He says he didn't have a chance to meet people - so decided to pay for sex. In every other way we got on like a house on fire, but just not in bed. Robert squirrels away as much money as he can to buy sex. The idea that human beings could be for sale is ethically controversial. Yet sex workers often say they don't sell their bodies but, like other workers, simply put a price on their talents and skills.
They argue that, if sex work was decriminalised and destigmatised, the associated problems would mostly disappear. Is there anything wrong with selling sex? While Robert sees paying for sex as a way to preserve his marriage, Graham, in his 30s, thought it might be a way to avoid the complexity of relationships altogether.
For the first 30 years of his life, former civil servant Graham thought he would never be the sort of man who would pay for sex. But one weekend in Amsterdam he found himself walking the streets of the red light district with some men he had just met. A girl beckoned them, but two of the men dismissed her. She turned to Graham. He followed her to a red-lit booth and spent half an hour with her, chatting and having sex.
It felt really romantic, it felt like we were condensing a relationship into just a couple of minutes. Reflecting on his previous relationships and painful breakups, he wondered: "Maybe you don't need to do any of that. Maybe you can pay and have these just incredible moments of spontaneous, all over in half an hour… just… magic.
Simon, a shy man, has never found meeting women easy. At 29 he decided to lose his virginity by paying for sex. But he was never comfortable with his decision. But it hasn't stopped him regularly visiting the same woman over the last few years. Simon prefers to see the same woman because he is more relaxed with her than he would be with someone new.
But although he knows her quite well, he says he is under no illusions. Simon has had a couple of girlfriends in the last few years and while in those relationships, he says he stopped paying for sex. He hopes to be in another relationship again one day. Most people think of male prostitution as dangerous, degrading and exploitative work. Compared with men who have been arrested for soliciting a prostitute, the "hobbyists" are more likely to say that prostitution should be legal, that they would marry a prostitute and that prostitutes enjoy their work, the researchers found.
Whereas the authors of the new study argue that hiring prostitutes is not necessarily an ordinary behavior, they say there's also little evidence to show that it's inherently deviant or linked to psychological deficiencies. That's in contrast to findings by some anti-prostitution groups. The sex-buying men were recruited through ads in newspapers and on Craigslist, and they were more likely than non-sex-buyers to have a prior criminal history, to say they would commit rape if they could get away with it and to have coerced non-prostitute sex partners into sex.
There are undoubtedly some johns who act violently toward call girls, but the new study found that most sex-buyers were unlikely to buy into so-called rape myths that have been linked to violence against women such as the notion that most women report a rape to get back at a man.
In a study of johns sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, sociologist Udo Gerheim of the University of Bremen, Germany, found that many of these men are either sexually frustrated because they are not getting satisfying sex elsewhere or hedonists who want to live out their erotic fantasies in a red-light setting.
Many men feel freer to experiment within the context of commercial sex than with their wives or girlfriends, enabling them to expand their sexual range and to experience greater sexual fulfillment. Yet some researchers have identified emotional and psychological motivations among the men who purchase sex. Gerheim spotted a type of romantic john who imagines that he is having a genuine relationship with a prostitute based on mutual trust.
Kleiber also saw a romantic streak in many of his interviewees. These men, Kleiber explains, seem to be pursuing the ideal of love in a fee-for-service setting. They portray these relationships as intimate despite their commercial nature and limited scope, he adds. The behavior of male customers during their encounters with prostitutes also may suggest that they seek a social connection outside of coitus.
According to Kleiber's study, more than two thirds of devotees used the services of a particular prostitute more than 50 times. One in four had sex with the same prostitute more than times. But why would a man turn to a prostitute—as opposed to a girlfriend, wife or other consensual female lover—to satisfy his need for a social bond?
One reason may be that real relationships with women are risky and complicated, features that men do not always want and cannot always handle. Prostitutes are far less exacting than girlfriends and wives and may even be soothing to the psyche.
That is, an ordinary female date might reject a man or happen to be tired, distant or not in the mood. In contrast, sex workers generally accept their customers unconditionally and offer intimacy on demand, whatever their true feelings, says gender researcher Gunda Schumann, who co-authored a book on the psychology of prostitution.
In this view, ordinary men buy sex to deal with their psychological insecurities as well as their sexual needs. The idea that sex with a prostitute can be therapeutic dates back thousands of years.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh , a poem from ancient Mesopotamia, Enkidu—a friend of the king who is half wild—is civilized by having sex with a whore.
The tale portrays the prostitute as sacred because she sacrifices herself to the man to cleanse him of destructive inner forces. Other researchers disagree that prostitutes serve as a balm for the woes of essentially normal men. These are men, she says, whose sexual desire is switched on by not having to care about the prostitute as a human being—the opposite of the intimacy hypothesis. Sex with a prostitute, she says, is more about seeking revenge on women or exerting control over them than about a quest for intimacy and romance.
Some sex purchasers may even have a social agenda to go along with their personal predilections. Only there can men reestablish the traditional male dominance over women. Catering to such men, brothels in countries where these institutions are legal hawk women like merchandise on their Web sites. Some clubs even offer happy-hour specials. In the opinion of these dissenters, johns in the U. However toxic the activity might be to the men, the women often end up more seriously wounded by it.
At the very least, prostitutes suffer psychologically from trying to wall off their own emotions so that they can sell intimacy as a commodity. In addition, they often suffer from physical abuse at the hands of their customers.
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