In The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men who Buy It, Victor Malarek explores the following theory: Men looking to pay for sex plus a money-driven society equals women and children treated as commodities and trafficked in a fashion similar to drugs and guns. The truth, exposed by his thorough research and methodology, is incredibly painful. Malarek uses these victims – from children in Asia sold by their parents to runaways throughout the United States and Canada who become truck-stop prostitutes enslaved by pimps – as the backdrop to highlight the callousness of the johns who rent their bodies.
I'd like to compare Malarek's book to others of its kind, but, as he points out, there aren't any books or major studies or information about the men who hire prostitutes. This is the first book about johns, but then this is the first time in the history of the world's oldest profession that, via the Internet, men who frequent prostitutes are finally coming out of the shadows and telling their stories: Wall Street guys too busy to date; divorced men who are sick of high-maintenance North American women and who prefer the accommodating attitudes of Eastern women; sex tourists, men who would rather vacation in places like Costa Rica and be treated like a king for $100 a day than date women where they live; sadists who want to punish and hurt prostitutes or women in general. The list goes on.
The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It
, by Victor Malarek, Key Porter, 310 pages, $29.95
The Johns is a follow-up to Malarek's 2003 The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade. It's easy to understand why Malarek, after hearing and writing hundreds of stories of the thousands of women and children bought and sold as sex slaves, shows no sympathy toward johns. From prologue to epilogue, he does not soften or crack. He never excuses or finds compassion for his subjects. He never rants; he delivers the truth methodically, but his opinions and emotions are obvious.
Malarek villainizes every man who has ever paid for sex, and in doing so risks turning them into caricatures, types instead of human beings behaving badly. He puts most of the blame on the porn industry and an over-sexualized pop culture. I wish he had included more of the psychology, found more men willing to open up about the details of their marriages, or the roots of their desire to punish women, and their ignorance of human trafficking. Men who hire prostitutes aren't all inherently bad human beings, and the women who choose to work as prostitutes aren't all victims.
But they aren't the people who need to be talked about and, ultimately, helped. The problem is that there is lots of money to be made and, as a result, all over the world prostitutes are doing as they are told for fear of being beaten, raped and killed. That is why even in countries such as Australia, where prostitution has been legalized, illegal brothels and organized crime still dominate the industry and there is an increase in human trafficking.
My other concern is that the book's language perpetuates the stereotypes. It gives the worst of these men – violent, angry and predatory – a voice and allows their comments and misogynistic rants. My oversensitive self was shocked to find a paragraph where even Malarek fell into the behaviour he chastises. Johns often demonize women as evil temptresses, and the author, telling one prostitute's story, describes how she leaves the bar, “her sights set on a thin, balding, {filig}ftysomething john,” placing the girl as predator and her client as prey.
