Sex Buyers, Consumer Rights and Emerging Themes from Online Communities for Men Paying for Sex

by Raquel Rosario Sánchez

Raquel is a writer, campaigner and researcher from the Dominican Republic. She specialises in ending male violence against girls and women. She is the Spokeswoman for FiLiA and a member of our Board of Trustees. The following speech was given at the 2020 Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation Global Summit on 21 July, organised by the National Centre on Sexual Exploitation. 

Welcome, everyone! 

Before I begin, I would like to express my gratitude to the National Centre on Sexual Exploitation for organising, and for making the deliberate decision to pursue this Online Global Summit, which forms a Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation in the midst of such challenging circumstances.

It is always inspiring to know that even during difficult times, the work of abolitionists around the world carries on and that, wherever we are, each and every one of the 100 speakers who are participating in this conference is committed to a world free from sexual violence and exploitation. 

I am particularly happy to join this coalition of advocates, campaigners and academics whose work has been fundamental to my understanding of prostitution and the sex trade.

The National Centre for Sexual Exploitation states: 

“The rise of the Internet, social media, and other technologies have completely revolutionised the way people live. Along with the good these developments have made possible; they have also unleashed tidal waves of sexual harm.

Modern technology is accelerating the pace and scale of sexual abuse and exploitation. This reality—combined with a toxic deluge of pop culture messages normalising harmful attitudes and behaviours—is rapidly transforming forms of sexual abuse, violence, and exploitation from the intolerable to the fashionable and “normal.”

I agree with this statement and that is why I am speaking to you all today. My name is Raquel Rosario Sanchez. I am a writer, a campaigner and a researcher. My work seeks to eradicate male violence against women and girls and, particularly to the purpose of this Global Summit, my work focuses on online communities for men who pay for sex. Currently, I am a PhD candidate with the Centre for Gender and Violence Research at the University of Bristol and, previous to coming to England, I did my Master’s Degree in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University, where I also researched online communities for men who pay for sex. 

So, what are they? What does it mean to say that there are online communities for sex buyers? Well, online communities for men who pay for sex in the sex industry are comprised of both forums and review boards where men who pay for sex get to speak with each other about their experiences and also to review the (overwhelmingly) women who they purchase… or, “whose services” they purchase. 

I became interested in this topic because I consider prostitution to be a form of violence against women and girls, and I therefore found myself troubled by the increasingly sanitised language which surrounds an industry were the worst conceivable forms of harm against women are enacted every day, around the world. As every single speaker at this Online Global Summit to End Sexual Exploitation can attest, debates about prostitution, both theoretical and political, have deliberately become disconnected from the material realities of women and girls. Any effort to address the substantive core of the prostitution industry becomes subsumed into language wars and semantical analysis. 

I did not want to be another academic who is so interested in theory that they disregard the material conditions of people’s lives, and I thought that analysing the words of sex buyers was a way to bridge that gap. 

For the purpose of my academic formation, I decided to go straight to the source of prostitution: the sex buyers themselves. For my Master’s Degree and my PhD (so far), I am using qualitative research, through the framework of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. Academic Michelle Lazar, whose work on this area is instrumental, argues that it offers “a critical perspective on unequal social arrangements sustained thought language use, with the goals of social transformation and emancipation” and that it is this shift in paradigm which constitutes the cornerstone of discourse analysis and feminist language studies.  

In her essay Power and Discourse at Work: is Gender Relevant? Janet Holmes agrees and contends that:

“Critical discourse analysis provides a framework to explore the ways in which systemic power is constructed and reinforced in interaction, to identify how the dominant group determines meaning and, more specifically, to describe the processes by which the more powerful person in an interaction typically gets to define the purpose or significance of the interaction and influences the direction on which it develops.”

Initially, I analysed review boards from the website for sex buyers Punternet and the content from the forum threads on UK Punting. Membership is free of charge to post content, and to analyse said content. Although one of them is located in the United States, the boards are primarily focused on the sex industry experiences of people in the United Kingdom. I chose them because these platforms constitute the oldest review boards and online communities for sex buyers in the worlds. Punternet, for example, was established in 1999 under the name of Field Reports. 

Both sites, along with the online communities for sex buyers which have proliferated around the world following their model, have managed to create a reputation within the sex industry in which a system is in place so that sex buyers reviews of prostituted women are referenced by escort agencies as a way to “promote” the women.

During the course of my research, I found an absence of the term ‘sex work’ itself, but a normalisation of the logistic behind this political term. The term ‘sex work’ was coined by Priscilla Alexander, one of the founders of the influential sex industry lobby group COYOTE. She wrote in 1987 for an anthology titled Sex work: writings by women in the sex industry, “I never have literally worked as a prostitute… although I was stigmatised as a whore at one time.” 

Nevertheless, the term ‘sex work’ has proven instrumental both to the sex industry as a whole, but particularly to sex buyers. Sex buyers have taken the utilitarian base of the term and gone one step further.

If sex is work, why not consider it a service? And that being said, if sex is a service that men get from women, does that mean that sex buyers should be attributed with consumer rights?

This question right there is one of the most fascinating and deeply troubling ones which sit at the core of my academic research. 

A sex buyer wrote the following review of a woman, shortly after paying her for sex. He said he felt disrespected because, even though she did everything he asked of her, she let him know that for her, this was a routine, not an authentic pleasurable experience. The sex buyer states: 

“She was polite and friendly before and after the event but was not so keen when we got down to business. I understand that a young 18-year-old may not dream of sex with a 50-year-old guy, but I equally expect better than this. Out of principle, I make every effort for the lady. I am always clean and well presented, I am always polite and respect the lady’s personal rules. Beautiful as she is, I will not return as I am left feeling disrespected”.

Another sex buyer wrote he felt disappointed because the woman he paid for treated prostitution as a job, rather than as the super fun, sexy fantasy they anticipated. He states that he was annoyed that he had to constantly ask her to do sex acts for him. She managed to arouse him enough for him to have an orgasm but he wrote: 

“When I returned to the room, she barely said anything and had her back turned to me as I dressed. Now, I had been friendly, clean and thoughtful, or at least I tried. When I dressed, I walked past her and she just looked at me and didn’t even get up. I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek and said goodbye. I couldn’t have felt worse. This is another of those (women) who do the terrible deed and then detach. Almost a female assisted wank, if you like. I just want a girlfriend experience, why the hell is that so hard to find? This is my 200th report, possibly my last after this deeply depressing punt.”

The problem for both men had in their sexual encounters, along with most men who write negative reviews of the women, is that they had deliberately bought into the rhetoric that assured them that sex work is work, that prostitution is a service that women can provide for men… but they found themselves facing human women who did not behave like the dehumanised machines this language implies. 

By far, the biggest complaint that sex buyers had when reviewing a woman in the online communities for sex buyers, was that women appeared disinterested or dispassionate about what they considered to be “a service”. That, and women who refused to do as told, in spite of their own personal boundaries. 

Sex buyers hated when the women reminded them, either implicitly or explicitly that prostitution was a job that they needed to do in order to put food on the table (oftentimes for their families), and not a vocation that came about out of sheer sexual desire for each sex buyer. Most sex buyers would rate women positively if the woman made a somewhat convincing effort to pretend that she had an authentic desire to a particular sex buyer, but would feel deeply disappointed (and write a negative review slating the woman) if they didn’t provide that illusion. 

As long as women provide the illusion of being the giddy sex worker, or as I called it in my research, as long as women displayed an “agentic complacency” which could be controlled entirely at the whims of each particular sex buyer, the women received rave reviews. If, however, the spell is broken, what Kajsa Ekis Ekman calls “the happy hooker myth”, then the sex buyers are reminded that if prostitution is work, then it is not an appealing form of labour. 

In that sense, online communities are no different than any review platform. For example, when people go to a restaurant with friends and are welcomed by a grumpy waiter or if the food takes inordinately long, some people are inclined to write a negative review of this establishment. “Service was awful. The food was overcooked and the bathroom was too far away.”, people complain. “I should get my money back!”

Movie reviews are their own genre because they operate under the assumption that, when people go to the movies they are paying for a service and are expecting to be wowed and amazed by the show. If the movie falls behind whatever expectation the moviegoer had prior to attending, we don’t bat an eye when they complain about it, either publicly in some public forum, or privately among friends and family.

But, what about women in prostitution? What are the consequences of framing the use of women’s bodies as a service a) to be consumed and b) to be rated? If prostituted women are service providers, as is claimed both by sex buyers and by pro-sex industry advocates, are men entitled to a refund when those women put boundaries around their bodies and refuse to perform X or Y sex act?

Emerging research from online communities for sex buyers’ evidences that the language of labour is the preferred choice for sex buyers. This is not done in the sense that many sex industry advocates promote, in which they argue that sex work is work as an empowered so-called feminist mantra, but in with the intention of stating quite clearly that they feel entitled to issue demands from prostituted women, akin to any other consumer who enjoys a service does. Hence why they refer to women as “service providers”.

In 2015, just around the time that I was conducting my research into online communities for men who pay for sex here in the United Kingdom, the UK parliament was debating a piece of legislation which touched on this very topic: the Consumer Rights Act 2015. 

The purpose of the Act is to “protect the rights of consumers and their interests” and applies both to “where there is an agreement between a trader and a consumer for the trader to supply goods, digital content or services if the agreement is a contract” and “whether the contract is written or oral or implied from the parties’ conduct or more than one of these combined”. 

Now if prostitution is work, should sex be considered a service that men can claim from women, or do women themselves constitute a form of ‘goods’ that is to be traded? If prostitution is a form of service, and if women are considered a form of goods, under the labour narrative sex industry advocates promote, could the Consumer Rights Act 2015 be used against women who entered an oral contract to “perform a sex act” and decided against it, at the last minute? 

If at 10:00 pm a prostituted woman agreed, during the exchange of money, to oral sex, intercourse and anal sex, but by 10:15 pm and after providing the first two acts she decided she does not wish to engage in anal sex, would said woman be considered to have breached the Consumer Rights Act 2015?

The Act’s definition contends that a good is “any tangible moveable item, but that includes water, gas and electricity and only if they are put up for supply in a limited volume or set quantity”. By normalising the utilitarian language of labour regarding prostitution, are sex industry advocates conscious that their politics place women’s bodies in the category of “a tangible moveable item” to be bought and sold?

The Consumer Rights Act 2015 argues that “every contract to supply goods by description is to be treated as including a term that the goods will match the description”. If a woman has gained 5 to 8 pounds since her prostituting agency took her promotional pictures, does the sex buyer has the right to claim that the “goods and services” was in breach of their contract?

The Act states: “if the goods do not conform to the contract, or because of a breach of requirements that are stated in the contract, the consumer’s rights are a) the right to repair or replacement and b) the right to a price reduction or the final right to reject”.

A woman is described by her prostituting agency as: 

“This naughty student is a must for any gentleman’s ‘to-do list’. Delivering a fresh and playful girlfriend experience, she is only 19 but already has an amazing repertoire. She is a deliciously saucy little minx and is a flower you’d definitely want to pick from our hot lineup.” 

Her details say she is delighted to engage in deep french kissing and oral sex without a condom. It also states that she enjoys having men ejaculating in her mouth. A sex buyer, though, was left dismayed when she did not match the “service” he expected of her. He wrote a review stating: 

“She does not do French kissing. She was reluctant to do oral sex without a condom and she doesn’t do cum in mouth either. This lack of skills and services is not what you expect from a lady who, and I quote, ‘has an amazing repertoire’”. He adds: “Although she looks stunning and she really is very good looking, her performance, lack of service and attention to the client means that she is NOT worth seeing”. 

But if this was a service, he was a client and she was the ‘good’, does that mean that this man is entitled to consumer rights? 

If so, could he potentially sue her? 

The purpose of my participation at this Online Global Summit is to encourage discussion among the ramifications of the utilitarian language of labour in the sex industry and the emerging ethical and political issues raised by the hegemonic prevalence of ‘sex work’ discourse. 

I look forward to continued debate on the subject and particularly, I hope that the advocates, activists, lawyers and trainers who have engaged with my submission have been left with considerable food for thought regarding this topic. 

Thank you!