As regular readers know, I’ve had a really full plate lately between blogging, work, caring for Jae and acceding to the demands of dear friends that I take care of myself for a change. So although I realized around the 1st of this month that I hadn’t secured a guest column, I got into a peculiar kind of lethargy about it; it was less my usual “Shit, I need to get on that!” and more a sort of exhausted, “Oh, look, that deadline’s approaching really fast and I don’t have anything lined up. I wonder if someone will volunteer an essay before Sunday night?” The same lack of energy caused me to sort of miss the fact that some important research was being conducted that I should say something about, but hadn’t. Well, synchronicity filled in for initiative in this case, and a gentleman who had taken the survey wrote to ask me why I hadn’t said anything about it. I asked if he’d write something about it, and here it is; it’s rather short, but what it talks about is very important, and if you have ever paid for sex please use the time you would’ve used to read a longer column in taking the survey so we can fight prohibitionist lies with real data.
Please spread the word: A research study currently being conducted by the (sex worker-friendly) sociology department at the University of Nevada – Las Vegas (UNLV), seeks to collect data and broaden the scholarship and research on the attitudes of adult clients of prostitutes. Customers of both brothel workers and/or independent providers, whether working legally or illegally anywhere in the United States, are invited to take the brief, 100% anonymous survey. Currently, the research literature in this field is dominated by the junk science of rabid prohibitionists such as Melissa Farley. This UNLV survey will take approximately 15 minutes to complete and will help researchers to gain a fuller understanding of the clients of sex workers.
Instead of a prohibitionist or “rescue” profiteer, this research project is headed by UNLV’s Dr. Barbara Brents, co-author of the book, The State of Sex (Routledge Press, 2010), as well as many pro-decriminalization articles and editorials such as “Why Decriminalizing Sex Work is Good for All Women” and “Nevada’s Legal Brothels Make Workers Feel Safer”. Brents has spent more than a decade studying political sociology, gender and sexuality, urban sociology, and public sociology. Her research focuses on the sex industry as a way to understand the intersections of culture and economics, political debates around sexuality, the relationship between tourism, consumption, and sexuality, and the emotional and bodily labor of selling sex. You can see other research she has published on her website.
This survey is being conducted under strict Institutional Review Board (IRB) ethical guidelines; the purpose of IRB review is to assure, both in advance and by periodic review, that appropriate steps are taken to protect the rights and welfare of humans participating as subjects in the research. For more on the university’s IRB protocols for its studies, please visit this link.
To take the survey, please click here.
By the by, those ethical guidelines aren’t a mere formality; researchers like Farley and Dominique Roe-Sepowitz of ASU routinely ignore them, as explained in “The Pigeons Come Home” and “The Phoenix Pharisees“, resulting not only in indirect harm (from the use of their answers to promote violence against them and others), but sometimes direct harm via sharing the data with the police. IRB guidelines absolutely prohibit any such misuse of data, so readers who take this survey can be absolutely sure that their answers won’t be used wrongfully.
It’s a shame I don’t qualify for this one and would have no data to contribute even if I did.
I checked through their guidelines and found not only that their privacy policy is impeccable – not unusual in university studies, Farley, et al notwithstanding, but their data management policies put them way ahead of the pack. Not only do they fully disclose the objectives, methods and, very importantly, means of data analysis from the outset, they also guarantee both the results and (anonymised) data will be published as soon as feasible so other researchers might employ it for, say, meta-analyses, or even contest the conclusions the original researchers draw from it.
Sadly that kind of integrity and commitment to open data is all too rare even in publicly funded research these days. If I could I’d participate if only as a way of offering moral support to their methodology.
The survey says on first page participants are customers of a NV brothel. Since I have never been a customer I bailed out. But lots of other escort experience for decades.
It does seem to be targeted at people who use brothels, however they do ask how many times you’ve used sex worker services outside of brothels as well. Most of the questions don’t really have anything to do with brothels.
As I understand it, the study was originally designed to be a brothel customer study, but they got permission to expand it.
I just took the survey, even though it was clearly aimed at clients who see sex workers in Nevada (and I have never seen anyone there).
There was one question, though, that I took some time to answer. The question was addressed to clients who have seen sex workers outside the setting of a brothel. It asked, in effect, why do you (a client) do that? What advantages or benefits do you see/get by *not* using a brothel?
I’m willing to share the little essay I wrote about that. Here it is;
I see only independent providers. I can spend more time with them, to establish a sense of connection. (This means more money, but that’s worth it, to me.) I like their own emotional comfort, from being in a physical setting they have chosen and often have furnished to their own taste. I do not want to be under the scrutiny of a brothel’s staff, before or after. I like knowing that she has made the decision to see me on her own, not because she was in a cattle call lineup. In short, I feel that her independence and agency gives me a better experience.
There, that’s my little essay. Every word comes from straight from the heart.
— RSRD
RunSilent RunDeep
“I do not want to be under the scrutiny of a brothel’s staff, before or after. I like knowing that she has made the decision to see me on her own, not because she was in a cattle call lineup.”
I totally respect everything you said.
However, at the brothels I frequent, I always refuse a lineup, It is not required. If I happen to come in while a lineup is in progress, I never pick a girl that way.
I have had several many brothel ladies show no interest in me. That is fine, because when a lady chooses to spend time with me I know it was her decision to do so.
Thank you for that information!! Since I haven’t darkened the door of one, my knowledge is limited to what I have heard from providers (such as Amanda Brooks) who have worked in them.
It is good to hear more, from someone (unlike me) who has been there.
This is a profession, ethical survey that understands and respects the privacy and safety of clients who take it.
It stands in stark contrast to the survey offered by Stacey Hannem and Tony Christensen from Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, I learned of that survey via a comment in the last guest column, A Client.
Unlike this survey there is no indication of any ethical guidelines, formal or otherwise. On the contrary the professors communicate directly via email, send WORD documents (filled with potentially incriminating metadata), and invite respondents to telephone or meet in person!
It is refreshing to see serious efforts to produce high quality and ethical survey results, and the efforts to protect clients’ privacy and liberty is welcome.
I also wrote a small essay in response to the question about why go somewhere besides a NV brothel. I won’t repeat the whole thing here, but the gist is that NV brothels are grim places indeed. Surrounded by barbed wire or razor wire fences, built from trailers, run down, cramped, dim, and always rushed. From the moment the door opens the client is urged to make a choice and finish as soon as possible. Food is pathetic and drinks are a watered-down scam.
The contrasts with a high-end brothel in Switzerland or Singapore are stark. Brightly lit, excellent food and drink that come with the price of admission, absolutely no rush, spotlessly clean, excellent facilities including bar, sauna, hot tub, quiet rooms for talk and negotiation, dance floor, large bedrooms with showers, tubs, and ample furnishings. There is no high fence but I feel much safer than in NV.
I’ve been to about eight of them, and my experiences mostly haven’t been like your description at all. I would simply urge you to avoid the ones nearest Reno, Tahoe, and Las Vegas.
That may well be the case in the US but hopefully that doesn’t apply to all other countries. For example, you might be interested in this 2010 Report of the Preliminary Findings for Johns’ Voice: A Study of Adult Canadian Sex Buyers, a project in “partnership between the Asian Society for the Intervention of AIDS (ASIA), Simon Fraser University (SFU), the Unversity of British Columbia (UBC), and the UBC Center for Disease Control (UBCCDC)”. Further details of the study, and a subsequent one, can be found at the Johns’ Voice website.
I got an erection when the survey asked about sex with more than one person. Whoever says “three’s a crowd” doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
I went through this survey with my partner who answered the questions. I don’t see how this will benefit our community. We do need more evidence based research alright, and research that will actually benefit US.
You might take a look through the links I provided (above) to a Canadian study on some 1300 “johns”. As Maggie has argued before, “We need all of the men who hire us at least occasionally [to provide support for decriminalization/legalization]”.
And I can’t think of a better way of doing that than that type of survey which, I think, tends to humanize the profession and those in and affected by it. At the very least, the demonization by the “antis” tends to be a little bit more difficult to peddle.