994 it was estimated that each day more than 450,000 Thai men visited prostitutes, while “prostitution, as an integral component of the tourist industry, is an important source of foreign exchange for the Philippine Government.”2

  These somewhat diverse statistics confirm that even though there is a wide variation in the percentages between countries, a huge number of men employ the services of prostitutes.

  Women Paying Men

  Some writers have thought that if buying sex is a benefit for men, it must also be a potential benefit for women, one they should be encouraged to seek out. Ericsson,* for example, argues that under the present unequal circumstances of sex work, “some benefit is withheld from or denied women that is not withheld from or denied men. The best way to deal with this inequality would not be an attempt to stamp out the institution but an attempt to modify it, by making the benefit in question available to both sexes.”

  —Christine Overall3

  It has always been the case that the number of male clients of female prostitutes far outweighs the number of women who pay men for sexual services. The principal reason for this, pointed out by Kingsley Davis in his 1937 article “The Sociology of Prostitution,” has been economic—the number of women who earned enough (or had jobs at all) to allow them to pay for sexual services has been considerably below the corresponding number for men. Nevertheless, the practice has existed since at least the late nineteenth century. In The Sexual Life of Our Time, Iwan Bloch refers to an anonymously written 1848 book, Prostitution in Berlin and Its Victims,† which

  contains an appendix on “prostituted men” (p. 207), who, however, are not homosexual prostitutes, but, according to the writer’s own definition, “men who make it their profession to serve for payment voluptuous women by the gratification of the latter’s unnatural passions.” This species still exists to the present day[i.e., 1909], but there is no particular name for the type. (In the seventies [the 1870s], in Vienna, men who could be hired to perform coitus were known locally as “stallions”—German Hengste.)

  In the pleasure-seeking boom of the post-prohibition United States, it was inevitable that men-for-hire-for-ladies would become a growth area within the world’s oldest profession. Ted Peckham quickly became famous in New York society during the mid-1930s for being able to supply presentable men who would satisfy the desires of his largely wealthy female clientele, on a strictly pay-as-you-go basis with a charge for overtime after midnight. For four years his agency, Guide Escort Services, was a booming success and very much in the public eye, even opening for business in Europe, but eventually the law turned against Peckham in the form of a writ accusing him of running an employment bureau without a license, a legal ploy designed to get around the problem that the authorities doubted whether any charges filed against him relating to prostitution could be made to stick. Peckham was prosecuted by the forceful gangbuster and district attorney Thomas E. Dewey, who later became governor of New York and was a Republican candidate for the presidency in two elections.* Peckham was found guilty by the judge (no jury) and was fined $250, with an additional sentence of three months in the workhouse suspended during his “good behavior” and “upon the condition that he not conduct this agency unless and until he has obtained from the proper authorities of the city of New York a license to do so.” Peckham duly gave up the escort business and became a writer.†

  Peckham may have been the exception rather than the rule during the 1930s. His notoriety did little to dent the assumption by most people that women have no need or wish to pay for sexual services, a view that prevailed at least until the advent of the boy-toy fashion in the early 1990s. This fashion, and the changing behavior patterns that accompanied and followed it, were all part of the new era of feminism, which encouraged women to assert their equal right to full and satisfactory sex lives. Enter Joel Ryan, a twenty-first-century version of Peckham, who runs a successful “escort” business called Heaven on Earth in Melbourne, Australia, catering to both male and female heterosexual clients (women make up approximately 40 percent of his client list). Brothels and escort services may legally ply their trade throughout much of Australia, as a result of which Ryan and his service have become something of a curiosity item in the media, including the subjects of a television film, What Sort of Gentleman Are You After? by the British documentary maker Jane Treays.*

  While Joel Ryan serves both men and women clients, a new brothel service announced in Valencia, Spain, was set up in 2006 by a woman exclusively for women. In Spain, as in most countries, visiting prostitutes is traditionally seen as una cosa de hombres (a men’s thing), with an estimated 25 percent of men having indulged, according to a survey by the Institute for National Statistics. And while the medical publisher Mundo Médico’s figure for Spanish women who have paid a gigolo is very much smaller at 2 percent, it is nevertheless higher than many people would expect, especially for a strongly Catholic country.

  “Charming Barbara,” the madam who opened and runs this particular Valencia brothel, was herself a sex worker for eight years. Then she set up an agency for female clients, offering male escorts, but soon decided to start a permanent luxury brothel. Barbara has had no shortage of men who want to work for her and is very clear about what her mostly professional executive clients want for their money, which can reach about €1,200 ($1,500) for a whole-night session: “I don’t want muscle men. Above all they must have good conversation.”

  The advent of the Internet has greatly facilitated prostitution, by making it possible to advertise, almost free of charge, to a huge potential client base. This freedom is being exploited by increasing numbers of men who advertise their sexual services to women in language that often leaves little to the imagination in terms of the advertiser’s claimed sexual prowess and size. In 2005, Isabel Kessler, at Middlesex University, investigated this growing trend. She found that between 1
50 and 200 male escorts offered their services to women in London via their own Web sites, which could be viewed free of charge. Kessler did not investigate the number of men advertising on so-called membership home pages, for which access is available only upon payment of a fee, so the figure of 150 to 200 can safely be assumed to be an underestimate. Typical of the charges quoted by these sites at that time were £100 ($180) per hour and around £450 ($800) for an overnight session.

  The comparatively recent growth in the heterosexual male prostitute business in the United Kingdom is almost nothing in comparison with a phenomenal surge in demand from financially well-off women in Thailand, noted in 2002 by Zenitha Prince in her article “Thai Female Elite Demand Black Gigolos,” which appeared in the independent newspaper of Morgan State University:*

  The long-perpetrated image of the black man as a sexual toy continues to flourish as the niche market for black male prostitutes in Thailand booms.

  Escort services are now importing hundreds of prospective black gigolos from Jamaica and Africa into the Asian country to satisfy the surge in the demand for these services among Thai female elite.

  A research project, recently completed by Associate Professor of Sociology Nither Tinnakul, from Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, puts the number of male prostitutes in Thailand at a staggering 30,000, triple the estimated amount of just two years ago….

  “I think the women want some equal rights you know [revenge against philandering husbands], some kind of freedom. She needs something,” Tinnakul said.

  Apparently, this is a need that these black foreign prostitutes or “forungs” have aptly satisfied. The report further stated that Thai women are paying upwards of 10,000 baht (243 dollars) per night for the servicers, who are “fiercer,” more “thrilling” in bed than their Thai peers and “well built.”

  A different form of prostitution for women clients has also been rising steadily in popularity in recent years—sex tourism, which is also referred to, with the benefit of a fair dose of delusion, as “romance tourism.” Sex tourism has of course long been popular with many men, who travel to Thailand, the Philippines, Bali, and elsewhere in the knowledge that the price of sex in their chosen destination comes very cheaply. For most of these men, the transaction is simple prostitution, sometimes for a single brief encounter and sometimes for longer, perhaps for most or all of their vacation if they meet a girl who gives them a really good time. For a few others, it is a means of finding a satisfying wife to take home.

  For women both the nature of the transaction in sex tourism and the treatment they are seeking differ from those of male sex tourists. Instead of a cash transaction that is overtly money for sex, often paid in advance, the payment comes in ways that the woman can rationalize as a gift, helping out the beach boy or the tourist guide and his family. “Most beach boys enter into sexual relationships with as many tourist women as they possibly can, and most of these relationships result in some form of material or economic benefit for the man. Some beach boys and hotel or bar workers engage in explicit sex for cash exchanges with male tourists, female tourists and/or tourist couples, but on the whole, the economic element of their sexual relationships with tourist women is less formally arranged.”4 These men play the game of pretending to be genuinely attracted to the women, of falling in love with them and wanting to marry them.* In turn the woman plays the game of enjoying being pampered and often deludes herself into believing that the man loves her and that she loves him. She buys him meals, buys him presents, and gives him money for a “sick relative” or on some other pretext, often repeating the cash gift after she returns home from her vacation. The whole process is described by Nigel Bowen in his article “Sugar Mamas”:

  It is not sex for sale; it is love for sale. These guys get girls by courting them, charming them, wooing them. Women are attracted to the romance of it. It is a fantasy to meet an exotic stranger on the street who seems to have fallen in love with you at first sight. Balinese men target women’s hearts: they’re sensitive, sweet, flattering and funny. And they’re also very clever about going for the Achilles heel. If a girl is fat, they’ll tell her she has a beautiful body.

  Prue (not her real name) is an exuberant fifty-four-year-old widow with a healthy bank balance and an even healthier libido. Three times a year, she locks up her home in one of Sydney’s more respectable suburbs and flies to Bali for the sole purpose of spending a week being sexually pampered by a teenager. “The Balinese say they love you, and of course I want to hear that, but at the end of the day, it is a business deal. At my age, money is their sole focus. I pay for the accommodation, meals, excursions and buy them gifts. At the end of the holiday, I slip several thousand dollars—enough to support their family for six months—into an envelope and leave it on the table for them.”5

  From the little published research that exists on the prevalence of women sex tourists, it appears that in some tourist destinations at least the practice is rapidly becoming commonplace. Jacqueline Sánchez Taylor surveyed 240 women who were on vacation alone in the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, asking them to complete a questionnaire for a study on tourism and sexual health. “A questionnaire was constructed which was designed to yield some basic data on tourist women who had sexual contact with local men, including their nationality, age, occupation and racialized identity; their perceptions of the ‘sexual culture’ of the host country; how often they had traveled to that country and other known sex tourist destinations; how many different local sexual partners they had and whether they perceived these relationships as ‘real love,’ ‘holiday romances’ or ‘purely physical’; whether or not they gave money or made other gifts to their local sexual partners; whether or not they took safe-sex precautions.”6 When responding to the questions about how they perceived their relationships with their local lovers, 39 percent of the women described it as a holiday romance, 22 percent as real love, and only 3 percent as purely physical. (A further 12 percent said it was both physical and a holiday romance.) Taylor found that part of the self-delusion process is due to “racist ideas about black men being hypersexual and unable to control their sexuality,” which enables the women “to explain to themselves why such young and desirable men would be eager for sex with older, and/or often overweight women, without having to think that their partners were interested in them only for economic reasons…Only women who had entered into a series of brief sexual encounters began to acknowledge that ‘it’s all about money.’”

  Almost one-third of those who completed Taylor’s questionnaire admitted to engaging in one or more sexual relationships with local men during the course of their holiday. These women ranged in age from girls in their late teens to women in their sixties, the most likely to indulge being those in their thirties to forties. About a quarter of the women surveyed said that they had been offered sex for money by local men, but not one of these woman admitted to have taken up the offer, so those who did engage sexually with the locals clearly did not accept that there was a commercial element to the relationship. This is despite the fact that 57 percent of the women who did take local sex partners acknowledged that they gave their lovers “help” in the form of cash, gifts, and/or meals. Taylor recognizes that because of underreporting, this figure “is unlikely to accurately describe the true level of economic benefits transferred to local men by these women.”

  Taylor also found that these women differ in terms of the type of sexual encounter they are after and the manner in which they rationalize these encounters. “Some are eager to find a man as soon as they get off the plane and enter into multiple, brief, and instrumental relationships; others want to be romanced and sweet-talked by one or perhaps two men during their holiday.”7

  Why Men Pay Women for Sex

  Several reasons have been identified as to why men pay women for sex—what the men want or expect from these sexual encounters. While the reasons vary somewhat from one country to another, there is one common underlying emotional need that appe
ars to be extremely widespread. It is the need for mutuality, the self-delusional feeling that the prostitute is a true partner in a relationship, however brief. This “myth of mutuality,” as Elizabeth Plumridge calls it, posits the typical prostitute as caring about the client and enjoying her intimacy with him. For the johns interviewed by Plumridge for her study, all of whom were clients at a New Zealand massage parlor, “pleasure rested on two postulates; on the one hand a complex of notions that revolved around relaxation from constraints and obligation, and on the other, a set of interpretations that relates to mutuality.”8 Plumridge found that these men wanted the myth of social warmth to be sustained from the moment they entered the so-called massage parlor and would complain “if the surface social pleasantries were torn away and the naked imperatives of sexual exchange for money revealed as the true purpose of the warm reception.” The johns in her study did not all claim that the prostitutes they visited loved them, but all of these men did ascribe some level of emotionality to the encounters, describing their visits in terms such as “very nice to be pampered, just the feel of it and the warmth.”

  This desire for reciprocity perhaps explains certain trends in the U.S. sex industry in recent years, away from brief gratification for the man and toward a warmer, more sociable environment for the sexual encounter, as explained by Elizabeth Bernstein:

  Those [ johns] who frequented indoor venues enjoyed the benefit of an arrangement that was structured to more effectively provide them with the semblance of genuine erotic connection. For example, interactions with escorts as opposed to streetwalkers are typically more sustained (averaging an hour as opposed to 15 minutes), more likely to occur in comfortable settings (an apartment or hotel room, rather than a car), and more likely to include conversation as well as a diversity of sexual activities (vaginal intercourse, bodily caresses, genital touching, and cunnilingus, rather than simple fellatio). The fact that street prostitution now constitutes a marginal and declining sector of the sex trade means a transaction that has been associated with quick, impersonal sexual release is increasingly being superseded by one which is configured to encourage the fantasy of sensuous reciprocity….