Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2016 April 9

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April 9

Male heterosexual prostitution

How many male prostitutes serving female customers are there? I am interested in the ratio of male and female heterosexual prostitutes. It doesn't seem easy to find any numbers, not even for countries where prostitution is legal. Icek~enwiki (talk) 10:08, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Do you mean exclusively "heterosexual" i.e. male sex workers who only take on female clients? In any case, I think one of the reasons why you're finding such difficult finding numbers is that male prostitution tends to be poorly studied, even more so than female prostitution. Even where it's legal there often remains a stigma to all prostitution making research difficult (in finding and getting people to answer, in securing funding, in people interested in carrying out the research) and for various reasons male sex workers tend to be even more marginalised than female sex workers. (There's also some risk that research is carried out for specific political purposes and so may be biased and further these purposes may mean there is little interest in male sex workers who take on female clients.) And so what limited research there is may not necessarily look in to whether the male sex workers were taking male or female clients.

See e.g. this from 2 years after prostitution was legalised in NZ [1] [2]. (A literature review so most info is from before legalisation.) If you do mean exclusively it's likely to be even more difficult since this may be even less studied and definitions used will vary.

P.S. I take it you're using heterosexual solely to refer to who the sex worker takes on as a client and understand this may have no connection to their sexual orientation. P.P.S. I probably should also mention that what limited evidence exists e.g. in the NZ data suggest proportionally there is significantly fewer male sex workers with female clients which also makes research more difficult.

Nil Einne (talk) 20:09, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

We have an article on Gigolo and one on Male prostitution, although neither is too informative on the question. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 20:10, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

With "heterosexual" I mean those prostitutes who (exclusively or at least most of the time) take clients of the opposite sex. Icek~enwiki (talk) 23:34, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

If they even only occasionally have same-sex clients, how can they say they're heterosexual prostitutes. It sounds like they're willing to take on all comers (pardon the pun), depending on some unspecified condition. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 01:33, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

There's gay, then there's gay-for-pay. It's fairly gay, but also quite pretend. On the inside, anyway. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:54, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

User:JackofOz Probably because sexual orientation is considered by many to be an opt-in matter of self identification, and because many people consider their orientation as not a simple sum of their sex partners. Surely you've heard of a homosexual person who's had occasional sexual relations with a member of the other sex? That doesn't necessarily mean they have to turn in their gay card. Same thing goes for the other way around, I think. There's also Kinsey_scale indicating that some people might have occasional homosexual contact without considering themselves to be a "homosexual." Thing can get confusing, e.g. Down-low_(sexual_slang), where some people were having lots of gay sex but considering themselves straight. Maybe some of these prostitutes actually identify as bisexual, but pick hetero to present as, vis. Bisexual_erasure. SemanticMantis (talk) 18:59, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, User:SemanticMantis. I guess I was thinking along the lines of, the way a sex worker (I include porn actors here) markets themself is not necessarily representative of their own personal sexual orientation. For example, some male porn actors who make exclusively gay films are happily married (to women), have kids, the whole disaster, and identify as straight, personally. Their personal sexuality is differentiated from their professional sexuality, if I can use such a term. So, if a sex worker caters to both same-sex and different-sex clients, even if not in the same proportion, then how can they say they're heterosexual prostitutes, as if if that were a complete and accurate description of their commercial offering? A porn actor who makes both gay porn and straight porn cannot be described solely as "a gay porn actor" or "a straight porn actor", without some risk of terminological inexactitude. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:20, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Might make some sense to bill yourself as straight. A huge part of fantasy is grabbing what's out of reach. I'd bet a fair number of gay dudes get an ego stroking from believing they're good-looking, smooth-talking or big-spending enough to "convince" a straight dude to jump ship. Sort of like how Catholic virgin schoolgirls are a huge market in porn (and the weirder sex industry), or more mundanely, how many straight barflies "wouldn't normally do this kind of thing", every single weekend. InedibleHulk (talk) 07:37, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

I'll remind you again, Jack, offering a complete and accurate description of an offering is good for humanity, but terrible for business. InedibleHulk (talk) 07:43, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Aye, some terminological inexactitude seems almost necessary when these things come up. But I think we're all basically on the same page. It's a little bit like like if I hold up my hand for a high five and ask "how many fingers am I holding up?" While most children would say "five" and be right, certain clever ones might say "four", thinking the thumb doesn't count, and some devious troublemakers strict followers of literal interpretations would claim that "three", "two", and "one" are also all equally correct. SemanticMantis (talk) 13:59, 12 April 2016 (UTC)