Melissa Farley, Emily Schuckman, Jacqueline M. Golding, Kristen Houser, Laura Jarrett, Peter Qualliotine, Michele Decker (2011)
Comparing Sex Buyers with Men Who Don't Buy Sex: "You can have a good time with the servitude" vs. "You're supporting a system of degradation"
Paper presented at Psychologists for Social Responsibility Annual Meeting July 15, 2011, Boston.

This research study compared 101 men who buy sex with 100 men who did not buy sex, matched by age, ethnicity, and education level. Most had a wife or girlfriend at the time of the study. Sex buyers had many more sex partners in their lifetime (prostituted as well as non-prostituted) than non-sex buyers.

Sex buyers were far more likely than non-sex buyers to commit felonies, misdemeanors, crimes related to violence against women, substance abuse-related crimes, assaults, crimes with weapons, and crimes against authority. All of the crimes known to be associated with violence against women were reported by sex buyers; none were reported by non-sex buyers.

Sex buyers acknowledged having committed significantly more sexually coercive acts against women than non-sex buyers.

Sex buyers had significantly less empathy for prostituted women than did non-sex buyers and they acknowledged fewer harmful effects of prostitution on the women in it and on the community. Non-sex buyers more often saw prostitution as harmful to both the woman herself and to the community as a whole.

The sex buyers masturbated to pornography more often than non-sex buyers, imitated it with partners more often, and had more often received their sex education from pornography than the non-sex buyers. Significantly more of the sex buyers compared learned about sex from pornography compared to the non-sex buyers.

Both sex buyers and non-sex buyers evidenced extensive knowledge of the physical and psychological harms of prostitution. Two thirds of both the sex buyers and the non-sex buyers observed that a majority of women are lured, tricked, or trafficked into prostitution. Many of the men had an awareness of the economic coercion and the lack of alternatives in women's entry into prostitution. Almost all of the sex buyers and non-sex buyers shared the opinion that minor children are almost always available for prostitution in bars, massage parlors, escort and other prostitution in Boston.

The knowledge that the women have been exploited, coerced, pimped, or trafficked failed to deter sex buyers from buying sex. Many of the sex buyers had used women who were controlled by pimps at the time they used her for sex.

Both sex buyers and non-sex buyers agreed that the most effective deterrent to buying sex would be to be placed on a registry of sex offenders. Other effective deterrents included public exposure techniques such as having their name or photo publicized on a billboard, newspaper, or the Internet. Spending time in jail was considered an effective deterrent by 80% of sex buyers and 83% of non-sex buyers. Educational programs were considered the least effective deterrent by both groups of men.

Taken together, these findings - a range of criminal activity in addition to prostitution, nonrelational sexual preference, a high number of sex partners, extensive pornography use - interact and increase the likelihood of future violence against women, according to other studies cited in this report.

Our finding that the sex buyers are involved in these criminal activities suggests that sex buying should be considered in that context. State and federal laws against prostitution and trafficking should be enforced against johns. Sex buyers hold extensive information about pimps, coercion, trafficking, and the harms of prostitution to the women in it. This information is not yet fully used by law enforcement and could be useful.

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MyFoxHouston.com
July 29, 2011

Study Looks at Men's Attitudes Toward Buying Sex: MyFoxHOUSTON.com

Newsweek, 7/17/2011
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/07/17/the-growing-demand-for-prostitution.html

The men who buy sex are your neighbors and colleagues. A new study reveals how the burgeoning demand for porn and prostitutes is warping personal relationships and endangering women and girls.

Men of all ages, races, religions, and backgrounds do it. Rich men do it, and poor men do it, in forms so varied and ubiquitous that they can be summoned at a moment's notice.

And yet surprisingly little is known about the age-old practice of buying sex, long assumed to be inevitable. No one even knows what proportion of the male population does it; estimates range from 16 percent to 80 percent. "Ninety-nine percent of the research in this field has been done on prostitutes, and 1 percent has been done on johns," says Melissa Farley, director of Prostitution Research and Education, a nonprofit organization that is a project of San Francisco Women's Centers.

A clinical psychologist, Farley studies prostitution, trafficking, and sexual violence, but even she wasn't sure how representative her results were. "The question has always remained: are all our findings true of just sex buyers, or are they true of men in general?" she says.

In a new study released exclusively to NEWSWEEK, "Comparing Sex Buyers With Men Who Don't Buy Sex," Farley provides some startling answers. Although the two groups share many attitudes about women and sex, they differ in significant ways illustrated by two quotes that serve as the report's subtitle.

One man in the study explained why he likes to buy prostitutes: "You can have a good time with the servitude," he said. A contrasting view was expressed by another man as the reason he doesn't buy sex: "You're supporting a system of degradation," he said.

And yet buying sex is so pervasive that Farley's team had a shockingly difficult time locating men who really don't do it. The use of pornography, phone sex, lap dances, and other services has become so widespread that the researchers were forced to loosen their definition in order to assemble a 100-person control group.

"We had big, big trouble finding nonusers," Farley says. "We finally 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."

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May, 2011

Melissa Farley, Jan Macleod, Lynn Anderson, & Jacqueline M. Golding (2011)
in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy

Public awareness about prostitution has grown in recent years, along with an understanding of the psychological trauma resulting from sexual exploitation as commercial enterprise, regardless of its legal status.

Mainstreamed and normalized prostitution is an example of a social ecology that offers men "the opportunity to aggress and force women to accept their aggression."

Historically, discussions about prostitution have centered on prostitution as a problem of women or as a problem of HIV transmission from prostituted person to john to the rest of the community. Just as a shift in awareness and research moved from battered woman to batterer, there is today an interest in the prostitutor in addition to the prostituted.

To have an understanding of prostitution, it is necessary to learn more about the perpetrators of the traumatic stress caused by prostitution. We found that those men who most frequently used women in prostitution were most likely to have committed sexually aggressive acts against nonprostituting women.

High-frequency users of women in prostitution used pornography more frequently than men who used women in prostitution less frequently.

The men's perceptions of prostituted women's experiences of prostitution tended to differ from the actual perceptions of prostituted women in other studies.

Deterrents to prostitution include public exposure or jail time if the men were convinced that laws would be enforced. Throughout our interviews with these men, we noted contradictions, inconsistencies, and ambivalence in their thinking about prostitution.

These cognitive and emotional lacunae may suggest possibilities for development of prostitution prevention programs.

Nearly all said that they saw prostitution as occurring between two consenting adults, yet at the same time, large majorities believed that women prostitute strictly out of economic necessity and that women do not enjoy the sex of prostitution.

Most said that prostitution should be treated like any other business, yet 4 in 10 believed that prostitution lowers the moral standards of the community.

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Film Review by Helen Redmond
Nov 18, 2010

"To make a documentary about Hugh Hefner--indisputably the world's most famous pornographer and unrepentant chauvinist--and omit his enormously influential role in negatively shaping ideas about female sexuality is sophistry. Berman's documentary is an attempt to "get beyond the bunny," but there is no getting beyond the bunny because the bunny made the man.

Hefner's success was built on the exploitation of women's nude bodies for the pleasure of men. Every aspect of Playboy, Inc. was consciously designed as "Entertainment for Men." Hefner was one of the first capitalists to commodify women's sexuality for mass consumption (by men). The profits from selling pornography made him a millionaire."

"Hefner currently stars in the reality TV show The Girls Next Door, but this is another chapter of Hefner's life completely left out of Berman's documentary. The reality show is set in the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles. It's the successor to Penthouse After Dark, with the jiggling, female flesh of Hefner's numerous live-in girlfriends on display. In each episode, we see the pajama-wearing, Viagra-fueled geriatric rutting of the 84-year-old Hefner. It is vomitous.

Hefner picks his girlfriends by looking at photos, pointing to them and shouting out to assistants, "Her, I want her!" His girlfriends are poorly paid prostitutes. Kendra Wilkinson, a former lover, reported that she was paid $1,000 a week, a pittance for a professional pimp like Hefner whose personal wealth is estimated to be over $50 million. Kendra admitted, "I hate putting my hand out, but we couldn't have jobs other than getting appearance fees...Hef was kind of like my best friend but a Sugar Daddy at the same time.""

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Government Office of Sweden
October, 2010

Prostitution and human trafficking are sustained by demand. Prostitution and human trafficking for sexual purposes represent a serious obstacle to social equality, to gender equality and to the enjoyment of human rights. Trafficking profoundly violates human dignity and the right of individuals to decide over their own lives and their own bodies. The victims are primarily women and girls, but men and boys are also being exposed to prostitution and human trafficking for sexual purposes. Studies show that it is mostly men who purchase sexual services.

Against Prostitution Sweden10-09.pdf

Jeanette R
September 2009

"Men do not go to strip clubs and use prostituted women so that they can have sexual pleasure. . . . Men use women in prostitution including strippers to express their anger at women. . . . Several times a year we hear about serial killers who kill large numbers of prostituted women, but they are not found until they kill a non-prostituting woman."

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UK-based Eaves for Women and U.S.-based Prostitution and Research Education teamed up to interview 103 men in London who had bought commercial sex. Of those men, 55% believed that the majority of women were lured, tricked, or trafficked into the sex industry unwillingly. Most of the men interviewed also claimed that at least a third of women in prostitution began when they were under 18. Half the men were aware that they were using a woman who was being controlled by a pimp. Despite believing that a majority of women in prostitution were currently or had once been victims of human trafficking, these men bought sex from them.

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Melissa Farley 2007

This article explores the perspective of a "trick", the perspective of a woman in prostitution, research on the effects of pornography on women in prostitution, and where the tricks/customers/buyers/predators are despite their attempts to remain invisible and anonymous.

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Jan Macleod, Melissa Farley, Lynn Anderson, and Jacqueline Golding, 2008

This is a research report based on interviews with 110 scottish men who bought women in prostitution. We asked interviewees about the extent to which their identity as men was based on valuing psychological and sexual dominance and about their suspiciousness and resentment toward women. We assessed sexually coercive behaviors with non-prostituting women such as verbally or physically threatening a partner or using physical force in order to obtain sexual intercourse. We asked what would deter these men from buying sex.

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