Episode 404: Women Who Pay For Sex
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You're listening to the Sex and Psychology Podcast, the sex ed you never got in school and won't get anywhere else. I am your host, Dr. Justin Lehmiller. I am a social psychologist and research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and author of the book, Tell Me What You Want, The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life. In the sex work literature, the vast majority of studies that focus on the customers looks only at men.

This isn't surprising because men are much more likely to report having paid for sex than are women. However, there are probably more women paying for sex than we think, and research is probably underestimating how common it is. In studies looking at women who have objectively paid for sexual services, many of them don't consider themselves to have purchased sex per se. They often characterize their interactions quite differently.

This might stem in part from the fact that many women view prostitution as inherently exploitative when men are buying from women, but they don't consider it exploitative when women are the buyers because they perceive a more equal power exchange. So although it's difficult to say precisely how many women have purchased sex before, we know that many women do this. So what are their primary motivations for doing so, and how do they compare to those of men?

In today's show, we're going to do a deep dive into the world of women who pay for sex. We're going to explore what their experiences are like, why some women see paying for sex as being safer than having casual sex, and so much more.

My guest today is Dr. Hilary Caldwell, a sex worker, author, academic, and sexologist. Her bold political memoir, "Slutdom: Reclaiming Shame-Free Sexuality," challenges the enduring impact of slut-shaming in an arduous fur world in which everyone can pursue pleasure without fear, stigma, or coercion. This is going to be another fascinating episode. Stick around, and we're going to jump in right after the break.

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Hi, Hilary, and welcome to the show. Thanks, Justin. It's great to be here. It's great to have you here as well. So in today's show, we're going to be talking about women who pay for sex. Now, much has been said and written about men who patronize sex workers, and a lot has been said about women who sell sex, but there's surprisingly little research out there on women as customers seeking sexual services. So let's start there. Why do you think this has long been such an understudied topic?

Well, sex is an understudied topic to start with because it's so highly stigmatized and shamed. But I think women's sexuality is even more so. Women are expected to be good and not to enjoy sex as much as men or to seek it. And so any kind of threat

to the narrative that women are demure and passive in sex is not helpful to patriarchy. And sexual studies don't really make money. They don't create infrastructure. And so sex itself is just

not widely studied, but anything that sort of threatens the narrative about how genders behave in sex is not supported very much. And particularly why I wanted to, I wanted to challenge the dominant thinking about women's sexuality, because as a sex worker of 20 plus years and a researcher, I also, I knew that women bought sexual services and that

My study was the first in the world at the time to study women buying sexual services in their own countries. And so that made

me realize that I couldn't really analyze the situation in any depth. All I could do was just expose it, is just do an exploratory study to say, this is what's happening. And I finished in 2018. So I've done a lot of thinking since then. And yeah, it's pretty exciting, I think, to think about the challenges to gender narratives in my research.

Yeah, and I think this is one of those cases where, you know, the idea of women buying sex just goes against the notions or stereotypes that a lot of people have about women's sexuality. You know, that this is something that might be expected for men, but not so much for women. And I think that's why it's been controversial. And I think there's also kind of been an assumption on the part of researchers that women don't really buy sex, so they haven't really even bothered to study it in a lot of cases.

Yeah, that was a barrier I faced when I first started my research is, well, I didn't get funding. I applied for five semesters in a row and I didn't get funding. I self-funded. Well, sex work funded my research because nobody believed that enough women were doing this to actually give enough data for analysis. So I knew different, but trying to get that message across, I had to do the study first to prove I could do the study.

Right. You know, it's funny that that often happens. Sometimes you have to do the research in order to actually get people's attention and be able to do further work in that area. But what do we know about how common it is for women to have paid for sex? You know, do we have any sense of the prevalence of this and how it compares to men? No, not really. I mean, we don't even really know men's numbers, do we? We broadly say that 15 to 20 percent of men purchase sex at least once in their lives.

and 10% or so do regularly. That's kind of very, very broad. It crosses countries and cultures. It's not really affected by particular laws or cultures. That's pretty much across the board. But for women, it's a lot less. But because we don't have numbers to start with, we don't have numbers to finish with. So numbers aren't really helpful. And also, it's very hard for people to tell the whole story and the truth, or even sometimes to own it to themselves. So

It's very hard to get that kind of number, but every sex worker I spoke to said that the numbers are increasing. And, you know, I mix with sex workers a lot and I have my own clientele, of course, and we all know that it's increasing. I now speak to sex workers regularly who tell me that they've got regular women clients, whereas before,

It used to be like 10 years ago, you'd say, oh, I've got a woman, I've got a woman, how wonderful. But now it's pretty much, it's so common that we expect to have women clients on the daily. So yeah, no numbers, sorry, but it's pretty accepted and commonplace amongst sex workers.

Yeah. And based on the data that I've seen in the US, if you look at nationally representative surveys, it's somewhere around 15 or so percent of men and one to two percent of women who say they've paid for sex before. But we have to be mindful of the fact that not everybody is necessarily going to be honest in how they respond to those questions. Some people might also consider different things as counting when it comes to buying sex. And so, yeah, there's always some

questions about kind of how squishy those numbers are and what they really mean. And I think also when you think about something like purchasing sexual services online through a website like OnlyFans, does that count as purchasing sex? Different people might have different ideas about that.

But I think the rise of online sex work is another case where we've seen an increase in women who are purchasing sexual services. Because if you look at a site like OnlyFans, about one in five users of the site, and we're not talking about content creators, we're talking about people who are subscribing, about one in five are women, which would mean that there actually are a heck of a lot of women out there who are purchasing sexual services in one form or another. Yeah.

Yep, quite right. So you've conducted research on women who pay for sex in Australia. Now, before we dive into the findings from that work, what was your inspiration for wanting to study this topic? You know, what drew you to this research area and why do you think it's important to study?

Well, I think it's a gap in the research. I really wanted to study the sex industry because I was a part of it in secret because I hid my sex work for 20 years from my entire family and most of my friends for safety reasons. And because I had this hidden knowledge, I wanted to try to use it in some way. So I used it through that system at first.

just to get more information and more grounding and more credibility because I was entering the establishment. I was kind of infiltrating in a way because I read a lot of really bad stuff. There's a lot of work passed off as research, which is really biased. They ask questions of sex workers like, what was the worst thing that ever happened to you versus the second worst thing that has ever happened to you? Like there was no sort of

nuance in a lot of the research that I was reading. So I wanted to do something that was going to be a little bit different. But also, I really wanted to champion women's sexuality. I really wanted to give women permission. I really wanted women to know that they have this resource available to them, just like everybody else.

And that instead of just calling men bad for buying sex, how about we actually think about how buying sex might be a really positive thing, not just for the sex worker, but for the clients themselves and the kinds of things that they can learn and grow. And I felt like if I did that study on men, it would be completely discredited because people have preconceived ideas about men's sexuality. But if I did it on women, they could see clearly

Oh, so you can learn to negotiate in a very formalized, even if it seems informal and friendly at the time. And so it's quite a formal process to negotiate a sexual experience. You've got to know what you're going to be doing and what you're consenting to. So consent experts, sex workers are consent experts and you learn from sex workers. I couldn't really show that if I was going to be talking about men. Does that make sense to you?

Yeah, I mean, I think what you said makes a lot of sense in terms of, you know, especially there being a lot of bias in the literature on sex work. It's one of those areas where a lot of people assume that all sex work is inherently exploitative and...

categorize sex workers themselves as victims. And so if you look at a lot of the data and the research, there are a lot of assumptions embedded in it and built into it where they're expecting to find negative outcomes, but they're only asking about negative outcomes, right? Right, yeah.

When you go into the research with that lens, you're just going to have what we call a confirmation bias. And so there hasn't really been as much work that's taken a more open-ended approach that's tried to look at what are the potential positive and negative sides of both selling and buying sex. And I think, you know, sex work is one of those areas where experiences are mixed and different people have different experiences depending on what they're

working conditions are like and if they're working in a culture where it's illegal or where it's legal and government regulated. You know, there's so many different things. You know, the amount of stigma that goes along with sex work is a big factor in all of this, too. So it's a tricky and complicated thing to study in a lot of ways. And I think you're right, too, that people's attitudes are going to be different towards studies that are looking at women versus men in terms of buying versus selling sex.

Yeah, that is exactly what happened. Alright, so let's dive into the study. So you interviewed nearly two dozen women in Australia, ranging in age from 18 to 69, and they were about evenly split between those who were heterosexual and those who weren't. And all of them had previous experience buying sex, most of whom had purchased it multiple times.

Now, one of the things you found was that many of the women you interviewed didn't consider themselves to have paid for sex, which is interesting. So, you know, what does that tell us? You have this sample of women who have paid for sex, but they're saying that they didn't actually buy sex. What's that all about? That is about stigma that we were talking about before. And I think I actually interviewed three dozen women, 21 women who had fought sexual services and also a

a number of sex workers as well. So I could get both sides of the story about how do women behave? Do women behave different than men was what I was basically asking sex workers. But one of them actually said, I'm only contacting you to talk to you about this because I want to tell you, you've got to change the title of your topic. Your topic is not about women buying sexual services from sex workers. That's sorted. When people do that, it's just this like quickie revolting thing. And I'm like, oh, is that what you think? Yeah.

But she said, no, I did something different. It was very emotional and very intuitive and it was a beautiful thing. So I wasn't buying sex like you said. But sex is a beautiful, intuitive thing. And she was buying sexual services just like that. And other people do as well. But also like half of the women actually said that they only bought sex for therapeutic reasons. Like they had really well-determined sex

therapeutic issues that they wanted to settle. Like, for instance, two women had vaginismus. One was a young woman

And she went to her sex worker and she said, look, I've got vaginismus, which is a condition of clamping of the vagina in a really, really painful way. And it's really difficult to treat because as a sex therapist in my other life, I would talk to someone and offer them dilators to do in their own personal space to try to force the vagina open a little bit gradually. But that's quite an awful process because vaginal

One of the biggest things that helps us to receive gifts into our vaginas and anuses is arousal. When we're aroused, we can experience

expand to receive what it is we're hoping to. So to be able to do this vaginismus therapy without arousal is really quite awful. And women who suffer from vaginismus are having difficulty with arousal as well because it's going to hurt, right? So they're already clamping up at the mere thought. So this woman went to a sex worker and said, look,

I think you are just like a physio. I want you to treat me like a physio. I've got this vaginismus and I've got these dilators and, you know, help me. And she didn't want to receive any pleasure from the experience, but I'm assuming she did because everything turned out just fine. The sex worker even gave her like a treatment

regime. He wrote it down and then he gave her some homework, which she did. And that worked out well. And the other woman with vaginismus was 69 and she was married to a man who was in his 90s and he had dementia and he couldn't consent to sex anymore. She hadn't had sex in a really long time. She said she had

cobwebs in her vagina. She tried to have a pap smear and couldn't even, the nurse couldn't even get the speculum in. And so she decided that she might need a new relationship in the future. And for her, having a relationship meant having sex or she didn't feel she had much to offer a relationship if she didn't have sex, which is another problem.

problem for women. So she started to masturbate to try to lubricate her vagina more and she woke up this inconvenient libido, but she still couldn't actually have penetration. So with this libido and this problem, she went to a sex worker and with gusto practiced with many sex workers. And I assume she's moved on to a new relationship now and she's all happy. These two women approached a

a similar problem in a very different way with sex workers and we're both helped but the interesting thing about women saying like half the women saying that they bought sex for therapeutic reasons the other half were bolder and said oh i just love it just wanted a bit more i just want to have lots of orgasms wanted to have it my own way wanted to

do what I want without man pleasing. And that's another thing that happens to women. So Cal, who was a really young woman, she just wanted a sex worker to come in and ravish her and then leave.

She just wanted to have that great sex without the interaction. And when she was there with the sex worker for the first time, she started to do what she always did, which was he did this to her, so she's going to do that to him. And then she was doing that to him and then thinking, hey, I actually don't want to do this and I'm paying for this, so I don't have to. So she stopped doing that to him and then really analysed the way she'd been man-pleasing in her sexuality. And she started to work out what it was...

she wanted to do without having to think that she had to please someone else. And that was really radical for her at the time. And it really changed the way she went into dating. So my point about therapeutic or fun for these women, because it was so divided, was that they all received therapy and they all had fun in the end. So it was the reason, the motivation, the justification, but they learned so much more than they expected.

It's so interesting and it, you know, gets back to what I was asking about earlier with regard to, you know, why some of these women had bought sex but didn't consider themselves to have been paying for sex because maybe they were seeking something else like a therapeutic reason.

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I'm curious, are there ways in which women's reasons for buying sex are different from men's? So for example, do we also see therapeutic reasons in terms of why men visit sex workers or does that have more to do with pleasure for men? I think we certainly see therapeutic reasons, but I don't think many men would.

would even admit to themselves like the women that they're buying sex for therapeutic reasons because men have this sort of expectation that they're just randy buggers and that's what they do oh sorry is that a swear word in the u.s that's fine men have permission to buy sexual services so they don't have to interrogate their motivations in the same way that women do

Yeah, I think you're so right with that. And a lot of guys, you know, I've spoken with a lot of sex workers on my study abroad travels where we go around the world and learn about sex in different cultures. And, you know, in talking with sex workers in different countries, they all describe themselves as being sex therapists in a way because they're kind of doing something therapeutic in a lot of ways for their clients, whether that's

in terms of filling some emotional or intimate need that they have, or in some cases, helping them to work through a certain sexual problem or difficulty that they might have. Yeah, yeah, definitely. That's something I like as a sex worker. Like I see a lot of men who have erectile dysfunction or have premature ejaculation. They don't have the words.

They can't ask someone. They wouldn't go to a sex therapist because they don't have the words. But their bodies are showing me. So I can use my body to show them ways to deal with this situation or ways to improve the situation. And sometimes we don't even need to speak about it. And sometimes we do because we're already naked, you know. But yes, sex is a very therapeutic thing.

Yeah, and I think a surprising number of people visit sex workers for therapeutic reasons, precisely because they want somebody who's not going to judge them for their body or how it's responding. And, you know, somebody who's going to be affirming to them in some way. So that therapeutic aspect of sex work, I think, actually comes up quite a lot.

Now, one of the things that you found that I think is really interesting and might be a little bit surprising to some of my listeners is that some women said that they actually felt safer, both physically and emotionally, buying sex rather than having casual sex. So what do you make of that? What does that tell us? Yeah, well, as you were saying, we won't be locked up for the shape of our bodies, for the age of our bodies.

But why I think that is, is because, you know, it goes so deep. We are taught, young people are taught in sex education classes, women are taught that we can say yes or no.

And men, young boys, are taught that they have to ask women and get them to say yes. That's their mission. That very dynamic sets us up for life and sets us up for dating and sets us up for a gender inequality that underpins all gender violence. And so when men are given this permission to ask women for sex all the time, they're the ones who have what kind of sex they want in their minds.

And they get to start the negotiation for consent with their pleasures in mind, whereas a woman has to consider her safety and her reputation.

So when a young person is negotiating sexual experience, a young woman, while they're worried about their safety and their reputation, they're not thinking about what they want. So those early sexual experiences where they could be exploring themselves and really finding out how glorious their bodies are and what wonderful things they can do, instead of that, they're just

keeping themselves safe. And then the dating situation continues. I'm nearly 60. A lot of my friends are in the dating scene on apps and it's pretty brutal out there. I don't know many men who are enjoying dating apps either, but there's this culture that's just

The ones that are still seem to be on the dating sites are the predators. And if you do want just casual sex and have a bit of fun because it is so fun and so good for you, it is much more dangerous for women to do that than men.

We had a woman assaulted on a public path up here just last week. You know, it's really dangerous for women to walk in the world, but to look for sex is far more dangerous. And so when a person can research the person they're about to have sex with, when they can look at their profile, when they can engage with them on social media, when they can perhaps see other people talking about experiences of being with that person, they can get a sense that person has a reputation and a business that they want to protect and

So sex workers seem much safer in terms of will I be murdered during this pursuit of sex, but also emotionally, as you said, that will I be treated well? Will I be respected for what I'm doing? Will it be?

about his pleasure. How many of these predatory people on dating apps are just in it for their own pleasure and don't really understand how wonderful sex can be when it's connected and when two people are interacting as equals on an emotional level, it's so deep and beautiful. I think a lot of people seeking casual sex have missed that memo and they're just all in for a quickie and quickie.

quickies are fun, but they're not really treating women the way that women would like to be treated when they're starting out. Yeah. And I think when it comes to casual sex, there are always lots of unknowns, right? Because it's with somebody that you don't have a prior history with. And so you don't know things that might have implications for safety in that encounter and that are also going to have implications for your pleasure. But with a sex worker,

who you've vetted in advance, you know about them, like you know what you're getting and you know this is going to be a situation where your pleasure is going to be the priority. And so I think in a lot of ways, when you think of it through that lens, it makes sense that a lot of women would consider buying sex to be safer than casual sex.

Now, of course, different women might have different ideas about this. And, you know, some women wouldn't be open to buying sex and might have very different ideas about the physical or emotional safety of that. But at least for the women in this research, you know, it was pretty clear that they saw buying sex as a way that was safer for them, at least, than having casual sex.

Yes. So what were women's experiences with buying sex like? So did it meet their needs and goals? Did they feel empowered by it? So in other words, you know, were they satisfied with the experience? Overwhelmingly, yes. Although there were a few that didn't. Well, there was one person who didn't have any good experiences buying sex at the time, but was hoping to do so later. And the reason she felt she didn't have good experiences, but she still wanted to try later was because she'd been

She'd been buying sexual services as a couple with various partners over years, and she always had felt that it wasn't for her. So she was at the point of talking to me where she wanted to do something for herself. So that was the only kind of negative one that I spoke to. But I do accept that people with really negative experiences probably didn't come forward to be interviewed.

The positive experiences were so very positive that they were actually transformative in ways that these women's lives changed. And I think something that's so often unappreciated is that our sexuality is...

part of our identity, that's not a theoretical thing. That's coming from our gut, you know. Our sex is the most private and intimate and inside of our bodies thing about us. And when they're in that place in our bodies, if we feel satisfied and successful and

Pretty damn cocky. I mean, we just had an orgasm. We want to sing it from the rooftops. You know, it's that kind of sex and that kind of experience deep down inside of ourselves, it makes you glow. It gives you a confidence. One of my participants said, when you have...

great sex, you walk different, you talk different, you present yourself to the world in a different way, you form your relationships in a different way because you have this confidence in your body's ability to create pleasure for yourself and others. And women were telling me that after they

bought sexual services. They felt so good. They went into dating in a different way. They formed new relationships. They went and asked that boss for a raise. They actually changed their lives because they felt this confidence on a level they'd never felt before. So interesting. Again, it's one of those things that we probably wouldn't know or recognize without having the research and without somebody asking these questions. Yeah. I think it's because we

We think that like sex is something that's dumb to women. Like a lot of women think that sex is dumb to them. And so if you buy sexual services, not only have you got to realize that you want sex, but you've got to realize what kind of sex you want. You've got to find out what you want to be able to talk about it and negotiate it. And that's a skill that women aren't really given much opportunity to develop. So that's part of the power as well of knowing, knowing yourself that well.

Yeah. So what do you want people to take away from your research? You know, what do you see as the biggest takeaways or how does this research challenge misconceptions people might have about women who pay for sex?

Well, I think it does two things. It tells us things about the sex industry, but it also tells us things about women's sexuality. It's not different than men's sexuality. Sexuality is sexuality. It is very personal. But if you strip away all of that stigma and all of the narrative that we've been taught and you just feel, that kind of power in our bodies is huge. Like the kind of power that you can get from sex

feeling good about your sexuality is so transformative. It's actually, I think, a political force. And that's where I wanted to go to beyond my research. I wanted to start exploring that political aspect of what if women and men were equal sexually? If we were equal sexually, we could work towards gender equality in a way that we've never done before. And so that's kind of where my research led me to go.

And we're going to dive into that further in the next episode. So thank you so much for speaking with me today, Hilary. I'm looking forward to continuing our conversation. Can you please tell my listeners where they can go to learn more about you and your work and to get a copy of your new book? Yes, please. My website is drhilarycoldwell.com.

Google it. It'll come up. I'm on Insta. That is Dr. Hilary Caldwell and my book Slutdom. But it's probably not in US stores, but you can buy it from Australia and have it shipped over. Thank you very much for talking to me today, Justin. I really enjoyed learning from you as well. And I hope that some people listening have gotten some takeaways from this that will help them in their journeys of lifelong learning about sex. Well, thank you again for this conversation. I really appreciate having you here.

Thank you for listening. To keep up with new episodes of this podcast, visit my website, sexandpsychology at sexandpsychology.com or subscribe on your favorite platform where I hope you'll take a moment to rate and review the show. If you listen on Apple Podcasts, please consider becoming a Sex and Psychology Premium subscriber to enjoy ad-free listening for just $3.99 a month.

You can also follow me on social media for daily sex research updates. I'm on Blue Sky and X at Justin Laymiller and Instagram at Justin J. Laymiller. Also, be sure to check out my book, Tell Me What You Want. Thanks again for listening. Until next time.