Does biology underlie the oldest profession? Prostitution and sex disparities in John behavior

Abstract

This study considers a biosocial explanation of why johns, the purchasers of commercial sex exchanges, are almost exclusively male. Trivers's theory of parental investment and sexual selection predicts that differential parental investment by biological sex will lead to divergent sex-based reproductive instincts. The sex bearing the larger parental investment will tend to be choosier, whereas the sex bearing the lesser investment will tend to be relatively indiscriminate and competitive for access to sexual resources. We hypothesized that men are more likely than women to offer objects of value in exchange for access to sexual resources. Using self-reports of sex-purchasing from Add Health data (N = 14,544), we found that maleness was a robust predictor of john behavior even after controlling for well-known criminogenic risk factors. Copyright © 2011 Society for the Study of Social Biology.