Men and

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Prostitution and Clients' Responsibility

Giorgia Serughetti
Men and Masculinities 2013 16: 35 originally published online 16 December 2012
DOI: 10.1177/1097184X12467008
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Article

Prostitution and Clients

Responsibility

Men and Masculinities

16(1) 35-48
The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1097184X12467008
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Giorgia Serughetti1

Abstract
In the last decades of the twentieth century, a major change has occurred in the
public understanding of prostitution, with the focus shifting from the sex worker to
the client. On the social scientific side, studies on clients have growingly shed light on
motivations and behaviors of men who buy sex. On the juridical-political side, in
many countries across the globe a trend has emerged towards the criminalization of
clients, represented as responsible for the perpetuation and proliferation of the sex
market and for its oppressive and victimizing effects on sex workers. The aim of this
paper is to retrace this turn and to discuss its political and cultural meaning, showing
how the discourse on male responsibility in prostitution involves the risk of
unilateral stances and partial views on the sex market. What I argue is that new
gender-sensitive thinking on prostitution is needed, context-rooted and free from
prejudicial understandings.
Keywords
sex work, clients, neoprohibitionism, masculinities, sexuality

Introduction
Prostitute, whore, call girl, escort, courtesan, fallen woman, harlot, hooker, hustler,
slut, streetwalker, strumpet, tramp, or sex worker; the latter with a less negative
connotation. An abundance of words surrounds prostitution, usually defined as the

Dipartimento di Sociologia, Universita` di Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy

Corresponding Author:
Giorgia Serughetti, Dipartimento di Sociologia, Universita` di Milano-Bicocca, U7 stanza 342 Prof. Calloni,
via Bicocca degli Arcimboldi 8, Milano 20126, Italy.
Email: giorgia.serughetti@unimib.it

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Men and Masculinities 16(1)

art or practice to engage in sexual intercourse for money. Although this definition
admits only one agent, the action is relational and involves at least another subject:
the one offering money for sex. Here the language is poorer and reduced to little
more than a word: the client (john or punter in English-speaking countries). This
linguistic disproportion is due to a crucial asymmetry in the discourse on prostitutionwhether scientific, philosophical, political, or drawn from the mediastarting
with industrial modernity: while the condition of women who become sex workers
had been growingly investigated as a psychological, social, and political issue, the
motivations and attitudes of men who buy sex had been ignored for centuries. As the
issue of prostitution was targeted mainly at women either as deviants or as victims,
the sexuality of male clients was understood mostly through a hydraulic model
which is based on pressure and the need to immediately get relief of a natural
driveconfirming the normality and naturalness of a moral double standard
where prostitution served as an outlet for mens sexual energy exceeding the
boundaries of the monogamous marriage.
Against this background, what happened in the last decades of the twentieth
century in the public understanding of prostitution in many countries across the
globe marks a major change and overthrows the discursive order, with the focus
shifting from the sex worker to the client. The modern industrial discourse on
prostitution has been challenged by the emergence of the demand for sexual services
out of the shadows which ensured its legitimacy for centuries, and its entrance into
the public debate as a moral, political, and social issue. The process has involved on
one hand social sciences, on the other hand the political, cultural, and juridical
construction of sex workers and clients.
Though still undersized if compared with the parallel extension and proliferation
of studies on sex workers, the empirical and theoretical production of studies on
clients has greatly increased, shedding light on the irreducibly complex and diverse
panorama of the demand for prostitution and outlining sociodemographic profiles
and behavioral types as well (Wilcox et al. 2009). On the juridicalpolitical side,
between the late eighties and the new millennium a trend toward the criminalization
of clients has emerged in the public discourse of many countries around the world.
There has been a repositioning of men who buy sex as the problem (Sanders
2008a, 135), that is, the clientprimarily intended as a male personhas growingly
been depicted as responsible for the perpetuation and proliferation of the sex market
and for its oppressive and victimizing effects on sex workers (Kulick 2005;
Brooks-Gordon 2006; Bernstein 2007).
Clients responsibility is intended in this article both in a philosophical and in a
juridical sense. On one hand, it is conceived as the moral capability (and duty) to
respond to another or to oneself (from the Latin word responsus, pp. of respondere)
accounting for ones actions and their consequences (the sexual exploitation of
vulnerable people, the perpetuation of unequal and oppressive gender relations, the
existence itself of a sex market, etc.); on the other hand, in several national contexts,
it has been framed as the condition of committing crime, violation, or offence

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against somebody (the sex worker) who figures as the victim of systemic as well as
individual oppression. The assumption behind both conceptions is a radically
negative representation of the sex market, as a place where the intimate act of sex
is merged with the world of commercial monetary exchange. Thus, the social stigma
surrounding clients (as morally deviant) and the statement of their penal responsibility tend to influence and reinforce each other.
In this article, I wish to show how the discourse on male responsibility in
prostitution involves the risk of a unilateral interpretation of the sex market, which
fails to captureas in the pastits relationality and its extensive connections to the
transformations of sexuality and economy. What I argue is that the turning point of
view from the sex worker to the client should be taken instead as a chance to develop
new gender-sensitive thinking on prostitution, fully recognizing the agency of both
actors involved.

The Rise of a Mens Issue in Prostitution

Today prostitution is an ever-growing market involving men, women, and
transgender people both as purchasers and providers of sexual services. If this market raises an issue concerning male responsibility, it is due not only to the definite
predominance of men who pay for sex over women but primarily to the historically
conditioned nature of the practice, its rootedness into specific modalities of gender
relations branded by material and symbolic inequality between men and women and
by the oppression of the second sex (Beauvoir 1949). The traditional distinction
between two modalities for men to express their sexualitythe conjugal mode and
the mercenary mode external to marriagedefines two types of women, the good
ones and the loose ones. In the social, political, and cultural organization of the
separate and unequal society of the past (Giddens 1992)where public sphere
and private sphere, male and female, are quite distinctmen enjoy the privilege
to move from one sphere to another while women should not cross the boundary
of the public space, otherwise they will be singled out as transgressive bodies, public
women, prostitutes (Wolff 1985).
Since the sixties, the Second Wave feminist critique has turned against this
dichotomous view of womenwife and whoreand their political and social
segregation in the domestic domain. Sex work is now interpreted moving from
factors that lead to the more general oppression of women and are likely to be identified in the sexual politics of patriarchy (Millett 1969, 1976), exercised
through social, political, economic, and linguistic institutions. Moreover, the feminist approach reverses the discursive order and investigates prostitutionusually
addressed as a womens issueby bringing it back to why men demand womens
bodies to be sold in the capitalist market as if they were commodities (Pateman
1988). Male demand for an unconditioned access to womens bodies in exchange
of money, based on an alleged unchangeable physiology, is delegitimized.

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Commoditization practices are deconstructed as material and ideological effects of

an economic, social, and cultural system built on male privilege.
Social sciences, especially from the eighties, have broken down the question
why do men buy sexual services? into research programs, marking the transition
from the recognition of a moral and political responsibility of clients to the
production of theoretical and empirical studies, with an effective extension of
the field of inquire in the sex market. No wonder those are the same years in which
the interest on the male gender started to grow in the academia. Masculinity
studiesfrequently renamed with the plural Studies on masculinitieshave raised
primarily as a response to an intellectual and political challenge, the gradual
disintegration of a traditional power construct affirming an unquestionable male
dominance in the three Hegelian spheres of family, civil society, and State. Pushed
and branded since the beginning by the same transversality as womens studies, they
have widespread among several disciplines of the humanities and the social
sciences, from history to anthropology, from literary analysis to sociology (Kimmel
2008). Thus, the masculine symbolic order was pulled out of the closet under various
inputs and eventually exited a paradox of invisibility, ceasing to be unnamable and
untellable, hidden behind the presumption of universality.
Since the new effort to investigate mens issues, driven by fundamental optimism
about the ability to imagine change in masculinity toward new models released from
sexism and patriarchy (Kimmel 1994), the interest in the world of prostitution was
extended to male participants: male sex workers, pimps, and most of all clients.
Studies by Holzman and Pines (1982), Mansson and Linders (1984), McKeganey
and Barnard (1996), Campbell (1998), Sullivan and Simon (1998), OConnell
Davidson (1998), Prasad (1999), Weitzer (2000), Monto (2000), Mansson (2001,
2005, 2006), Sharp and Earle (2002), Bernstein (2007), Sanders (2008a, 2008b),
Di Nicola et al. (2009), along with other important contributions, prove the growth
of a specific interest among scholars for those whom Rosie Campbell (1998) address
as the invisible men and Elroy Sullivan and William Simon (1998) describe as the
unseen patrons of prostitution.

Studies on Clients: Making the Invisible Visible

Who are the invisible men emerging from the studies on the demand for prostitution?
And why do they pay for sexual services? Since the eighties, studies on clients have
abandoned both the paradigm of the early twentieth-century sexologybased on
natural male sexual driveand the psychopathological model proposed in the
sixties by Charles Winick (1962) who interpreted the propensity to purchase sexual
services as a sign of a mental disorder. The picture of clients drawn by empirical studies is rather that of men of any marital and socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and age.
Besides that, clients can significantly differ from one another. Teela Sanders
illustrates the wide range of features belonging to men who pay for sex suggesting
five typologies based on patterns and lengths of involvement in the sex market as

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well as on the trajectories of being a client: Explorers (starting at any age according to the desire for sexual experimentation, curiosity, fantasy); Yo-yoers (30s,
who stop patronazing sex workers when in a relationship and start again when the
relationship becomes dissatisfactory); Compulsives (of any age, who enact
compulsive behavior toward the planning and arrangement of a sexual encounter
with a sex worker, until they find a satisfying relationship or therapeutic help);
Bookends (who have initial sexual experiences with sex workers and go back
to buy sex in later life as the ultimate chance to satisfy their emotional and sexual
desires); Permanent purchasers (who buy sex sporadically throughout their whole
lifetime; Sanders, 2008a, 48).
The representation of this irreducible multiplicity follows the ordinariness of
visiting prostitutes, a practice which does not involve only people with specific characteristics, easy to identify and recognize, but is rather widespread across various
social groups. Numerical estimates on the population of men who pay for sex in different countries around the world support this interpretation. The first dates back to
the 1948 Kinsey report, which showed that two-thirds of the surveyed men (68 percent) had paid for sex at least once in their lifetime and that between 15 percent and
20 percent were regular clients (Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin 1948). More than half
a century later, researches indicate a decrease in the use of prostitution, but still register a consisting percentage between 7 percent and 40 percent of the male population taking part to it (Mansson 2005). Impressive figures that, combined with
sociopersonal data on johns, define the use of prostitution not as exception,
deviance, disease of male sexuality, but as a normal practice or at least one of the
possible forms through which contemporary masculinity expresses itself.
The same applies to the motivations of clients. According to Alfred Kinsey and his
associates in the postwar United States, the main reason to visit prostitutes apparently
resided within the desire to satisfy those practices considered to be perversions by all
purposes, even punishable by law, that is, fellatio, oral sex. The years of the so-called
sexual liberation, however, have muddied the waters and led scholars since the early
eighties to dig deeper into the experiences and self-representations of clients. Answers
to the question why do you do it? were therefore multiple, highly variable, or even
different for each individual. However, the classification of information resulting from
empirical research led to the formulation of categories of motivations behind the use of
prostitution. Swedish sociologist Sven Axel Mansson proposed to distinguish five
types of discourse (2005), which are widely recurrent in the extant literature: The
dirty whore fantasy (expressions of contradictory feelings of curiosity, excitement,
and contempt), Another kind of sex (beliefs that certain kind of sex cannot be
experienced with a nonprostitute women), No other women (self-representations
of inability to find another woman, due to shyness, fear, advanced age, physical, and
mental disabilities), Shopping for sex (Images of sex as a consumer product), and
Another kind of woman (antifeminist images of a true and natural femininity).
Given the plurality of individual characteristics trajectories and motivations, one
must assume that clients are male, trivially male (Colombo 1999, 39). In political and

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cultural terms, this means scholars have to deal with the resistance of models based on
patriarchal domination or, more often, on the (compulsive) reaffirmation of masculinityshaken by the advancement of womens achievementswithin not fully isolable
groups of the male population (Giddens 1992; OConnell Davidson 1998; Kimmel
2000; Mansson 2001). Here is why today scholars and activists feel the urge to suggest
directions for a possible transformation of male desire, in keeping with much of the studies on masculinities and male profeminist movements (Holmgren and Hearn 2009).

Public Policies on Prostitution: Criminalizing Demand

The need to recognize the responsibility of clients and to intervene on the demand
for prostitution is embraced at the end of the twentieth century by what Bernstein
(2007) defines the Feminist State, replacing the multifaceted representation
proposed by the social sciences with the juridical-discursive construction according
to which the purchase of sex is a pathology of desire and a deviant behavior. Over the
past twenty yearswith reference to the sex industry in many countries around the
world, from the United States to some states of Australia, from Northern to Southern
European unprecedented strategy to channel State intervention in public
expressions of heterosexual male desire (ibid., 114) is profiled, interruptingat
least in appearancethe collusion between clients, law enforcement, and
politicians, as denounced by many feminist scholars.
In 1993, Gail Pheterson pointed out as the effective approach to prostitutes and
clients, even where states put in place prohibitionist policies, remained highly
discriminating, especially in the matter of police interventions to enforce the ban
on prostitution. The author explains this is partly because law officials are either
customers themselves or they identify with customers (1993, 44). Also Italian
feminist Roberta Tatafiore denounced in the same year the coincidence of the
interests of the clients with those of the State in all its joints (1997, 126). As noted
by Bernstein (2007, 138), Pheterson and other critics would never have predicted
that, by the mid-90s, municipal and national governments might actually intervene
to challenge and reconfigure patterns of male heterosexual consumption, and even
mobilize feminist arguments in the service of such interventions.
During 1998, Sweden was the first country to propose and approve a measure to
counter prostitution focused on differential treatment for clients and prostitutes, overthrowing the traditional model that punished those who sold sexual services rather than
those who purchased them. The reason to punish only one agent lies in the interpretation
of prostitution as physical abuse and an expression of gender inequality: according to
the Act (Ministry of Labour, Sweden 1998, 55), it is not reasonable to punish the
person who sells a sexual service. In the majority of cases at least, this person is a weaker
partner who is exploited by those who want only to satisfy their only drives.
Sweden has thus established a model of State intervention on prostitutionwhich
can be defined neoprohibitionist (Danna 2006)based on the reversal of the roles
traditionally ascribed to the two actors: the vision that has been emerging

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recognizes the client as the only responsible for the existence of prostitution: the
demand is the trigger for the supply and the trafficking in women (ibid., 36).
Measures inspired by the Swedish model were introduced in Norway (2009), Iceland
(2009), England (2009), and in Northern Ireland (2008). In Italy the last attempt
(which remained a proposal) to reform the law on prostitution (Merlin Law) had the
purpose to introduce severe penalties for sex workers who solicit in public (the traditional target of right-wing policies) as well as for clients caught in the act. As for
the United States, in big cities like New York and San Francisco (where prostitution
is illegal) police operations to arrest clients in the streets have intensified since the
late nineties. The purchase of commercial sex is therefore problematized across the
globe, revealing the client to be the major agent in a relationship based on womens
oppression.
How could the common perception of men paying for sex shift from
irresponsibility toward responsibility, from the naturalness of this practice to its
being antimodern and opposite to the advancement of gender equality? According
to Sanders (2008a), three separate processes may have contributed to the determination of this transformation in the public discourse. The first is the radical feminist
agenda for abolishing prostitution as a form of violence against women, where men
are blamed for the demand for sexual services perpetuating oppression and abuse.
The second is the growth of urban activism against prostitution animated by upset
community residents and fuelled by media stereotypes of clients as sexual
predators and perverts warring increased police attention and official policy
response (ibid., 136). The third is the shift of conservative attitudes toward sex and
sexuality, away from deviances related to sexual orientation (homosexual) toward
other deviances related to heterosexual behavior that continue to be cast as
abnormal, unpleasant and not to be tolerated but instead controlled (ibid.).
The tendency to criminalize the use of prostitution is therefore very close to its
pathologization (Kulick 2005; Bernstein 2007; Sanders 2008a), implying the
possibility of treatment and rehabilitation. In Swedish cities such as Stockholm,
Gothenburg, Malmo, so-called KAST groupsthat is groups of social workers who
assist clients through the provision of counseling aimed at launching psychotherapeutic treatmentwere activated. According to the official vision in Sweden, the
purchase of sexual services is always problematic. Therapists believe men to be
wrong because they sexualize other feelings like mourning, sadness or anger. The
alternative would be to deal with such feelings for what they really are (Danna
2006, 51). In sum, the psychotherapist is willing to replace the prostitute and to begin
a process where the patient recovers from alleged pathologies driving him toward
the search for satisfaction in paid sex (e.g., sex addiction).
Other strategies of correction and normalization of heterosexual desire can be
found among John Schools in the United States, that is, schools for clients (john
in American slang) who were arrested for the first time in flagrante delicto (in the
negotiation or consumption of sexual service) and may barter a fine or imprisonment
by enrolling in paid courses. These classes provide complex information on

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prostitution and its negative impact on the people who engage in it. The same ratio
foresaw the establishment of the Kerb-Crawler Rehabilitation Programmes (KCRP)
in the United Kingdom. The purpose of such an intervention is to prevent recidivism
and to reduce customer demand, increasing awareness around the more negative
aspects of sex work but also claiming what Bernstein (2007, 135) defines a firm
reassertion of the primacy of marital domesticity.
Both the idea of therapeutic help (counseling) and that of rehabilitation through
cognitive processes (school) imply that the mens demand for paid sex always
reveals a troubled personality, the inability to express ones sexual desire in other
relational contexts, particularly in situations of emotional and sentimental investment. Punitive and rehabilitative actions on the demand for prostitution transform
the split between love and sexwhich is a foundational element in the construction
of modern Western masculinity (Seidler 1989)into pathology. Public intervention
addresses, albeit implicitly and with little effect, a culture of masculinity that collides with the values of gender equality. The man who visits sex workers embodies
eventually the sociocultural excess that the discourse of gender parity produces in
order to eliminate (Kulick 2005, 225).
The effectiveness of rehabilitation programs, as that of counteractions in general,
is not easy to evaluate (Monto and Garcia 2001; Campbell and Storr 2001); it is quite
sure though that countries in which the visible face of prostitution is opposed (especially
on the street), many experience the emergence of alternative anonymous and invisible
spaces for paid sex across clubs, apartments, and the web. That is, neither the prosecution nor the corrections produce the much desired effect of eliminating the demand for
paid sexual services. How should one evaluate this failure in respect of the construction
and transformation of models of masculinity, the discourse of men responsibility in the
sex trade, the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the market?

For a Critique of Neoprohibitionism

Abundant criticism has been raised against neoprohibitionism in countries where it
came into force, arguing that such policies are based on a prejudicial understanding
of the sex market with reference both to the supply and the demand for sexual
services. This causes the anticlients approach to be not only limited in effectiviness
but also to produce contradictory effects in respect of gender equality and the
protection of sex workers rights.
Referring to the KCRP in the United Kingdom, Teela Sanders affirms that
rehabilitation programs tend to be ineffective because they do not examine the
sexual behavior, sexual desires, and sexual and emotional needs of the clients, therefore essentially ignoring the root cause of why men visit sex workers (2008a, 156).
In particular, clients desire for a (commercially bounded) relationship with sex workers finds no recognition in the legal and moral construction of the sex buyer performed
by neoprohibitionism. Not only that, but according to Sanders the enrollment itself in a
rehabilitation program given its negative biasaggravates the emotional and

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relational problems which are at the origin of clients demand for paid sex. The programs, in short, turn out to be criminogenic: while not affecting clients behavior and
its causes, they rather discursively produce criminal and sexual deviance.
Although the empirical and theoretical interest about the clients and the political
legal approach targeted at them have grown in parallel in recent decades, within
neoprohibitionist interventions there is an apparent disconnect between research and
policy, a lack of attention by decision makers to the composite panorama of studies
on the demand for prostitution. The fear of the user that has strongly influenced
social and criminal justice policies in many parts of the world is the result of a cultural construction based on distorted information (Sanders 2008a, 175).
Misinformation is, in turn, the secondary effect of a representation of the sex market
increasingly compressed on the phenomenon of trafficking and sexual exploitation.
Part of the depiction of males as violent and dangerous clients steams from their
association with the most degrading and coercive expressions of the sex market.
In the case of Sweden, prevention campaigns targeted at clients was often explicitly
associated with disseminating information on international trafficking: the buzz
around the film Lilja Forever by Lucas Moddyssonthe true story of a young
Lithuanian forced into prostitution in the Scandinavian country (Danna 2006)is
a clear example of such strategy.
Male responsibility then becomes a rhetorical instrument in a public discourse
that feeds moral panic toward sex work (Sanders 2008a; Hubbard and Sanders
2003). The stigmatization of the purchase of sexual services as a behavior heavily
biased by gender inequality and the representation of clients as responsible for the
most oppressive, coercive, violent forms in the exercise of prostitution, are nothing
but the new version of an old habit: the exclusion of prostitution as a legitimate
profession from the public sphere and from the access to rights.
The criminalization of the clientdespite and perhaps because of the stated goal to
protect sex workers and to reverse the secular direction of action on prostitutionholds
unilateral positions and partial views on the sex market: sex workers described only
through the passive and helpless victim role, with no consideration on the relative size
of choice and willthat is to say agency (Hubbard, Matthew, and Scoular 2008); counteractions limited solely on visible prostitution on the streets (Bernstein 2007); persistence of
a hard core stigmatization of prostitutes (Danna 2006); hidden concern for the protection of national borders from the invasion of foreign sex workers (Kulick 2003); clients
represented as the direct perpetrators of violence against women forced to lose their
bodies in unwanted intercourses by pimps or by their own misery (Agustn 2007).
Thus, it can be argued that the shift of focus from sex workers to clients retains
the same stigmatizing lens (pathologization/criminalization) of the past, and the
same tendency to focus only on one agent within the construction of prostitution
as a social, political, and moral problem. In the end, there is no room for a different
interpretation of prostitution moving far away from the traditional one and rather
consisting of the relationship between different actors displaying their own needs,
desires and rational behavior, resulting in complex geometries among gender,

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sexuality, and power. Moreover, the neoprohibitionist description of sex trade tends
to isolate the purchase of sexual services from the social economic and cultural
institutions in which this practice is historically laced, struggling to account for the
gap between theory and practice when it comes to the relationship between progress
in gender equality and development of prostitution demand.
For generations of social thinkers, there has been an assumption that womens
increasing partecipation in legitimate paid employment and a decline in the
gendered double standard would eliminate the social reasons behind the existence
of prostitution, as well as other commercial sexual activities (Bernstein 2007, 2).
Yet at a time when women show historically higher levels of participation in the
labor market in almost every country in the world and changes in sexual morality
undermine the survival of the sexual double standard wife/prostitute, the sex industry has not whitered away as predicted but has instead continued to flourish.
Furthermore, it has diversified along technological, spatial and social lines
(ibid.,2-3). Are we to believe that the pace of gender equality goes along with more
and more pervasive phenomena of reactionary assertion of male dominance? Or
should we recognize that along with male revanchism and mens research for compensation due to economic/social/sexual disempowerment, the demand and supply
of prostitution is fed also by the normalization of a non relationally bound, recreative sexuality (Laumann et al. 2004), by the growing compenetration of intimate
life and the market (Zelizer 2005; Russell Hochschild 2003), by intensive commoditization of sexuality in a consumers society (Baudrillard 1970)?
The prostitution-as-violence-against-women paradigm, where clients figure as
perpetrators, is anchored to a transhistorical representation of sex work in general
and of prostitution demand in particular; the latter due to a supposed immutable
masculinity (Bernstein 2007). Responsibility weighs on men who buy sex as if this
was an original sin of their gender. A nonprejudicial view of the sex market should
instead extend to people of all gender and sexual orientation engaging in it both as
clients and as workers, and call for a rights-aware attitude in consumerist behavior
and in relationship with othernesswhether sexual, socioeconomic, or racial.

Removing the Stigma, Rethinking Prostitution

Since the feminist critique of prostitution has first raised the issue of male responsibility
in sex tradedenouncing the guilty silence of authorities that used to control women who
sold rather than men who bought-men have entered the spotlight of the moral and
political discourse on prostitution. This shift of attention is consistent with the transition
of late-modern Western societies from a production-based to a consumption-based
economy: the focus of moral critique and political reform is gradually being displaced:
the prostitute is increasingly normalized as either victim or sex worker, while attention and social sanctionat municipal, national and transnational levelsare directed
away from labor practices and toward consumer behavior (Bernstein 2007, 115).
Against this background, it is arguable that, in a more general reunderstanding of the

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dynamics and meanings of the sex market, the client can no longer play neither the role of
invisible actor nor the one of supporting actor, but should assume the title role.
However, if the focus on clients aims at becoming the guiding principle of a new
position to embrace prostitution, the criminalization of the demandrather than
offering new elements of knowledgeraises some issues and reveals its frailty.
Reversing the discursive order cannot mean just a transfer of the stigma surrounding
the sex market from the sex workertransformed into a passive victimto the
client as an active perpetrator of violence. The development of a new approach must
begin with the removal of the stigma itself, in order to address the demand that drives
prostitution out of the psychopathological or biologistic schemes of the past.
Understanding clients today means to question sexuality in its dense interconnections with the market, to tackle issues related to gender culture in which the vision
of sex as a commodity is produced and reproduced, to understand the needs that
shape demand beyond their reduction to subjugation and control, often presented
as a reaction to the loss of power in the private sphere.
Empirical investigations by Bernstein (2007), Sanders (2008a, 2008b), Prasad
(1999) and other scholars state how clientsor at least most of themperceive paid
sex as no compensatory practice in regard to the oblative understanding of sex, not
even a substitution for its missing, but rather as a frequently preferable alternative.
In this regard, clients interpret the gradual disappearance of the boundary between
public and private domain particularly the one between the market and the sphere
of intimacy (Zelizer 2005)in its more radical consequences. Since there is no such
thing as the client while we discuss the clients, in order to understand them and
understand the demand one must acknowledge the ethical necessity of
distinguishing between markets in sexual labor, based on the social location and
defining features of any given type of exchange (Bernstein 2007, 179).
Prostitution cannot be addressed as an issue that affects only women, but to interpret
the phenomenon through the criminalization of the demand without further reflection
on the broader factors that determine it, is nothing but a variant of the undifferentiated
approach of the past, tending to exclude and disqualify sex workers. What is needed is a
novel look at sex trade free from preconceived visions, understanding prostitution as a
relationship between different parties, and a practice rooted in contexts crossed by gender, economic and power inequalities, where actors locate themselves in different ways
moving beyond the rigid assignment of the victim and perpetrator roles.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

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Author Biography
Giorgia Serughetti has a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Palermo (Italy) and
is currently employed as research assistant at the Department of Sociology, University of
Milano Bicocca (Italy). She also works as freelance researcher on migrations, sex work and
women trafficking for nonprofit organisations and public bodies.

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