Abstract
This paper examines the narratives of men who purchase sex from street level providers in a mid-sized city in Western Canada. We explore what men’s stories tell us about how masculinity is constructed in relation to street sex work. These men narrated their purchase of sex as attempts to exercise or lay claim to male power, privilege, and authority; at the same time, research reveals how tenuous this arrangement is for men. Study participants drew on conventional heterosexual masculine scripts to rationalize their actions and behaviors. Their stories reveal that their purchase of street-level sex is motivated by a sense of failure to successfully align with classed and gendered norms of hegemonic masculinity in which the purchase of sex was an attempt to “feel like a man again”. In this paper we move beyond the notion that static “types” of men purchase sex, highlighting instead that sex work customers are complex social actors with multifaceted reasons for purchasing sex but that are nonetheless inseparable from socially valorized forms of masculine comportment. We conclude that hegemonic masculinity is not only injurious to some men, but also to the sex workers on whom it is enacted.
Highlights
It has become customary in the sex work “customer” literature to begin with a statement about how the “demand” side of the sex industry is woefully understudied (Sawyer et al, 2001; Monto, 2004; Holt and Blevins, 2007; Huysamen and Boonzaier, 2015)
To date the sex work customer literature has largely focused on the discursive rationales of one group of buyers, men who purchase off-street sex
This scholarship has begun the task of understanding how men tend to draw on dominant hegemonic masculine scripts to explain and justify their choices
Summary
It has become customary in the sex work “customer” literature to begin with a statement about how the “demand” side of the sex industry is woefully understudied (Sawyer et al, 2001; Monto, 2004; Holt and Blevins, 2007; Huysamen and Boonzaier, 2015) While it is true much less is known about buying than selling sex, there is a growing body of literature that attempts to understand who purchases sex, and for what reasons. Most of this research has focused on the experiences of men who buy sex in off-street venues, including escort agencies, massage parlors, and through online or print ads This focus on off-street venues reflects in part the fact that men who purchase street-based sex comprise a hidden and hard-to-access population. While this literature has started to explore some of the motivations that underlie men’s motivations to purchase sex, what is still missing from these studies is a sophisticated understanding of how gender, especially dominant and hegemonic notions of masculinity, shapes these motivations
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