The study bases its claim on the redefinition of paying for sex as “substitute rape”. This reminded me of some of the other ways that true levels of criminal activity can be concealed for political reasons.

For example, there is a relationship between reporting theft to the police and having contents insurance that will cover your loss (because insurance companies only pay out if the theft has been reported to the police).

Making contents insurance so expensive that only the wealthiest could afford it, would reduce reported “theft” dramatically and enable politicians and academics to claim that they had virtually eliminated property crime. Theft would have been re-framed as the appropriation solely of the property of the affluent and well-connected.

Prostitution is not an activity that results in less sexual violence. Rather it is one in which a buyer acquires immunity from being reported and prosecuted through the payment of compensation to a subclass of women. Violence inflicted on prostituted women ceases to be considered or documented as sexual violence.

The researchers refer to “commercial sex” rather than just “sex”. A sex buyer doesn’t pay for sex, he pays for “control of sex”. The commodity traded is control of sex with another person.

“Commercial sex” includes being defecated on, urinated on, ejaculated on, and being exposed to other serious health and safety hazards and acts of physical and sexual violence without the protection that would be required in any workplace environment and at a frequency that can never be made safe.

Describing the expansion of the commercial sex market in Germany, which was facilitated so that the supply of prostituted women would exceed the huge increase in demand which followed the change in the law there, and the consequent lowering of prices prostituted women could charge, as something that “attracts” them is pure propaganda.

Buyers are so confident that women they pay for sex have substance use issues that they often ask whether you can obtain Class A drugs like heroin and cocaine for them. As a result, men involved in drug distribution have additional interests in becoming your pimp.

Changes that require affirmative consent have widened the circumstances in which complaints of rape can be made.

The official crime statistics from Eurostat, where the researchers obtained their data, don’t report delays in processing cases or reports of rape that are dismissed because the courts work against rape victims in countries that don’t have high levels of gender equity.

The most common perpetrators of rape are men who have access to sex or who previously had it and now wish to inflict punishment for their loss of access on the person who removed it.

When I was studying for a Masters’ degree, I attended a lecture about global cities during which the speaker said that two essential elements for a city that wished to be considered a “global” destination...

...attracting businesses, or politicians, academics and NGOs as a conference or meeting destination, were access to recreational drugs and access to prostituted women.

This would only be true if you accepted that business and other visitors to global cities are, and always will be male and that the supremacy and inequality resulting from this is immutable. For the most part, these visitors are not single men. Their status amongst their male peers would be lower if they were.

Paying for sex does not make men less violent or less of a risk to women or civil society in general. In fact, the opposite is true.FACT: Buying sex makes men more prone to violence ag...

Men involved in both political or terrorist violence and organised crime, for example, make use of prostituted women because atomised lifestyles are preferred to the operational risk that ongoing relationships and consequent responsibilities which would connect them with civil society are to them.

If it were the case that access to prostituted women made men less violent, one of the first steps taken by military officers would be to remove any brothels or prostituted women from the vicinity of the male soldiers under their command during operations and in environments where they had “rest and recreation”.

The researchers’ inaccurate claim that sex buyers are mainly motivated by being unable to access sex through marriage or partnership means that the trade-off they consider a rational buyer to make is limited to setting the cost of paying for control of sex against the risk and cost of conviction for rape.

This is presented as if there are no other potential consequences, and as if a buyer is an atomised individual making a decision with no surrounding social or cultural context.

When academics and commentators say that the stigma attached to prostitution is greater than it was in previous centuries, what they are really lamenting is women and girls gaining social and political rights and wider options in life,...

...including education, control over their fertility and reproductive potential, the right to own property, equal rights to divorce and employment rights.

Ultimately it is the consequences of the social and political advancement of women and girls that the researchers who carried out this study (and other academics and commentators who advocate for the expansion of the sex industry) object to.

The premise that men who pay for control of sex are unable to access it elsewhere is false because many, if not most, men who pay for sex are in relationships. They fear the loss of the unpaid sex, unpaid emotional support and domestic duties performed at home by their wife or partner, including the care of their children and other family members.

Men who are single are concerned about what their families will think, or that their peer group will see paying for sex as evidence that they are not successful in attracting partners.

This is why, for example, commercial sex websites and brothel-owners do not require buyers to provide proof of their identity and why the reputations of their respective businesses depend on the prioritisation of the public reputations of buyers above the safety of the women they charge for the use of their premises and websites.

The opportunity cost to women recruited into prostitution isn’t considered by the researchers at all. The women are of no significance to researchers with a buyer/pimp focus.

另外兩篇對嫖客的意見調查MYTH: Punters are lonely single men | Nordic Model N...MYTH: Punters respect the women they buy | Nordic Mo...