What money buys: clients of street sex workers in the US

Abstract

The article presents a review of current theoretical and empirical approaches to sex work, followed by the presentation of an original theoretical framework (Della Giusta et al., 2006), which is tested with an econometric model of the characteristics of demand for sex services by a sample of clients of street sex workers in the US. We present findings in relation to stigma and the relationship between paid and unpaid sex that corroborate our model's hypotheses and are in line with findings from other empirical studies. Furthermore, we identify in our sample two diametrically opposite profiles: one for clients whom we label ‘experimenters’, and one for more experienced ones that we name ‘regulars’, we also estimate attitudes toward risk, and draw implications in terms of both policy and future theoretical and empirical research.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge helpful comments and suggestions received by Francesca Bettio and participants at the 2004 Annual Conference of the International Associati on for Feminist Economics in Oxford, at the workshop ‘Analysis of migration flows at risk: prostitution and trafficking Torino 17-17 March 2006’. We would like to thank also an anonymous referee for helpful suggestions. We gratefully acknowledge research funding from the Department of Economics Cognetti de Martiis (ex-60% research funding 2004) and from MIUR (Italian Ministry of Research and University) under the grant PRIN 2005–2006 ‘Analysis of migration flows at risk: prostitution and trafficking’. Wegratefully acknowledge The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (aunit within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, USA), which provided the data. Data are available and downloadable from: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu:8080/ABSTRACTS/02859.xml?format=ICPSR The views expressed in this article are those of the authors.

Notes

¹The sample was taken by distributing a survey to customers of a Sexpo exhibition hold in Melbourne 2001. This is a commercial event hosting a wide range of exhibitors of products associated with sex; of 4.905 respondents, 1225 received a version of the questionnaires with questions on sex workers. Among 1225 respondents, 612 were men and 601 were women.

²Dispatches: Sex on the Street; Channel 4 season Prostitution  – The Laws Don’t Work, Channel 4, September 2002.

³The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (a unit within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, USA) provided the data. Data are available and downloadable from: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu:8080/ABSTRACTS/02859.xml?format=ICPSR

⁴Though refusals constituted the largest single category of noncompletions, language barriers and late arrivals also accounted for a substantial proportion. Of these 1342 respondents, 36 from San Francisco and 15 from Las Vegas completed a Spanish-language version of the questionnaire. Completing the English version of the questionnaire were 950 men from San Francisco, 254 from Las Vegas, 77 from Portland and 10 from Santa Clara.

⁵The nationally representative sample data of The National Health and Social Life Survey, are provided by Monto (2000b). The survey data are collected by personal interviews and self-administered questionnaires, and provide information on the sexual experiences as well as social, demographic (race, education, political and religious affiliation and occupation), attitudinal (amongst which attitudes toward pre-marital sex, the appeal of particular sexual practices, levels of satisfaction with particular sexual relationships) and health-related characteristics. The overall response rate was 78.6% of the 4369 eligible respondents selected for inclusion in the study. The sample reported in Table 1 includes only the nonmissing values.

⁶Because men in the sample were almost all arrested while propositioning a decoy posing as a sex worker, it is possible that some had never before sought out a sex worker or had not successfully completed the transaction.

⁷Rape myths are attitudes that have been shown to support sexual violence against women. Rape myths are ‘prejudicial, stereotyped, or false beliefs about rape, rape victims, and rapists’ (Burt, 1980, p. 217) that serve to justify or support sexual violence against women and diminish support for rape victims. They include the idea that women who are raped are in some way responsible for the violence against them, the idea that women often lie about being raped for selfish reasons and the idea that only sexually promiscuous women are raped.

⁸The choice of the number of factors is based on the number of eigenvalues of pattern/correlation matrix, which is the covariance matrix of the standardized variables, which are >1. Eigenvalues for a certain factor measures the variance in all the variables, which are grouped into that factor. The ratio of eigenvalues is the ratio of explanatory importance of the factors with respect to the variables. A low eigenvalue poorly explains the variance of the variable. Thus, the correlation between indicators and factors is characterized by large loadings above 0.5, moderate loadings between 0.3 and 0.5 and small loadings below 0.3. In our case, we have considered only loadings >0.45.

⁹‘The desire to ‘have a variety of sexual partners’ and ‘be in control during sex,’ and the need to ‘have sex immediately when I am aroused’ all point to this kind of self-focused sexuality that Blanchard (1994) calls ‘McSex’ in his popular expose on ‘young johns.’ According to one man he interviewed ‘lit's like going to McDonalds; most people are looking for a good quick cheap meal. It's satisfying, it's greasy, and then you get the hell out of there.’ Paying for sex because of the desire to have sex with women with particular physical attributes, a motivation described by McKeganey (1994), also reflects a conception of sex as a commodity’. (Monto, 2000b, p. 34).

¹⁰Available from the authors on request.

¹¹We note that the distribution of the dependent variable is such that the percentage of 0, i.e. clients who use the condom never and seldom is only 5.6%.