Why Women Have Sex (31 page)

A woman has the right to sell sexual services just as much as she has the right to sell her brains to a law firm when she works as a lawyer,
or to sell her creative work to a museum when she works as an artist, or to sell her image to a photographer when she works as a model, or to sell her body when she works as a ballerina. Since most people can have sex without going to jail, there is no reason except old-fashioned prudery to make sex for money illegal.

Dr. Jocelyn Elders, a surgeon general under President Bill Clinton, echoed this sentiment: “We say that [hookers] are selling their bodies, but how is that different from athletes? They’re selling their bodies. Models? They’re selling their bodies. Actors? They’re selling their bodies.”

Regardless of one’s position on whether prostitution should be legal, it is important to understand the underlying motivations of women who enter into the “world’s oldest profession.” Because women’s sexuality is so highly prized, it can be regarded as an asset that economists call fungible—it can be transposed or exchanged for many other kinds of resources. But how do women become prostitutes instead of finding other ways to take advantage, if they like, of their sexual value?

Prostitution is not a singular phenomenon—but it does almost singularly affect women, who comprise well over 90 percent of the world’s prostitutes, while more than 99 percent of prostitutes’ clients are men. Some girls and women become prostitutes because they are literally forced to become sex slaves.

The problem of sexual enslavement, also called sex trafficking, is particularly pernicious in Myanmar (Burma), Pakistan, India, Cambodia, and Thailand. Sex traffickers use a variety of tactics to enslave girls and women. They typically prey on those in extreme poverty. A common trick is to promise a well-paying job in another city or country; pay the girl’s or woman’s parents a sum of money to initiate her move; and then sell her sexual services to a brothel, often bribing police and border guards along the way.

The conditions in the brothels, some of which are operated openly, are often appalling. The women and girls are forced to have sex with dozens
of men each day, paying most or all of their earnings to the brothel owners. Although some of their clients are Westerners, the largest clientele consists of men from local or neighboring Asian countries. The details of sex trafficking have been documented in several excellent books and are beyond the scope of this one. Although there are movements devoted to eliminating sex trafficking, the demand for prostitutes is so great and the money to be made by traffickers so lucrative that these efforts have met with little success. Suffice it to say that why women have sex in these circumstances is obvious—they are forced to do so.

But there are also women who turn to prostitution because it is the best among strictly limited options for survival. Some women become prostitutes because they are unmarriageable in their cultural communities. Women with dependent children often have difficulty attracting husbands. Among the Ganda of Uganda, for instance, women with children are actually forbidden by law to marry. Malays and Somalis historically forbade women who have been divorced to remarry. Even when not strictly forbidden to remarry, divorced women sometimes have great difficulty attracting husbands, especially if they were divorced on the grounds of adultery. In Myanmar and Somalia, nonvirgin single women are considered to be “tarnished,” making it extremely difficult for them to marry. In most cultures, men regard a woman who has children sired by other men as an onerous burden, which lowers these women’s mate value. And women who suffer from disease or disfigurement often have difficulty attracting husbands. For these reasons, some women are essentially forced by circumstances to become prostitutes to support themselves and their children.

In other cases, there are women whom many men would consider desirable as wives, but who choose not to marry because they perceive the eligible men to be of low quality or because they see prostitution as a better option than marriage. Indeed, some women even choose prostitution to avoid the drudgery of marriage. In Singapore, for instance, historically some Malay women reported becoming prostitutes to avoid the hard work expected of wives, which included gathering and carrying firewood and laundering clothes by hand. Among the Amhara and Bemba of Africa, prostitutes can earn enough money to hire men to do work for them—work that is normally expected of wives.

There is a hierarchy of prostitutes ranging from low-priced street prostitutes, commonly called hookers, to high-priced call girls. Of course, the amount of money a woman is able or willing to receive in exchange for her sexual services varies greatly, depending on the location and competition, her level of attractiveness, and her degree of desperation. An attractive street prostitute might make two hundred dollars for an act of sex, while a desperate drug addict, blemished with needle marks and missing teeth, might take as little as twenty bucks. Street prostitutes are targeted by police more often than escorts or call girls since they are both visible and vulnerable.

Young girls and women who are homeless sometimes trade sex for money, food, shelter, or drugs. Often these are tragic cases in which adolescent girls have fled from homes riddled with emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. On the streets, they have sex as a strategy of survival. Some trade sex to support their boyfriends as well as themselves. As one put it, “Me and [my boyfriend] would pretty much leech off him for awhile [the man she was having sex with for money]. Pretty much I was using [the man] to get money for drugs or to get alcohol or drugs for me and [my boyfriend].”

One woman in our study described a similar motivation:

We both had a drug addiction at the time—the kind that keeps you up all night talking. I was never initially propositioned for anything but I knew if I stuck around and got him to fall in love with me then I could have all [the drugs] I wanted and I did just that.

—gay/lesbian woman, age 20

At the other end of the spectrum are high-priced call girls, as exemplified by Ashley Alexandra Dupré. In February 2008, Dupré allegedly charged Eliot Spitzer, then the governor of New York, $4,300 for a sexual encounter. When the media exposed the purported transaction, it brought to light a booming underground business of high-end sex clubs, including the one for which Dupré allegedly plied her
trade, the Emperors Club VIP, located in New York City. According to news reports, call girls for the Emperors Club VIP typically charged between $1,000 and $3,000 per hour, depending on their sophistication and attractiveness. Although the escort agencies generally receive half of the money, it is not difficult to understand the lure of this quick cash, especially when compared to jobs such as waitressing, which pay a paltry seven to thirteen dollars an hour on average.

Although prostitution can be extremely lucrative, it can also be a psychologically stressful and physically risky means of making money. In addition to the risks of sexually transmitted diseases and the potential for violence at the hands of clients, many prostitutes suffer the emotional toll of living a double life. As one prostitute put it: “It’s very stressful to lead two lives, to have to lie all the time—how is it that you can afford those great shoes, that $2,000 bag, the apartment? Of course you put up with it because you love the money and the control . . . but you do get lonely.”

Not all women who exchange sex for money view it as prostitution:

I only [have sex for money] with my kid’s father. Not a prostitute or anything and because I love him but nothing is free in this world.

—heterosexual woman, age 32

A “sugar baby” is a woman who offers her time, company, and usually sex to a financially well-off man (her “sugar daddy”), who in turn takes care of the woman financially—covering many, and sometimes all, of her expenses. The women in these relationships are usually significantly younger than the men. No one knows how common these arrangements are, since they are usually kept secret. A study of more than one thousand urban Kisumu Kenyans revealed that 7.4 percent of women reported themselves to be in a relationship with a “sugar daddy,” although systematic studies of this phenomenon in other cultures have not yet been conducted. A hint at the prevalence of sugar daddies within the United States comes from the modern proliferation of Web-based businesses
specifically devoted to matching sexually attractive women with financially attractive men. The sites, billed as dating services, include
Sugardaddie.com
,
SugarDaddyForMe.com
,
WealthyMen.com
,
MillionaireMen.com
, and
MarryMeSugarDaddy.com
. There is even a Web site devoted to rating the quality of sugar daddy / sugar baby Web sites!

When women seek out sugar daddies, they say their main motivation is financial. An Associated Press report about sugar babies notes that for some of the women, the relationship is a way to live the “high life” without enduring the drudgery of a nine-to-five job. The benefits, sometimes given in the form of gifts, range from spa and acrylic nail appointments to dinners at expensive restaurants, designer clothing, jewelry, exotic vacations, luxury cars, and even luxury apartments. One woman in our study found sex to be an equitable exchange for books:

I basically was a glorified “sugar baby” for one relationship. I slept with one of my professors. I received a lot of attention academically and the man gave me tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of books. I didn’t feel guilty or anything. To me, the books were a bonus and really, he would have given me items anyway because I was his research assistant and his friend. I always wondered why people believed that this was unethical and borderline illegal as prostitution. He was a great lover, so he didn’t need to give me anything.

—gay/lesbian woman, age 25

But some women also seek more than the money. Another news article observed that what starts out as sex for resources can be transformed into a committed relationship marked by romance, loyalty, and even chivalry.

Not all sugar-daddy relationships end up happily, though, as illustrated by the experience of a woman in our study:

I was living out of a hotel, pregnant and with my eldest son and there was an ex-professional football player that wanted to be my “sugar daddy” and put my son and I into a house and financially take care of us in exchange for sex. He told me he would give me a
car so I had sex with him. Later he wanted to have sex again before delivering the car and I began to feel “cheated” so I quit talking to him.

—predominantly heterosexual woman, age 21

Unlike in prostitution and sugar-baby relationships, some forms of sexual bartering are implicit rather than overtly negotiated. Here is how a few women in our study describe the sex-resource exchange:

I love sex so there is no reason in the world not to have sex with someone who wants it with you if they are going to take the time out and buy you a nice meal.

—bisexual woman, age 45

This person was very powerful in his company and was pretty wealthy. It wasn’t done at first for anything other than mutual attraction. But after he started giving me gifts, it felt like that was all I was having sex with him for at that point.

—heterosexual woman, age 29

I was seeing a man who was sixty-nine years old, twenty-two years older than me. He took me to an expensive steak and seafood restaurant. I was only seeing him because I was bored, new in town, had not met anyone else. We both lived with relatives so mostly parked in his car, a big Cadillac. He usually only wanted oral sex, so I did it. I figured, why not? He enjoyed it and I got a good meal.

—heterosexual woman, age 47

Often the sex-resource exchange is not as explicit as these examples imply. Nonetheless, most women are quite aware of the role of resources in being sexually attracted to a man. In one of the first comprehensive studies of tactics men use to attract women, the act “He bought me dinner at a nice restaurant” proved to be one of the most effective. The Buss Lab discovered that effective sexual inducements for women include:

Moreover, women find stinginess in a man to be a huge sexual turnoff.

One study found that women shown photographs of different men are more sexually attracted to men who wear expensive clothing, such as three-piece suits, sports jackets, and designer jeans, than to men who wear cheap clothing, such as tank tops and T-shirts. Another study had the same men photographed wearing two different sets of clothes. One was a Burger King uniform with a blue baseball cap and a polo-style shirt. The other was a white dress shirt with a designer tie, a navy blazer, and a Rolex watch. Based solely on these photographs, women stated that they were not willing to consider dating or having sex with the men in the low-resource garb, but were willing to entertain the possibility of dating, sex, and even marriage with the men in the high-resource attire.