Canadian journalist Victor Malarek’s book The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It is a distinctive contribution to the ongoing conversation about sex work. While we tend to focus on the women who work in the sex trade (as Malarek himself did in his earlier book, The Natashas), here he trains his lens on the men who patronize prostitutes, arguing vehemently — and occasionally convincingly — that the demand side of the transaction is really the problem.
This argument is premised on an “unwavering realization†Malarek has proudly come to: “prostitution — all prostitution — is not about choice.†Researching his previous book seems to have clued him in to the hypocrisy of the whole situation: the fact that sex workers are stigmatized and demeaned, while the men who seek out their services literally get off easy. It’s a reasonable, and entirely welcome, point. But to make it, Malarek rests on easy assumptions, particularly about the women involved in the sex trade, who he uniformly portrays as victims. He makes his case with a sensationalist zeal that is often moralizing, sometimes condescending, and nearly always guided — and defeated — by sweeping generalizations. I wonder, though, if a decidedly mainstream takedown of men’s sexual privilege could really have gone any other way. (Perhaps tellingly, male sex workers are all but absent from these pages.)
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[via Melissa Gira]
