Anti-porn and anti-prostitution advocates will frequently claim that men who watch porn or sleep with escorts will therefore objectify the women they see more in their daily lives. People who promote the idea of porn addiction will go so far as to say that watching porn causes many men to compulsively imagine all women naked when they see them in the street or meet them. It is not porn that causes this phenomenon; instead, it is shame about sexuality leading to intrusive thoughts, which can be exacerbated by watching porn because it causes someone to confront that shame.
While there is much discussion about the objectifying ways many men view women, often blamed on them watching or meeting with sex workers, there is far less about the way selling sex can change how sex workers view men (who are the bulk of our clientele).
Not every man is a client of sex workers. In fact, the majority are not, though the claimed percentages of men who’ve paid for sex vary wildly by country and polling method. However, when you have sold sex for a while and seen the diversity in the types of men who pay for sex, it is very easy to imagine any man as a client.
No matter where I go out, it’s likely I’ll see at least one man who I mentally slot into a category of client. If I see a businessman, I might imagine the kinds of inane crap he’d tell me about before two minutes of thrusting and then leaving to go back to work. A guy might flirt with me and I’ll wonder if he’d pay for it. Hell, when a friend’s dad bought me a train ticket and kissed my cheek once when I was a teenager, I was viscerally reminded of clients doing the same thing for me at the train station after an evening out. I wondered if he was used to doing the same thing and was mimicking that behaviour with his daughter’s friends.
Other sex workers will say men have “client vibes” based on certain things they say or behaviours they exhibit, and I find myself agreeing most of the time. Men who complain about their wives being uninterested in sex with them, in public and to strangers, give me this vibe. Clients will often try to absolve themselves of guilt for cheating on their spouse or girlfriend or boyfriend by explaining that they only cheat because they aren’t getting sex often at home. I find that the willingness for people to make these complaints in public, like to people they meet at the pub, to come from the same place of trying to justify cheating to themselves and I figure a lot of them are probably clients of sex workers.
This way of viewing men can even bleed into casual sexual encounters, during which I may wonder to myself whether or not the sex is any better than the kind I have with clients. If the sex is as bad as a typical encounter with a client, I find myself resenting the person I’m with and thinking I could have been paid instead for the effort I was putting in only to get a mediocre experience from my perspective whilst he enjoyed himself.
Is this way of thinking about men harmful for sex workers?
It can certainly put us off of men we otherwise might have liked or make us hesitant to interact with them. I notice myself sometimes having a disgust reaction to men who remind me of bad clients, or interacting with other men as if they literally are a client even though that is very unhelpful for making genuine connections with people and leaves me exhausted.
There’s also the issue of possible hypervigilance, with reminders of clients everywhere meaning we’re always on high-alert about bumping into someone who has paid us for sex in the past. Being outed as a sex worker can have serious repercussions, depending on who already knows or what other work a person might be doing, and this constant stress about being found out can have huge impacts on a person’s ability to function. It might stop people from socializing at all, never wanting to give out their real name to anyone in case it is overheard by someone who knows their working name.
These issues are not necessarily going to impact every person who finds themselves thinking about clients, because whether or not these thoughts become overwhelming will likely be impacted by what someone’s natural tendencies are and how much shame they feel. If you are an anxious person, the thought of bumping into a client in public might be debilitating. For someone who is deeply ashamed of selling sex, any reminder of it will have a negative mental impact which feeds into the cycle of more intrusive thoughts and shame about sex work.
What kinds of men tend to be clients?
SWERFs would often have us believe that clients are uniquely evil men or that men become clients because men are inherently evil, depending on the specific brand of radical feminism they’ve aligned themselves with or which radfem book they’ve most recently read. When you’ve actually sold sex to a lot of men, something which becomes apparent to you is that the kind of men who pay for sex are often pretty mundane and average.
There are trends that exist in clients, in terms of their common types, and some of those will be related to wealth or type of job or age. I drew up some archetypes of clients I was used to seeing, years ago, which will help to give some of you an idea:
I have found that rich clients tend to feel more entitled to you, clients who use a lot of drugs and alcohol tend to be more unpredictable and likely to engage in more sudden acts of violence or verbal abuse, and that younger inexperienced clients tend to be extra objectifying. With most of my clients though, they are men who are extremely unremarkable. They’re the sort of men I’d see walking along the street in my daily life, who usually tell me their reason for paying for sex is discretion since they’re married or convenience since they’re not currently looking for a relationship and want no strings attached sex.
While abuse is commonly experiencing by sex workers, it’s not the case that every client is abusive. Cumulatively over my time selling sex, most clients have been fine and non-abusive. The most abuse I have faced, where a significant percentage of my clients would mistreat or hurt me, was during time periods where I was visibly vulnerable and desperate and working in more precarious settings like brothels. Those situations lead to different types of clientele.
Men from all walks of life with all sorts of backgrounds pay for sex, the only barrier being that they tend to skew towards having more disposable income because poorer men don’t have enough money to justify paying for sex (or save for longer to pay for it as a treat, and see sex workers less often).
Could any man be a client?
In the literal sense, no, most men will not pay for sex during their lives. Would they, given the right circumstances? It’s hard to say. I think plenty of them would do so, even those who vehemently claim they wouldn’t (many of whom already do), if they were in circumstances where paying for sex was less stigmatized or where it made sense for them to pay for the discretion that sex workers offer.
Personally, when I look at a man and imagine him as a client, it’s not exactly that I think he already is one. It’s that I could imagine him becoming one so easily. I can picture him browsing escorting sites after a few months of his wife not having sex with him, or after a divorce where he’s not ready for a new relationship yet, or as a way to act out kinks his boyfriend doesn’t want to indulge in.
This realization that it’s merely circumstances which determine whether most men pay for sex, rather than personal convictions about the morality of it, can be upsetting for people who feel it’s inherently wrong to pay for sex. Some sex workers feel like this (as I once did, back when I was 17 and all my clients were abusive), and so thinking this way can make them dislike men as a whole. As I see it now, having had good clients whose custom was preferable to me than working a bar shift with customers would have been, I don’t condemn people simply for the act of buying sex. I think clients who buy sex in certain circumstances, like sex tourism or from people who are clearly terrified and desperate, need to be blamed for taking advantage of a vulnerable person rather than solely based on the act they do that with.
The client who booked me a few months ago, who I was paid to sleep with for an hour, isn’t someone I have animosity towards. That hour having sex paid me more than a 10-hour shift bartending used to, he respected my boundaries, and I don’t think he committed some sort of heinous act. When I think about it with that context, the fact that most of the men I meet might have ended up paying for sex in a certain context doesn’t bother me so much.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 