“There’s Massive Pressure to Please Her”: On the Discursive Production of Men’s Desire to Pay for Sex

Abstract

This article presents a discursive analysis of 43 men’s narratives about paying for sex, collected using a combination of online and traditional face-to-face interview methods. It argues that the societal pressures placed on men to “perform” sexually help to produce conditions that make paying for sex desirable. Paying for sex provided men with a “safe” space where they felt exempt from expectations to display sexual experience, skill, and stamina. Moreover, men valued paid sexual encounters with experienced sex workers as spaces where they could acquire sexual experience and skills to better approximate idealised versions of heteronormative male sexuality. The article explores the emotional aspects tied up in men’s desires to pay for sex and attends to the question of power within the paid sexual encounter, shedding light on the complexities, nuances and multiplicities within client-sex worker relationships. In conclusion, this paper discusses the value of addressing the broader social structures, sites such as media, online spaces, and medical industries, where heteronormative discourses on male sexual “performance” continue to be reproduced and maintained.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor Floretta Boonzaier and Professor David Gadd for their support with the broader research upon which this paper is based.

Notes

¹ ‘Coloured’ is a racial term created during Apartheid to refer to a heterogeneous group of people. Despite the abolition of Apartheid, this term is still used to identify and name people in South Africa.

² See Huysamen (2018) for a reflexive methodological discussion on the interview process, particularly the impacts of her positionality as a feminist woman researcher on the data.

³ See Platt et al. (2018) for a meta-analysis and systematic review of international research on sex work that shows that criminalisation of sex work is linked to poor physical, sexual, and mental health outcomes for sex workers, thereby highlighting the importance of decriminalisation of sex work.

⁴ While I look at the discursive production of men’s desire to pay for sex, there are very material conditions implicated in some sex working women’s presence in the industry. For a thorough analysis of these social and material mechanisms (such as poverty and harmful immigration laws, border controls, and drug policies) see Smith and Mac (2018).

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by the Harry Crossley Foundation, The National Research Foundation (NRF) and the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission.