by David Levy
In recent years, one of the most sought after features in the prostitution encounter has become the “Girlfriend Experience,” or GFE. In contrast to commercial transactions premised upon the straightforward exchange of money for orgasm, clients describe the GFE as proceeding “much more like a nonpaid encounter between two lovers,” with the possibility of unhurried foreplay, reciprocal cuddling, and passionate kisses.9
Several of those interviewed by Plumridge claimed that their paid sex partners were of greater emotional importance to them than their relationships with their wives. While this speaks volumes about the states of these men’s marriages, the fact that they genuinely believed it, or at least deluded themselves into believing it, demonstrates just how easy it is for someone who wants a particular person to care about him to succumb to the myth that that person does indeed care. Plumridge summed this up by explaining that the men “all wanted a responsive embodied woman to have sex with. This they secured by ascribing desires, responses and sexuality to prostitute women. They did not know the true ‘selves’ of these women, but constructed them strategically in a way that forwarded their own pleasures.” Another New Zealand study on why men visit prostitutes found further support for the companionship, the myth of mutuality, and the lack of complications as prime reasons for paying for sex. There was also an emphasis by some of the johns in this particular study on the inability of their wives to satisfy them sexually.
Some fifteen years prior to Plumridge’s research, Harold Holzman and Sharon Pines had examined the motivations of a sample of men aged from twenty-seven to fifty-two almost half of whom were married, for their paper “Buying Sex: The Phenomenology of Being a John.” In common with Plumridge, they found that the men’s desire for sex was coupled with a desire for companionship, hence “in every encounter discussed, the individual paying for sex engaged in social, courting behaviors that were often flavored with varying degrees of romance.”10 Holzman and Pines found that “there existed a belief that by being pleasant or even quite amorous they could subtly seduce the prostitute into allowing their created illusion to play itself out…Clearly, a great deal of energy is invested in the maintenance of the illusion.” Roger Kernsmith found the same need for a social bond in those johns whose postings on the Internet newsgroup ASP (alt.sex.prostitution) he studied for his survey: “The theme that clients hired prostitutes as much for the sense of social closeness and acceptance as for the physical stimuli associated with the performed sex acts was found in every element of the ASP data.”11 Further reinforcement of this theme comes from an even earlier study by Charles Winick, who interviewed 732 clients in five major American cities and concluded that the “emotional meanings and overtones of a client’s visit to a prostitute are more important to the client than the desire for sex.”12
The importance of companionship for the client as a benefit of the transaction is fully acknowledged in the teaching at the Hanky Panky School in Amsterdam, which was opened in 2003 by Elene Vis, the former madam of an escort agency. In the Netherlands, brothels are legal and prostitutes pay tax on their earnings. The country is renowned for its tolerant attitude toward commercial sex, and the red-light district in Amsterdam is a well-known tourist attraction where the women display themselves in shop windows.
Vis prides herself on teaching her students to perfect their skills and boost their sales by giving “more than sex.” “Of course I teach sex techniques to the students, but with a client that only takes ten minutes and does not satisfy the customer or the escort…. It is about attention, listening, tenderness and positive energy, and those things can be bought.”*13
Vis claims that after a half day of classes, the prostitutes emerge with the power to change “ten disappointing minutes” into an exchange of positive energy. “Escort is accompanying someone. If the man feels pampered, he will be willing to pay for more than just the sex. In return this boosts the girl’s self-esteem.” For €450 ($490) students can take classes in “Presentation,” “Adding On Hours,” and “Entertaining.”*
The illusion in the minds of the johns, this myth of mutuality, is something that will be even more believable when the pampering and the imitation affection emanate from a sexual robot rather than a human prostitute. One reason for this is that in the case of the prostitute the john pays for every encounter and is therefore reminded repeatedly of the connection between the sexual experience and money, whereas when he’s purchased a robot, this connection in its owner’s mind will quickly dissipate forever.† More obvious reasons why the robot experience will be more appealing than visiting a prostitute include the utterly convincing manner in which robots will express affection and other emotions, simply because their emotions will be programmed into them, to be part of them, instead of being make-believe affections acted out by a prostitute with little genuine enthusiasm for the need to convince.
Motivation: Variety
Neil McKeganey and Marina Barnard studied the reasons most often mentioned by johns as being important in the decision to employ the services of prostitutes. One reason they highlighted is variety—the opportunity to have sex with a range of different women. Plumridge’s research confirmed this finding, quoting as an example one john who explained his motivation as “someone different someone new,” and another responding that “What actually turns me on is a bit of variety around me.”
A robot will be able to provide endless variety in terms of its conversation, its voice, its knowledge and its virtual interests, its personality, and just about every other aspect of its being. All will be changeable on demand. Even a robot’s physical characteristics could be changeable, thanks to clever mechanical design and replacement parts. And all aspects of a robot’s sexuality will similarly be changeable according to its owner’s wishes. It is hardly practical for a john to go searching the streets of a red-light district or to a brothel expecting to be able to find a woman looking like Marilyn Monroe (or whoever his lust desires), with the brainpower and knowledge of a university professor and the conversational style of a party-loving teenager. But with a robot at home, he need search no further—all these characteristics and more will be selectable at the time of purchase. So the man who wants variety in his sexual partners will be able to find it, wherever he wishes, and far more easily than when looking for a prostitute to match his desires.
While variety in the appearance, personality, and attitude of prostitutes is one major reason men pay for sex, variety in the sexual experience itself is, for many johns, another important factor, often the most important. “One of the main reasons clients pursue encounters with prostitutes is that they are interested in sexual practices to which they do not have access, either because they have no regular partners or because their partners are unable or unwilling to accommodate their desires.”14
Many men are in relationships in which their wife or partner’s sexual tastes do not accept oral sex or some other sexual practice in which the man would like to indulge, so paying for the service provides an easy way out of his problem. The extent to which oral sex is an important reason for male clients to visit female prostitutes was studied by Martin Monto at Oregon’s University of Portland and described in his 2001 paper “Prostitution and Fellatio” in the Journal of Sex Research. Monto gathered questionnaires from more than 1,200 men who had been arrested while attempting to hire female prostitutes in Las Vegas, Portland, and San Francisco and who were participating in a program known as “johns school,” designed to discourage them from reoffending.* The results of Monto’s survey indicate that having a prostitute perform oral sex was even more prevalent for most johns than vaginal sex, with 81 percent of those surveyed having experienced oral sex given by a prostitute, when the figure for vaginal sex was only 55 percent. However, when asked how they would rate various sexual activities, 76 percent of the johns in Monto’s survey described vaginal intercourse as very appealing, while the figure for “having a partner perform oral sex on you” was lower, at 65 percent. Monto suggests various
possible reasons for this discrepancy. One reason is that “it is much easier and more convenient to engage in oral sex than vaginal intercourse in a car or alley, where many of these episodes occur”; another is that prostitutes might “prefer oral to vaginal sex for a variety of reasons”; while others include clients’ beliefs that there is a lower risk of AIDS from oral sex than there is from vaginal sex and less need to wear a condom.15,16
Comparing Monto’s figures with findings from the National Health and Social Life Survey† revealed that in the U.S. male population as a whole, a significantly lower proportion of men, 45 percent, found receiving oral sex very appealing. This comparison, between johns and the male population as a whole, indicates that a significant number of men seek encounters with prostitutes because of a desire for oral sex, providing a convincing example of the wish for sexual variety as a prime motivator for many johns. This motivation has also been confirmed by various other researchers.
Clearly there will not be much of a problem in designing a mechanically sophisticated robot so that it can perform oral sex. Furthermore, sexual robots will be able not only to satisfy any particular sexual desire expressed by their owners but also to suggest sexual practices that their owners have never previously experienced and to teach their owners to become better lovers for those occasions when they prefer human company to sex with their robot.
Motivation: Lack of Complication and Constraint
For many clients, one of the chief virtues of commercial sex exchange is the clear and bounded nature of the encounter…. What is unique to contemporary client narratives is the explicitly stated preference for this type of bounded intimate engagement over other relational forms.
—Elizabeth Bernstein17
Alongside variety as a prime reason for visiting prostitutes, the research literature has identified a small group of motivations that might collectively be described as a lack of complications and constraints. Neil McKeganey found that “for some men the appeal of prostitution seemed to lie in a combination of the anonymity, the brevity and the emotionally uninvolved nature of the prostitute contact.”18 Another survey, this one conducted among the clients at two Australian brothels, indicated that 90 percent of the men who participated confirmed that a lack of “complications” was one of their main motivations in paying for sex. From earlier research it appears that the complication most often cited as an obstacle to getting noncommercial sex was the perceived need by men to “play games,” pampering and courting a woman in order to achieve their goal, possibly requiring an enormous effort in return for which there is no guarantee of sex. As one of the johns in Holzman and Pines’s survey put it, “If I just want to go out and get laid I’m not going to bother going to a bar and buying drinks and dancing with a girl all night because I’m not interested in that…you don’t want to spend time looking for it where there is always a maybe—maybe yes or maybe no…you almost want a written guarantee.”19
When discussing their wish for sex without constraints, johns present something of a paradox in their attitudes. On the one hand, there is the self-delusion of the myth that a measure of emotional involvement exists in both directions with the prostitute. In contrast there is what Monto describes as “a wish to avoid the responsibilities or emotional attachments of a conventional relationship,”20 the attitude that “payment of money for sex entitled them to freedom from the requirements normally associated with relationships.”21 Many of the johns who provided data for this research indicated that they regarded sex with their wife or partner as part of a different type of transaction, one in which they were tied down or had other demands placed on them. So instead of playing games, instead of the constriction of obligations imposed within a noncommercial sexual encounter, the johns are attracted by the ease of a paid sexual experience. The limited nature of paid sexual encounters and the lack of any long-term emotional involvement further contribute to the johns’ feelings of freedom. The payment of cash is a simple, direct way to guarantee a sexual experience with the minimum of effort.
To avoid any necessity to indulge in games in the pursuit of a sex partner, for the avoidance of what are often perceived by johns as being constraints and complications in more conventional sexual relationships, and in the interest of limiting the nature and duration of any emotional involvement to whatever extent is wanted by its owner, a robot will be the ideal sex partner. You don’t have to buy it endless meals or drinks, take it to the movies or on vacation to romantic but expensive destinations. It will expect nothing from you, no long-term (or even short-term) emotional returns, unless you have chosen it to be programmed to do so.
Motivation: Lack of Success with Women
The basic function of prostitution is to provide a primarily sexual service to people who either fail to meet the requirements of the more legitimate “market” or who exclude themselves from the larger market because they do not feel comfortable in it. The system is very flexible, and no-one is turned away.
—Mary Laner22
For a variety of reasons, many men have difficulty in becoming involved in dating or more permanent relationships with women. In some cases this is because the man is ugly, physically deformed, psychologically inadequate, a stranger in another town or a foreign land, or simply lacking in the necessary social skills and/or sexual assurance. Such men, with normal male desires, have a need for sexual intimacy that they cannot satisfy because of their lack of sexual effectiveness—they simply cannot attract a mate, or are afraid to try, or suffer from a combination of both. Their need can, however, be satisfied by a prostitute. By seeking to pay for sex, they reduce the risk of rejection to an absolute minimum, thereby almost guaranteeing themselves sex on a plate. For these men, prostitution is the only sex available, a reason for paying for sex that was indicated by almost 40 percent of the johns in a study by Xantidis and McCabe.
None of these categories will present any problem to robots. Any man lacking in the self-esteem necessary to make sexual overtures will be able to purchase a fembot that is immune to ugliness or a physical deformity in its owner and to its owner’s psychological inadequacies.* She will be available for hire (or travel with her owner) when he is visiting another town or country. And she will cater to the socially inept and the sexually unassured with the same virtual emotions and the same sexual responsiveness as when she is encountered by the handsomest, the most socially adept, and the most sexually confident.
Why Women Pay Men for Sex
In contrast to the relatively well researched topic of men paying for sex, there is almost no systematic published research on the reasons why women pay, on what exactly they are seeking from their commercial sexual encounters. Reported anecdotal evidence from a number of media articles on sex tourism promotes the view that when on vacation many women are looking for physical satisfaction from young, toned, native male bodies with large penises. But that is far from being the whole story, as an examination of the extremely sparse evidence testifies. The truth appears to be close to what has been observed from the studies on why men pay women for sex.
One source that does go some little way to explain why women pay for sex is an article published in the UK edition of Marie Claire in February 1994: “Why Women Go to Male Prostitutes,” the research for which was carried out by an academic at Birmingham University (who was not credited in the magazine*). Ten women were interviewed for this article, of whom nine gave reasons that mirror some of those generally expounded by men.†
Three of the women responded very much in line with the “myth of mutuality,” wanting social warmth, caring, companionship. Jane,‡ aged fifty-one, a housewife, commented, “It’s not so much the sex I’m looking for, as the feeling that someone is there for me.” Jean, a thirty-nine-year-old teacher, endorsed the importance of companionship: “It’s not even the sex I want—just the company. Unless you have been through it yourself [husband leaving you for another woman], it’s impossible to understand how desperately lonely you get…. I did eventually
have sex once, but I would be just as happy to pay for the company.” And Anne, sixty-four, a housewife, was very much like Prue the sex tourist, in her attitude: “I suppose I think of it as a holiday romance more than anything else. I would never dream of looking for anyone here in England. I certainly didn’t feel demeaned by it. I wouldn’t expect a man to want to do it with a woman of my age for nothing.”
Six of the other women in the Marie Claire article also espoused motivations that are among the most prevalent ones expressed by men.
Lack of Complications and Constraints
“The only thing lacking in my life is regular and uncomplicated sex,” said Yasmin, forty-four, a charity fund-raiser. And, “The only way I could guarantee sex without involvement was to pay for it,” stated Barbara, twenty-nine, a hospital administrator.
Lack of Success with Men
“I have always been overweight and have developed a bit of a complex about it over the years. I’ve never really had a proper boyfriend—not one that lasted more than a few weeks anyway,” said Lucy, thirty-five, a housing officer. “Finding a new man [after a breakup] seemed impossible,” according to Nicole, an art director. “My husband hasn’t made love to me for ten years,” said Irene, thirty-seven, a housewife, describing lack of success with one particular man—the one she wanted. And similarly, “I felt neglected by Colin’s lack of interest in me,” said Louise, forty-seven, a doctor’s receptionist—about her husband.
A small but useful source of additional data on the reasons women pay for sex is the group of clients who consented to be interviewed for the documentary What Sort of Gentleman Are You After? Their comments revealed that in addition to simply enjoying “good sex,” by and large they are motivated by the same desire for a “lack of complications” that appeals to many johns*:
