Off Limits

I think married men should be off limits for prostitutes.  Why don’t you care about other women?

How do you propose whores determine a man’s marital status, demand he produce his certificate of bachelorhood?  You do realize a married man looks exactly like an unmarried one, don’t you?  Frankly, it’s not our responsibility to determine which men are married, just like it isn’t a bartender’s job to guess which of his customers may belong to a religion that forbids drinking.  If a man wants to have extracurricular sex he’s going to, and there’s nothing his wife or any whore within driving range can do to stop that; even if we had some sort of professional code against providing services to married men, they’d simply lie and say they weren’t married.  However, it would be really stupid for us to make such a code, even if it could somehow be enforced; for one thing, married men make up easily 75% of our clients, and for another you wouldn’t actually WANT us to stop seeing them, even though you believe that you do.  As I wrote almost five years ago in “Harm Reduction“,

…at least two-thirds of married men will at least occasionally seek extramarital sex.  No woman has any way of knowing whether the man she chooses will be a member of the minority who is able to resist temptation, so if she defines a “successful marriage” as one in which her husband never strays she is playing Russian Roulette with at least four bullets.  But if she defines it as one in which her husband’s probable infidelities cause no overt damage, difficulty or social consequences, all she need do is keep him from getting involved with amateurs…whores allow men to cheat in a managed fashion and thereby minimize harm to their wives and children.  Far from being a “social evil” as it usually referred to in the United States, prostitution is a positive good because it provides a controlled outlet for male sexual impulses which might otherwise cause tremendous problems, including (but by no means limited to) rape and broken marriages.  While it’s true that for a wife to discover her husband has been patronizing whores might damage their marriage, would an affair or constant pressure for unwanted sex do any less?…

Insecure women may refer to sex workers as “homewreckers”, but in fact we save far more marriages than we destroy because we allow men to manage the sexual impulses their wives either can’t or won’t cater to, and which they would otherwise follow into affairs which might indeed wreck the home.  Finally, married men are the safest of clients; they have good boundaries and aren’t likely to get obsessed, fall in love or turn into stalkers.  They come to us precisely because they want to stay married, so they choose to dally with women who are absolutely not going to jeopardize their marriages by getting involved with them.

(Have a question of your own?  Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)