Paying for sex can allow some women to challenge social norms around femininity and pleasure. iStockPhoto // Sergey Dementyev

a woman walks into a brothel…

Sex sells, the old marketing adage goes, but who is buying? Many assume that commercial sex is purchased by men, from women. However, new research published in the British Journal of Sociology sheds light on sexual transactions in which the traditional gender script is flipped—when sex is purchased by women from male sex workers.

To offer a novel account of women clientele in the commercial sex industry, sociologist Eileen Y.H. Tsang draws on interviews with female clients and male sex workers conducted during three years of ethnographic research in Pistachio, a high-end Chinese nightclub. Tsang reports that the transactional nature of these sexual experiences allowed some women to find forms of intimacy or sexual experiences that were otherwise unavailable to them. For other women, pleasure was the primary motivation in seeking novel sexual experiences focused on elation over emotional attachment. Finally, some women deliberately sought sexual experiences that challenged traditional gender roles. In those cases, women clients typically described a desire to adopt traditionally masculine behavior in their sexual encounters, a pattern corroborated by male sex workers who described performing femininity for wealthy women consumers.

Tsang’s research challenges us to expand the enduring male-consumer, female-provider vision of commercial sex in order to recognize the diversity of subversive sexual experiences sought by and available to both male and female clients. Especially for women, these experiences can allow for challenging notions of what society expects of them—in and beyond the bedroom.