CONSUMERISM, MORALISM AND THE LAW, INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN INTERNATIONAL PROSTITUTION POLICIES AND THE ENDEAVOR FOR GENDER EQUALITY

Studies that have been carried out on men that pay for sexual services often haphazardly (re)create client typologies perceiving the identity of men that pay for sexual services – often condescendingly described as ‘the John’ – as a fixed, trans-historical and trans-national entity. Instead of asking ‘why’ men pay for sexual services this doctoral dissertation addresses ‘how’ men pay for sexual services. Drawing on 44 interviews, evenly distributed on heterosexual Swedish and Dutch (upper)middle class white men, supplemented by online questionnaires and material of specific forums, the ‘how’ is addressed with reference to the men’s own narratives and reflexive accounts. In this doctoral dissertation it will be claimed that from the position and perspectives of these clients/consumers/customers of sexual services, Sweden and the Netherlands cannot be perceived as having oppositional policy regimes. Far beyond calculations of a reduction or increase of ‘prostitution’ when ‘prostitution’ is partially criminalized or regulated, I will uncover and unravel the complex processes of becoming a client by the multitude of strategies that Swedish and Dutch men employ in their home country and abroad. Furthermore, by describing the technical as well as spatial displacements I will claim that national discourses work as power techniques that govern the modes of thought of both Swedish and Dutch men that pay for sexual services in their own country and abroad.