Intimacy, pleasure and the men who pay for sex

Introduction It is widely accepted that the performance of sex work involves both emotion work and emotional labour – the shaping of feelings, as well as their public management (for example, Chapkis, 1997; Sanders, 2004). However, whilst much is known about the feelings and experiences of female sex workers, very little is known about the experiences of their clients – the men who pay for sex. This chapter seeks to make men’s voices heard by drawing on a study exploring men’s cyber-accounts of paid-for-sex posted on the British internet site www.punternet.com and focuses, specifically, on men’s accounts of intimacy and pleasure. Firstly, the chapter explores men’s accounts of intimacy and romance within paidfor-sex showing how patterns of ritualised courtship in commercial sex often echo those found in non-commercial sexual encounters. However, whilst emotional labour plays an important role in sex work, the commodification of pleasure is also important. Secondly, this chapter moves on to examine men’s accounts of pleasure in paid-for-sex, showing that just as non-commercial consensual heterosex is based on the normative assumption of sexual reciprocity, men’s accounts of commercial sex also follow these normative expectations.