It happened on the terrace of a restaurant in Las Palmas, on one of those mild nights, over drinks and light conversation, with Las Canteras beach in the background.
When the talk turned to me and I said, with the same ease as someone who had just described his latest work trips, what I do for a living, the mood shifted almost physically. A woman sitting across from me left her fork in mid-air, looked at me and, after a few seconds of silence, said a single sentence:
“You don’t need to do this.”
Her tone of voice betrayed not contempt but concern, as if she had just discovered that I slept on the street or was hiding an impossible debt. She didn’t ask whether I liked it, whether I had chosen it or what place it held in my life. The conclusion had already been drawn: if I did this work, there must be some reason that would absolve me.
The explanations people offer me change, but they all serve the same function. Sometimes they are economic, sometimes psychological: “Are you addicted to sex?” I have been asked, as if only a compulsion could explain what I do. And then there is the most telling one: the certainty that I ought to feel disgust. “Doesn’t it disgust you?” “Aren’t you disgusted with yourself?” “I feel embarrassed for you,” an ex once threw at me.
What is interesting is not that these people disapprove of my decision. No one is obliged to understand it or to share it. What is interesting is the difficulty in admitting that it might be, quite simply, a decision.
Before judging it, they need to correct it, to turn it into need, disorder, degradation or failure. The reaction does not describe what I do. It describes the limit of what the other person believes possible.
Think of the last time someone told you about a decision you would never have made. Did you try to understand it, or did you quickly look for an explanation?
The same freedom, a different verdict
The sexual double standard is so familiar it almost seems obvious. A man who accumulates experiences tends to receive recognition. He is credited with initiative, seductive skill, confidence or success.
The woman who behaves in an equivalent way has been judged for centuries with a far less kind vocabulary.
One might think all this belongs to the past, a mindset of other generations that we would have left behind. The available research does not confirm that it belongs to the past. The meta-analysis by the psychologists Endendijk, van Baar and Deković, published in 2020 and based on 99 studies[1], concluded that the sexual double standard had not disappeared, though how strongly it shows up varies with how it is measured. It may now be less explicit than it once was, but it still operates in the way similar behaviours are judged depending on the sex of the person performing them.
The popular formula is simple: he conquers, she is cheapened. He gains, she loses. Even when both have done exactly the same thing, the social story hands out prestige to one and damage to the other.
Up to here, the ground is familiar; we almost take it for granted. But that mechanism changes when money enters the picture.
What is admired for free is degraded once it is charged for
As long as a man has sex without charging, he can go on occupying the recognisable role of the Latin lover. When he turns that intimacy into a service, the character stops working. Admiration recedes.
The activity is the same; what has changed is where he stands within it. He no longer seems to act solely out of his own desire, but to have entered into a transaction: he has put a price on something that, by certain conventions, he should offer only out of impulse, conquest or pleasure.
The man who once seemed to exert power begins to appear governed by a need.
With the woman, by contrast, the arrival of money does not remove the contempt that could already accompany her sexual freedom. It aggravates it or transforms it. She can be judged morally and, at the same time, considered a victim. Often both views coexist without much contradiction: she is condemned for selling herself, and it is denied that she could have decided to sell.
In both cases the will is denied. But it does not mean the same thing, nor carry the same weight, and that extra weight falls almost always on them.
Let us begin with them
Any reflection on sex work that places the male and female experience side by side runs the risk of distorting the proportions. It is a mistake I do not intend to make.
For countless women who sell sex, the word choice is a poor description of what happened. Prostitution is shot through with coercion, trafficking, poverty and survival.
The International Labour Organization estimates that 4.9 million women and girls are subjected to forced commercial sexual exploitation[2]. The 2024 global report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) notes that they account for roughly 61 per cent of all detected trafficking victims, across the different forms of exploitation[3].
Notice that word: “detected.” They are only the ones someone managed to see. Behind them remain all those no one ever counted, the ones who keep silent for fear that speaking will bring something even worse than what they already endure. The figures do not let us calculate what share of the entire market belongs to one situation or the other, but they do show a reality too grave to treat lightly.
In Spain, social perception itself reflects that association. In the study by the Government Delegation against Gender Violence and the CIS, close to 70 per cent of the population attributed female prostitution to economic necessity, and 41.5 per cent believed the women had been forced into it[4].
A person who sells sex so as not to go hungry is not choosing in the full sense of the word. A woman who has been recruited, threatened, trapped in debt or exploited does not need society to recognise her autonomy. She needs someone to stop whoever took it from her.
Compared with that, my experience is not on the same scale.
The discomfort of a stranger misreading my decision cannot be compared with the violence that determines the lives of millions of women. In my case, the denial of choice is a judgement. In theirs, all too often, the absence of choice is the material condition of their existence.
The woman who did choose
Among those realities there is a figure almost never spoken of, perhaps because it makes almost everyone uncomfortable: the woman who did choose.
We do not know precisely how many such women there are, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Nor can their existence be invoked to minimise the millions of coerced or exploited women. But there are women who decided to do this without being driven by hunger, debt or fear.
That woman works like anyone who makes a living from who they are. She puts on the table what she has: her presence, her conversation, her intelligence, her humour, her physical appearance, her way of reading whoever is in front of her. The body is one part, not the whole trade, whatever people say. She has turned her qualities into a profession, with the same naturalness as a lawyer who lives by his eloquence.
And here is the revealing part. That woman, who has chosen with as much clarity as any professional, is not granted the benefit of the doubt either. She continues to be read as fallen, as a victim, as someone damaged by life.
Same act, choosing; what changes is the way the world refuses to accept it.
The man who charges stops being the man who conquers
Only after establishing that disproportion does it make sense to return to the male case.
Research on men who sell sexual services remains scarce. The researchers Curtis and Boe, in 2023, describe the subject as a neglected field[5]. When it does appear in studies, the male sex worker is usually framed in terms of vulnerability, youth, marginality or the lack of alternatives.
The public health researchers Berg, Molin and Nanavati, for example, situate him within a context very different from the fantasy of the prestigious seducer[6]. The sociologist Scarlett Redman, who compared female and male escorts, also observed that sexual stigma remains attached far more intensely to the female body[7].
I am not claiming that a handful of studies amounts to conclusive proof. The available evidence is limited and does not support a universal portrait of men who charge for intimacy.
What I can offer is more modest, and of another kind: the reactions I have been hearing over the years.
”Something must have pushed you”
Let us go back for a moment to that terrace, to the fork frozen in mid-air. “You don’t need to do this” sounds like a compassionate phrase, but it holds a certainty. Whoever says it takes for granted that I would not want to do it either if my life were as it is supposed to be. My autonomy, my history or my motives are secondary: the activity is enough to infer that something is missing. “Are you addicted to sex?” I have also been asked, and the explanation shifts towards pathology. If I don’t do it out of need, then I must not be able to help it. Desire stops being desire and becomes a symptom.
Of the woman who chose, the same is said in other words. “Someone must have got her into this.” “Poor thing, with the life she must have had.” For her, people imagine not a vice but an outside cause: a man behind her, an old wound. The cause we invent changes with the sex. For me, a lack or a compulsion; for her, always someone else who pushed her.
In both cases, the phrase offers an alibi, and it is more generous with the one who says it than with us. It lets us not have chosen. I can be a man in need or a sick one; she, a victim. What neither of us is granted is having arrived there on our own two feet.
”You ought to feel disgust”
The harshest reaction no longer looks for a cause; it looks for an emotion. It assumes there is a right way to feel, and that not having it is proof that something is wrong. Beneath it lies a certainty few state aloud: that the body is almost a temple, and that charging for access to it profanes it.
To me it comes as a question. “Doesn’t it disgust you?”, about the work. “Aren’t you disgusted with yourself?”, about the person. The second no longer separates the act from the identity. It takes for granted that I should see myself as degraded, and that my calm, my lack of disgust, is one more piece of evidence against me.
To her the same demand comes as a sentence. “Have you no dignity?” “How can a woman lower herself like that?” Both of us are required to feel shame we do not feel, and its absence is charged against us. Except that she is punished more harshly: I am taken to be defective, she to be dishonoured.
The sociologist Erving Goffman wrote about the discredited identity, about the way an attribute can impose itself on the whole of a person[8]. Another sociologist, Howard Becker, formulated something similar from another angle: deviance does not reside solely in an act, but in the label others manage to pin on whoever commits it[9].
Once the label is applied, the biography begins to reorganise itself around it.
You are no longer someone who has made a specific decision. You are the kind of person who makes decisions like that. And therefore there must be something in you that explains them.
Judgement works better when the person is not known
As those episodes accumulated, I ended up noticing a pattern: the most categorical statements tend to come from those who do not know me, or know me very little.
Those who have lived with me may disagree, feel uncomfortable or prefer not to know. But they rarely need to invent an addiction, an economic urgency or a moral flaw to make sense of me.
The abstract category needs a cause. The actual person spoils that comfort.
It is easy to imagine that “a man who does this” is broken, or that “a woman who does this” is a poor wretch. Both images hold up as long as the person is a silhouette. They collapse the moment they take on a recognisable shape: judgement, work, affections, limits and the last word over their own life.
The moment the explanation stops fitting, something more uncomfortable appears: that a person may have chosen, in full awareness, something we would never choose.
Perhaps that is why the alibi proves so useful: it protects the worldview of the one who judges. It allows one to claim that certain decisions do not exist, that there are only people driven towards them by a deficiency.
As long as the person stays far away, the theory holds. When they come closer, when they speak and stop behaving like the expected caricature, the theory begins to need too many exceptions.
When we cannot conceive of someone's choice, we invent a cause that lets them not have chosen.
A very old asymmetry
This asymmetry was not born with today’s market. The disguises change, but the need stays the same: to decide which bodies may be exchanged, who keeps prestige afterwards and who, instead, loses the right to consider themselves their own master.
The few women who managed to turn eroticism into culture or influence always did so on the edge of the precipice. Veronica Franco published her poems in sixteenth-century Venice and debated in verse with the most powerful men of the city, until the Inquisition brought her to trial: a single accusation was enough to bring down all she had built. Tullia d’Aragona, poet and philosopher, wrote about love and obtained an exemption from the yellow veil that marked prostitutes; the requirement was waived because she was a poet. Dazzling and fragile exceptions, never the rule.
The difference lies in the weight of the denial
When someone asks me what forced me to do it, they are denying my choice. When they presume I should be ashamed, they are trying to decide for me what meaning that choice should have.
That can be irritating, revealing or, at times, almost comic. But it remains an external judgement. I can listen to it, analyse it, smile and go on with my life.
For too many women, by contrast, the absence of choice is not a social interpretation. It is a threat, a debt, a border, a pimp, a family to feed or a violence they cannot escape.
It would be obscene to confuse the two.
The double standard does not disappear when the one selling is a man; it only changes shape.
For me, that denial is barely a nuisance. For millions of women, choice is not denied: it is torn away. And that is the only thing in all of this that should keep us awake at night.
When you started reading, I asked you to remember the last time someone told you about a decision you would never have made. The next time it happens, you can still choose not to agree with it, but before looking for an explanation that makes it bearable, ask yourself whether you are not denying them the only thing that truly belongs to them: having made it.
Author's note
This article combines the reactions I have been receiving over the years as a companion with data and studies on sex work and the double standard. The cited sources support the data; the interpretations are mine. The disproportion between the discomfort of being judged and the violence suffered by millions of women is stated in the text itself and is never blurred or played down.
Cited sources
- Endendijk, J. J., van Baar, A. L. & Deković, M. (2020). "He is a Stud, She is a Slut! A Meta-Analysis on the Continued Existence of Sexual Double Standards". Personality and Social Psychology Review, 24(2), 163–190. · Meta-analysis of 99 studies: the sexual double standard is still in force. ↩
- International Labour Organization, Walk Free & IOM (2022). "Global Estimates of Modern Slavery". · 4.9 million women and girls in forced commercial sexual exploitation, out of 6.3 million people in total. ↩
- United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2024). "Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024". · Women and girls accounted for 61 per cent of detected trafficking victims in 2022. ↩
- Government Delegation against Gender Violence and CIS (2026). "Analysis of the data from the Survey on the social perception of prostitution" (in Spanish). · Close to 70 per cent attribute female prostitution to economic necessity; 41.5 per cent believe the women have been forced into it. ↩
- Curtis, M. G. & Boe, J. L. (2023). "The Lived Experiences of Male Sex Workers: A Global Qualitative Meta-Synthesis". Sexes, 4(2), 222–255. · Male sex work as a neglected field of research. ↩
- Berg, R. C., Molin, S. B. & Nanavati, J. (2020). "Women Who Trade Sexual Services from Men: A Systematic Mapping Review". Journal of Sex Research, 57(1), 104–118. · The male sex worker tends to be framed through vulnerability, not through the prestige of the seducer. ↩
- Redman, S. (2016). "Female and male escorts in the UK: A comparative analysis of working practices, stigma and relationships". Doctoral thesis, University of Leeds. · Sexual stigma attaches more intensely to the female body. ↩
- Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Prentice-Hall. · How an attribute can impose itself on a person's entire identity. ↩
- Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. Free Press. · Deviance does not reside in the act, but in the label others manage to pin on whoever commits it. ↩