Are We Surrounded By Sexual Predators?

Discussions about prostitution always end with a debate as to who, between the provider and the buyer, is the most guilty. Is it the pimp who traffics women or the client who perpetuates the demand for their services? Is it the prostitute herself who presents her body as a commodity or the one who gladly takes her up on her offer?

Melissa Farley, director of Prostitution Research and Education in San Francisco has a clear answer: the buyers, whom she found were often abusive toward women as they were drunk from the power of having paid them for their own personal pleasure and blind to the sex workers’ inner turmoil. And in a new study she conducted published in Newsweek, she not only explains how she found those results, she also tries to show how pervasive that behaviour is.

The trouble is, her method for distinguishing the sexual habits and perceptions of those who buy sex and those who don’t are deeply flawed.

To begin, she makes generalizations about men’s perceptions of women when they buy sex from a pool of men between 20 and 75 with an average age of 41 from the Boston area and nowhere else. Most of them were married or partnered, “like the majority of men who patronize prostitutes” says the Newsweek article, hinting maybe at Farley’s initial bias.

Indeed, she is known for entering stores who sell pornographic magazines and destroying the publications and her aversion towards sexual entertainment shows in the criteria she had to settle on to define her 100-person control group, those who don’t buy sex.

“We [...] had to settle on a definition of non-sex-buyers as men who have not been to a strip club more than two times in the past year, have not purchased a lap dance, have not used pornography more than one time in the last month, and have not purchased phone sex or the services of a sex worker, escort, erotic masseuse, or prostitute,” she said, after struggling to find men who corresponded to her definition of a non-sex buyer.

But many of the services she lists here are legal, unlike prostitution. While someone who buys Penthouse every now and then does play into some of the objectification of women, it’s hardly comparable to engaging in degrading sexual acts with a sex worker. By playing a game of opposites, we can understand from this category that Farley’s definition of prostitution is very different from the legal one but it’s too broad, making the study flawed. It mostly demonizes practices that are often harmless and even enjoyed by both partners in a couple.

The study also relies on very vague figures to describe people’s attitudes about prostitution, which is not surprising. Sex workers risk getting arrested for doing what they do; it’s understandable they’d avoid talking about their profession. The average age of death is 34 for prostitutes, and the American Journal of Epidemiology reported that their “workplace homicide rate” is 51 times higher than working in a liquor store, the second most dangerous profession. The risks this line of work involve are unfathomable to most of us and come from all sides.

On the other hand, Farley’s study found that men who buy sex were most afraid of being listed as sex offenders, which would also stop them from reporting stories about their true feelings on the issue.

The response to the study has been strong and mostly negative, both regarding her definition of someone who buys sex and the attitudes of the men who do it. Journalist Susannah Breslin doubts Farley’s results that buyers are simply doing it to fulfill the violent fantasies that their girlfriends won’t do.

“Unlike Farley, I found that most men seek out sex workers for one simple fact: they are lonely,” she said. “They are looking for companionship, they crave intimacy, they are looking for some kind of a connection, and because they cannot find it any other way, they buy it.”

Although Farley is a fierce abolitionist, her study and the responses it’s garnered show that as long as prostitution is illegal or as long as we don’t offer greater protection to those who come forward with information, there is only so much we’ll be able to know about it. Whether we’re talking about what circumstances those who enter this industry are or if the demand for it is actually growing, data will only be close to the truth once a legal set-up is made to protect and support the victims of abuse in that situation.

With our mindset of calling prostitution “the oldest job in the world” and the somewhat frightening illegality of it that keeps it under wraps, it’s as easy to slip into thinking that it’s going on in every household and that all who partake in it are abusive as it is to think that those who are in the industry are there willingly, as the men in Farley’s study seemed to think.

But what’s certain is that it’s not by calling all those who have given money to the sexual entertainment industry perverted that the most durable change is going to come. There is a massive difference between jerking off in front of a computer and thinking you can abuse woman because you bought her.

Contact the author here: sedera@morningquickie.com