Why buy sex? Conscientious clients.

• Author: Brown, Elizabeth Nolan
• Position: Survey of commercial sex clients in Ireland & UK - Citings - Brief article

As Northern Ireland prepared to pass a ban on buying sex last year, crusaders for the measure called on familiar stereotypes about prostitution clients, portraying them as self-centered misogynists and deviants. But new research suggests the opposite is true.

"The desire to find sexual pleasure does not automatically mean that men who pay for sex are simply looking for a receptive, passive female body," the anthropologist Susann Huschke and the sociologist Dirk Schubotz write in the June issue of Sexualities. Rather, "commercial sex involves social interactions and emotional aspects, which play an important role for many clients."

For their study, Huschke and Schubotz surveyed 446 clients from Ireland and the U.K. online and conducted in-person follow-ups with 10 of them. Ninety-seven percent of the respondents were male, largely between the ages of 31 and 50, and most (85 percent) saw female sex workers. Forty-eight percent...