Clare Spurrell writes for the Times of London:
"There are lots of whorehouses in Macau,” Tom confided to me under his breath in a crowded bar in Islington one Thursday night. “It was my first time in Hong Kong and I remember getting a ferry to one of the brothels where there was a madam and a security guard. On that occasion I didn’t have full sex with the girl, but all my friends did.”
Tom was 23 when he jetted out to Hong Kong to visit friends in 2001, but even then he was no stranger to brothels: it was the fourth time that he had sought the services of a prostitute. He is the sort of young man of whom most mothers would approve, a 29-year-old teacher who is good-looking, well educated and respectful. Yet on his worldwide travels he has paid for sex in several countries, including Australia, the Netherlands and Thailand.
The stereotypical “John” who uses prostitutes is a middle-aged, empty soul whom you might spot slinking around red-light districts in an outsized mac and stained trousers. The uncomfortable truth, though, is that most men who pay for sex are just “regular guys” — colleagues, brothers, fathers, sons and lovers.
Volumes of research have been published on trends among sex workers across the globe — studies on drug use, on the spread of STDs, on the impact of prostitution on society. Yet as a study published in the British Medical Journal in 2005 pointed out, “far less is known about the men who pay for sex”. That study found that the proportion of British men who reported paying for heterosexual sex had increased from 5.6 per cent in 1990 to 9 per cent in 2000. Of these, the largest group were in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties, living in London and either single or divorced.
I realised that, as a single woman in her late twenties living in London, I am surrounded by this demographic. And given that a small but significant proportion of the men identified in the study were apparently upstanding types who slept with prostitutes in secret, I decided to see if I could persuade a few of them to confess.
It took some digging — and a fair amount of tongue-loosening lager — but I found that in some cases the kind of man whom I’d be happy to take to tea with my mother was also the type capable of paying for sex.
