Transformational sexualities: Motivations of women who pay for sexual services

Abstract

Previous research on client motivations to purchase sexual services in the UK has predominantly focused on the experiences of men. Women who buy sex have largely been overlooked as it is commonly assumed that women provide, rather than purchase, sexual services. In addressing this empirical absence, this article examines data gained from 49 interviews with women clients and sex workers. It examines the reasons why women decide to purchase sexual services in the UK. We argue that the increasing importance of contemporary capitalism and consumerism has shaped women's engagement in the sex industry as clients. We show how women's sexual agency and assertiveness as clients, inverts the female sex worker/male client binary assumed to characterize commercial sex and illustrates the overlap and convergence of male and female sexuality. Our research thus contributes to an understanding of female sexuality more broadly, as exemplifying the hallmarks of ‘transformational sexualities’ in cosmopolitanism (Plummer, 2015).

Institutional Ethics Challenges to Sex Work Researchers: Committees, Communities, and Collaboration

“…Where REC concerns are clearly based on exaggerated ideas about the sex industry, researchers can cite work that debunks the conflation of sex work and human trafficking (Smith and Mac, 2018), provides evidence that challenges assumptions of sex workers as inherently vulnerable (Agustín, 2007; Brown and Sanders, 2017), or that talking about non-normative sexual practices is inherently distressing (Irvine, 2012). In cases where researchers are discouraged from doing research on male clients on account of their own vulnerability, they can draw on research that repeatedly disqualifies assumptions of purchasers of sex as a homogeneous and inherently dangerous group (Hammond and Kingston, 2014; Huysamen, 2020; Kingston et al, 2020; Sanders, 2008; Smith, 2019).…”