DRAFT – NOT FOR CITATION OR CIRCULATION

Title: Prostitution and clients’ responsibility

Author: Giorgia Serughetti

Affiliation: University of Palermo (Italy)

Email address: giorgia.serughetti@unimib.it

Prostitution and clients’ responsibility

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 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 prostitution – whether

scientific, philosophical, political or drawn from the media – starting 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 drive – confirming the

normality and naturalness of a moral “double standard” where prostitution served as an outlet for

men’s 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 the 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

juridical-political side, between the late 80s and the new millennium a trend towards 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 client - primarily intended as a male person - has 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 paper both in a philosophical and in a juridical sense. On

the 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 one's 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

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 paper, 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 capture - as in the past - its

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.

1. The rise of a men's issue in prostitution

Today prostitution is an evergrowing 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 to 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 sexuality- the conjugal mode and the mercenary

mode external to marriage - defines 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 distinct – men 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 60s, the Second Wave feminist critique has turned against this dichotomous view of

women - wife and whore - and 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 prostitution – usually addressed as a women’s issue –
by bringing it back to why men demand women's bodies to be sold in the capitalist market as if they

were commodities (Pateman 1988). Male demand for an unconditioned access to women's bodies in

exchange of money, based on an alleged unchangeable physiology, is delegitimized.

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 80s, 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 studies -

frequently renamed with the plural Studies on masculinities – have 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 women's 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 men's issues, driven by fundamental optimism about the ability

to imagine change in masculinity towards 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), Månsson and Linders

(1984), McKeganey and Barnard (1996), Campbell (1998), Sullivan and Simon (1998), O'Connell

Davidson (1998), Prasad (1999), Weizer (2000), Monto (2000), Månsson (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”.

2. 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 80s, studies on clients have abandoned both the paradigm of

the early twentieth-century sexology – based on natural male sexual drive – and the

psychopathological model proposed in the 60s 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 lenghts of involvement in the sex market, as 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 towards 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 2/3 of the surveyed

men (68%) had paid for sex at least once in their lifetime, and that between 15% and 20% 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%

and 40% of the male population taking part to it (Månsson 2005). Impressive figures that, combined

with socio-personal 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

post-war 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, i.e.

fellatio, oral sex. The years of the so-called sexual liberation, however, have muddied the waters

and led scholars since the early 80s 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 Månsson 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 non-prostitute women), “No other women” (self-

representations of unability to find another woman, due to shyness, fear, advanced age, physical and

mental disabilities), “Shopping for sex” (Images of sex as a consumer product), “Another kind of
woman” (anti-feminist 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 1999a: 39). In political and 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 masculinity – shaken by the advancement of women's

achievements – within not fully isolable groups of the male population (Giddens 1992; O'Connell

Davidson 1998; Kimmel 2000; Månsson 2001). Here’s 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 pro-feminist movements (Holmgren and Hearn 2009).

3. Public policies on prostitution: criminalising 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 Elizabeth 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 years – with reference to the sex industry in many

countries around the world, from the United States to some states of Australia, from Northern to

Southern Europe – an "unprecedented strategy to channel State intervention in public expressions of

heterosexual male desire" (Ibidem: 114) is profiled, interrupting - at least in appearance - the

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 Elisabeth Bernstein,

“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” (2007: 138).

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 Labor, 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 prostitution – which can be defined

“neo-prohibitionist” (Danna 2006) - based on the reversal of the roles traditionally ascribed to the

two actors: “the vision that has been emerging 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”

(Ibidem: 36). Measures inspired by the Swedish model were introduced in Norway (2009), Iceland

(2009), England (2009) and in Northern Ireland (2008). The last attempt (which remains a proposal)

to reform the law on prostitution (Merlin Law) in Italy has introduced 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

90s. The purchase of commercial sex is therefore problematized across the globe, revealing the

client to be the major agent in a relationship based on women’s oppression.

How could the common perception of men paying for sex shift from irresponsibility towards

responsibility, from the naturalness of this practice to its being anti-modern and opposite to the

advancement of gender equality? According to Teela 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” (Ibidem: 136). The third is the shift of conservative attitudes towards sex

and sexuality, away from “deviances” related to sexual orientation (homosexual) towards other

“deviances” related to heterosexual behavior “that continue to be cast as abnormal, unpleasant and

not to be tolerated but instead controlled” (Ibidem).

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 groups –

that is groups of social workers who assist clients through the provision of counseling aimed at

launching psychotherapeutic treatment – were 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 towards 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 U.S, 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

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 defines a

"firm reassertion of the primacy of marital domesticity "(Bernstein 2007: 135).

Both the idea of therapeutic help (counseling) and that of rehabilitation through cognitive processes

(school) imply that the men's demand for paid sex always reveals a troubled personality, the

inability to express one's 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 sex – which 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 counter-actions 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), may 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?

4. For a critique of “neo-prohibitionism”

Abundant criticism has been raised against neo-prohibitionism 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 anti-clients

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 UK, Teela Sanders affirms that rehabilitation programs tend to be

uneffective because they don’t 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

neo-prohibitionism. Not only that, but according to Sanders the enrollment itself in a rehabilitation

program – given its negative bias – aggravates the emotional and 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 neo-prohibitionist interventions

there’s 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 Moddysson – the 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 towards 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 client – despite and perhaps because of the stated goal to protect sex

workers and to reverse the secular direction of action on prostitution – holds 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 will – that is to say agency (Hubbard,

Matthew and Scoular 2008); counter-actions 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 (Agustín 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, sexuality

and power. Moreover, the neo-prohibitionist 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 women’s 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”(Ibidem: 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 men's

research for compensation due to economic 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 non-prejudicial view of

the sex market should instead extend to people of all gender and sexual orientation engaging in it

both as clients and workers, and call for a rights-aware attitude in consumerist behavior and in

relationship with otherness - whether sexual, socio-economic or racial.

5. Removing the stigma, rethinking prostitution

Since the feminist critique of prostitution has first raised the issue of male responsibility in sex trade

– denouncing 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 sanction – at municipal, national and transnational levels –

are directed away from labor practices and toward consumer behavior” (Bernstein 2007: 115).

Against this background, it is arguable that, in a more general re-understanding of the 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 criminalisation of the demand – rather than offering new elements of

knowledge – raises 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 worker - transformed into a

passive victim - to 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 Elisabeth Bernstein (2007), Teela Sanders (2008a; 2008b), Monica

Prasad (1999) and other scholars state how clients – or at least most of them – perceive paid sex as

no compensatory practice in regards of 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.
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